Senator Sinema: Blocking Progress
Senator Kyrsten Sinema is our modern Neville Chamberlain. That’s neither a casual nor a simple comparison.
She, with Senator Joe Manchin (D) WV, sabotaged an enormous portion of the progressive policies that President Biden and other Democrats were ready to enact early in Biden’s term. In a recent interview with The Washington Post, Sinema (D) AZ, said she expects the Senate filibuster will be ended, “in order to have a short-term political gain.” No, at that time the president, the House and all 48 other Democratic senators wanted to bypass the filibuster to take advantage of a very rare opportunity to do the country tremendous good. Those two alone thwarted it, leading to years of the country doing without those advantages, and which might continue for years to come.
A short refresher about Chamberlain. He was the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom while Hitler was rising and starting to take neighboring territories. Chamberlain had talks with Hitler to get promises that he would stop invading neighbors. Hitler did make promises and Chamberlain assured the British that full war had been avoided. Of course, that was wrong.
Even then, Churchill, who was not yet Prime Minister, and many in his camp, did not believe Hitler would stop until he was stopped. They wanted Britain to ramp up war preparations and form a European coalition to force Hitler to back down.
Sinema believes what is most effective is finding what smaller, but achievable, steps can be gained through bipartisan compromise. That is sometimes true on smaller issues. And it was true in the 1950’s when so many senators had recently come back from fighting side-by-side against Hitler.
Sinema now wants us to trust, and to wait for the other side to join in being reasonable, just as Chamberlain did. But the GOP have already been so blatant in so many ways, that to trust is just as foolish now as it was for Chamberlain.
The historians cast a picture of Chamberlain as sincere. I wouldn’t be surprised if Sinema was too, in her initial conversion to trying for bipartisan compromises. Sincere but naive, because in this era it will work for some things, but not for the key issues that divide us.
But is she still sincere? She wouldn’t support Biden’s Build Back Better plan because she wanted something more bipartisan, and we got nothing. She wouldn’t go along with the idea of bypassing the filibuster to enact voting rights that would undo the damage GOP states have done restricting voting in often biased ways. With school children dying in constant shootings and, at times, an apparent majority ready to take substantial steps, she again preferred preserving the filibuster. With only her and Senator Manchin having blocked so much, it can make one wonder if she’s still standing on principle or looking for gain? For the attention? For the big-dollar donors who have supported her obstruction? For the claim, warped as it is in her hands, of being a maverick? For a strategy to appeal to conservative voters to help keep her in office next time? However, in irony on irony, both she and Manchin saw their reelection odds and are not running.
For the Democrats to have had the House, Senate and White House was a once in every few decades opportunity. A chance for them to show the public how they could reframe government as an ally of everyday working people. A big part of the public frustration that has led to so much turmoil among voters, creating opportunity for someone like Trump, has been frustration. Not just with bad decisions, but with no decisions. With stagnation. With government confronted with big issues and just not doing much of anything.
Had Sinema and Manchin, at the start of this president’s term, stated their objections, gotten a few concessions to lay claim to, but then gone along with all of the rest — the House, the White House, and 48 other Democratic senators — then big changes would have happened quickly, which would have given the public a brighter hope for a positive path forward. But their dual-handed forcing the stagnation to continue killed that rare opportunity.
Sinema and Chamberlain. His error helped worsen horrific military damage. Hers has created terrible policy damage which has consequences in the real lives of millions of people. It would not be surprising if future history books list them as parallel lessons to be learned: Sinema and Chamberlain.