Okay, Kyrsten Sinema has made it clear she will never under any circumstances do anything to eliminate the filibuster, even if it means things she claims to support will never pass the Senate. Why she is doing this is a mystery; her justifications are not credible.
Amy Siskind has provided a possible rationale for why Sinema is doing her best to derail the Biden agenda, one supported by a majority of Americans. Keep in mind that these allegations are anonymous, so they must be taken with a large grain of salt. On the other hand, they seem plausible given the nature of her actions to date.
Here’s the full thread from Siskind:
THREAD on Sinema:
• Sinema's behavior has made no common sense to me. Surely she knows too that she would lose in the 2024 Democratic primary. Why would she do it?I have info from an inside source who lives in AZ and has a direct connection. With his permission am sharing.
• First, and this likely isn't breaking news to anyone: Sinema has a highly overinflated ego. She believes since she has been able to work her way up, and accumulate so many academic degrees in a short time, she is a true super star -head and shoulders above intellectually.
• To Sinema, as many of us suspected, her term in the U.S. Senate, she believes is just a stopping ground for her next step. She doesn't assume she will need to be re-elected.
This is something I imagined, but assumed she would be a consultant or something of that variety.
• But nope, I was wrong. That isn't what Sinema believes will be her next step. With her inflated ego and small circle of friends, many of whom she has alienated and lost, not pushing back, she has been living in an echo chamber. The big $$$ corp donors are happy to feed this.
• Sinema believes she will be running to President in 2024 I am told. This self-styled bipartisanship she believes she speaks for, will be her brand to run as the candidate in the middle. Not far-left of far-right. She has convinced herself this is her calling and she has it.
• And you can see why having alienated so many close to her, & believing she is smarter than everyone else in DC and beyond, and with the corporate donors feeding this too while she tows their line, this misguided fantasy can be her view.This I am told is what is happening.
• One postscript per my friend: Sinema believes MAGA elected officials will reject partisanship when they are given a choice of her or Trump.
Yes, the land of magical thinking. But here we are folks!
• I have known about this for a few months, but did not want to betray my friend’s confidence. And he assumed the media would come knocking and find this story - it is well known in Sinema’s inner circle! But they never did, so today he messaged me and said time to go public!
So, if this thread is credible, it demonstrates that toxic narcissism is not exclusive to the Former Guy. This is one form of bipartisanship we can do without.
As for the other narcissist, his actions are more understandable for an old rich white guy who makes his money pushing coal, lives on a yacht, drives a Maserati, and his best friends are hedge fund managers and other “No Labels” fantasists.
Will this thread from Siskind make it out of the weekend news void? Will there be any followup from the press?
And if they do, want to bet their first question will be who will she pick for her 2024 running mate?
The battle cry Kos used so long ago is still relevant:
More Democrats. Better Democrats.
emphasis added.
UPDATE: Charlie Pierce has some historic context and his own comment on Sinema. If you can’t get through the paywall, here’s a bit of it.
...Sinema’s speech concerned changing (again) the Senate rules on the fillbuster. Without a change, voting-rights legislation cannot pass amid unanimous Republican resistance. But, in reality, it summed up four decades of political futility, in which the Republican Party slid toward militarized insanity and the Democratic Party failed in its most essential task, which was to make the Republicans pay a political price for their rising irrationality...
emphasis added
...This dreamy flight from reality is the culmination of everything one faction of the Democratic Party has been about ever since Ronald Reagan got elected in 1980. It is cut from the same weak pastel cloth as Bill Clinton’s assertion that the era of big government was over, and his attempt to middle issues like criminal justice and the social-safety net. It is from the same spun-sugar universe that brought us the Simpson-Bowles fiasco and the nomination of Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court, the latter of which represented an assumption of good-faith in the political opposition that history has proven to be laughably mistaken.
Sinema was not speaking entirely out of personal ambition or stubborn eccentricity, or even from the interests of her donor class. She was speaking for an actual political constituency. There always has been a constituency in her political party that believes profoundly in a Republican Party and a political order that no longer exists. It is a constituency of hope over reality, of nostalgia for a time that really doesn’t deserve it, an appeal not far removed from the current efforts to launder the teaching of American history until it’s smooth and edgeless and easy to travel. Kyrsten Sinema called for American exceptionalism at a time in which the country is far from exceptional, but is, really, struggling to survive, not against “divisions” but against an attack on its fundamental character as real as Bull Run was, and as democratically heretical as anything that ever occurred to John C. Calhoun.
“There always has been a constituency in her political party that believes profoundly in a Republican Party and a political order that no longer exists. It is a constituency of hope over reality, of nostalgia for a time that really doesn’t deserve it, an appeal not far removed from the current efforts to launder the teaching of American history until it’s smooth and edgeless and easy to travel.”
One could argue that description also covers the media, especially the Beltway press.