Kyrsten Sinema, apparently not ready to concede her position as the biggest pain in the ass to the Democratic Party, has taken advantage of its joy at winning a fifty first seat in the Senate to go full monsoon on the celebratory mood and announce she is switching her party affiliation from Democratic to Independent.

The somewhat good news here is that she apparently will still caucus with Dems ala Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Angus King of Maine… as she states she expects to keep her Committee assignments.

The bad news is that we Dems will have tough choices to make concerning her 2024 reelection bid. By switching to Independent has she insured that Democrats must let her run against the Republican candidate unopposed or will we insert a real Democrat into the race and risk splitting the vote and ensuring a GOP win?

CNN

“Arizona Sen. Kyrsten Sinema is leaving the Democratic Party and registering as a political independent, she told CNN’s Jake Tapper in an exclusive TV interview.

“I’ve registered as an Arizona independent. I know some people might be a little bit surprised by this, but actually, I think it makes a lot of sense,” Sinema said in a Thursday interview with Tapper in her Senate office.

“I’ve never fit neatly into any party box. I’ve never really tried. I don’t want to,” she added. “Removing myself from the partisan structure – not only is it true to who I am and how I operate, I also think it’ll provide a place of belonging for many folks across the state and the country, who also are tired of the partisanship.”

Sinema’s move away from the Democratic Party is unlikely to change the power balance in the next Senate. Democrats will have a narrow 51-49 majority that includes two independents who caucus with them: Sens. Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Angus King of Maine.

While Sanders and King formally caucus with Democrats, Sinema declined to explicitly say that she would do the same. She did note, however, that she expects to keep her committee assignments – a signal that she doesn’t plan to upend the Senate composition, since Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer controls committee rosters for Democrats.“

I suppose this is slightly better than switching to Republican, though doing so would mean further placating the GOP base voters, to whom she is now probably regarded with some affection for being a thorn in Biden and Shumer’s side but could possibly not fare well against a firebrand MAGA type like Kari Lake. Possibly her calculus here is to force Dems to let her run unopposed or split the vote and risk losing the seat.

Some other opinions:


Yup


I think I agree with Liz here, MAGA likes her giving Dems a pain in the ass but will want to vote for one of their own.


Mmmm. I guess that is possible, but a real Democrat might need those moderate Republicans votes to win. We need to do some polling.


Yup


Possibly.


🤣

I suppose if she caucuses with us we’ll just have to tolerate her antics and watch what she does before deciding about 2024.

If her goal is to be a pain she has certainly achieved that yet again.

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26 COMMENTS

  1. God DAMN her! You know, if she broke out in boils and hives and contracted some horribly painful but not fatal disease I might be convinced maybe I’m wrong about being agnostic. That there is actually a God.

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    • Ease up…she knows that when she comes up for reelection, she’s got an uphill fight. Most Dems hate her guts for her failed attempt at being Manchin Jr. The fact that she’s gone independent might actually work to our advantage, clearing the way for us to easily nominate a good alternative. My guess: she’s going to try to do a Murkowski impersonation and probably fail at that too.

  2. Selfish is as selfish does. Think how the AZ democratic voters feel. I asked her to marry me at the restaurant and later find her giving rimjobs in the men’s room.

  3. When someone shows by their actions who they really are… Sinema has for a long time been a republiQanon by her actions while calling herself a Democrat. A DINO at the very least, but more likely pure MAGAt!!

    • No…a pure MAGA maggot would have made the full leap. Just being a confirmed bisexual (and, more importantly, being unwilling to recant such) makes that a statistical impossibility. This is her trying to be like Bernie Sanders or Lisa Murkowski the same way she tried being Joe Manchin. She will fail yet again at the former the way she did the latter.

  4. If everyone will step away from their ritual outrage for a second, you will see how this move makes sense. Sinema’s Dem credentials have been thoroughly shredded by her own selfish stupidity. She was looking at getting primaried out if she stuck around, so this is an attempt to stay in the 2024 race. However much some of you want to flatout call her Republican, the fact is they’d never accept her and even if they did, they’d give her no real influence.

    So…this was a long time coming. Our single saving grace is that she did it when it wouldn’t put Dem control of the Senate in danger.

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    • I agree Sinema is simply declaring what has always been true since the moment she ran for office. She got what she wanted, a seat in the Senate by using the Democratic Party. Every bit as cynically as Trump used the GOP. For the same reason Trump did – to raise her profile and make money. It’s my fervent hope that corruption charges can be made against her and put her in jail. Sadly, while she’s blindly opportunistic her corporate masters are likely savvy enough to have created plausible deniability that she was always for sale. But make no mistake – if she doesn’t wind up getting charges and imprisoned for corruption she’ll make out like a bandit financially. Given she’s clearly in the midst of a long lasting mid-life crisis money and lots of it will make her feel better. But she’s a corporate whore, albeit now a rich one. And an attention whore too and she’ll be getting a boatload of that moving forward. My worry is that Manchin is just as big an attention whore and who knows what he’ll wind up doing? I don’t see him switching to the GOP. He’d never survived a primary in two years. Hell, he’d lose it by a far larger margin than he will lose re-election running again as a Democrat.

      • Your outrage is overriding your ability to think again, Denis. Manchin is an asshole but not a stupid one. He’s known the truth of your last two sentences for a long time now. So he’s staying right where he is until he can retire, the final vestige of the Dixiecrats.

        • I do tend to think he’ll retire. His margins have shrunk and he’s toast in 2024 if he runs. I think he’s in his 70s now, and huge as his ego is even he knows he’ll never be as admired as Robert Byrd although that was probably his dream. He knows he can’t win a GOP primary, even if in that state they miraculously gained a small portion of sanity and abandoned Trump/Trumpism. He could and probably would win the Dem nomination but Jim Justice is only one of several people who would wipe him out in the general election. Manchin is corrupt, and has managed to enrich both himself and his family members. Much of his antics in the past couple of years have been to advance his and their financial well-being. Being slick and from a state so thoroughly corrupt he’s escaped serious attention from prosecutors who have so many targets including entire agencies. Damn near every one in WV is at least partially under some level of court monitoring. So Manchin quietly makes his deals with cronies and pisses in the soup but even they know he’s not going to win in 2024 so they’ll work out some final fuck-you votes for him to make and Manchin will go away. And seldom return to his home state. He’ll set himself up for a semi-retirement lobbying gig in DC and settle in some tony enclave in a DC suburb. The only question in my mind is if he will continue to vote our way on judges, and hopefully another Justice or two – both Thomas and Alito are up there in years.

    • she is making an interesting calculation. if she runs as an independent can she peel off enough republicans to win. she will be cutting herself from dem fund raising, but I guess that was a given. how does Arizona do run offs in a three way race?

  5. Schumer needs to tell her, in no uncertain terms, she will NOT keep her committee assignments unless she SWEARS that she will vote with the Democrats on EVERY SINGLE VOTE and not play any kind of shit like she’s done for the past couple of years. The very first time she votes against the Democrats–even if it’s a vote that doesn’t change a single matter–she’s booted off whatever committees she’s on. And point out that if she threatens to caucus with the GOP, they’re NOT going to reward her with any kind of committee assignments.

    I’ve had little patience with Sanders having any role in the Party (especially since the SOB ran for the Democratic nomination twice without once actually *joining* the Party or even considering a formal party switch and then the Party caved to the asshole by changing convention rules to assuage him) but Sinema needs to have her career put in absolute jeopardy. “So you think you’re holding us hostage? Go ahead. Even if it means we might lose the Senate in 2024, we will NOT let you dictate shit to us, you (fill in the blank with the most outrageous obscenities you feel apply). You BARELY won the last time and you’ve already been threatened by your own state’s party leadership for betraying them and the people who voted for you–who believed you were a genuine progressive candidate. Just remember this: The GOP might be happy to have you for now, but they’ll turn on you in a heartbeat just as they’ve done to EVERY OTHER Democrat who’s switched parties in the last twenty years. Go f*** yourself, Kyrsten.”

  6. Well, looks like her seat will be going to the ‘pubes. On the one hand, that is putting another senate seat in the hands of an anti-women extremist. On the other hand, we’ll be rid of this dumb c*nt. Every cloud has a silver lining after all.

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  7. Joe, I’m sorry to disagree, but she isn’t loyal to anyone or anything but herself, therefore any ‘swear’ she makes will be worthless. She swore to the voters she was a Democrat. Lie. I just hope Schumer finds a way to use this in the most positive way possible. I believe in unintended consequences & there must be some to this latest move.

  8. As long as she caucuses with the Dems (or at least doesn’t caucus with the Republicans), we still control Committee chairmanships It appears to me that the person most inconvenienced by this is Kamala Harris. And if Schumer takes Joseph’s advice, that might not happen. Jaseph, have you cmmunicatrd this advice to Schumer directly?

    • All the reporting I’ve seen says she’ll still caucus with the Dems, so it’s a non-problem for now. It’s not like the Republicans have much incentive to fold her into their ranks.

      • You are very trusting of a lying bitch. Why? She has shown us all what she is all about. She is all about putting money in her pockets, and will lose in 24 and become a lobbyist.

        • Because said lying bitch wants to be taken seriously, Rhonda. She tries to go full Republican, she loses that in a nanosecond. God damn, all of you who are my age or older, stop using your outrage as a substitute for thinking. It is way past time ANY of you have any excuse not to know how leverage in politics works.

          • Your comment makes a lot of sense. However, I’ve seen how Moscow Mitch admires her, and I cannot imagine that he hasn’t had a conversation with her about coming to their side. I think he would do everything in his power to help her as well. I am outraged yes, but I am also thinking that the republican party will embrace anyone who wants to come aboard their sinking ship to help them.

  9. Whet we have always known is that “cake lady” has only one party, the Sinema Retirement Fund Party. In this position, she will rake in millions in contributions from the oligarchy that owns her. After all, she has already collected from big pharma, and who know who else. She is the poster child and dictionary photo next to the definition of “political whore.” And she is shameless.

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