Kyrsten Sinema won her US Senate seat largely by blaming an incumbent for supporting “huge tax breaks for the wealthy and large corporations,” and vowing to help a Democratic majority roll back the Trump tax cuts, 83 percent of which benefit the top 1%.
Yet now she has rejected any tax hike on corporations or high earners to pay for President Biden’s “Build Back Better” package, and that alone could tank the entire agenda.
The massive legislative package – and with it, the $1 trillion infrastructure bill – cannot pass without the votes of the inscrutable Arizonan and fellow holdout Sen. Joe Manchin, and nobody is sure how the pay-fors will be worked out.
But one difference worth noting is this: Manchin has explicit, articulated objections to the bill, works to moderate it, and supports repealing the Trump tax cuts. Sinema won’t allow Biden to raise the top income tax rate (from 37% to 39.6) and the corporate rate (from 21% to 28), and she won’t say why adding debt is better than making the wealthy pay their fair share.
Along the way, she seems to relish her role as chaos agent, and since returning from a recent fundraiser in Paris, the White House has slashed the bill to pieces almost daily, trying to get her on board.
Sinema got them to limit the expanded Child Tax Credit to a single year – a bizarre demand for someone who was once homeless herself.
She reportedly killed the provision to lower prescription drug prices – no surprise there, since she has taken $400,000 from Big Pharma.
She demanded that they whack $100 billion off the bill’s climate programs, even as her home state is suffering the country’s worst drought, while takes $900,000 from industry groups trying to kill the Biden plan.
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She reportedly is also behind free community college being dropped from the package. That was a $45.5 billion investment, roughly what the US spent every year to occupy Afghanistan, and it would have benefitted 8 million students.
Five military veterans on her advisory board resigned Thursday, slamming her as one of the “principal obstacles to progress, answering to big donors rather than your own people,” adding that “your failure to stand by your people and see their urgent needs is alarming.”
They have a new term for it in Washington: Sinema Verité. It’s bringing the house down, and not in a good way.
Kyrsten Sinema is teaching a class on fundraising at ASU, where activists confronted her last week.
Students learn “how to cultivate donors” and key concepts like “power” and “influence,” the syllabus states: https://t.co/TX67AR6Myt — Ken Klippenstein (@kenklippenstein) October 8, 2021
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Shionkron on October 24th, 2021 at 14:27 UTC »
I voted for Her, but she totally became the opposite of what she ran as. What a jerk.
WhatIsSevenTimesSix on October 24th, 2021 at 13:49 UTC »
What a garbage human.
walker1555 on October 24th, 2021 at 13:41 UTC »
Every time i think about her smug thumbs down on a $15 minimum wage it makes me depressed. She was gleeful about keeping millions below the poverty line.