Voto Latino Launches Six-Figure Campaign To Unseat Sen. Kyrsten Sinema

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Gabe Ortiz at Daily Kos posts, ‘Adiós Sinema’: Voto Latino announces campaign to replace Arizona senator:

Voto Latino announced Monday evening that its launching a six-figure campaign to unseat and replace Arizona’s Kyrsten Sinema. The advocacy group says on the Adiós Sinema website that in siding with the Jim Crow filibuster over critical voting reforms, “Sinema’s actions directly undermine and suppress the right and wellbeing of Latinos that elected her into office.”

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“Make no mistake: Senator Sinema owes her political career to Latino voters,” Voto Latino President María Teresa Kumar says at the website. “She clearly doesn’t understand that she can’t take that support for granted. Grassroots Latino leaders in Arizona and in Washington repeatedly reached out to Senator Sinema and urged her to protect our constitutional right to cast a vote and have it count, but she refused. Now voters will have the last word.”

Kumar said in announcing the campaign on Rachel Maddow’s show Monday night that the organization “did not make this decision lightly. We had conference calls and we spoke to individuals, we engaged and we engage with Senator Sinema. We are very clear on the day of the vote what we needed her to do.” But as all know, she (along with West Virginia’s Joe Manchin) joined all Senate Republicans to kill critical voting legislation named after a civil rights icon she’s dared call her “hero.”

Kumar said Sinema “did not take seriously this idea that voting is the essence as the president said it`s the threshold of democracy, where millions of Arizonans and Latinos will be disenfranchised, millions of Americans across the country if we do not have fair, free elections at the federal level where everybody, regardless of party, are just playing by the same rules.”

Maddow cited a recent poll of Arizona Democrats finding that 72% of respondents “would prefer that there was a different candidate for her seat than her next time around. Another poll found at the best-case scenario for her it would be a very crowded primary for her seat, in a very crowded primary, she would still lose the primary by four points.” Rep. Ruben Gallego, a U.S. military veteran who represents the state’s 7th district, said some of Sinema’s colleagues in the Senate have in fact urged him to challenge her.

“To be honest, I have gotten a lot of encouragement from elected officials, from senators, from unions, from your traditional Democratic groups, big donors,” Gallego recently told CNN. “Everything you can imagine under the sun.” He told the outlet that he’ll make a decision on whether to primary Sinema [in 2024].

Latino and Indigenous activists and voters were critical in sending Mark Kelly to the Senate last November. They also delivered the state to President Biden, who became the first Democratic presidential nominee to win the state in more than two decades. “In Arizona, 30% of the electoral base is Latino,” Kumar said. “By the time that Senator Sinema [gets] on the ballot, we`re going to have 162,000 newly minted eligible voters that have just turned 18 within the last four years.”

Voto Latino is the first major Latino organization to challenge Sinema following her betrayal to Arizonans. She’s also lost support from EMILY’s List and NARAL. “We believe the decision by Sen. Sinema is not only a blow to voting rights and our electoral system but also to the work of all of the partners who supported her victory and her constituents who tried to communicate the importance of this bill,” said EMILY’s List President Laphonza Butler.

”We have to remind folks that it wasn`t just the filibuster,” Kumar continued. “If we cannot access the voting booth, everything else that Arizonans say that they care about, whether it`s the environment because they don`t have—they don`t have water, whether it’s access to health care, whether it’s access to minimum wage, none of that is possible because there`s an obstructionist government right now that`s being held by the minority party and is being espoused by the minority of Americans, not the majority of Americans.”

Then there is the Wall Street corporate front group that pretends to preach the gospel of “bipartisanship,” former Senator Joe Lieberman’s (yes, this asshole again) No Labels organization. This So-Called Bipartisan Group is Really a Secret Money Machine for Corporate Interests:

No Labels wants people to believe its mission is to find bipartisanship solutions – it even has its own affiliated caucus in Congress, called the Problem Solvers. But the truth is No Labels is just a front group for a handful of mega donors looking to stack the deck in their favor at the expense of everyone else.

Earlier this year, the Chicago Sun Times exposed No Labels campaign finance scheme.

“No Labels, a group advocating bipartisanship in Congress, has created a network of Super PACs to influence the 2018 elections — but doesn’t want its fingerprints on the money…

“A Sun-Times investigation determined Super PACS related to No Labels include: United for Progress Inc.; Citizens for a Strong America Inc.; United Together; Govern or Go Home; and Forward, Not Back.”

Further investigations by other media outlets uncovered more about the network and its donors. The Intercept reported that it consists of eight Super PACs associated with No Labels and, despite the litany of PACs, the donors remain largely the same group of about 13 wealthy businessmen, most of whom have a history of financing Republican campaigns.”

How is a dark money group, with a network of Super PACs, funded by a dozen or so mega donors using “bipartisanship” to look out for the best interest of American families? The short answer is that it isn’t.

Last fall, Joe Lieberman Urged Joe Manchin And Kyrsten Sinema To Fight Biden Agenda As He Fought Obama (and they did):

Joe Lieberman, a former Democrat, now an independent known in recent years for his advocacy on behalf of the dark-money group No Labels, is urging Sens. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., and Kyrsten Sinema, D-Ariz., to keep obstructing the Build Back Better legislation that has stalled in the Democratic-controlled Congress.

At a recent event promoting his new book, Lieberman reflected proudly on his actions from over a decade ago, when he worked to kill the public option during the Obama-era Affordable Care Act legislative debates. The move stopped what would have been a small but important step toward establishing universal health care.

[In] 2014, a year after leaving the Senate, Lieberman joined the centrist dark-money group No Labels, for which he now serves as co-chair. The group has fought to curtail the size and scope of President Joe Biden’s Build Back Better domestic spending bill and has called for it to be separated from the bipartisan infrastructure bill — a move that would strip progressives of their leverage to pass the ambitious social spending legislation.

On Monday, the No Labels official website echoed that message in a blog post recapping the state of play in Washington, stopping just short of calling to scrap the $1.75 trillion domestic spending plan completely. Instead, the group endorsed a two-track solution that pushed infrastructure forward and left Build Back Better spinning its wheels.

“The House can and should get infrastructure done,” the group wrote. “Both houses should take time to think about the rest.”

As The Intercept said, Here’s a Better Name for No Labels: Republicans:

[C]uriously, the sensible solutions so often proposed by No Labels and its ilk have an uncanny likelihood of benefiting one particular element of our nation’s political economy: the superrich, or more precisely, the finance industry.

A new report on Monday from the Daily Beast adds a sweeping array of details to what many long knew or suspected about this movement, which allegedly wants to remain above the fray: It’s funded by the barons of hedge funds and private equity.

So what does “Traitor Joe” Lieberman’s wealthy plutocrat barons of hedge funds and private equity think of voting rights in America, and reforming the archaic Senate filibuster rule to secure voting rights? Senator Kyrsten Sinema is now their new hero of Senate obstruction in the mold of “Traitor Joe” Lieberman.

There is nothing “courageous” about selling your soul for corporate bribe money and subjecting millions of Americans to voter suppression and voter disenfranchisement in a crypto-fascist authoritarian GQP tyranny of the minority in which “Traitor Joe” Lieberman’s wealthy plutocrat barons of hedge funds and private equity will do just fine, but American democracy as we know it will come to an end. Senator Sinema is a Judas of American democracy for thirty pieces of silver. Her betrayal of all that generations of Americans have fought and died for and hold dear is not to be rewarded. She will be held accountable.





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5 thoughts on “Voto Latino Launches Six-Figure Campaign To Unseat Sen. Kyrsten Sinema”

  1. A cause for concern is Arizona voters can change their registration anytime and switch back after an election. Potentially, one can expect Repugs to switch to Democrat for Sinema’s primary thus throwing our nomination to her.

  2. “Senator Sinema is a Judas of American democracy for thirty pieces of silver. Her betrayal of all that generations of Americans have fought and died for and hold dear is not to be rewarded.”

    Rumor has it that $inema loved all the attention she got after voting down the minimum wage and that she’s still enjoying her reputation as a “spoiler.” And then there’s all that money rolling in.

    I was watching Ava DuVernay’s film Selma last night. At the end she uses actual film footage of the triumphant third attempt to get over the bridge led by MLK, protected by the Army and the National Guard. King asked for help, and the people came from all over, all kinds of people. It was one victory in a long, hard, and brutal struggle.

    I thought about Sinema. Does she even know this history of her own country, the fight for voting rights and equality?

    I can’t comprehend a person who would betray that history and those people as well as the people she was elected to represent. I can’t comprehend a traitor of her caliber, one who pulled a bait and switch on the voters, got into the Senate via the backdoor, and abused her power at the very first opportunity.

    But apparently, Sinema still thinks she’s flying high. She really doesn’t seem to get it. She’s got all of those GOP white boys cheering her on. She’s got all that money and rightwing support. She seems to think she’s on her way to bigger and better things.

    It’s a really bad situation.

    • Trying to see people like Sinema as rational caring for others human beings will lead to excessive drinking and sadness.

      She’s not wired up like most of us. She’s transactional like 45, she doesn’t care about others or have any shame.

      One of the Lincoln Project folks tweeted out today that they think Sinema and Manchin are expecting a GQP Senate takeover and will switch parties after that happens.

      To keep the money rolling in.

      Switching parties is nonsense, of course. You can’t one day wake up and suddenly be against everything you were for the previous night.

      We really need to vote her out.

      I see the con artists over at NoLabels is attacking Gallego and supporting Sinema, so there’s your proof that Sinema is bought and they fear Gallego.

      • Ruben Gallego is starting to get interesting. He’s on cable news quite a lot these days building up name recognition.

        What I’ve noticed is that he really wants to do this. He wants to be Sinema’s replacement and he’s out there working on it everyday.

        I hope he’s the real deal with pure motivations and so forth.

        It’s encouraging that the Democrats are finally speaking out against Sinema and she is losing support from Democratic donors. This is good and it needs to get louder. But what I really like is there might be a relentless competitor on her bumper, ready to run her right off the road.

        • A quick read of Gallego’s wikipedia page says “tailor made to defeat Sinema and any GQP whacko”.

          Frontrunner I think, unless Schumer wants to screw us over again.

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