Today's Arizona maverick

While serving in the U.S. Senate from 1987 until his death in 2018, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) didn't always vote along with the majority of his party. He was best described as a "maverick," a fact he pointed out incessantly. And for that, McCain earned critical acclaim from the prog media who often lamented that there weren't many Republicans like him anymore. Of course, McCain learned the hard lesson that when he did run afoul of Dems (i.e. running for President against "The One" Barack Obama in 2008), the proverbial long knives came out for him as if he were George W. Bush incarnate.

But when today's senior Senator from Arizona exercises her own maverick tendencies, she doesn't quite receive the same rhetorical fawning from the agenda-driven media. 

Arizona Sen. Kyrsten Sinema has left the Democratic Party and registered as an independent.

Sinema, in a Friday op-ed in the Arizona Republic, cited increasingly partisan interests and radicalization of both political parties as the reason for her departure.

"Americans are told that we have only two choices – Democrat or Republican – and that we must subscribe wholesale to policy views the parties hold, views that have been pulled further and further toward the extremes," Sinema wrote in the op-ed.

"Most Arizonans believe this is a false choice, and when I ran for the U.S. House and the Senate, I promised Arizonans something different," she continued. "I pledged to be independent and work with anyone to achieve lasting results. I committed I would not demonize people I disagreed with, engage in name-calling, or get distracted by political drama."

 

In a natural extension of my service since I was first elected to Congress, I have joined the growing numbers of Arizonans who reject party politics by declaring my independence from the broken partisan system in Washington and formally registering as an Arizona Independent. 1/3 pic.twitter.com/jUQHAeuxym

— Kyrsten Sinema (@kyrstensinema) December 9, 2022

Given that Sinema votes 93% of the time with President Joe Biden, this isn't exactly a huge shakeup in the short term. However, 2024 is a different story. In that year's election cycle, Democrats have 20 seats up for election, including in reliably red states like West Virginia, Montana and Ohio as well as the swing state of Nevada. If the GOP can hold all 11 of their seats up for election, they literally need only one of those four Dem seats to regain the Senate majority. Why Sinema herself is up for reelection, so provided the Arizona GOP candidate doesn't have the stink of Donald Trump on him/her, that seat too may be up for grabs. 

While there's very little in which I agree with Sinema politically, I admire her convictions. She has stood strong on maintaining the legislative filibuster and also declined to drive America further into a fiscal quagmire by not supporting "Build Back Better." In fact, her opposition to BBB resulted in Sinema being harassed by deranged progs upon her entering a public restroom stall. The fact that Biden didn't even unequivocally condemn the incident (he basically dismissed it as "part of the process") had to be one of the final straws for her. 

Pardon the language, but this seems to be Sen. Sinema's general sentiment towards her loony detractors: 

Again, that's typically not how I'd engage opposition but one can hardly blame Sinema given what she's endured over the past two years. 

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