After creating a lot of drama and suspicion, Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema did the right thing Friday and voted for the Senate resolution to advance President Biden’s $1.9 trillion COVID relief bill. But that vote was just a first step. Final passage is a few weeks away, and beyond the COVID bill, there are numerous other priorities from immigration to voting rights that will probably require Democrats doing something about the filibuster. Which means that so far, all Manchin and Sinema have done is pass the first test.
Of the two, Manchin is easier to understand. He represents a state that Donald Trump won by nearly 40 points in November. The situation in West Virginia is so unwelcoming to Democrats that even Governor Jim Justice, who originally ran as a Democrat, became a Republican in order to survive.
So, what is Sinema thinking? A plausible if charitable explanation is that she wants to emulate the late Arizona Senator John McCain and play the maverick. “Everyone knows that I am very independent-minded,” Sinema told Politico last October. “And that it’s not super useful to try and convince me otherwise.” That sounds nice—but it’s a horrible misreading of the historical moment she’s in. The Democrats have a mere two years to do as much as they can for the American people. What the party needs right now is unity and discipline, not mavericks.
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Sinema’s shift toward aggressive centrism is surprising for those who followed her beginnings as an unapologetically progressive independent aligned with the Arizona Green Party. The Wall Street Journal once described her as a “Nader-supporting ‘bomb thrower.’” Sinema’s progressivism cost her: In 2002 she finished last in a five-candidate state house race, garnering just 8 percent of the vote.
Her time in the Arizona House of Representatives taught Sinema to survive in a conservative state with a heavily Republican legislature. Between 2005 and 2012, she started to build up her McCain-esque public brand: the socially progressive, fiscally conservative bipartisan coalition-builder.
By the time Sinema ran for Congress in 2012, she had established a comfortable niche as the Democrat who defeated Arizona’s proposed ban on same-sex marriage but who often bucked the Democratic line on budget issues to side with the GOP. It’s a persona Sinema has been unwilling to set aside: a record of her roll call votes while she was in the House of Representatives marked Sinema out one of the most conservative Democrats in the House, especially on budgetary votes.
Sinema’s rightward drift accelerated in the obstructionist atmosphere of the Senate. By the end of her first year as a senator, Sinema’s voting record was comfortably to the right of Mitch McConnell’s. Furious progressives argue that Sinema’s bipartisanship does little more than “help Republicans to negotiate [Democrats] down from real solutions.” Alongside Manchin, she remains opposed to killing the obstructionist filibuster even as 62 unions progressive advocacy groups united this week to call for its end.
The irony is that she’s going to need that filibuster personally in a way most of her Democratic Senate colleagues won’t. Why? So her party can pass laws protecting voting rights, which right now would require 60 votes. The Latino vote is around 20 percent of her state’s electorate and growing. She’ll need that vote in a big way when she runs again in 2024.
But this year, Republicans are already busy introducing a raft of new voter suppression laws, including an especially harsh set of measures in the state. Those laws would make it easier for officials to strip voters from the absentee list while making it harder for regular Arizonans to obtain their ballot. That would be fatal for Sinema, who won by a margin of only 55,000 votes even before inflaming progressive activists against her.
If the Democrats fail to deliver on COVID-19 relief and future stimulus, it would devastate the 12 million Americans facing an unemployment cliff. It would also shatter public faith in the institutions Sinema earnestly wants to protect. Sinema may be auditioning to fill McCain’s wild card Senate role, but the high cost of her stubbornness means she’s closer to becoming Democrats’ Rand Paul. At a time when Democrats can finally pass powerful economic policy long stonewalled by the GOP, the last thing the party needs is its own “Cult of No” standing between hurting Americans and the promise of federal relief.
Biden’s relief package represents the rare moment when good politics and good government meet. The package helps people regardless of who they voted for, offering Sinema a storybook bipartisan outcome even if achieving that much-needed stimulus means shoving do-nothing Republicans aside. Drag the process out with centrist obstructions, and $1.9 trillion will look like a bargain compared to the cost of bailing the country out of mass evictions and vaulting social unrest.
If Sinema hopes to build a legacy as a bipartisan centrist leader, she must put her country and Arizonans first by being the leader they elected her to be. That means joining with Democrats to deliver long overdue financial relief and legislative leadership to millions of suffering Americans.
