The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell played a short video clip on Tuesday’s program of NBC reporter Garrett Haake trying to get a response from Senator Kyrsten Sinema about … well about anything. She just ignored his questions and stared at the elevator doors hoping they would open so she could get away, while one of her staff members ran interference for her.
Transcript (excerpt):
Senate Democrats are still struggling to meet the 50-vote threshold necessary to pass the tax and social policy portion of the Biden infrastructure package through the reconciliation package in the Senate.
And once again today, Senator Kyrsten Sinema mocked the very concept of public accountability.
I could not locate the video, but here is Garrett Haake’s tweet (he is obscuring the staffer running interference for Sinema).
No response from @SenatorSinema to my questions about reconciliation top lines, whether she opposes tax increases to pay for it, or whether she owes Arizonans more public explanations of her positions. pic.twitter.com/hY7Xha9Quq
— Garrett Haake (@GarrettHaake) October 5, 2021
REPORTER: Senator, where are you on the reconciliation? Senator, I`m wondering why you feel you don`t have to say literally anything about this publicly to the people that voted for you and didn`t vote for you. Everybody needs to be engaging in a public conversation.
(INAUDIBLE EXCHANGE)
REPORTER: I appreciate this but she`s — I appreciate that. Senator.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: You have a phone and email.
REPORTER: I do. It`s a great email account. Senator, do you have any —
REPORTER: They monitor it all the time.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Garrett, you haven`t reached our office.
REPORTER: Senator, do the people who have been protesting you have any effect on the way you`re looking at this issue?
All right. Thank you, Senator.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Thanks, Garrett.
REPORTER: Thank you.
O`DONNELL: That was intrepid Garrett Haake trying to get Senator Sinema to recognize the concept of accountability.
* * *
Michelle Goldberg, I`d like to begin with you tonight and your reaction to that video of Senator Sinema. You wrote one your op-ed pieces about her current posture in the Senate. [Whats Wrong With Kyrsten Sinema?]
And there she is continuing a complete, I don`t know what to call it, is it a defiance of public accountability and inability to comprehend — go ahead. Sorry. Go ahead.
MICHELLE GOLDBERG, OPINION COLUMNIST, THE NEW YORK TIMES: I mean, it looks to me like contempt for public accountability and what`s significant is that you can sort of make — you can make an argument that you`re not accountable to the national press corps if you`re talking to your constituents, if you`re talking to the people who put you in office. But what progressives, the progressives to mobilize to elect Sinema to the Senate in 2018 say is that, you know, she won`t meet with them. She won`t talk to them. She doesn`t do any sort of public events in Arizona.
And so I disapprove of the stunt people pulled the other day when they followed her into the bathroom, but nobody has been able to communicate with her as far as I know in any way whatsoever and she holds at this point the fate of the Biden presidency and the fate of the republic in her hands. And what`s so maddening is not just that she has objections to the social spending package, not just that she`s trying to leverage her kind of power as a swing voter but that she won`t even articulate what concessions she would accept from progressives.
O`DONNELL: And Jelani Cobb, the job Garrett Haake is trying to do there is a job that the been done in the halls of the Senate office building as soon as they finished building that building and every senator is subject to that. Most of them have an easy time including when they don`t want to say anything and there used to be 100 senators and now maybe there are only 99 who know how to speak and say nothing important at the same time, in those situations with reporters. There are a lot of options in that moment other than completely denying that there is any reason to ever say anything public to the press.
JELANI COBB, MSNBC POLITICAL ANALYST: Sure. I mean, it`s an art form. We were all there. I mean, I teach journalism at Columbia, we have conversations about this. People are able to give you and fill up — give you absolutely no information and, you know, we all as journalists know when they`re doing it and they know we know they`re doing it as part of the process to get people to give you something of substance.
The stonewalling is bizarre in addition to the fact that it`s very difficult to discern what the end game is here. You know, her approval ratings back home plummeted. She has essentially held the Senate in a more legislatively constipated situation than it typically is, and we don`t know what`s going to change it, which is kind of bizarre.
Legislative constipation? And Kyrsten Sinema is the blockage? That’s a new descriptor I have never heard before.
Avoiding any accountability to her constituents is a thing for “Silent Sinema.” DACA leaders confronted Kyrsten Sinema on flight, at ASU to ask for her support. They got silence.
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Salon reports, “Joe Biden complains Kyrsten Sinema is ignoring his calls — but she talks to Mitch”, https://www.salon.com/2021/10/08/joe-biden-complains-kyrsten-sinema-is-ignoring-his-calls–but-she-talks-to-mitch/
President Joe Biden has sounded “exasperated” at Sinema and fellow holdout Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., who have rejected the $3.5 trillion price tag of the Democratic proposal to expand health care and family care, provide paid family leave, combat climate change, provide free community college and lower housing and prescription drug costs.
Biden has complained to lawmakers that the two senators “don’t move” from their positions and has even “contended that Sinema didn’t always return calls from the White House,” sources told CNN’s Manu Raju.
Sinema and her aides have repeatedly said that she would not negotiate publicly. Democratic leaders are also rankled that she doesn’t appear to be negotiating much in private either.
Sinema has faced growing criticism from constituents and even the threat of a Democratic primary opponent over her refusal to support Biden’s signature bill. Although she told lobbyists earlier this year that “senators need to hear from their constituents,” activist groups now say Sinema has ignored the “Black, brown, and indigenous communities who elected her.” The New York Times reported that Sinema has “effectively cut off communication with the local progressive groups that worked to elect her in 2018.”
[D]espite complaints from fellow senators, her constituents, and now the president that she appears unwilling to negotiate, Sinema has found time amid this legislative battle for Biden’s agenda to meet with business lobby groups that are eager to kill the Build Back Better legislation.
Amid her standoff with her own party, which has caused her poll numbers to plummet, Sinema has gotten the backing of a pharma-funded group, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and even Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell.
McConnell has urged fellow Republicans to praise Sinema publicly and privately assured his party earlier this year that Sinema would successfully block Biden’s proposed tax increases on corporations and the wealthy.
The Republican leader earlier this week relented on his opposition to helping the Democrats raise the debt ceiling, offering a short-term increase in hopes of lowering the pressure on Sinema and Manchin to change Senate filibuster rules in order to raise the debt limit, Republican sources told the New York Times. McConnell called Sinema and Manchin to discuss the deal even before informing members of his own party, according to Politico. Democrats, including Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, only learned of the deal McConnell floated to Sinema and Manchin through a press release.
[G]arrick McFadden, the former chairman of the state Democratic Party, said that Sinema should not be labeled a “centrist” but an “obstructionist.”
“I don’t understand the calculus,” he told Politico. “It’s not like we’re asking her to do the Bernie Sanders or the Elizabeth Warren agenda. It’s the Joe Biden agenda.”
So what exactly is Kyrsten Sinema teaching at ASU in her “spare time” when she is not obstructing the U.S. Senate? The Intercept reports, “KYRSTEN SINEMA IS LITERALLY TEACHING A COURSE ON FUNDRAISING”, https://theintercept.com/2021/10/08/kyrsten-sinema-fundraising-course-asu/
Graduate students at Arizona State University have an unusual opportunity this fall to learn from the top experts in their field, where Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, D-Ariz., is teaching a course on getting rich people to give you money.
The course, titled “Developing Grants and Fundraising,” is one of two classes Sinema is teaching this fall at Arizona State University’s School of Social Work. The syllabus, which was obtained by The Intercept, says students will “learn diverse fundraising strategies” for nonprofits as well as “how to cultivate donors,” including “large individual donors,” by leveraging resources like “opportunistic fundraising,” “finding supporters for major fundraising events” — and, well, “asking for money.”
The outline identifies “Key Course Concepts” such as “corporate giving,” “political strategy,” “influence,” and “power” as well as more socially conscious terms like “discrimination,” “oppression,” and “privilege.” One of the required books is “Fundraising for Social Change” — ironic in light of Sinema’s attempts to ensure things like corporate tax rates remain unchanged. A spokesperson for Sinema did not respond to a request for comment.
Fundraising is a subject the Arizona senator knows a thing or two about, having raised eye-popping sums of money from groups opposed to President Joe Biden’sBuild Back Better agenda. Sinema has racked up some $920,000 in campaign contributions from said groups, according to an analysis by Accountable.US, a watchdog group that monitors corporate lobbying.
In the past two years, she has received tens of thousands of dollars in maxed-out contributions from private equity partners and investment firm CEOs who stand to lose in the event of a tax hike on corporations or the rich.
[S]ince entering Congress, Sinema has also received more than $6 million in donations from the finance, insurance, and real estate industry.
Sinema’s “fundraising” expertise is more like:
1.) Get elected
2.) Sniff the money
3.) Like the money
4.) Take the money
5.) Take more money
6.) Sell your vote
OCT 8, 2021 ANDREW PEREZ, DAVID SIROTA
“They Pick The One”
How Big Pharma flipped Kyrsten Sinema, who’s now threatening to be their key obstructionist.
https://www.dailyposter.com/they-pick-the-one/
The Democratic Senators should throw Manchin & Sinema a party. A blanket party.
Ha ha, I had to look that up.
‘”blanket party (also known as locksocking) is a form of corporal punishment, hazing or retaliation conducted within a peer group, most frequently within the military or military academies.”
Good for Bernie Sanders.
Sanders declined to sign statement condemning protests against Sinema: report
BY CAROLINE VAKIL – 10/06/21 11:17 PM EDT
Jeff Giertz, communications director for Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.), coordinated a joint statement among lawmakers condemning the protests against Sinema, asking senators’ offices if they’d be interested in signing and mentioning Booker was open to edits, according to screenshots of the conversations.
Sanders’s communications director, Mike Casca, asked for a line to be added. The proposed change would have included “While we hope Senator Sinema will change her position on prescription drug reform and support a major reconciliation bill” before an already existing line saying “what happened in that video was a violation of her privacy that has no place in our public discourse, and we resolutely condemn it.”
Giertz apparently told Casca “my boss can’t agree to that edit,” to which Sanders’s office replied, “Sanders will not be signing, so please cut ‘Senate Democratic Leadership Team’ from headline.”
https://thehill.com/homenews/senate/575687-sanders-declined-to-sign-statement-condemning-protests-against-sinema-report
Sinema could have avoided the whole bathroom incident if she’d just talk to people, she won’t.
What happened is on her and a few days consideration, I have no problem with what happened.
Maybe we should crowd fund a ticket to a Sinema fundraiser and send someone in, because she only talks to people who give her money.
Crook, con, scum.
Awww. Mittens is smitten, Mr. 47 percent.
Mitt Romney
@MittRomney
I’ve spent countless hours working alongside Kyrsten Sinema. She is smart, hard working and principled. We don’t always see eye to eye, but I respect her. The harassment she has endured is inexcusable and disheartening. It reflects so poorly on the bullies and abusers.
6:32 PM · Oct 4, 2021·Twitter for iPhone
“…Biden is frustrated with two of these centrists, Sens. Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.) and Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.).”
I’ve noticed that Biden does not sound as confident as he used to about getting both the “bipartisan” infrastructure bill and the BBBA legislated. Manchin represents Mitch McConnell’s GOP and Sinema is a certified loon. It appears either one is willing to set fire to Biden’s presidency, and meeting with them must be like a day in Hell.
It’s painful to watch Biden and Bernie Sanders these days. Biden hasn’t always been this way, but I believe that at this point in his life he wants to do what is right for the American people. And Bernie has always been that way.
They are both old men. I hope that they both get through this without a stroke or heart failure.
If you really want to feel pissed off today, read this op-ed by Reid Epstein at the New York Times, “The Cocooning of Kyrsten Sinema”, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/05/us/politics/kyrsten-sinema-arizona-democrat.html
(excerpt)
Ms. Sinema rarely granted requests for sit-down interviews with national reporters during the rest of her 2018 campaign. Since coming to Washington, she has been one of the most elusive senators on Capitol Hill.
She doesn’t engage with Washington reporters in a serious way, doesn’t hold open-to-the-public events in Arizona and has effectively cut off communication with the local progressive groups that worked to get her elected in 2018. Her spokesman did not respond when I emailed him.
Ian Danley, the executive director of Arizona Wins, a coalition of 32 progressive advocacy organizations, said his group had registered nearly 200,000 new voters and knocked on more than two million doors in support of Ms. Sinema’s 2018 campaign. She has not once met with his group or its partners since taking office in 2019, he said.
That, Mr. Danley said, prompted the frustration that led to the viral ambushing of Ms. Sinema over the weekend in a bathroom at Arizona State University, where she teaches classes on social work and fund-raising. Activists from Living United for Change in Arizona, one of the groups in the Arizona Wins coalition, pressed Ms. Sinema to support the $3.5 trillion Democratic legislation that would expand the social safety net.
“What’s she supposed to do, she asked for a meeting — they tried to go meet with the staff and the senator, that doesn’t happen,” Mr. Danley said. “That’s a breakdown of constituent services, a breakdown of leadership — that’s not the fault of young people who are trying to lobby and influence their elected officials.”
Another activist tried without success to engage Ms. Sinema on her flight to Washington from Phoenix on Monday and there was another group waiting for her at Reagan National Airport. There, she pantomimed listening to something on her iPhone, which was odd because during the flight she had her AirPods in.
What happens next with Ms. Sinema is anyone’s guess. Unlike Senator Joe Manchin III of West Virginia, her fellow Democratic holdout on Mr. Biden’s legislation, Ms. Sinema hasn’t publicly articulated what she wants from the negotiations, a development that got her skewered on the latest episode of “Saturday Night Live.”
Perhaps the thing to know about Ms. Sinema is how she views her own political metamorphosis. After beginning her career so far on the liberal end of politics that she refused to take campaign contributions (“that’s bribery,” she said while running for the Phoenix City Council in 2001) and wrote letters to the Arizona Republic condemning the very idea of capitalism, Ms. Sinema has gone to great lengths to define herself as the opposite of what she was before.
[Ms.] Sinema has finally swung so far around that the people she used to disagree with are now her allies. Her old allies, who now disagree with her, no longer have any hope she’ll work with them.
Greg Sargent: “Biden’s frustration with Manchin and Sinema captures a dark truth,” https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/10/05/biden-manchin-sinema-frustration-reconciliation/
One of the strangest [media] story lines about the battle over President Biden’s agenda is the notion that progressives won’t accept “reality.” But if this saga tells us anything, it’s that we need a wholesale rethink of what counts as “realism” in our politics these days.
[T]he deep perversity of this is illustrated by the news that Biden is frustrated with two of these centrists, Sens. Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.) and Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.). Politico has a new report on a conference call between Biden and House progressives that illuminates this dynamic.
On the call, Biden told progressives that the reconciliation bill will have to come down to about $2 trillion. But he also detailed how difficult dealing with Manchin and Sinema has been:
“It was a blunt conversation,” said one House Democrat who was in the meeting. Biden is “getting more and more frustrated.”
The source familiar with the discussion added that Biden said things like, “‘I hear your frustration. You don’t have to talk to them as much as I have to talk to them’ — but then using it as a dash of realism to get progressives to come down, like, ‘This is as far as these folks will go.’”
I can confirm more. Progressives on the call were not told that Manchin and Sinema had actually agreed to that $2 trillion, just that the White House believed this was roughly what would pass muster, an aide to a House Democrat confirms to me.
[So] Manchin and Sinema are still not detailing how much spending they can accept, or what they want sacrificed from the reconciliation bill. Meanwhile, progressives are signaling a willingness to make sacrifices to win Manchin and Sinema, and talking pragmatically about how to accomplish this, without even knowing what that will take.
Tell me who the true realists and pragmatists are in this scenario again?
Phillip Bump adds, “Why Kyrsten Sinema’s political position is so baffling”, https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/10/05/why-kyrsten-sinemas-political-position-is-so-baffling/
Whatever [Sinema’s] plan might be — and it is certainly the case that any plan she has for this particular political moment is hard for an outsider to ascertain — it is also probably the case that it’s rooted in questionable assumptions about the electorate.
We should start by noting that there’s nothing about Sinema that necessarily stands out politically to a significant effect. We can measure the Senate on two metrics: how ideological they are (as indicated by a measurement called DW-NOMINATE calculated by Voteview) and how red or blue their state is, as revealed in its 2020 presidential vote margin. When we do so, we find Sinema near the middle on both metrics: Arizona narrowly preferred President Biden and she is among the most ideologically “moderate” members of the Senate, much less the Democratic caucus.
But, then, so is her colleague, Sen. Mark Kelly (D-Ariz.). Sinema is the second most-moderate member of the Democratic caucus, behind only Sen. Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.). But Kelly is ranked fifth, trailing Sens. Angus King (I-Maine) and Thomas R. Carper (D-Del.). In other words, the difference between Sinema and Kelly on these two metrics is vanishingly small — but the difference in their responses to the twin policy proposals the caucus is trying to pass is miles apart.
(Bump then goes into an analysis of research which has consistently shown that politicians and staff for elected officials make incorrect assumptions about what the electorate wants.)
Again, maybe there’s a plan. Perhaps there isn’t; politics is not usually driven by perfectly logical analyses. But if there is a plan, and it depends on Sinema’s assessments of where Arizona wants her to be, her plan may not unfold as anticipated.
Sinema has taken to issuing statements and posting them on Twitter, This is apparently all she thinks she owes to the lowly people who voted for her as well as the rest of the nation. But I would say the walls are closing in.
Sinema pulls a bait and switch on Democratic voters in Arizona, “fundraises” big money from corporate donors to block or diminish Biden’s agenda, and then she “fundraises” again to get paid.
At this point, all she’s doing is “fundraising”, representing corporate donors, and trying to be a corrupted, entitled a$$hole on the same scale as her mentor, Joe Manchin.
But Sinema hasn’t figured out how to deal with angry activists and voters. Manchin is 6’3″ tall, a very confident man, accustomed to deference and unafraid. He loves being interviewed, talking to reporters, and defending his indefensible positions. When activists in kayaks chased down his yacht recently, he didn’t issue a statement condemning them.
There appears to be a lesson here for Sinema. If you’re going to screw the people who elected you to represent them, then you better have a plan for their righteous anger and demands for accountability. And if your response is to run into a bathroom or an elevator because you’re afraid of them, then maybe it’s time to stop screwing them so hard. The people are not going to stop resisting, nor should they.
Maybe if the press stopped talking about only the price tag on these bills and instead did their f’n jobs and reported on what’s actually in the bills, it would put more pressure on the con lady to act like an adult.
Because what’s in the bill(s) is very popular with Americans.
Instead, most of what we get from the MSM is money talk without context and reporters calling Sinema and Manchin “moderates” with straight faces.