Sen. Sinema Is The Biggest Obstacle To Voting Rights Legislation

Rep. Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) told “Axios on HBO” that the “integrity of our democracy” is at stake without federal voting rights legislation, and the Senate must seriously consider filibuster reform if it can’t get 60 votes to pass it next year. Rep. Jeffries demands filibuster reform to pass voting rights bill.

“It’s an open question as to whether we can get to 60 votes in the Senate on voting. And if we can’t, then the Senate is going to have to make some decisions as it relates to filibuster reform,”Jeffries said. “The integrity of our democracy hangs in the balance,” he added.

Jeffries also told Axios he considers “the undermining of the fundamental right to vote” as the greatest threat to democracy right now.

The House has already passed several pieces of voting rights legislation. The obstruction continues to be the anti-democratic Senate which continues to cling to its Jim Crow relic Senate filibuster rule which empowers a tyranny of a minority.

Democrats have it in their power to change the Senate filibuster rule. But two prima donna Democratic divas are appeasing the anti-democratic Sedition Party and continue to make unprincipled defenses of the Jim Crow relic Senate filibuster rule.

Sen. Joe Manchin at least has made the effort to negotiate a voting rights bill that he believed he could sway ten “patriotic Republicans” to support, the Freedom to Vote Act. Manchin failed to convince any Republicans to support his bill. (Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) was the only Republican to support the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act).

Would Manchin have put this much effort into drafting a voting rights bill only to continue to support the Senate filibuster in the face of unified Sedition Party opposition to prevent his bill from passing? Who does this? One would think Sen. Manchin would support a Senate filibuster rule change to advance his voting rights legislation.

The biggest obstacle to voting rights legislation in the Senate is Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, who says she supports the voting rights legislation, but she will do nothing to help pass it. You get no credit for supporting a voting rights bill when you appease the enemies of democracy who are preventing passage of the bill because of your unprincipled support for the Jim Crow relic Senate filibuster rule.

The Washington Post reports, Sinema holds firm in support of the filibuster, imperiling late voting rights push:

A key Democratic senator said this week she remains firmly opposed to changing federal election laws on a partisan basis, signaling that a planned last-ditch voting rights push that party leaders and activists are planning for the closely divided Senate in the coming months is likely to fail.

Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (Ariz.) is a co-sponsor of Democratic voting rights bills meant to combat state-level GOP efforts to restrict ballot access. But she has firmly resisted a campaign by some in her party to modify or eliminate the filibuster — the Senate rule requiring a 60-vote supermajority to advance most legislation — to pass them.

In an interview with The Washington Post on Thursday, about two weeks after Republicans blocked a third major voting rights bill, Sinema reiterated her stance.

“My opinion is that legislation that is crafted together, in a bipartisan way, is the legislation that’s most likely to pass and stand the test of time,” she said. “And I would certainly encourage my colleagues to use that effort to move forward.”

This woman is delusional. The Sedition Party has voted in lockstep to block any voting rights legislation. As Rep. Jeffries said, “the undermining of the fundamental right to vote” as the greatest threat to democracy right now. And yet, all Sen. Sinema cares about is her quest for the mythical bipartisanship. She is willing to let American democracy die because the enemies of American democracy will not support voting rights. This is inexcusable and unforgivable behavior. History will condemn her for selling out American democracy.

Asked about potential modifications to Senate rules — such as an exception to the filibuster for voting rights matters — Sinema cast doubt on whether such a maneuver would be workable.

“That caveat — ‘if it would even work’ — is the right question to ask,” she said.

The new statements come as Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) and other Democratic senators are strategizing with the White House, Vice President Harris and civil rights leaders over how to push voting rights legislation forward quickly after the Senate clears President Biden’s $2 trillion domestic policy agenda.

Changing the Senate rules would require unanimity from the 50 Democratic senators, plus Harris’s tiebreaking vote, to overrule the chamber’s precedents. Schumer earlier this month said Democrats would “find an alternative path forward” to pass voting legislation “even if it means going at it alone.”

“Debate is central to this chamber’s character, but so is governing, so is taking action, when required, after debate has run its due course,” he said.

Schumer said Friday he hopes to clear that legislation as soon as next month.

[W]ith the midterm elections less than a year away, Democrats are under mounting pressure from elected officials, activists and donors to act on national ballot-access standards and other voting provisions. A push to curb partisan congressional gerrymandering has already been overtaken, with more than 20 states having enacted new House district maps. But advocates say there is still time to set federal standards for early voting, vote-by-mail and voter registration, as well as to improve financial disclosure requirements for political groups.

Tiffany Muller, executive director of the advocacy group End Citizens United, said lawmakers have scant time to act. Not only are new redistricting maps going into effect, she said, but state legislatures will be coming back into session early next year to potentially pass new voting restrictions, and election administrators need time to implement any new federal mandates.

“We are not out of time yet,” she said. “But the time to act is now, and the attacks that our democracy are under are only increasing with each day.”

Muller said she was pleased that Sinema backs the policies that Democrats are hoping to pass, and “we’re going to continue to make the case to her . . . that we have to do whatever it takes to pass this critical legislation.”

* * *

Sinema detailed her reasoning in a June op-ed published in The Washington Post and in a July interview with ABC’s “The View.” “The filibuster compels moderation and helps protect the country from wild swings between opposing policy poles,” she wrote in June.

In the interview this week, Sinema suggested that those who expect her to revise those pronouncements have misjudged her.

“I don’t have a lot to say, typically, but when I do say something, I mean it,” she said. “That op-ed was something that was heartfelt, and it’s something that I believe very strongly.”

She is either a fool, or an appeaser, or both. The New York Times reports, G.O.P. Donors Back Manchin and Sinema as They Reshape Biden’s Agenda:

Over the summer, as he was working to scale back President Biden’s domestic agenda, Senator Joe Manchin III of West Virginia traveled to an $18 million mansion in Dallas for a fund-raiser that attracted Republican and corporate donors who have cheered on his efforts.

In September, Senator Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, who along with Mr. Manchin has been a major impediment to the White House’s efforts to pass its package of social and climate policy, stopped by the same home to raise money from a similar cast of donors for her campaign coffers.

Even as Ms. Sinema and Mr. Manchin, both Democrats, have drawn fire from the left for their efforts to shrink and reshape Mr. Biden’s proposals, they have won growing financial support from conservative-leaning donors and business executives in a striking display of how party affiliation can prove secondary to special interests and ideological motivations when the stakes are high enough.

Ms. Sinema is winning more financial backing from Wall Street and constituencies on the right in large part for her opposition to raising personal and corporate income tax rates. Mr. Manchin has attracted new Republican-leaning donors as he has fought against much of his own party to scale back the size of Mr. Biden’s legislation and limit new social welfare components.

[T]he stream of cash to the campaigns of Ms. Sinema and Mr. Manchin from outside normal Democratic channels stands out because many of the donors have little history with them. The financial support is also notable for how closely tied it has been to their power over a single piece of legislation, the fate of which continues to rest largely with the two senators because their party cannot afford to lose either of their votes in the evenly divided Senate.

[T]his month, the billionaire Wall Street investor Kenneth G. Langone, a longtime Republican megadonor who has not previously contributed to Mr. Manchin, effusively praised him for showing “guts and courage” and vowed to throw “one of the biggest fund-raisers I’ve ever had for him.”

Stanley S. Hubbard, a billionaire Republican donor, wrote his first check to Ms. Sinema in September and said that he was considering doing the same for Mr. Manchin because of their efforts to trim the sails of the Democrats’ agenda. “Those are two good people — Manchin and Sinema — and I think we need more of those in the Democratic Party,” he said.

Cash has also poured in for Mr. Manchin and Ms. Sinema from political action committees and donors linked to the finance and pharmaceutical industries, which opposed proposals initially included in the domestic policy bill that the lawmakers helped scale back, including changes to Medicare and the tax-rate increases.

John LaBombard, a spokesman for Ms. Sinema, rejected any suggestion that campaign cash factored into her approach to policymaking. [Yeah, right.]

“Senator Sinema makes decisions based on one consideration: what’s best for Arizona,” Mr. LaBombard said. [You mean what’s Best for Sen. Sinema.]

The lawmakers share a campaign finance consultant, who helped organize fund-raising swings through Texas for both lawmakersthat yielded cash from Republican donors, as well as a fund-raiser for Ms. Sinema in Washington in late September with business lobbying groups that oppose the domestic policy bill.

[Mr.] Peltz, who donated to Mr. Manchin in 2017, has not given to Ms. Sinema, but he said that she had requested a meeting, which will take place in a few weeks.

Individual donors like Mr. Peltz, who over the years has donated nearly three times as much to Republicans as he has to Democrats at the federal level, offer the two Democratic senators a way to restock their campaign coffers — both are up for re-election in 2024 — at a time when they are unlikely to get an enthusiastic reception from some more traditional Democratic donors.

Mr. Manchin has long been to the right of his party on litmus-test issues like abortion rights and fossil fuels, while Ms. Sinema started her political career as a liberal activist before shifting to the center. One Wall Street executive joked that in his industry, Ms. Sinema — who as a young politician once likened political donations to “bribery” — was now referred to as “Saint Sinema” for opposing most of Mr. Biden’s proposed taxes on the wealthy. (She has, however, supported a 15 percent corporate minimum tax and other revenue-raising measures that will help pay for Mr. Biden’s legislative spending.)

Progressives are less amused and have accused both senators of undermining their party’s agenda at the behest of special interests.

Wealthy liberals recently began an effort to lay the groundwork for a primary challenge to Ms. Sinema in 2024, and the liberal group Demand Progress wrote in a petition that “a small group of right-wing Democrats backed by corporate cash, including Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, are trying to destroy” Mr. Biden’s legislative agenda.

This year, Mr. Manchin and Ms. Sinema have received donations from major Republican donors who had never before given to them, including James A. Haslam III, who owns the Cleveland Browns football team, and the Dallas real estate developer Harlan Crow, who is close to Justice Clarence Thomas of the Supreme Court.

Several other prominent Republican donors who supported Mr. Trump also wrote their first-ever checks to Mr. Manchin in the last few months. They include the Oklahoma oil and gas billionaire Harold Hamm, who pushed the former president to deregulate the energy industry; the Dallas-based lobbyist and investor Roy W. Bailey, who helped lead fund-raising for Mr. Trump’s inauguration and a pro-Trump nonprofit group; and the banker Andrew Beal, who donated a total of $3 million to a super PAC supporting Mr. Trump from 2018 through last year.

Executives at Goldman Sachs, including the firm’s president, John Waldron, combined to donate tens of thousands of dollars to Ms. Sinema in the spring and summer. In July, she attended a meet-and-greet at the offices of the Blackstone Group, which is headed by a major Republican donor; some Blackstone employees made donations around the same time. A handful of employees from the investment firm Apollo Global Management, including Marc J. Rowan, the chief executive and a major donor to predominantly Republican candidates and causes, donated to Ms. Sinema in late September after the firm sent a plea to industry contacts seeking donations for her.

G. Brint Ryan, the Republican donor who hosted the fund-raisers in Dallas for Mr. Manchin and Ms. Sinema, said the senators were “out of step with their party, but I tend to believe that they’re in the right.”

Mr. Ryan had not previously donated to Ms. Sinema and had not held fund-raisers for either before this year, though he donated $1,000 to Mr. Manchin’s 2018 re-election campaign.

[He] advised Mr. Trump on tax policy during his presidential campaign in 2016. One of the partners in Mr. Ryan’s tax consulting firm is Jeff Miller, a corporate lobbyist and close political adviser to Representative Kevin McCarthy of California, the House Republican leader.

Mr. Miller, who is a top Republican fund-raiser, helped steer Mr. Ryan’s team to people who could assist in planning the fund-raisers for Ms. Sinema and Mr. Manchin. And Mr. Miller’s wife gave to Ms. Sinema’s campaign.

In the days around the fund-raisers at his home, Mr. Ryan, his employees, his company’s political action committee and a relative’s law firm combined to donate nearly $80,000 to Ms. Sinema’s campaign and more than $115,000 to Mr. Manchin’s.

The $2.6 million raised by Ms. Sinema’s campaign through the first nine months of this year was two and a half times as much as she raised in the same period last year, while the $3.3 million raised by Mr. Manchin’s campaign was more than 14 times as much as his haul through the end of September last year.

Overall, Ms. Sinema’s campaign took in about $6.1 million in donations between the beginning of 2019 and the end of September, and it had $4.5 million in the bank with three years to go until she faces the voters in Arizona. Mr. Manchin’s campaign raised about $3.8 million and had $5.4 million on hand.