Sinema Bows Out, Blames You

The centrist Senate negotiator is right about dysfunction, wrong about its source.

Sen. Kyrsten Sinema speaks to reporters at the U.S. Capitol on February 5, 2024. (Photo by Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images)

KYRSTEN SINEMA IS ABSOLUTELY one of the most maddening people ever to serve in the Senate. So it is not surprising that her retirement announcement is, well, maddening.

Americans don’t want compromise anymore, it’s “a dirty word,” says the centrist, independent, former Democrat from Arizona in a video released on Tuesday. She has been part of many successful negotiations, she says, ticking through them, and yet “Americans still choose to retreat farther to their partisan corners. These solutions are considered failures either because they are too much, or not nearly enough. It’s all or nothing. The outcome, less important than beating the other guy.”

But wait, hold on—that doesn’t sound like America. It sounds like Donald Trump, who recently ordered House Republicans to kill a bipartisan immigration deal that Sinema and two colleagues had toiled over for four months—because he wanted to run for president on problems at the border, not solve them.

Sinema, who has also felt backlash at times from the left, is understandably fed up, but she’s wrong about who’s to blame. America writ large doesn’t reject deals. Congress often passes them when it gets the chance. Most Democrats are open to compromise. Many Republicans are, too. So is President Joe Biden, who has staked his career on bipartisan deals (like that border compromise, which he embraced) and is delivering plenty of them—to the benefit of all Americans, whether they realize it or not.

Sinema should know all this because she has staked her career on the same thing. She was lead negotiator on a bipartisan infrastructure package that eluded Trump for his entire term, perhaps because he didn’t really care. After the school shooting in Uvalde, she was central to bipartisan negotiations on the first new gun-safety law in nearly thirty years.

She was also a pivotal negotiator on the Democrats’ climate, energy, and health care package, the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act. I followed it closely but learned only after the fact that she had held out for $4 billion in sorely needed drought relief for the Southwest. Good for her, I thought.

Yet on that same bill, and earlier iterations of it, her unexplained opposition to raising tax rates on corporations and the wealthy was infuriating. Trump and Republicans had reduced the corporate income tax rate from 35 percent to 21 percent in their 2017 tax law. Democrats led by Sen. Joe Manchin, a fiscal conservative, wanted to nudge it up to 25 percent to help pay for part of Biden’s “Build Back Better” agenda.

At that point, in a 50–50 Senate, Democrats needed every single vote plus Vice President Kamala Harris as a tiebreaker. Without Sinema, they moved on. Plan B was to close the carried interest tax loophole, which CNBC described as allowing “hedge fund managers, law firm partners and private equity executives, among others, to pay significantly less taxes than ordinary workers.” But Sinema didn’t like that idea, either. She and her then-party finally agreed on a solution—a complicated and confusing one.

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TO BE CLEAR, SINEMA’S NOT ENTIRELY WRONG: Washington really is dysfunctional. Congress is struggling this week to pass the first of two enormous federal funding bills that would prevent a government shutdown. The decisions were supposed to have been made by October 1, when the fiscal year started. Since then, the GOP House has been trying to accept the fact that it is not the boss of the entire government and adjust the expectations of its more MAGA members on spending cuts and social policy provisions, such as abortion restrictions, that the Democratic Senate and White House would never accept.

Again and again, it’s obvious that the dysfunctionality originates with Trump and his MAGA fans, in the House and across the country. Headlines like this from NBC can make one despair for the republic: “Conservatives bash ‘uniparty’ Republicans in push to dissuade bipartisanship.”

If the government stays open, it will be part miracle and part back-breaking work by people who understand they are in a divided government. They are not in a war, they are in a perpetual negotiation that requires concessions from all sides. Nobody wins a total victory. Everybody lives to fight another day.

That’s how politics works. If people don’t understand or agree, what are they doing in Congress?

And the budget is hardly the only priority gumming up our government. Most significantly, we’re having trouble honoring our commitment to help Ukraine in its fight to survive as a sovereign nation, because Trump and the right—yes, the right, not America—rejected a compromise.

Conservatives said last year that a tough border deal had to be part of a national security aid package for Ukraine, Israel, Taiwan, and Palestinian civilians. That’s why Sinema and her Senate colleagues Chris Murphy of Connecticut and James Lankford of Oklahoma worked toward an agreement “around the clock, through the holidays, over the weekends,” in Biden’s words.

Last month the trio produced what Sinema characterized as “the strongest border security legislation in decades that reasserts control of the border, ends catch and release, enhances security, fixes the asylum system, and supports border communities.” The Border Patrol union called the compromise “far better than the status quo” and urged speedy passage. So did Biden, whose team helped negotiate the deal.

It was an “extraordinary effort” by the three senators, Biden said. And what followed was an extraordinary implosion. Senate Republicans gave up on the deal because House Speaker Mike Johnson, a close Trump ally, pronounced it DOA before anyone had even seen it. Nobody tried particularly hard to hide why they were killing it. Trump told them to.

Sinema was beyond furious. On the Senate floor, she told GOP grandstanders to stay away from Arizona, to stage their photo ops in Texas. And she mocked an immigration bill passed and promoted by the House GOP as all talk, no action, and not nearly as tough as the Senate deal.

What a short life for a glimmer of hope. When else would this set of conditions come around again—mounting chaos at the border, shrinking resources and a badly outdated system, a Democratic president looking for solutions, and a bipartisan compromise that gave conservatives much of what they wanted? Probably never. When could the problem be solved? Also probably never. Trump may have written The Art of the Deal, but as president, including two years with a Republican Congress, he didn’t fix the border or the immigration system. In fact he was a terrible negotiator across the board.

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“I BELIEVE IN MY APPROACH. But it’s not what America wants right now,” Sinema said in her not-quite-farewell address, once again blaming America in general for the absolutism that Trump & co. hath wrought. “Because I choose civility, understanding, listening, working together to get stuff done, I will leave the Senate at the end of this year,” she added.

If Biden had signed the immigration deal into law, it would have been Sinema’s legacy-crowning achievement. That would have made it a good time to leave. But it’s still a good time. She’s a former Democrat (she left the party in late 2022) running third in polls of a three-way race in Arizona. Her chances of a general-election loss would have been high, along with the odds she’d divide the Democratic vote and catapult election denier Kari Lake into office.

Sinema won’t be without opportunities in her next phase. She has a business-friendly resume and years of experience working closely with members of both parties on Capitol Hill. As a student of political negotiation and author of a book on it, I’d love to see her at the Bipartisan Policy Center writing or lecturing about how to be an effective political negotiator in a divided government and nation. She might also make a good White House border czar in a second Biden term.

The Sinema-Lankford-Murphy agreement, Biden said, represented “the most fair, humane reforms in our immigration system in a long time and the toughest set of reforms to secure the border ever.” That is a sound balance and a foundation for reform efforts going forward. We owe aspiring Americans a safe, orderly, predictable, and efficient immigration process. We owe thanks to the three senators who worked so hard to make it so.