Sen. Kyrsten Sinema under fire from progressives, Democrats on minimum wage hike
Progressive Democrats have grumbled for months about Sen. Kyrsten Sinema's political centrism and willingness to stray from the Democratic Party line. But Sinema's vote last week to keep a federal minimum wage increase out of the Senate's COVID-19 relief package has brought passions to a boiling point.
The moment elicited an onslaught of social media jeers, memes and cartoons and condemnation from Democrats and liberal groups.
“What we’re seeing is just the first of these moments, but I do not think it will be the last and I do not think it will be contained to minimum wage,” said Emily Kirkland, executive director of the liberal advocacy organization Progress Arizona.
Over the weekend, Kirkland's group projected a gigantic video of Sinema, D-Ariz., voting "no" — with a thumbs-down — on the minimum wage issue on the side of the historic Hayden Flour Mill in Tempe. The video encouraged passersby to call her office to register their support of the hike.
“I think that Sinema has been really trying to set herself up as somebody who picks fights with the left," Kirkland said. "And I think she thinks that helps her politically, but I think that she’s misreading the moment.”
Sinema's vote on Friday was no surprise to those who closely follow her, but Sinema and six other Democratic senators and an independent senator didn’t want the $15 hourly minimum wage issue as part of the $1.9 trillion coronavirus relief package that passed the Senate on Saturday, a position supporting the chamber’s parliamentarian decision that it didn’t belong in the package.
Still, she was the only one to go viral for her vote, given with a thumbs-down gesture regularly used by senators but indelibly associated in the public consciousness with the late Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., who thwarted GOP efforts in 2017 to erase the Affordable Care Act with his vote.
The eruption of criticism of Sinema, who has forged a political identity as a moderate willing to buck her party, drowned out her explanation for her vote. She supported increasing the minimum wage, she said, but not doing it this way.
She said in a written statement on Friday she had supported previous efforts in Arizona to raise the minimum wage. She noted there was bipartisan support in the Senate to see earnings raised from the current federal minimum of $7.25 an hour, but “the Senate should hold an open debate and amendment process” separate from the COVID-19 relief package.
But pushing the matter to a separate vote could mean it is subject to the 60-vote, filibuster-proof majority that requires GOP support that may not exist. Many Senate Democrats want to get rid of the filibuster and its 60-vote threshold for legislation, but, in another move that rankled some in her own party, Sinema's support of that procedural maneuver has kept it in place in the 50-50 Senate.
Sinema is saying little else publicly about how she intends to proceed on the minimum wage issue; her spokeswoman declined to comment further this week.
Pressure on Sinema could increase
Sinema rarely previews her votes on nominees and legislation and avoids commenting to media on news of the day.
Spokespeople for Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., and the White House did not respond to The Arizona Republic's requests for comment on how Sinema may affect the Democratic agenda.
Norman Ornstein, an expert on Congress at the American Enterprise Institute, said Sinema holds a significant amount of power, along with Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., who said Sunday he thought the Senate would be able to reach a compromise on increasing the minimum wage.
Ornstein suggested that the anger directed at Sinema by progressives on Twitter and Facebook is not shared by the Senate Democrats who work with her.
“There is a widespread understanding among Democrats in the Senate, and a whole lot of people outside — that they wouldn’t have a majority if it weren’t for having Sinema in the Senate, and that when she ran, you weren't going to have some (Sen.) Bernie Sanders-type win that seat,” Ornstein said, referring to the liberal Vermont independent.
"There’s a substantial amount of tolerance for views that might be dissonant with the majority of her Democratic colleagues.”
In a state like Arizona, for years a conservative bastion, Democrats must demonstrate crossover appeal to independent voters and Republicans, two constituencies that helped Sinema win in 2018 and President Joe Biden carry the state in 2020.
But with Democrats in full control of the presidency, the House and the Senate — by just one vote — there are sky-high expectations to move a liberal agenda, Ornstein said, and the pressure on Democratic senators to stay aligned will only escalate.
“That makes her more powerful in a sense,” Ornstein said. “If you are the pivotal vote, there’s a price that comes with that: You get a spotlight put on you and you get criticism.
“Certainly part of the criticism was the way she cast her vote,” he noted. “It wouldn't have been the same if she had very quietly just said, ‘No.’ … But the other part of it is that she's a woman. … There is, whether it’s the left or the right, a double standard here.”
Threats of a primary challenge
Sinema is up for reelection in 2024 and, in politics, four years are an eternity.
Nonetheless, she is facing threats from the left of a primary, with at least one high-profile liberal group actively seeking to recruit candidates to run against her.
Tomás Robles, executive director of Living United for Change in Arizona, a progressive social justice group that helped persuade voters to pass a ballot initiative to raise Arizona’s minimum wage, accused Sinema of being more concerned about “self-preservation” than the needs of constituents.
“She knows that there's no way that any debate will lead to passage of raising the minimum wage other than the budget reconciliation,” Robles said of the process that allows senators to move some kinds of spending and revenue legislation quickly by bypassing the typical 60-vote threshold.
Robles, who ran the 2016 Arizona initiative campaign, said he can’t fathom why Sinema passed on the chance to demonstrate her support of a policy she has led voters to believe she supported.
“It breeds confusion and breeds a little bit of betrayal, it breeds distrust, and a lot of frustration comes out,” Robles said. “To me, it feels like she's disregarding a very critical voting bloc because she doesn't believe in the values of those voters and those communities that have worked very hard to get her elected in the multiple levels that she's been in.”
Minimum wage fight may go on
Despite the pessimism of some Democrats, the fight over the minimum wage may not be over.
The issue has proven broadly popular with voters and, phased in over two years, would seem less daunting to Arizona businesses that already face a $12.15 hourly wage under state law.
Democrats could work out a compromise to bring Republicans along to move stand-alone legislation, try to hike it through budget reconciliation as part of another bill, or change the filibuster rules to avoid having GOP support on a simple majority vote.
The timeline for trying to advance the issue is unclear, as is any potential role Sinema may play in helping to shape it.
Sinema "is not open to changing her mind about eliminating the filibuster," her spokeswoman Hannah Hurley has previously said.
Sinema hasn't weighed in on whether she would be open to reforming the filibuster as a way to make it easier for Democrats to push their agenda, an idea Manchin has signaled support for. Her spokeswoman this week declined to weigh in further on the filibuster issue.
Sinema’s seatmate, Sen. Mark Kelly, who helped Democrats gain control of the Senate after he unseated former Sen. Martha McSally, R-Ariz., last year, has taken no heat from his party for his yes vote on debating the minimum wage.
National Republicans are trying to put heat on Kelly, characterizing his support for a $15 minimum wage — which he registered using a thumbs-up gesture — as a vote "to kill 1.4 million jobs during a pandemic."
Since entering the political fray, Kelly has said he supported the need to raise the minimum wage to $15 but has not endorsed an explicit proposal on how it should be done. He recently told reporters he was flexible on how to implement it.
"I've spoken to folks that try to survive ... on minimum wage, try to raise a family," he said before last week's vote.
"It's nearly, it's impossible," he said. "I mean, you can't work 40 hours a week on minimum wage and raise a family and have a decent standard of living."
Unlike Sinema, there’s no sense at this point that Kelly is a crucial swing vote in the Biden era because he doesn't have a lengthy voting record and has not yet defected from major party-line votes, Ornstein said.
Kelly faces reelection sooner than Sinema, and may see a need to more quickly shore up support from Democrats, whose unanimous support is necessary ahead of his 2022 reelection bid, where he is a prime target for national Republicans.
'This is a very different moment'
For progressives who helped turn out Democrats in 2018 to help Sinema win, it is particularly difficult to reconcile Sinema’s moderate positioning with her earlier days as an anti-war activist and progressive state lawmaker.
Kirkland noted that Sinema came of age politically at a time when conservative control of Arizona was unquestioned. That political reality shaped her approach to framing issues, forging relationships, and legislating.
"But this is a very different moment," Kirkland said. "Now she is one of the key figures in D.C. at a moment when Democrats control the House and Senate and the White House. There's a sense in which her mindset was really formed by a particular moment, and the moment has changed."
For the first time in Sinema's career as a lawmaker, she finds herself in the majority, wielding a deciding vote.
Some Sinema supporters want her to remember that her home state has moved from red to purple, not yet red to blue. She represents a state with a nearly perfectly divided state Legislature in which Democrats have picked up statewide offices. Biden carried Arizona by the closest margin in the nation.
"This is where I pray that progressive Democrats don't throw her under the bus for not being so far left, for not being far enough left to meet their needs and demands," said Rich Crandall, a former GOP state lawmaker-turned-independent who worked closely with Sinema in the Legislature and is a Sinema supporter.
"Because if they do, they're going to lose a very, very skilled politician."
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