Kyrsten Sinema is officially a former senator from Arizona and, when she made her final speech in Washington recently, she highlighted her record as a bipartisan broker.
Sinema has been something of an enigma in Arizona politics for decades. The former social worker and progressive state legislator rose through the ranks to be elected to the Senate as a centrist Democrat in 2018. Once she got to Washington, she made a habit of bucking her party, finally officially leaving it to become an independent in 2022.
She made a name for herself in Washington as an aisle-crossing dealmaker who was willing to take the heat even when she was being skewered by her former party. Case in point: Her refusal, along with former Sen. Joe Manchin, to grant Democrats’ wish to weaken the filibuster, the 60-vote threshold for getting most bills through the Senate. Democrats will likely rely on as President-elect Donald Trump and the GOP take control of Washington this year.
Last year, she announced she wouldn’t seek reelection as an independent. Arizona Congressman Ruben Gallego took her seat this week.
Sinema is not known for her willingness to talk to the press, but she did give an exit interview to Burgess Everett, a congressional bureau chief for Semafor, who covered Congress for POLITICO before that. Everett joined The Show to discuss what Sinema had to say upon her exit from Washington — and politics, beginning with that contentious vote on the filibuster.
Full conversation
BURGESS EVERETT: She said that it was the most important vote she took in her life to protect the legislative filibuster. As, as you might recall, about three years ago, Democrats were considering, kind of weakening the filibuster and letting, letting a voting bill come to the Senate floor under a majority vote, kind of simple for simplifying it there, but that was, that was what was going to happen, and she believes real strongly in that 60-vote threshold. And so that was a really important moment for her, and it seems to be the one that she grasped onto the most as she kind of reflected on our service.
But I will also say that that vote is, is actually going to end up helping her former party, her and Joe Manchin kind of stood against the tide there, and now Democrats are in the minority and they're almost certainly going to be wielding the legislative filibuster in the coming days.
I'm not sure exactly how this vote is going to go, but there's going to be a vote on an immigration-related bill on Friday. And if Democrats don't give the Republicans eight votes, they'll use the filibuster to stop it. So it's come full circle pretty quickly.
LAUREN GILGER: Pretty quickly is right. Sinema often had this uniquely powerful position because she was bipartisan, right? Like she ran as a bipartisan kind of dealmaker. She had friends across the aisle. She was very proud of that. Do you think that that made her more impactful in some decisions like this where she was willing to buck her party at the time?
EVERETT: Certainly. I mean, I think there's two, two key attributes here. One is, it is not just lip service. Like I, I'm, I'm someone who will go out, I will sit on the Senate floor sometimes and just see what's going on out there. And she would often be out there, even when she was a very junior senator. I know she only served one term, but you know, just a few months into her service, she was out there hanging out with the Republicans more, more than the Democrats.
And you might say, you know, “why is, why do we care about that?” Well, there were situations where they were just trying to do simple things like line up votes to fund the government or legislation like that, like pretty basic nuts and bolts stuff, and she would help negotiate how to do that by like essentially triangulating between the Republican and Democratic caucuses. That's a pretty unique role.
And the second part of that is, I think those relationships are one thing and the other thing she was willing to do is just take heat from the outside world in a way that most modern senators don't want, you know, you see folks who might say something semi-critical, for example, of a Trump nominee on the Republican side, and they get fileted over it and they don't want to talk about it anymore.
I think Sinema kind of embraced the, the ability to to stand strong and not move, even when you're kind of getting torched by people that were, you know, when she was a Democrat, by her own party. That's pretty rare attribute in politics, and I think that made Republicans and even some Democrats respect her more because not everyone's willing to tolerate that level of abuse.
GILGER: Yeah, yeah. What did she say were some of her major accomplishments from her point of view? I mean, there was movement on gun safety, the CHIPS Act is a big deal. What, what stood out in her mind?
EVERETT: I think to her, infrastructure was probably the big one because it was, it was sort of the agenda setter on this bipartisan kick that the Senate got on. To her, like the process mattered. She wanted to show that, you know, you can still do big things with the filibuster in place.
Now, there's one counterargument to that, which is that immigration bill that she negotiated a year ago with James Lankford, a Republican from Oklahoma, and Chris Murphy, a Democrat from Connecticut. That went down because Donald Trump didn't like it. He wanted the campaign issue and Republicans all turned on it, and I, I do think that kind of left a sour, sour taste in her mouth when it came to that. That's kind of the one that got away. We'll see if some pieces of that bill come, come back in the coming days.
GILGER: And I wanted to ask you about that particular bill because she announced, you know, she's not going to run for reelection not long after that deal was sunk by now President-elect Trump. I wonder like, what do you think this proves, or maybe disproves, about her thesis here, which is that like you're saying, like you can be successful in governing across the aisle, that we could negotiate, we can be bipartisan, that is more effective. Did she prove that?
EVERETT: I think on a budget issues she did. I think on the immigration one, I asked her directly, you know, “was this a factor in your decision not to run again?” And she said it wasn't, but to me it was hard to see, like it didn't at least kind of like sour her a little bit on the institution in politics or, or maybe offer some validation to her previously made decision to not to not run again.
I just think there's sometimes like a, a limit to how much you can do. And frankly, like, I've covered politics quite a while now. I, I've seen a lot of fits and starts on infrastructure and on, on gun legislation. And I was definitely somebody that was just very skeptical that the gun safety bill would ever be able to pass, for example. And so that, that was a little bit of a paradigm shift to see somebody say that we can do it and then actually do it.
So the fact that she kind of met reality and, and obstruction from the other party on a different piece of legislation, I don't think totally detracts from the other things that she was able to accomplish.
GILGER: What do you think that says or will say, I guess when the history books are written about her legacy, like how might she be remembered?
EVERETT: I, I mean, I think there's a reason she says the filibuster is her most important vote. I, I think that's probably the most enduring at the moment thing that she did, because what, you know, people forget about legislation, it expires, it gets rewritten by the other party and gets tweaked as time goes on. But I do think like at the moment and for the foreseeable future, her and Sen. Manchin's filibuster vote will be kind of a touchstone for that debate.
You know, these two stood up to that. Like, you could totally see a situation where Donald Trump wants Republicans to kill the filibuster. And who's willing on the Republican side to stand up the same way that they were? It's easy to say that you're going to do it, but then in the moment when you're getting crushed online by an army of Trump allies, you know, will you be able to stand strong and continue that?
And she and Sen. Manchin were able to do that, and I think, I think that's probably gonna be the enduring thing, but also that like, you know, she didn't do what she was doing for electoral reasons, you know, Senator Manchin's from a very Republican state. It was easier to explain why. He did what he did when he, when it came to cutting down the Democratic agenda, you know.
Arizona's a battleground. It's a purple state. Mark Kelly kind of proved that a more center-left Democrat can win there too, but Sen. Sinema didn't care about that. She wanted to do things her way, kind of the politics would be damned, which again is pretty rare in Washington.
GILGER: Given that, do you think that she ever really cared about being re-elected? Did she always kind of plan to leave politics after this?
EVERETT: You know, it's easy to, to kind of look back and, and say this is definitely what was gonna happen. It does seem to me that she never, it was never important to her to, to get re-elected. So I, I, I don't know that she planned to only serve one term, but it didn't ever seem to me like winning re-election was, was top of mind for her.
I do think like there are some competitive juices though, like. You know, Ruben Gallego up mounting a primary challenge to her before she'd made a decision. Like, I, I do think that probably irked her a little bit, even if she doesn't say it, and she didn't want to talk at all about Ruben Gallego during our interview either. So I don't know if she's the type of person that would say, “no, I couldn't have won,” because I do think, you know, in her, in her mind she's a formidable politician as well.
GILGER: Did she tell you what she is planning to do next? Lots of speculation about that.
EVERETT: She, she told me she's, she's made a decision, but that she couldn't tell me now, part of that might have been because she was serving in office during her interview. Now she's not serving in office, so it's possible that that'll come out, you know, any minute.
