The Scene
After Donald Trump won the presidency and Republicans claimed the Senate, Kyrsten Sinema got an unexpected message about her insistence on protecting the filibuster.
“One person reached out to me after the election and apologized — and said I was right. One Democratic senator,” Sinema told Semafor in an interview this week in her pink-hued hideaway office beneath the Capitol. “I was surprised about that one. I was very surprised. And I appreciate it.”
The retiring Arizona Independent, not known for her chattiness with the press, did not identify the Democrat who credited her with ensuring the survival of the 60-vote threshold for getting most bills through the Senate. But her former party will now benefit from her and Sen. Joe Manchin’s refusal to vote to weaken the filibuster.
As Republicans prepare to take power next year, the procedural tool she pushed Democrats to preserve is now their strongest leverage point in Washington. And despite the criticism her stance elicited from Democrats on and off the Hill, Sinema said that her 2022 opposition to changing the filibuster was the “most important vote I’ve ever taken in my life.”
She had plenty of other huge votes to choose from, many negotiated in that subterranean pink office. In only a single term, Sinema has played an unusually integral role in bipartisan deals both big and small, on everything from infrastructure to gun safety to run-of-the-mill Senate floor operations.
It’s a record that got clouded by her repeated breaks with her former party. She voted just last week to block President Joe Biden’s reappointment of a top labor board nominee and shrugged off the resulting criticism from the left in typical fashion: “Don’t give a shit.”
Now that she’s perhaps just a day or two away from the end of her first and only Senate term, Sinema is still tuning out her haters. If she questions any popular criticism of her style, it’s the idea that she’s a political cipher.
Sinema isn’t openly gregarious like Manchin and didn’t participate a lot in caucus meetings over the years. That approach at times left her a mystery to her own colleagues, but she says anyone who had questions about her perspective on issues were “not paying attention.”
“I know some people think I’m, like, this enigma or whatever, but I don’t think that’s true at all,” Sinema said. “I think, maybe, this is a place where sometimes people say things that they don’t mean. I am not one of those people … I think I’m highly predictable.”
That said, there are still questions Sinema won’t answer. She won’t discuss what sort of senator Rep. Ruben Gallego, her successor in the seat — who launched a run against her before she retired — will be.
And she won’t divulge her presidential vote this year: “I’m not telling you that. Of course, I voted.”
She also knows what she’s going to do next but won’t divulge that either, though she’s already growing “happier” as her tenure draws to a close. She did confirm that she’s done with politics after a lengthy career in state politics and then in Congress, first as a House member.
“No,” she said. “We’re good.”
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When Sinema judges her six years in the Senate, she looks strictly at the results, not the vibes. That may not be surprising for a lawmaker so often scrutinized online for her choices and comments, frequently from liberals — who sounded off when she opposed hiking tax rates on some high earners, skipped some votes to compete in an Ironman triathlon or worked at a winery for a stint.
“Honestly, I feel like we got 40 years worth of work done in one term,” Sinema said. “I do wish we had gotten immigration done. We tried really hard, but everything else was just pretty freaking amazing.”
The border security deal she cut earlier this year with Sen. James Lankford, R-Okla., and Chris Murphy, D-Conn., is certainly the one that got away. About a month after Trump and most Republicans sank the agreement, which had Biden’s buy-in, Sinema announced she wouldn’t run for a second term.
She said her decision not to run wasn’t based on the border bill’s demise, but it was hard not to see that moment as a nadir for the Senate’s once-mighty dealmaker class. The roving band of centrists in both parties who championed cross-aisle negotiations had a remarkable run in a 50-50 Senate amid Democratic control of Washington and two party-line spending bills, beginning in 2021 with the bipartisan infrastructure law.
They followed that victory with successful passage of legislation on microchip manufacturing, gun safety and same-sex marriage.
Once Republicans controlled the House in 2023, though, dealmakers were marginalized. The original 10 senators who got together to write the infrastructure bill dined as a group on Wednesday night, their last hurrah before several more of them retired this year.
It’s clear that Sinema enjoys the close relationships she’s forged with people like Sen. Mitt Romney and former Sen. Rob Portman. But did she enjoy being in the chamber?
“I don’t know if enjoy is the right word,” she said. “Did I feel like it was meaningful and worthwhile? Mostly. Were there times when I was like, ‘Oh, my God, this place’? Yeah, a lot.”
The View From Democrats
Whatever the broader party makes of Sinema, particularly outside the Capitol, the energy was positive during her farewell speech this week. Roughly 20 Democratic senators attended, as well as a dozen or so Republicans. There were some progressives, too.
“She was always hard-working, you know, a reliable colleague for Arizona. And had a big impact,” Sen. Mark Kelly, D-Ariz., told Semafor of Sinema’s record.
“The amount of positive things that are coming to our state because of her hard work should be noticed by people,” he added. “And sometimes, with specific people, maybe it isn’t.”
Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., offered another view: that she and Manchin will be “likely remembered for the role they played in” cutting down Biden’s first-term climate and health care bill, “which could have been transformative to this country.”
Burgess’s view
Even if you don’t like Sinema, there’s no denying her impact. She forced Democrats to curtail the ambition of Biden’s early progressive agenda, but she also meaningfully leveraged her relationships with Republicans to move long-stalled bipartisan priorities.
It’s easy to downplay that second action in retrospect, but even modest legislation on infrastructure and gun safety were stuck for years before Sinema (and others) helped shake them loose.
She also made life harder for herself politically by spurning big Democratic initiatives like raising the minimum wage, weakening the filibuster and raising tax rates. Given that iconoclasm, it’s not clear to me she ever really prioritized reelection, regardless of what Gallego did.
Sinema appears to have made a calculation to do things her way, consequences be damned.
The biggest misunderstanding of her seems to come from her infrequent remarks in public — she simply saved her breath for her colleagues behind closed doors. When she does talk to the press, she avoids talking points or even redirection to her preferred topics.
And when she shuts you down, she still has a sense of humor. After she skirted my question on her presidential vote, I observed that she can be tough to interview.
Her reply: “Imagine how hard it is to write a speech for me.”