The Sinema Show (So Much for Federalism, Part 5)

Please forgive this horrible pun. I couldn’t help myself.

Kyrsten Sinema, Senator from Arizona, has with her colleague Joe Manchin of West Virginia, has torpedoed the Democratic agenda, from the Build Back Better infrastructure plan to the far more urgent legislation concerning voting rights. Her rationale for refusing to change the filibuster is that doing so would “worsen the underlying disease of division infecting our country” and foreclose the possibility of government by bipartisan consensus.

I suspect that Sinema’s argument for retaining the filibuster, which raises the threshold for debating legislation to 60% of the 100-member Senate, is disingenuous, sweet rhetorical perfume covering up a political scent that is far less pleasant. (Excuse the pun, once again.)

First, it is evident that Sinema’s appeal to the small-r republican value of free debate among representative citizens to deliberate about bills and arrive at a consensus, or at least a modus vivendi, hides an ulterior motive. For the capital-R Republicans have, for decades, run roughshod over this value, and intentionally so. Senator McConnell of Kentucky announced, in 2008, that the only goal of Republicans in Congress would be to ensure that Barack Obama would be a one-term president. Thus he committed his party not to bipartisan governance…