Today, Explained - What does Kyrsten Sinema want?

Episode Date: October 19, 2021

Tim Murphy from Mother Jones explains how Sen. Kyrsten Sinema went from a left-wing activist to a Biden obstructionist. Today’s show was produced by Will Reid, edited by Matt Collette, engineered by Efim Shapiro, fact-checked by Laura Bullard and hosted by Sean Rameswaram.Transcript at vox.com/todayexplained Support Today, Explained by making a financial contribution to Vox! bit.ly/givepodcasts Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Get groceries delivered across the GTA from Real Canadian Superstore with PC Express. Shop online for super prices and super savings. Try it today and get up to $75 in PC Optimum Points. Visit Superstore.ca to get started. Let's check in on American politics, shall we? Let's see here. We've got a Democratic president, a Democrat-led house, and by the slimmest of margins, a Democrat-controlled Senate.

And there's this massive economic agenda. The president's trying to push through Congress. And Democrats have just one problem. Actually, two. Actually, three. The first one is the Republicans. They don't want to help with this human infrastructure business we've talked about on the show before. The second problem is Senator Joe Manchin, West Virginia. We've talked about him on the show before, too. Manchin in the middle, back in March. Check it out. But the third problem,

as you've surely heard recently, is Senator Kyrsten Sinema, Arizona. Today, we're going to talk about her. Arizona freshman Senator Kyrsten Sinema emerging as the key player, holding the fate of the president's agenda in her hands. Literally one senator, one Senator Kyrstenema, is holding up the will of the entire Democratic Party. She is, depending on how you look at it, the 49th or 50th vote for any piece of legislation requiring 50 votes in the U.S. Senate. Tim Murphy, senior reporter, Mother Jones, mojo. And she is a very difficult vote to get. When you pass legislation that's

supported by both parties, that's how it sticks and how it stays. So my approach has always been, if you can do something in a bipartisan way and you can make a difference in people's lives by working together, it's the way you should do it. You know, Joe Manchin is sort of the obstructionist that you would expect if you looked at the Democratic caucus. He comes from, you know, one of the nation's most conservative state. He's always been like this. And Democrats always knew that it was going to be hard to get him on board with any piece of legislation, you know, requiring just 50 votes. We're talking. We're talking. You're going to have a resolution by the end of the week.

We're talking. We're talking. Kyrsten Sinema started off as almost the antithesis of Joe Manchin. You know, if you talk to people who knew her when she was just getting started, and even in much of her early career in Arizona politics, they would really never have expected her to take the turn that she has right now. So let's go back to her origin story. Where does she come from? She was born in Arizona. She moved to the Florida Panhandle at a young age.

Her family was going through some financial difficulties, and they ended up living in a gas station that was owned by a relative. For nearly three years, we lived in an old abandoned gas station without running water or electricity. The exact parameters of the gas station, whether it had running water, electricity, things like that, these are things that she's sort of been challenged a bit on over the years. But, you know, the fact of the matter is it was really difficult circumstances for her. They didn't have a lot of money. They relied on donations from the local LDS church

that her family belonged to. She's a Mormon. She was raised Mormon. Huh. And she's talked about, you know, that experience growing up as she's characterized it as homeless as really kind of giving her this drive to change her own circumstances.

I never believed that being homeless was going to stop me from being who I wanted to be. See my parents taught me that if you work really hard, you can make it. I worked really hard, but I still needed a little help. And you see that from a very early age. She graduates high school at the age of 16, so they end up having two valedictorians at her graduation because she just kind of showed up out of nowhere as a co-valedictorian. Huh. After high school, she enrolled at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah,

the flagship Mormon university. And you graduated college early as well. Just 18. She leaves the LDS church not long after graduating and moves to Arizona and takes a job as a social worker. So she sounds like a pretty advanced kid turned teenager turned adult. At what point does she get into politics? Not too much longer after that. She's in her early 20s living in Arizona. She's been divorced, and she's working at a social worker in a poor community in Phoenix with a lot of Mexican immigrants

and kind of encountering, you know, the brokenness of the American system in lots of ways. And through one way or another, it leads her to involvement with the Arizona Green Party. And this is around 2000 Ralph Nader's running for president. Over the past 20 years, big business has increasingly dominated our political economy. And this control by the corporate government over our political government is creating a widening democracy gap. Where he will eventually play a significant role in that election. And Sinema takes a position as the spokesperson for the Arizona Green Party there,

you know, showing up at bars to, like, register people to vote and get them involved with the Nader campaign. One year later, 2001, she decides to run for a spot on the Phoenix City Council. How's it go? It doesn't go very well. Doesn't get very many votes. And in any event, the election's on September 11th. Like the September 11th. The September 11th. So very quickly, her career moves into another chapter.

Where does it go after that? Well, she becomes very involved in the anti-war movement. By God, war is the ultimate mortal sin. There's no such thing as a just war. War cannot end terrorism because war is terrorism. It's very much an uphill battle in Arizona, particularly in that moment. And Sinema becomes involved as a leader in a group called Arizona Alliance for Peaceful Justice.

It's a very ragtag mix of anarchists, and there's Quakers, and there's, you know, Green Party types, and libertarians, and just a real coalition of folks who sort of know that they're outnumbered in maybe the Phoenix area, but are very much committed to kind of stopping the war by any means. Right. I mean, thinking back to this time, I imagine John McCain is a Arizona senator who's very much for these wars. I've said many times that I believe the progress of the war is more than satisfactory. Yeah. She would famously show up at protests wearing a pink tutu just to make sure that the attention was on her. You know, she'd be there with a pink tutu and a megaphone. It's very much people kind of outside the system trying to pressure the insiders.

How does she find her way back to politics, to not only being a political activist, but to being a politician? So she keeps running. She loses her first city council election as a candidate. She runs again the next year for state rep as a independent this time and comes pretty close to winning. And then two years later, she finally changes her party affiliation to Democrat, runs for state rep and gets in. Third time's a charm. Now, Arizona at that time was nothing at all like Arizona today. You know, it was extremely, you know, Republican state legislature and Sinema was very much in the minority there. And so for her first year in office, she thinks of herself as this bomb thrower who's just not getting anything done. And that kind of causes her to do some soul searching about what she's in politics for. What did she find? She found an outlet.

You know, around 2005, about one year into her time in the state capitol, she got involved with a group called Arizona Together, which was formed to combat a same-sex marriage ban that was going to be on the ballot in 2006. Sinema, who is by that point openly bisexual, sort of a natural person to be in the leadership of this organization, and she teamed up with a Republican, and their job was to find a way to beat back this ballot initiative at a time when gay marriage bans were just cleaning up at the ballot box. You know, they were undefeated. What they're about is a number of states, 20 so far, have introduced and passed amendments protecting the institution of marriage. Many of those came after, I think about 16 of those came after the Massachusetts decision

allowing for same-sex marriage in that state in efforts to protect the institution of marriage from activist judges and from activists and allow the people to vote on the issue. That's why all these states are introducing marriage amendments, eight this time around, which would, of course, bring the total to 28. They had never lost a gay marriage ban. It just looked like, you know, it was like a political law, like gravity. This is just something that would pass. So in order to defeat this, Sinema had to sort of recalibrate and try and look at politics in a different way. How do you mean? She kind of tones down her act a lot. Huh. They made a deliberate

decision that they weren't going to make this fight about gay marriage, even though it was clearly an enormous number of retirees, is filled with, you know, heterosexual senior citizens, you know, who benefit from the domestic partnership law by, for instance, having hospital visitation rights or access to somebody's pension or somebody like that. Large, large numbers of people would actually be affected by a referendum that purportedly was simply going to be a preventative measure to ban same-sex marriage. In attempting to build this broader coalition that could actually win, they were going to focus on what this would mean for the retirees in Arizona, which was kind of a radical decision that got a lot of blowback, you know, from LGBT allies.

So she wasn't wearing like her pink tutu to these same-sex rallies? No. She was really driving this middle-of-the-road message that, you know, if you paid attention to her, you might not even know that there was a same-sex marriage fight on the ballot that year. And kind of an incredible thing happened, which is that she won i think this was

the only same-sex marriage ban to ever actually be defeated at the ballot box in arizona of all places in 2006 she ends up writing a book in response to this and in response to kind of the the feedback that she'd gotten and some of the pushback she'd gotten. And her book is called Unite and Conquer. And in it, she just talks about how, you know, one of the lessons that activists can draw is to sort of be less activist-y. In politics, we tend to see things as right versus left, black or white, Republican or Democrat. But if we want to impact meaningful change for the people that we serve,

we have to be willing to work with people who are different than ourselves. You know, to listen to the polls and to kind of tone down your rhetoric and your list of demands and lean into building, like like the biggest coalition possible. In order for politics to work for people in this country, we can no longer divide and conquer.

We must unite and conquer. Thank you. Support for today explained comes from Ramp. Ramp is the corporate card and spend management software designed to help you save time and put money back in your pocket. Ramp says they give finance teams unprecedented control and insight into company spend. With Ramp, you're able to issue cards to every employee with limits and restrictions and automate expense reporting so you can stop wasting time at the end of every month. And now you can get $250 when you join Ramp. You can go to ramp.com slash explained, ramp.com. Ramp.com. Cards issued by Sutton Bank. Member FDIC. Terms and conditions apply. BetMGM, authorized gaming partner of the NBA, has your back all season long.

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to speak to an advisor free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario. Never has such a refreshing experience been offered at this or any other cinema so tim it sounds like kirsten cinema has like a pretty interesting origin story from you know a kid living in a gas station to a you know practicing mormon who goes to byu she skips all sorts of grades graduates graduates early, tries to become

a politician, doesn't work out. She becomes a pretty vocal anti-war activist, gets kind of crunchy, and then finds her way back to being a sort of more moderate, nuanced politician after her days in a pink tutu. At what point does she make the transition to a national figure? It's sort of a long transformation for her. You know, it's happening while she's in the state legislature. It's happening while she's a member of the House of Representatives. And now that she's in the U.S. Senate, she's kind of the fully formed final version of Kyrsten Sinema. You know, while she's in the Arizona legislature, she is, for the entire time she's there, in the minority. And so her job is, you know, facing this deluge of kind of terrible conservative legislation.

We're talking about things like SB 1070. This legislation, SB 1070, required police officers to inquire into the status of individuals they interacted with. It jeopardized families who did something so simple as give their neighbor a ride to church. You know, we're talking about kind of the rise of the birthers in Arizona politics, questioning the legitimacy of President Barack Obama. Governor Brewer does not yet have an opinion on the birther bill. The bill was passed yesterday evening and would require a presidential candidate to show a U.S. birth certificate to Arizona legislators, or else the candidate name would be pulled from the Arizona ballot. Do you believe Obama is a citizen? I think there's some real question about that. So she's there at a really wild time,

and she thinks of her job as trying to kind of find a way to slow down this avalanche of bad stuff by any means. How is she going to do that? She's going to make friends with the Republicans. We had to win this one. So I teamed up with Adam Driggs, a Republican state senator who had supported SB 1070. We carefully devised a legal and economic strategy targeted towards each senator we had to win over. She's going to, you know, move her desk across the aisle and sit next to, you know, a real conservative Tea Party colleague, and they're going to be friends, and they're going to find stuff they can work on. And that's going to give her credibility to slow down other things or to block other things. And she's going to achieve some kind of incremental progress in a way that would

otherwise not be accessible to her. And you start to see kind of traces of that while she's in Arizona politics. But in 2012, they do redistricting and a seat opens up in the Phoenix area. It's a swing seat. And she decides to run for that. And she wins. And she wins. You know, up until that point in Arizona, she'd still been kind of a progressive. She was a progressive hero. In fact, there were questions when she ran about whether she was too liberal for the seat, whether she could win, you know, an Arizona swing seat. And Republicans reprised all these ads. Kyrsten Sinema calls herself a Prada socialist. She acts like one. They dug up an interview in which she had kind of jokingly referred to herself as a Prada socialist because

she was both fashionable and radical. Sinema even supported Nader for president a prada socialist yeah kind of a strange strange term but um you know self-deprecating in a way you know they pulled up um things she had written when she was not just an anti-war activist but an anti-globalization activist at a you know at a protest in which the police were shooting rubber bullets at people and she was complaining about brutality um you know they pulled up all these aspects from her past and photos of her in the pink tutu and stuff like that. And she just deflected all of it. None of this stuck. How did she deflect all of it? How does none of it stick in a relatively conservative state like Arizona? Well, part of it is that she had also spent, you know, the last few years

demonstrating, you know, her congeniality or her ability to work with and make friends with the other side of the aisle. You know, she'd had this kind of self-deprecating streak that allowed her to, you know, sort of Teflon in a way for the attacks that they're throwing out of her. You know, they wanted to portray her as if she was still stuck in 2002, but it was kind of clear as day to anybody watching her that some gear had started to change in her political calculus, and she was very much not that. She was aggressively seeking to be the voice for the political middle. And when she gets to Washington, one of the first things she does is she starts talking about the need to work with Republicans at a time when people like Paul Ryan are ascendant

in Congress and Republicans are in charge of the need to kind of put aside our partisanship and work together. Does she fix Washington? You know, I think maybe the jury's still out. No, she does not convince Paul Ryan to not be Paul Ryan. She does not prevent the Republican Party from becoming the party of Donald Trump. But in her incremental, you know, ground level ways, she sort of thinks that she is achieving some kind of progress. So one of the things she does in her effort to, you know, befriend the other side of the aisle and come up with a kind of working arrangement with everyone is she starts a bipartisan spin class in the Capitol gym. It's actually at the behest of a new friend of hers, Kevin McCarthy, the current House minority leader. We're here to lift each other up. So turn to your neighbor and compliment one part of their body. Be specific. Kevin McCarthy spins? You know, I don't even know if he goes to the classes, but she got a bipartisan assemblage of lawmakers to do this. She's a very competitive

athlete. And so she would go on early morning jogs with Republican members of Congress. So she, you know, through athletics or what have you, you know, she kind of set a goal of being able to work with all of these Republican members of Congress who at the time were very much, you know, very vocally, you know, anti-Obama, deeply partisan figures. And she is in her way able to work with these people. You know, she's able to push through kind of measures on, say, veterans health or, you know, kind of less overtly partisan things that, you know, to her count as a real victory. But if you look at the overall direction, the trajectory of Congress during these years, you would not say that, you know, Kyrsten Sinema's policy of radically

accepting her Republican colleagues had actually moved the ball in any way. And I mean, I guess by any measure, she at least is successful because some years later, she wins Jeff Flake's Senate seat, right, in 2018? Yeah, and by the time she's running in 2018, she barely even mentions that she's a Democrat. It's time to put our country ahead of party, ahead of politics. It's time to stop fighting and look for common ground. Her independent brand is very well earned. And although the Democratic, you know, senatorial committee more or less clears the way

for her to run in that primary and eventually to run for that seat, and although she, you know, still had ties to, you know, Democratic institutions and certainly was running as a Democrat, it wasn't something that she very freely advertised. She didn't publicly endorse the Democratic nominee for governor that year. So she, once again, really, you know, sort of identified what she decided was the political middle here.

So, you know, eventually, yeah, she wins the seat in 2018 by the narrowest of margins. And does she endorse a candidate for president in 2020? Yeah, she eventually did endorse Joe Biden late in the Democratic primary, but, you know, continued to kind of try not to even be too critical of President Donald Trump in kind of keeping with her, you know, idea of being able to work with anybody regardless of their party. So that was more than anything, very much her brand. She wasn't somebody who was out, you know, stumping for Biden as he sought to flip Arizona that fall. Which I suppose that was a very roundabout way of coming back to this present moment where Joe Biden is trying to pass this landmark piece of legislation,

this sort of revolutionary way of thinking about care in America. It's infrastructure spending. It's spending on education. It's spending on health care. And Kyrsten Sinema is one of two Democrats who really seem to be holding it up to the frustration of many fellow Democrats. Is this whole story we just went through informing this moment? It is. You know, you can see how her experiences just being ignored, her experiences being in a minority party without any power changed not just how she thought about being a minority legislator as somebody who needed to work really closely with the other side, but it changed what she thought a majority

legislature should work like. So she didn't come away from her time in Arizona or her time in Congress with the idea that when Democrats take power, they need to just push everything through and take advantage because you don't know when you're going to have another shot. That's what a lot of activists think right now. She came away with a much different perspective, which is that if you want Washington to work, then you need the majority party not to function at all like it did in Arizona. You need people like Kyrsten Sinema to come in and inject like a new kind of order and bipartisanship and comedy to a chamber that's been missing all of these things. You need to build a durable kind of legislative strategy that might not be as big and might not have as big of a price tag or as many agenda items in it, but will be able to withstand successive changes in the structure of Congress? So the thing to remember, and I know this can be really hard to do when we're feeling really

worried about what's coming right in front of us, is to think a couple years down the road on what it looks like 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? So she is a product of these experiences early in her career, but it's kind of a much different path than a lot of other people have taken from those same data points. And so that's why you see this big conflict in Arizona right now among her constituents, among people who have supported her in previous elections, you know, for literally decades, who marched in the streets with Kyrsten Sinema, who look at this as we've finally gotten this power. We finally have the votes to do all of these things that we were, you know, marching with Kyrsten Sinema for all these years ago. Let's do it. And she,

from the same set of experiences, has finally come to a different set of conclusions. Well, it feels like the one or two or three trillion dollar question right now, take your pick, is what exactly does Senator Kyrsten Sinema want? Does anyone know the answer to that? If you take it from her, the White House does know. She's sort of pushed back on the narrative that Kyrsten Sinema won't say what she wants, not by telling us what she wants, but by, you know, insisting that she has told other people what she wants. It's kind of unusual for a senator to be as almost antagonistic to her own, you know, constituents and former supporters as she is right now. Over the last few weeks, for instance, you've seen a number of activists, you know activists trying to talk to her at Arizona State where she teaches a class on a flight to D.C.

I just want to know if you can commit, as my senator, if you can commit to passing a reconciliation that could provide a pathway to citizenship for immigrants. And they're doing this because she's not really meeting with anybody. Coalitions that helped get her elected, you know, groups like Lucha in Arizona that did more than almost anyone else, you know, to turn the state blue over the last decade or so by mobilizing Mexican-American communities, you know, they can't get a meeting. They say that, you know, John McCain was an easier person to talk to despite being a Republican. I mean, her relative silence on her positions has led to people creating their own narratives, right? And one of them is that, oh, Kyrsten Sinema takes a lot of money from big business, from pharmaceutical companies, and maybe that's

why she doesn't want to support this infrastructure spending bill. Has she said anything to address those concerns? She hasn't really. And that's, you know, that's the surprising thing. You know, you take, you know, her political role model. She said John McCain is a political role model. And John McCain's kind of signature calling card was that he never stopped talking. You know, he never said no to an interview or a TV appearance. And this is what the activists criticizing Sinema will say is you always knew where he stood. It wasn't always where you wanted him to stand, but it wasn't a question of John McCain won't tell us where he stands. Is she willing to scuttle the entire legislation plans of her party for some concerns she might have voiced privately to the White House?

That's the big game of chicken here. And she, you know, through it all, insists that she is a good faith partner on this. You know, she has not at any point said, I'm going to kill the Democratic agenda. She's simply not committed to, you know, supporting the democratic agenda. She is where she wants to be, which is she's in the room. She's one of the decision makers here. You know, she has, you know, almost final input on what's going to go into this bill. As somebody, you know, who entered politics from, you know, the outside of the outside, having that seat at the table is almost like the culmination of, you know, what she's worked for in politics. So I think that she sort of looks at this and is exactly where she wants to be.

And it doesn't mean, you know, that the number connect agenda is dead, but it does mean that whatever passes is going to be something with Kyrsten Sinema's imprint on it. Tim Murphy writes about politics for Mother Jones. Will Reed produces Today Explained. We reach out to Senator Sinema's office for comment on what exactly she wants out of these negotiations and why.

And we heard nothing back. Thank you.