The Daily - The Story of Kyrsten Sinema

Episode Date: October 27, 2021

As congressional Democrats dramatically scale back the most ambitious social spending bill since the 1960s, they’re placing much of the blame on moderates who have demanded changes.One senator, Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, has played an outsized role in shaping the bill — but has remained quiet about why. Today, we explore what brought her to this moment.Guest: Reid J. Epstein, who covers campaigns and elections for The New York Times.Love listening to New York Times podcasts? Help us test a new audio product in beta and give us your thoughts to shape what it becomes. Visit nytimes.com/audio to join the beta.Sign up here to get The Daily in your inbox each morning. And for an exclusive look at how the biggest stories on our show come together, subscribe to our newsletter. Background reading: How Senator Kyrsten Sinema has undergone a political metamorphosis.Progressive activists have adopted more aggressive tactics against Ms. Sinema and other centrist holdouts as they have blocked aspects of President Biden’s agenda.For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday. 

From The New York Times, I'm Sabrina Tavernisi. This is The Daily. As congressional Democrats dramatically scale back the most ambitious social spending bill since the 1960s, they're placing much of the blame on moderate Democrats who have demanded the cutbacks. A holdup on this massive plan is Democrats Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, who say, we don't need to spend this kind of money. This is way too much money. Today, the story of one of them, Senator Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona. In the middle of it all, Arizona Senator Kyrsten Sinema, whose demands have stalled the Democrats

making progress on the deal. Who has been a key blocker of the package and yet has remained remarkably quiet about it. For months, the most popular parlor game in Washington has been, what does Senator Kyrsten Sinema want? I spoke with my colleague, Reed Epstein, about her rise to the Senate and her outsized role in shaping the bill.

It's Wednesday, October 27th. Reid, we've been hearing Kyrsten Sinema's name a lot together with Senator Joe Manchin as one of two moderate Democratic senators who are kind of putting the brakes on really the most ambitious parts of Joe Biden's agenda. And I feel like I understand at this point why Manchin is in that position. He's a Democrat from a red state, so he kind of has to walk a line. But I don't really understand what motivates Sinema. I mean, she's a senator from Arizona, a state that President Biden won. And we don't actually hear very much from her. She's not out there talking to the press like Manchin is. So who is Senator Kyrsten Sinema?

Where does her story begin? Kyrsten Sinema is 45 years old. She was born in Tucson and during her childhood moved back and forth between southern Arizona and the Florida Panhandles in a poor family. She grew up Mormon. She went to college on a scholarship, was married and divorced by her early 20s. She moves back to Arizona. She begins working as a social worker helping refugees. And in 2000, she takes a job as the spokesperson in Arizona for Ralph Nader's Green Party presidential campaign. Nader at the time was the left-wing alternative to Al Gore in that campaign that Gore narrowly lost to George W. Bush. During this time, she's a prolific letter writer to the Phoenix newspaper, condemning the idea of capitalism, among other things.

In 2001, she runs for the Phoenix City Council and loses while refusing to accept campaign contributions, calling it bribery to the Arizona Republic. In 2002, she loses another campaign for the state legislature as an independent and becomes one of Arizona's Central Iraq War protesters in 2003 as the war begins. Okay, so at this point, she's a hardcore progressive activist. I mean, a real committed idealist, it sounds like. She is. Somebody I talked to called her a radical. And in 2004, she, for the first time, runs for office as a Democrat for the state legislature. And this time she wins.

In 2005, after she wins office, she is involved in some of the state's biggest pro-immigration marches led by undocumented people. I spoke with a Phoenix civil rights leader named Salvador Reza, who led a march from Mesa, 20-some miles to the state capitol in the middle of the summer that he recalled Sinema doing in high heels in 100-degree heat. That she was literally in the middle of this progressive activism in Arizona at the time, and in the legislature very quickly became one of the progressive movement's leaders in Arizona politics. So as a leader of the progressive movement in Arizona politics, did Sinema have a signature achievement? The biggest thing she did in the legislature was organizing and running the opposition to a constitutional amendment that would have banned gay marriage in Arizona.

And she did it by essentially making the constitutional amendment vote about something other than gay people. She made it about how this amendment would infringe on the rights of straight people and single people. And in doing so, she was successful. The amendment failed. But she also alienated some of her allies in the progressive movement, especially in the LGBT world, who felt like they were sort of being disappeared from her political campaign and that this vote, which was essentially about them, was becoming about something else. So she's not using the language of the left. She's essentially fighting this ban on gay marriage by really walking away from the culture war aspect of it. Right. What she did was created a bipartisan coalition to oppose this constitutional amendment. And so that it wasn't

just progressives and Democrats and the LGBT community that opposed this proposal. She brought Republicans on board and people who wouldn't necessarily be allies on gay rights issues to create this group to eventually vote no on the proposed constitutional amendment. And what lesson does she take away from that? I mean, how does that shape her as a politician? You know, I think for the first time we see her realizing that she can be both progressive and bipartisan, or at least use bipartisanship toward a progressive end. use bipartisanship toward a progressive end. And she realizes that she is in the minority in Arizona and that if she's going to get things accomplished, she's going to have to have some support across the aisle from Republicans who may not necessarily be her ideological allies.

So she has to figure out a way to frame these issues in a way that will appeal not just to her progressive allies, but also to people who are Republicans or fundamentally disagree with her on the issues. So how does that play out for her? Well, it plays out in a really interesting way. So in 2010, Arizona was really at the center of the immigration discussion in America because the legislature was considering and ultimately passed a law called SB 1070, the Show Me Your Papers bill that required essentially anyone who was interacting with law enforcement to be able to show that they were either a citizen or legally allowed to be in the country at any time. All eyes on Arizona tonight as several thousand people make their way through the streets of Phoenix in one of the biggest immigration rallies in our state's history. And Sinema was at the forefront of the opposition to this.

Mr. Chair, I rise in opposition to SB 1070 as amended. She tried to slow it down in the Capitol with various procedural tricks. I would encourage you to oppose this legislation as it has constitutional infirmities, major unfairness issues in the law, and does not address the real problems facing our state. She ultimately was unsuccessful, but it again raised her profile even more as a Democratic activist in Arizona. But the next year, in 2011, she co-sponsored a border security bill that Arizona Republicans wanted to pass that increased the penalties for people caught with forged documentation. Huh. for people caught with forged documentation. And that to people in the immigrant rights community in Arizona was really seen as a betrayal from her

that she would have supported something like this. It wasn't something that she needed to support for it to pass. It was a Republican bill. She was the only Democratic sponsor. And they saw it as kind of the beginning of a transformation from her to be somebody who would sell them out if it helped her politically. Huh. So how do you understand that reversal? It's hard. It's hard to understand kind of how she went from point A to point B on this outside the realm of that Arizona was getting an extra congressional seat in the 2012 elections.

And she wanted to run for Congress. Washington doesn't get it. They don't get that people are hurting. Jobs are scarce. People are losing their homes. And they worry that they're next. I get it. The new district was going to be in a competitive area where it wasn't going to be particularly Democratic or particularly Republican.

I'll work with anybody. I'll work with anybody to get things done. Remember, most people in Arizona at that time knew her as the person who was leading marches against the Iraq war, against some of these immigration reforms. You know, they saw her as a hard progressive, and that's not necessarily the best way to win office in a competitive area. Right. If you take the time to form relationships with people, meaningful, authentic friendships with folks, not only do you learn about yourself and others and sometimes change your own opinions and grow, you can get other folks to do things they wouldn't normally do to help you.

So she was essentially looking at higher office and thinking, I have to be more moderate in order to win. She's moving a little bit from left to right. She's trading a little bit of her left-wing credibility to get a little bit of right-wing credibility. And that is something that we have seen from her pretty consistently over the last decade since she's been in Washington. Right. And she wins. She wins in 2012. She comes to Congress and she keeps winning. She wins by more in 2014 than she won in 2012. She wins easily again in 2016 while Trump is losing her district by 16 points.

But the first year that Trump's in office, she votes with him more than half the time. A really striking number, much more than almost any other Democrat in the Congress. And something that was really out of step with her district in central Phoenix at the time. How's that? Because the politics in Arizona are moving to the left and she is moving to the time. How's that? Because the politics in Arizona are moving to the left, and she is moving to the right. Well, I've bucked my party over the years to do what's right for our border. She's, you know, adopting more sort of conservative language. So this is real for us in Arizona. And that's why when opportunities came to work across the aisle to do what's right for our state, I was willing to buck my party.

So I've supported a $10 billion increase for our Customs and Border Patrol agents, a $5 billion increase for ICE agents. She's appearing at the White House with President Trump, and she's doing a lot to appeal to Republicans, particularly suburban Republicans, who voted for President Trump. Who did you vote for? Sinema. Sinema, the Democrat. Yes. Do you usually vote Democrat? No.

No. Are you Republican? Yes. So why vote Sinema? I'm changing. So what do you make of that read? I mean, why is she so out of step with her own district and effectively her own party? Because at this point, she has designs beyond her congressional district.

She wanted to run for the United States Senate. And in 2018, Jeff Flake, a Republican senator from Arizona, was not running for re-election. And she knew that to win, she couldn't appeal only to Democrats, that she had to get a lot of votes from people who had voted for Republicans and who had voted for President Trump. And so she couldn't not only just not alienate those voters, she had to do something explicitly to appeal to Trump voters and be seen as someone who could and did work with President Trump to, in her words, get things done. Right. Because after all, she's running for a seat that was vacated by a Republican. I mean, that's why she's being more moderate than her congressional district, right?

Right, because she understood that it was, at the time, even though it had moved to the left, it was still a Republican state. All of the statewide office holders were Republicans. The two senators were Republicans. A Democrat hadn't been elected to the Senate in 30 years from Arizona. Wow. And so there wasn't much of a track record for someone running on progressive policies. Interesting. So in February of 2018, I decided I wanted to talk to Kirsten Sinema, both about her evolution as a politician and to find out whether progressives in Arizona would accept someone who had moved so far from left to right. At the time, I was a reporter at the Wall Street Journal, and I flew to Phoenix, where I tried to ask her what it was that she really believed and whether she thought that the progressives would be with her. And what she told me was that she'd had a lot of personal growth over the 15 years in public life,

and that what she'd learned was how to operate in a way that was effective and also pragmatic, and to work with people with whom she might disagree to get a little bit done, even if it wasn't everything she wanted to get done. And she felt then that even though she had alienated progressives in her party, that they would stick with her through the election in November and help her win the seat that Republicans had held for 30 years. November and help her win the seat that Republicans had held for 30 years.

And she was somebody who, you know, thought that she could win without a real animating idea of why she would win other than the fact that she was somebody who was going to go to the Senate to try to get things done without really articulating what any of those things would be. And obviously, easier said than done. Yeah, well, getting things done, as it turns out, is hard. And a lot of people in Washington and in Arizona are wondering how committed she really is to getting those things done. We'll be right back.

So Kyrsten Sinema wins the Senate race in 2018, and she takes office. And she's been a senator for almost three years now. How does her political evolution play out? Who is she now? Well, perhaps the most interesting thing about her at first is who she talks to and doesn't talk to. She becomes sort of one of the least publicly accessible senators in the country. She does very few press interviews. She stops meeting with a lot of constituent groups and particularly progressive groups that were her allies and helped her get elected in 2018. Even in Washington, it's hard for lobbyists to get meetings with her office. And so she's somebody that becomes a figure of mystery in both Washington and Arizona.

And what we know about her is that she's somebody who says her political idol is the late John McCain, who also was from Arizona and had spent a long time crafting an image of himself as sort of a quirky maverick willing to buck his own party, who in 2017 in a latenight vote on the Senate floor... With all eyes on McCain, he casts his vote with a thumbs down. Famously voted thumbs down on President Trump's proposal to gut the Affordable Care Act. Seven years of repeal efforts have now essentially gone up in smoke. This is a major defeat for this president,

and it was Senator John McCain, the self-proclaimed maverick, who delivered the final blow. Cinema, this year, there was a vote on raising the minimum wage. I rise today to offer an amendment to increase the federal minimum wage from a starvation wage of $7.25 an hour to $15 an hour over a five-year period. Which was not going to pass, but she echoed McCain by doing a bit of a curtsy with a thumbs down on the Senate floor that got her a lot of attention. Senator Kyrsten Sinema's thumbs down on boosting the minimum wage enraged her party. Those, like, four seconds in what you saw lit up the internet.

Arizona Senator Kyrsten Sinema's posturing thumbs down vote against- And really infuriated a lot of the progressive world in Washington and Arizona. Forget her thumbs, she might as well have stuck her middle finger up at the people of her state, especially the more than 800,000 Arizonans who work for less than $15 an hour. Because she not only voted against the minimum wage increase, but she did so almost flaunting it and sticking it in their faces without so much as an explanation to them for why.

an explanation to them for why. And from there, now we're in a place where she's refused to entertain the idea of altering the filibuster. I would argue the tool itself is neither negative or positive. It's how it's used. To pass things that she ostensibly supports, like gun control or voting rights legislation

or immigration reform. If you remove this tool, this protection for the minority, what happens when you're the minority and that tool is no longer there to protect your rights? And she is, like every Democratic senator, but particularly her and Senator Manchin, the key to President Biden's agenda. And both infrastructure bills that are

sort of on the table this week need her support in order to pass. This is a pretty powerful position she's in. She is. She has placed herself in a position where she can be the key to getting a lot of big stuff done that the White House and congressional Democrats want to see done. And frankly, what she herself said in our 2018 interview was what she wanted to do in the Senate was to be able to get big things done. But that's confusing, actually, because right now she's one of the senators that's putting the brakes on this big Biden spending bill. I mean, the heart of his whole agenda.

She is. I mean, she and Joe Manchin are, at the moment, the impediments to Senate Democrats having a bill that they can get 50 votes for. She, unlike Senator Manchin, doesn't hail from a state where Donald Trump won two-thirds of the vote. Joe Biden won Arizona. Mark Kelly, the other senator from Arizona, is also a Democrat and is basically on board with the rest of the Democratic agenda, even though he has to base the voters next year in 2022 when she doesn't have to face them again until 2024. And so a lot of people, both in the Capitol and in Arizona, are confounded by what she's doing. Because while she said she came to Washington to get things done, she has at the moment made herself a major impediment to getting things done, getting the biggest things done. Senator Kyrsten Sinema has poured cold water on the Democrats' reconciliation infrastructure bill,

the $3.5 trillion infrastructure bill that includes everything that is... So what's going on? I mean, what exactly does she dislike about this social policy bill? She says the following. While I support beginning this process, she says, I do not support a bill that costs $3.5 trillion. Well, she doesn't like the big number that Democrats initially proposed He's also been concerned about a major provision to allow Medicare to negotiate drug prices. She she doesn't like

the mechanics of How Medicare might negotiate lower drug prices? Senator Kyrsten Senma the other, her office confirmed that she is supportive of getting tax revenue from the wealthy. However, she doesn't want to do it by raising that corporate tax rate. And the big thing is she doesn't like the proposed tax increases

that would pay for all of this. And that's really thrown a wrench into this process at a pretty late stage where you have Senate Democrats scrambling to try to find alternate ways to pay for this whole package without raising tax rates that she has said she won't vote for. Right. I mean, that's huge because it's blocking the way that they pay for everything else. Right. And then part of the frustration is that in 2017, she voted against the Trump tax cut that Democrats are trying to undo at least part of it in order to pay for this agenda.

So she's effectively reversing her position on taxes and in doing so gutting her own party's agenda. Or at least forcing them to find an alternate way to fund their agenda. Which they're now scrambling to do. Right. There's sort of an all-hands-on-deck effort to find some way to pay for this. So, Reid, do you think that this all represents an ideological metamorphosis that she's gone through? I mean, from her progressive activist days? Or is it something else? I mean, maybe it's her just wanting to be in the middle of the action, wanting to be a player, an influencer, without any real ideology.

I mean, look, she'd spent her entire elected political career until this year in the minority. political career until this year in the minority. And this year was the first time when her party had a majority in the chamber that she sat in and the opportunity to pass laws. And what we've seen is she continues to act like a member of the minority party. She still seems like someone who is seeking permission almost from Republicans before enacting or supporting pieces of the Democratic agenda. And that's something that has been immensely frustrating, not just to her colleagues in the Senate who have taken to openly castigating her in public, but to her former allies in Arizona. I'll be back. I said I really want to talk to you real quick. Want to talk to you real quick? Hi, actually, I am heading out.

We saw she was followed into the bathroom after teaching a class at Arizona State University. We need $7 million citizenship for $7 million. We need the belt of that better time right now. Wait, who followed her into the bathroom? We knocked on doors for you to get you elected. And just how we got you elected, we can get you out of office

if you don't support what you promised us. You know, there was a group of activists called Lucha, which is an immigrants' rights group in Arizona. I was brought here to the United States when I was three years old. of activists called Lucha, which is an immigrants' rights group in Arizona. I was brought here to the United States when I was three years old. And in 2010, my grandparents both got deported because of S-6 and 70.

And they staked out her class at Arizona State and followed her into the bathroom with a camera rolling, demanding to know if she would be supportive of a path to citizenship for undocumented people. Wow. Something that she, remember, was marching in the streets for. Right.

And now has been sort of hesitant to change the filibuster rules or try to get this piece of legislation into this reconciliation bill. And so that's kind of the position that she's in now. She is in these sort of intense negotiations with her fellow Democratic senators in Washington, almost shuttling from one to the other. At the same time, she has become target number one for these progressive activists

who are following her around with cameras, essentially to yell at her at the airport. It happened even Monday this week. She was walking through National Airport with Tim Scott, Republican senator from South Carolina, through the concourse at the airport. And Scott was almost like a bodyguard for her between the activists with the cameras and cinema. Wow. It's a very different stance for her than we see even from Joe Manchin, who

routinely stops to engage with the same groups of progressive activists that have targeted cinema. Manchin manages to diffuse the situation by stopping and chatting with them for a few minutes at a time. So I'm just thinking back to your 2018 interview when she expressed confidence that progressives wouldn't abandon her. And that turned out to be untrue. And so I guess I'm wondering, who is this for? Who is she serving by doing this? Well, look, when she started out in politics, it was very clear who she was fighting for. She was fighting for immigrant workers in the streets. She was fighting for people who are against the Iraq war. She was fighting against harsh anti-immigration laws. And now she seems to be fighting back against progressive

policies. She's fighting to keep taxes lower on high earners and corporations. She's fighting against lowering drug prices. And she's fighting to keep the government from spending more money than she thinks is appropriate. You know, all of these at the moment put her at odds, not just with progressives, but with the White House and President Biden and almost all of the rest of the Democratic caucus in the Senate. You know, she has the potential to bring down the fortunes of everybody in her party,

from Terry McAuliffe in the Virginia governor's election next week to fellow Democrats facing a reelection in the midterms a year from now to President Biden, who will face the voters again in 2024 if he runs again. And so that's a lot of political pressure on one person who has said that her overriding goal is to get things done. And if she doesn't get things done, how much of the blame can Democrats shift to her? And will voters in states other than Arizona

care that it was Kyrsten Sinema who bollocksed up the Democratic agenda? Or will voters take it out on all Democrats? And so it leaves us wondering kind of what she's doing and whether this is because she really believes that Republicans should have a say in President Biden's big agenda, or whether it's because she has a read on politics in Arizona that's different from her Senate colleague, Mark Kelly, and that her idea of a path to reelection involves a significant amount of Republican support. And frankly, we don't know whether she's right, and she doesn't know whether she's right at the

moment, but we'll all find out eventually. And a lot of that will depend on kind of whether there is eventually an agreement on a package that President Biden can sign and the Democrats, including Kyrsten Sinema, can tout as evidence that they got a big thing done, which is precisely what she said she wanted to come to Washington to do. Reid, thank you. Thank you, Sabrina.

Thank you. We'll be right back. Here's what else you need to know today. Dr. Moore voted yes. Dr. Wharton voted yes. Dr. Wharton voted yes. Dr. Perlman voted yes. Dr. Sawyer voted yes. On Tuesday, a key advisory panel

to the Food and Drug Administration voted overwhelmingly to approve a dose of the Pfizer vaccine for children ages 5 to 11. Shots will be offered in two doses and could begin as early as next week. Today's episode was produced by Rachel Quester, Sydney Harper, Robert Jimison, and Diana Nguyen, with help from Soraya Shockley. It was edited by Paige Cowett and engineered by Chris Wood.

Our theme music is by Jim Brumberg and Ben Landsberg of Wonderland. That's it for The Daily. I'm Sabrina Tavernisi. See you tomorrow.