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From Green Party rabble-rouser to Senate power broker, Kyrsten Sinema's rise is a political fairy tale-and nightmare.
Kyrsten Sinema wasn't the only Democrat to vote against including a $15 federal minimum wage in the $1.9 trillion covrn relief bill in early March, but she was the only one whose vote became a meme. The clip itself is short and sparse: Sinema, the 44-year-old first-term Democratic senator from Arizona, walks briskly around the well of the chamber, gives Mitch McConnell a friendly pat on the back, and pauses in front of the clerk. Then she thrusts her right thumb dramatically down, dipping her body for emphasis.
"Ms. Sinema. Ms. Sinema: No," says the clerk, recording her vote. But Sinema, by this point, is already gone.
That morning, she had brought a chocolate cake for the floor staff who worked long hours before the final stimulus vote. Now "Marie Antoinette" was trending on Twitter. Within a few hours, the image was everywhere-on cable news, late-night shows, even the side of an old flour mill in downtown Tempe, near the intersection where, in 2003, Sinema led an anti-war vigil on the eve of the invasion of Iraq. "Keep the cake," read the message projected onto the building. "Support the $15 minimum wage now."
To Sinema's progressive critics, her vote was a funhouse mirror image of John McCain's thumbs-down vote to save the Affordable Care Act four years earlier-only now an Arizona Democrat was rejecting one of her party's biggest legislative priorities. More alarming was her opposition to reforming the filibuster, the Senate rule that allows a minority of senators to block a piece of legislation from coming to a vote. Weeks earlier, Sinema, who rarely speaks to reporters from news outlets that are not based in her home state, had drawn a sharp line during an interview with Politico: "I want to restore the 60-vote threshold for all elements of the Senate's work," she said. In the face of united Republican opposition, many Democrats feared such a standard would doom almost every piece of their agenda- from immigration reform to voting rights to LGBTQ equality.
Democrats expected such intransigence from West Virginia's J oe Manchin, a conservative from a state Donald Trump carried by 39 points, who...