The Intercept's Ryan Grim: Senator Sinema is the dying scream of the corporate Democrat Party

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^^Terlit trencher joke....
I doubt we see the last of the corporate whores who fight to give the taxpayer a break.
 
There is this defeatist attitude that feeds upon itself. Rather than do some good now, continue to hold power and do some more good next time the Democrats see things as they must do this great big thing now because they will soon lose power and then have to start all over.

So things like the Infrastructure bill that is being held up doesn't get passed even though it had bipartisan support and the (D)'s lose support.

Pass the bill. Negotiate and get what you can in another bill and tell the people if this is what they are wanting to keep them in power to further address our issues.

But they have decided it will be all or nothing.
 
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excerpts:

Think of her and Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., as the dead hands reaching out of the grave, grabbing at the party as it tries to move on from them. They might have managed to claw back spending on the Build Back Better Act, but the reality that their time has passed is clear. And the way you can measure this most directly is in terms of dollars.

For Sinema in particular, her approach to the negotiations — to push against social spending and tax hikes on the rich and corporations — has cost her badly in the polls at home and hasn’t had much of an upside when it comes to campaign cash. Her model of politics is outdated, though it has been the dominant form for most of her life.

ONE OF THE people who noticed this shift was Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., once known as Wall Street Chuck. But thanks to all of these small donors, he now serves as Senate majority leader. A lot of people have chalked up Schumer’s pivot toward progressives as fear of a primary challenge from Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., and no doubt that’s part of what’s going on. Another factor is that Schumer is used to delivering for donors so that they keep the spigot flowing. And Schumer’s donors are now rank-and-file Democratic activists throwing in $27 at a time. In 2020, 41 percent of the money raised by Democratic Senate candidates came from donations of less than $200. What they want is to see Democrats fighting for what they ran on, so Schumer is happy to give them that fight.

But when she was a candidate running for Senate — back in the third quarter of 2018, when Democratic voters thought she was a progressive and wanted to help her flip a Republican seat — she raised almost $7 million.

That’s not a fluke. You might think that 2018 was a special year and that Democratic small donors are no longer fired up since President Donald Trump is out of office and kicked off Twitter. That argument falls apart when you start looking at individual candidates. Fellow Arizona Democratic Sen. Mark Kelly is totally fine with the full $3.5 trillion proposal for the reconciliation bill, voted for a minimum wage increase, supports passing parts of the labor reform legislation called the PRO Act, and generally supports all kinds of reforms that Sinema is battling. Kelly, who’s up for reelection next year, raised $8.2 million this past quarter, while the Republican candidate expected to win that primary raised just over half a million.

In the last three months, Kelly raised $3.4 million from small donors, according to his FEC report. In other words, he raised three times more than Sinema just from small donors even while Sinema was making a corporate-loving spectacle of herself and traveling the world to raise money. He made nothing from PACs. And his $3.8 million in itemized contributions shows that a Democrat in a swing state can back the Biden agenda and still raise money from big donors.

The fundraising profile that looks the most similar to Sinema’s is Manchin’s. Like Sinema, he’s up for reelection in 2024. He did better than Sinema in the third quarter, raising almost $1.6 million. But just $10,448 of that was made up of donations of less than $200. Of that, $1.3 million came from large donations, and $250,000 came from PACs.

Manchin, though, is distinguished from Sinema in that he can plausibly claim to be in a different political environment back home, a state that Trump carried in 2020 by nearly 40 points while losing in Arizona.

Sen. Tammy Baldwin is perhaps the best comparison, since she serves from Wisconsin, which Trump won in 2016, Biden won in 2020, and will be hotly contested in 2024. The last quarter, she raised $640,000, about half of which is from small donors. So if that’s Sinema’s game — selling out the entire Democratic agenda to do slightly better than Baldwin in the fundraising race — I guess congratulations are in order.

Over in Georgia, Sen. Raphael Warnock put Sinema’s haul to shame, raising $4.7 million from small donors in the third quarter on his way to raising $9 million overall. Maggie Hassan, the New Hampshire senator up for reelection this cycle, also raised more than Sinema: $2.5 million last quarter, more than $800,000 of which was from small donors.

Ocasio-Cortez raised just over $1.6 million to Sinema’s $1.1 million. In fact, she raised more from just small donors than Sinema raised total.
The simple fact is that Sinema’s style of fundraising just isn’t the best way to raise large sums of money anymore. And most politicians ultimately follow the money, which means that they’re now going to follow the people, especially if they’re in swing states that millions of people care about. So if you believe that politicians are corrupt and only do what their donors tell them to do, this is actually good news about the future of the Democratic Party. For now, however, the party’s past still has a death grip on the present.
 
Pass the bill. Negotiate and get what you can in another bill and tell the people if this is what they are wanting to keep them in power to further address our issues.

But they have decided it will be all or nothing.
Yes, yezzz, because putting up with Obamacare has been so much better than single payer/Medicare for all!
President Obama: I want to cover everybody.
In other words, "For me to poop on!"
There might still be people left out
even though they are required to purchase health insurance
and we may end up giving them some sort of hardship exemption.
..
 
Yes, yezzz, because putting up with Obamacare has been so much better than single payer/Medicare for all!

In other words, "For me to poop on!"



..

You had a group of Democrats that did not want Medicare for all which is why that is not what we got. You had the corporate Democrat wing writing Obamacare and that's what we got.
 
The socialist-minded spenders of other people's money are pissed Sinema won't jump on the financial bankruptcy train with them.

She may or may not be owned by big donors, but tell me which of these hypocritical pigs isn't.

These assholes are exploiting Covid for every wet dream they ever had about engorging themselves on the flesh of the American taxpayers.
 
Senator Manchin has been a straight shooter — you know exactly where he stands. I disagree with areas, but I respect that

My concern with Senator Sinema is why are the rules different for her? Why doesn’t she go on the shows; why doesn’t she explain herself?
 

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