Month: June 2021

Nothing more than an ordinary hobby:

A federal judge in California on Friday overturned the state’s three-decade-old ban on assault weapons, which he called a “failed experiment,” prompting a sharp retort from the state’s governor.

California prohibited the sale of assault weapons in 1989. The law was challenged in a suit filed in 2019 against the state’s attorney general by plaintiffs including James Miller, a California resident, and the San Diego County Gun Owners, a political action committee.

The judge, Roger T. Benitez of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of California, wrote that sections of the state’s penal code that defined assault weapons and restricted their use were “hereby declared unconstitutional and shall be enjoined.”

But the judge said he had granted a 30-day stay of the ruling at the request of Attorney General Rob Bonta, a move that would allow Mr. Bonta to appeal it.

Judge Benitez wrote that the case was about “what should be a muscular constitutional right and whether a state can force a gun policy choice that impinges on that right with a 30-year-old failed experiment.”

“It should be an easy question and answer,” Judge Benitez, who was nominated by former President George W. Bush, continued. “Government is not free to impose its own new policy choices on American citizens where constitutional rights are concerned.”

The judge wrote that the firearms banned under the state’s law were not “bazookas, howitzers or machine guns,” but rather “fairly ordinary, popular, modern rifles.”

In a statement late Friday, Gov. Gavin Newsom called the ruling “a direct threat to public safety and the lives of innocent Californians.”

Mr. Newsom also criticized the opening lines of Judge Benitez’s decision, in which he wrote that, like a Swiss Army knife, the AR-15 assault rifle “is a perfect combination of home defense weapon and homeland defense equipment.”

The AR-15 re-entered the American gun market in 2004 after the end of a federal assault weapons ban. It has a national following among gun owners, but it has also been used in mass shootings and vilified by its critics as a weapon of mass murder.

Right. It’s been “vilified” as a weapon os mass murder. No, it has been correctly described by any sane human being as a weapon of mass murder. Like this one, for instance, perpetrated by a Bushmaster AR-15.

On December 14, 2012, at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, Adam Lanza kills 20 first graders and six school employees before turning a gun on himself. Earlier that day, he killed his mother at the home they shared.

The Sandy Hook shooting was, at the time, the second-deadliest mass shooting in the United States after the 2007 shooting at Virginia Tech, in which a gunman killed 32 students and teachers before committing suicide.

Shortly after 9:30 a.m., 20-year-old Adam Lanza shot through a plate-glass window next to Sandy Hook’s locked front entrance in order to gain access to the school. Hearing the noise, the school principal and school psychologist went to investigate and were shot and killed by Lanza, who was armed with a semiautomatic rifle, two semiautomatic pistols and multiple rounds of ammunition. Lanza also shot and wounded two other Sandy Hook staff members.

He then entered two first-grade classrooms, where he gunned down two teachers and 15 students in one room and two teachers and five students in the other room. The children Lanza murdered, 12 girls and 8 boys, were 6 and 7 years old. Twelve first-graders from the two classrooms survived.

But hey, boys like this need their toys or they just don’t feel freeeeee!

This ruling is grotesque. California’s law has been in place for over 30 years and until now, even the far right jurists have agreed that states have a right to regulate guns on certain criteria. Even Scalia believed that! But this new court is very likely to just let their freak flag fly and allow American nutcases to carry whatever killing machine they choose to intimidate and terrorize their fellow Americans at will. That, after all, is what they are really talking about when they rail against “tyranny.” They’re talking about you.

Update: I thought this was an extremely effective argument:

Assault weapons aren’t equipped with a nail file and corkscrew in case you get lost in the woods with a bottle of wine.

They are designed with a purpose: to kill as many as possible as quickly as possible. Don’t insult our intelligence by minimizing their destructive power. https://t.co/Hwa3CSihLW

— Brandon Wolf (@bjoewolf) June 5, 2021

I could be wrong but this smells like a tease to me. “What’s he going to say? Will he act like a crazy man? Will he be presidential instead? Who knows? Tune in to see!”

On Saturday evening, Donald Trump, the former president and current leader of the GOP, is scheduled to deliver another one of his red-meat-hurling, post-presidency speeches at the North Carolina Republican Party’s annual convention. And there is one particular morsel that various Trump advisers and confidants are praying that the twice-impeached former president does not serve to his followers this weekend—or, ever.

“I conveyed something [to Trump] to the effect of, ‘It would be a terrible idea to even say the word, ‘August’ [at Saturday’s event],” said a person who is still in contact with the Republican ex-president.

In the time since New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman tweeted on Monday that “Trump has been telling a number of people he’s in contact with that he expects he will get reinstated by August,” several close allies of the former president have made a point of getting in touch with Trump to deliver a simple message, according to three sources familiar with the matter.

The message: Whoever is trying to get in your ear to tell you that you could be “reinstated” in the White House by August, or at any time during President Joe Biden’s term in office, doesn’t know what they’re talking about, and repeating their deranged theories in public could be used against you by your enemies. Furthermore, they told him, it would be better to focus on the 2022 midterm elections and, subsequently, the 2024 presidential race.

These knowledgeable sources said that the people close to Trump who’ve sought to dissuade him from talking about this publicly have counseled him gently and diplomatically, determining that pushing too hard could risk inadvertently nudging the mercurial ex-president towards actually talking about it.

The idea that Trump would be “reinstated” in a few weeks is the stuff of MAGA fan fiction—but that hasn’t stopped Trump from privately entertaining the baseless August theory. He has claimed the theory is something that many “highly respected” people have recently assured him is possible (once the nonexistent evidence of massive 2020 voter fraud is finally revealed), as The Daily Beast reported this week. The former president has refused to accept reality and admit that he legitimately lost the last U.S. presidential election, and has spearheaded the Republican Party’s anti-democratic crusade that kicked into high gear in November and continues to this day.

The theory of Trump’s August re-ascension to power, which is being promoted by a segment of MAGA diehards and election dead-enders, isn’t based on any particular intel or insider gossip, even. It’s based on a guess.

In an interview with The Daily Beast earlier this week, MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell, a mega Trump ally who helped fund several efforts to overturn Biden’s victory, said, “If Trump is saying August, that is probably because he heard me say it publicly.”

He continued, “The month of August, for this, is subjective…but I don’t know if it’ll be that month, specifically…I spoke about it with my lawyers who said that they should have something ready for us to bring before the U.S. Supreme Court by July. So, in my mind, I hope that means that we could have Donald Trump back in the White House by August. That’s how I landed on August, and I’m hopeful that that is correct.”

Several advisers to Trump would only want him to mention August or “reinstatement” on Saturday, or any day, if he were to quickly deny that this kind of reinstallation is possible. But as of Friday evening, Trump’s office had yet to release a statement pushing back on this week’s reporting that he believes this, even though the former president hasn’t been shy about commenting on recent news items that he alleges are incorrect.

As of the start of this weekend, those in Trump’s social and political orbits who spoke to The Daily Beast did not know for sure if the ex-president would veer off-script on Saturday and say something about August or reinstatement that would cause them severe headaches. One of the sources who still talks to Trump said they discussed it with him not long after Haberman posted her tweet, expecting Trump to say the reporting was “bullshit” or “fake news,” only to have the ex-president decline to knock it down.

I have no idea what he’ll do. He operates on his own political logic. If I had to guess, he’ll rail on the stolen election but he won’t mention the August “reinstatement.” If he does it would indicate that he’s just decided to say “fuck it” which would show that his inability to accept his loss is truly delusional and not just driven by a base desire for revenge in 2024.

He does have an instinct for what his cult wants to hear so I expect he will give them what they want. It will be interesting to see if he thinks they are all as far gone as Sidney Powell, Mike Flynn and Mike Lindell.

Remember this?

The Army falsely denied for days that Lt. Gen. Charles A. Flynn, the brother of disgraced former national security adviser Michael Flynn, was involved in a key meeting during its heavily scrutinized response to the deadly assault on the U.S. Capitol.

Charles Flynn confirmed in a statement issued to The Washington Post on Wednesday that he was in the room for a tense Jan. 6 phone call during which the Capitol Police and D.C. officials pleaded with the Pentagon to dispatch the National Guard urgently, but top Army officials expressed concern about having the Guard at the Capitol.

Flynn left the room before the meeting was over, anticipating that then-Army Secretary Ryan McCarthy, who was in another meeting, would soon take action to deploy more guard members, he said.

“I entered the room after the call began and departed prior to the call ending as I believed a decision was imminent from the Secretary and I needed to be in my office to assist in executing the decision,” Flynn said.

The general’s presence during the call — which has not previously been reported — came weeks after his brother publicly suggested that President Donald Trump declare martial law and have the U.S. military oversee a redo of the election. There is no indication that Charles Flynn shares his brother’s extreme views or discharged his duties at the Pentagon on Jan. 6 in any manner that was influenced by his brother.

Let’s hope he doesn’t:

 Gen. Charles Flynn took command of U.S. Army Pacific on Friday, vowing to continue transforming the 90,000-soldier force into one that can meet the challenge of a rising China.

“Today, as China trends on an increasingly concerning path, presenting challenge to the free and open Pacific, the Army is charged to change once more,” Flynn said during a livestreamed ceremony at Fort Shafter. Media were not allowed to attend the event.

Guilt by association is wrong so it wouldn’t be fair to hold Mike Flynn’s lunacy against his brother. But I would certainly hope that the Army made sure they weren’t fellow travellers in this QAnon crapola. That would be very, very bad:

Per Politico, more evidence that it isn’t the racial minorities who are “vaccine hesitant.” It’s the Trump cult:

Rep. Brad Wenstrup (R-Ohio), the leader of Congress’ GOP Doctors Caucus, said he has focused on understanding and responding to vaccine hesitancy in conservative communities across the country and his Cincinnati district, where 42 percent of residents have received at least a first shot — about 9 percentage points behind the national pace. He has sat in on focus groups with Donald Trump supporters and has cut a public service announcement with fellow Republican physicians in Congress.

“People say, ‘We don’t know what [the vaccine] will do long term,’” he told POLITICO, listing off concerns he’s heard from people resisting vaccination. “There are people in the lower age group who are saying: ‘I’m young and don’t have other comorbidities and I just haven’t felt like it.’ Some people are just afraid of needles. I can tell you that as a doctor — some people pass out when they see one. And I’ve heard everything all the way down to: ‘They’re putting a chip in me.’

But Rep. Raúl Grijalva (D-Ariz.) said the struggle to ramp up vaccinations looks much different in districts with large low-income and minority populations, like his own in Tucson that until recently had one of the nation’s lowest vaccination rates. The same barriers that prevented his constituents from getting tested when the virus emerged — poor transportation, lack of child care, little familiarity with the health care system — hampered their ability to get vaccinated, despite federal efforts like mass vaccination sites the government prioritized to get as many shots in arms as quickly as possible. His district has made up ground over the past few weeks — 44 percent have now received at least one shot — after the county health department boosted outreach, particularly in Hispanic communities, Grijalva said.

“For people who have traditionally limited-to-no access to health care, the revelation that they have to go to the vaccine does not come easily,” he said.

In fact, the magnitude of the struggle to broadly vaccinate low-income, minority communities that have been disproportionately hurt by the pandemic is obscured by the high levels of vaccine resistance among white conservatives. The stark racial disparities in vaccination would otherwise be far worse.

“Among the remaining unvaccinated people, white people are much more likely to say they are definitely not going to get the vaccine, whereas Black and Hispanic people are more likely to say they haven’t gotten it yet but are hoping to get it soon,” said Liz Hamel, vice president and director of public opinion and survey research at the Kaiser Family Foundation.

[…]

Republicans are roughly six times more likely than Democrats to say they have no interest in being vaccinated, according to recent polls. Democratic districts, meanwhile, are largely vaccinating at a faster clip, as local officials and organizations redouble efforts to reach the holdouts, with a focus on minority groups.

Data on racial disparities throughout the Covid response has been incomplete, including on vaccinations, making comparisons tricky in some cases. Some states have done a better job tracking this data than others, which can skew comparisons between congressional districts.

But data collected by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and outside researchers find racial disparities in the vaccination effort are narrowing, particularly for Hispanics. During the last two weeks, more than one-quarter of first doses went to Hispanics, according to the CDC, almost twice the average over the previous six months.

The Biden administration this week announced new efforts to get Americans vaccinated in the month leading up to Independence Day, rolling out new programs offering free child care, free transportation, expanded pharmacy hours and other measures. What’s at stake, President Joe Biden said in a Wednesday speech, is the possibility of a virus resurgence in low-vaccine areas that sets back the nation’s progress in stamping out Covid.

“I don’t want to see the country that is already too divided become divided in a new way,” he said, “between places where people live free from fear of Covid and places where, when the fall arrives, death and severe illnesses return.”

That ship sailed. The Trump Death Cult is determined to expose itself to a deadly disease in order to own the libs.

Even the Bush family:

The recent campaign launch by a Bush family scion has upended their longstanding unity, causing heartbreak behind the scenes and even a rare public rebuke from a longtime Bush loyalist.

The Bushes have long been known for their conservative politics and loyalty to their inner circle. Political consultants and advisers for former President George H.W. Bush, former President George W. Bush, and former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush often worked with them for a decade or more, remaining in close contact years after the time in elected office had come to an end.

George P. Bush, Jeb’s son, was elected as Texas Land Commissioner in 2014, his first elected office, and he easily won reelection in 2018. He was a frequent sight on the campaign trail for his father’s 2016 presidential campaign, as pictured above. This week, he announced that he would challenge incumbent Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton in 2022.

Bush’s campaign launch was notable in at least two ways: the lack of other Bushes and the direct appeal to former President Donald Trump. Neither of Bush’s parents, Jeb or Columba Bush, were present at his announcement speech, nor was his presidential uncle GWB. Jeb and Columba had attended a number of his previous campaign events. This reporter spoke with Jeb at George P.’s 2018 election night party in March 2018, and he had made comments about being a proud father seeing his son succeed.

Another noteworthy absence from George P. Bush’s campaign is other Bush alumni. Karl Rove, who served as W’s chief of staff, continues to advise GOP campaigns from his Austin-based consulting firm, but he is not involved in GPB’s AG campaign, and other recognizable names of still-active Republican consultants who worked for other Bushes have not been hired either.

Back in 2016, Trump was a freight train through the Republican presidential primary, crushing a crowd of far more experienced GOP candidates, including Jeb, a frequent target of Trump’s humiliating insults.

George P. was the sole Bush who voted for Trump in 2016, and strongly endorsed his 2020 re-election campaign. Other Bushes have continued to publicly criticize Trump over the years, but George P. has continued to support Trump, including backing the ouster of Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY), herself connected to the Bush family through her father Dick Cheney, from House GOP leadership.

The campaign swag at Bush’s AG launch event included beer koozies depicting a rally where Trump praised Bush as “the only Bush that likes me” and “the Bush that got it right.”

MSNBC’s Chris Hayes brutally mocked this campaign messaging as showing a “weird fetish” for “humiliation.” Matthew Dowd, chief strategist for George W. Bush’s 2004 campaign, called it a “sad tale” to see George P. “abandoning” his family to “suck up to Donald Trump.”

Rove dropped his own comment on the family divisions on Twitter Friday, tweeting a photo of the latest book he’s reading. “The perfect beach read…warm, deeply personal,” was Rove’s review of Jean Becker’s The Man I Knew: The Amazing Story of George H. W. Bush’s Post-Presidency.

Rove is not a prolific tweeter, posting something new usually only once every few days, and is known for being very deliberate and strategic in his communications.

“There is an enormous disturbance inside the Bush family” regarding George P.’s support for Trump, said one longtime Republican consultant who spoke to Mediaite on condition of anonymity. “Jeb is heartbroken,” he said, adding that he had heard the word heartbroken “repeatedly” in conversations this week with various Bush family insiders.

This consultant and another Republican strategist based in Texas (again speaking on condition on anonymity) both remarked that Rove’s tweet, about a book honoring the late patriarch of the Bush dynasty, should be viewed as a rebuke of George P.’s schism from the family.

Boy, Karl really went out on a limb there didn’t he?

The article doesn’t mention that Trump calls George P “my Bush” which is, of course, a double entendre. And:

“I can tell you the president enjoys the prospect of knowing how much it kills Jeb that his son has to bend the knee and kiss the ring,” a Trump confidant told Politico. “Who’s your daddy? Trump loves that.”

Corporations (artificial persons) have been holding humans’ leashes when they should be wearing the collars. It seems people are finally stirring in their sleep about that, if not fully awake yet:

London (CNN) — Finance ministers from the Group of Seven (G7) nations have put their support behind the Biden administration’s ambitious plan to overhaul the global tax system, backing a minimum tax of at least 15% on corporate earnings.

UK finance minister Rishi Sunak announced the agreement in a video posted on Twitter Saturday, saying G7 finance ministers — hailing from Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the UK and the US — had”reached a historic agreement to reform the global tax system to make it fit for the global digital age and, crucially, to make sure that it’s fair so that the right companies pay the right tax in the right places.”

The agreement was made during a G7 meeting of finance ministers in London, attended by US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, where she sought backing for the administration’s efforts to rewrite international tax rules and discourage American companies from booking earnings abroad.

Yellen said Saturday that the agreement was a “significant, unprecedented commitment,” from the world’s richest economies aimed at preventing companies from avoiding taxes by shifting profits overseas.

Stick an ear out your window and listen for corporate howls. Look for smaller economies to exploit the situation. Bribes will be paid. “It’s not personal. It’s strictly business” isn’t just a line from a Coppola film.

Biden plans to use the increased tax receipts at home to offset the cost of his ambitious infrastructure plan (yet to pass Congress). Eliminating offshore tax havens — there will always be some — should help discourage companies from relocating operations from the U.S. Coprorations with global reach will also factor labor and shipping costs into such decisions, so the 15% minimum tax among the G7 will be no panacea for job displacement.

But it’s a start.

https://youtu.be/36EuwLlr380

Prof. George Lakoff once described the conservative philosophy in ten words: strong defense, free markets, lower taxes, smaller government, family values. Democracy is not among them. Granted, the word appears nowhere in the U.S. Constitution. It underlies words that do appear frequently: elect, vote, majority, and their variants. And in votes required to pass laws: two thirds, three fourths, etc.

“Strong defense” in this scheme is outward looking. Defense of democracy itself is not among the defining characteristics of American conservatism no matter how often its spokespersons repeat phrases such as election integrity. Hence today’s editorial from the New York Times Editorial Board.

“Congress Needs to Defend Vote Counting, Not Just Vote Casting” is a headline-tight summary of what those committed to democracy see needs defending right now from enemies domestic. Republican legislatures are in a rush to secure the Blessings of Power for themselves and their Posterity.

It would be overreach to assign blame for this antidemocratic movement solely to the immediate past president, perhaps the most corrupt, emotionally damaged, and antidemocratic leader in the nation’s history. Republicans are not working furiously to rig upcoming elections because they are afraid of Trump, Eric Boehlert wrote this week. “Republicans are doing this because they want to.” They do not want to govern. They want to rule. Democracy is a cosmetic convenience for them, not principle. They’ve proven that with actions.

The Times Editorial Board, however, believes the Democrats’ H.R. 1 is too broad, and inadequate to defend the republic against the systematic assault on democracy from within. Rather than wage a losing symbolic fight, Democrats should craft a more focused bill perhaps more palatable to more senators (Senate Republicans) “that aims squarely at ensuring that Americans can cast votes and that those votes are counted.”

That advice may be sound on its face, but ignores the fact that such legislation is needed because one major party in this country has rejected democracy as a foundational principle. Democracy itself has become unpalatable for Republicans, however well-seasoned.

The Board nonetheless presses on:

The vote-counting process necessarily relies on the judgment and integrity of local officials. No rules can perfectly prevent malfeasance. But Congress can take steps to protect the integrity of the election process.

One important measure included in H.R. 1 is to require a paper record of every vote, so that outcomes can be verified independently.

But the bill needs to go further. Congress also should establish uniform rules for vote counting, certification and challenges. It should also clarify its own role in certifying the results of presidential elections to prevent the possibility that a future Congress would overturn a state’s popular vote.

Some of the areas that are addressed by H.R. 1, including protections for voting and provisions to limit gerrymandering, are also urgent, because the threats to electoral democracy are interlocking. Restricting participation in elections, and playing with district boundaries, both conduce to the election of more extreme politicians, who in turn are more likely to regard elections as purely partisan competitions waged without regard to the public interest.

In addition to setting minimum standards for voting access, there is also a need to constrain states from moving backward, even if existing standards exceed those minimums.

Democrats are separately pursuing the revival of a key provision of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which required certain states and counties, mostly in the South, to obtain approval for any changes from the Justice Department. A 2013 Supreme Court ruling effectively ended this system, helping to clear the way for the restrictions that states are now imposing.

The problem with H.R. 1, the Board argues, is that it is too “sprawling.” And it may be. But that is not the source of Republican opposition. Republicans bent on undermining democracy itself are. Narrowing the bill’s scope will not change that.

“If Democrats can find 50 votes for reform, they should not postpone necessary interventions in the illusory hope of a bipartisan breakthrough, nor allow Republicans to filibuster,” the Board concludes.

On this, at least, we agree.

The dingo is a baybeee:

After an emergency C-section, this dingo pup became the miraculous lone survivor from her mother’s litter at the Australian Reptile Park in Somersby, Australia. Her name? Lucky 🐾 pic.twitter.com/Q13gepZPsu

— NowThis Impact (@nowthisimpact) June 4, 2021

More dingos:

There’s a third track of “rules everyone agrees are rules, but people think are unfair” like gerrymanders and electoral college. But people don’t functionally treat the government as fake when there’s an EC/pop split, we’ve had 2 recently. Overturned election is truly uncharted.

— Benjy Sarlin (@BenjySarlin) June 3, 2021

It’s uncharted but I wouldn’t bet on it staying that way. They will do it, perhaps first in a couple of House races or maybe in a close Senate race. in 2022 It will be tested in the courts and go all the way up to the Supreme Court.

Will McConnell’s Supremes decide that the Constitution really does give state legislatures the unilateral power to overturn elections? Will they uphold the wingnuts new insistence that courts and election officials have no power to change rules that have been passed by those legislatures? I think we are going to see. And if they vote the wrong way, we can kiss legitimate elections goodbye.

Here’s an astute analysis of the Kyrsten Sinema conundrum from Dan Pfeiffer:

Arizona Senator Kyrsten Sinema has a bad habit of lighting the Internet on fire. Earlier this year, Sinema stoked outrage with the Democratic base when she very theatrically voted no on a $15 minimum wage. It happened again yesterday when More Perfect Union, a progressive media and content outfit, tweeted out a clip of the Democratic Senator offering a passionate defense of the filibuster.

Standing next to Republican Sen. John Cornyn, Democratic @SenatorSinema says the filibuster "protects the democracy of our nation."

Cornyn voted to filibuster creating an independent commission to examine the 1/6 attack on our democracy. Sinema didn't vote. pic.twitter.com/zUTE9utzqp

— More Perfect Union (@MorePerfectUS) June 2, 2021

In one sense, Sinema’s remarks were nothing new. She has repeatedly reiterated her support for the filibuster. She has been more adamant than even Joe Manchin in defending the Jim Crow relic that stands in the way of much of what she supports. However, this instance felt different. The online reaction was more intense. The offense against her own supporters felt more personal. I have no reason to doubt the sincerity of Sinema’s views, but that doesn’t make them less problematic for the larger progressive project. There has been so much discussion about what Democrats can (or can’t) do about our Manchin problem, but the Sinema situation is worth unpacking.

In full disclosure, I am one of the people that got very mad online about Sinema’s remarks. I fired off a tweet in a blind rage (perhaps violating my own rule).

Sinema’s message was not new, but the circumstances were. First, she was speaking in Texas at the exact moment that Democratic legislators had to go into hiding to prevent the passage of a package of voter suppression laws. These courageous Texas lawmakers are literally begging Democrats like Sinema to take action to help protect the right to vote. Second, Sinema touted the merits of the filibuster while standing next to Senator John Cornyn, one of the biggest purveyors of the big lie being used to justify new voter suppression laws like the one in Texas. Finally — and this is really important — Sinema’s explanation of the origin of the filibuster is patently false. New York Magazine’s Jonathan Chait wrote a great piece correcting the record and explaining how the true story of the filibuster bears no resemblance to what Sinema claims. The whole thing is worth a read, but here is Chait’s summary of the argument:

In sum, the Founders did not create the filibuster. It emerged accidentally, was changed repeatedly, and was not “designed” for any purpose, and most certainly not to give the minority party a veto. It’s no more true than George Washington chopping down a cherry tree. It’s a story people made up to rationalize a system that nobody invented because nobody ever would create a system like this on purpose.

As much as I disagree with them, there are good-faith arguments to make in support of the filibuster. Unfortunately, Sinema refuses to make those arguments. Making a bad faith argument in Texas at this moment is not only to be willfully naive about what is happening in America and in the Senate. It is essentially sticking a thumb in the eye of the Democratic base that elected her in 2018.

While there are undoubtedly others, Manchin and Sinema are the most public Democratic Senators opposing filibuster reform. They are intrinsically linked in the conversation about why more of the Biden agenda can’t get through the Senate. Earlier this week, Biden responded in the third person to critics of his failure to yet pass the For the People Act.

[…]

Manchin and Sinema’s political situation could not be more different. Donald Trump won Manchin’s home state by 39 points. Manchin has not yet said whether he will run for reelection in 2024, but he would be a massive underdog if he did. Manchin barely won in 2018 against a very bad opponent in a very good Democratic year, with a third-party candidate taking four percent of the vote. Those circumstances are unlikely to replicate themselves.

Arizona is not West Virginia. Sinema is the first Democrat to win a Senate seat from Arizona in thirty years. The state has been reliably Republican since the mid-nineties. The first time someone wins a tough state, the analysis tends to attribute the victory to some magic message or strategy that is unique to the victor.

When Mark Warner won the Virginia governorship in 2001, he became an immediate Democratic superstar for his rural outreach, gun-friendly rhetoric, and his courting of NASCAR fans. Everyone in the party wanted to emulate his approach. Four years later, Tim Kaine, the liberal former mayor of Richmond and Warner’s Lieutenant Governor, won by a similar margin. A few years after that, Barack Hussein Obama won Virginia. In hindsight, Warner’s shocking win seems much less shocking. His victory was the product of a profound demographic shift happening beneath our eyes.

In the moment, Sinema’s unlikely triumph was attributed to her moderate message and bipartisan credentials. But the fact that Mark Kelly and Joe Biden won the state only two years later suggests that her victory was as much about a radically changing state. The point here is not to demean Sinema’s victory in 2018. She ran a good campaign, but we shouldn’t pretend that political circumstances compel her to distance herself from Democratic priorities. Arizona is a purple state that is trending blue.

Numerous profiles of Sinema suggest that she is modeling herself after Arizona’s tradition of political mavericks like John McCain — carving out an independent identity by being willing to anger both parties. While this strategy seems intriguing on paper, it actually makes zero sense and is a recipe for defeat in 2024. In highly polarized times, politicians need near-unanimous support from their own party to win. The pool of true swing voters has shrunk and split ticket voting is now incredibly rare. There is no credible math where Sinema can attract enough Republicans and Independents to make up for diminished Democratic enthusiasm.

Several recent polls show that Sinema is losing support among Democrats without gaining any from Independents and Republicans. A March poll from Civiqs shows that Sinema’s net favorable rating among Democrats is down 30 points from December. Among Independents, it’s down 14 points. Sinema isn’t up for reelection until 2024, so time is on her side. However, if Sinema stays on this trajectory, she is in profound trouble in either a primary or the general election.

Ultimately, this is what is so frustrating about Sinema’s approach to the filibuster. Her substantive arguments are inaccurate, and her political strategy makes no sense. She is more Joe Lieberman than John McCain. Like Lieberman, the former Democratic VP nominee turned Iraq War and McCain supporter, Sinema seems to enjoy being a spoiler in the eyes of their own party. In 2006, Lieberman lost the Democratic primary to Ned Lamont, but won the general election as an independent. The path will not be available to Sinema. Arizona is not Connecticut. 2024 is not 2006. And she does not have Lieberman’s long ties to her state.

For the time being, we are stuck with Sinema. Arizona has a recall law, but that would be an excellent way to end up with a Republican in that seat and Sinema is much better than a Republican. However, I will be the first person to contribute to the first Democrat that lines up to run against her. Politicians should not be captive to their bases, but they also shouldn’t go out of their way to stick a thumb in their eye either.

Personally, I think Sinema may just switch parties. I know that sounds absurd but she has been walking toward wingnuttia ever since she decided to dump lefty politics to fulfill her ambitions. Don’t be too surprised if that is how she deals with this problem. Manchin could do the same at any moment …