Seems like Sinema is trying to emulate McCain’s maverick persona, e.g. his thumbs down on ACA repeal. But the thing is, McCain almost certainly would have lost his next primary. Also… there is a difference between voting down unpopular bills and standing in the way of popular bills.
Anyway, I think it’ll be important for the “primary Sinema” movement to frequently contrast Sinema and Kelly (“while Mark Kelly is fighting to lower prescription drug prices, Kyrsten Sinema wants to keep prices high to protect her donors”). Bolsters Kelly’s popularity while also making the objections to Sinema seem more reasonable, not just far-left complaining.
I wish to God we had a faction of the Democratic party that was culturally conservative but wanted to tax yuppies. So that voting for the Democrat was a way of giving the middle finger to college graduates and their (our) sensitivities.
There are people like that in Germany who really compete with the far right for votes (they hate NATO, like Putin, want to tax rich people & think that under the Communist dictatorship at least you could get a good job in a factory with a pension). But even they just got shellacked everywhere outside the East. Left wing politics shouldn't be fancy person politics. They aren't in the US in minority communities at least, but even that seems to be changing.
Your take on her intentionally being a maverick in the McCain mold and learning the wrong lesson from it is my take as well. And I think she is naturally a contrarian and even somehow more personally quirky than she displays (like that winery internship).
Arizona can be a funny place but I can imagine Gallego entering as the favorite despite Sinema's incumbency.
Two Sinema episodes from her House career standout, and I think demonstrate that she may very well be sincere, but politically stupid.
Back in 2013, as a freshman member, Sinema voted for the original GOP Farm Bill which famously failed on the floor (https://www.politico.com/story/2013/06/how-the-farm-bill-failed-093209) because a significant share of Republican members felt like the bill didn't cut spending enough, while the cuts to food stamps had alienated the Democratic caucus.
But 24 Democrats did vote for the bill, and they are largely the moderate to rural Democrats from farm-oriented districts. And then there was Sinema, from a suburban Phoenix House seat, voting for cuts to food stamps for ... reasons? To be politically moderate?
It didn't really make sense, and the reports at the time were that she cried on the floor, overwhelmed by the vote to cut food stamps while reflecting on her own time growing up as a child homeless and dependent on government assistance. She sincerely felt like she had to vote yes, even though it was "difficult" for her.
Less compelling, but still interesting, a few years later, Sinema is one of the only Democrats to back a weird proposal from House Republicans to privatize the air traffic control system (https://thehill.com/policy/transportation/341367-crunch-time-for-air-traffic-control-push). It's a bit wonky, and the idea itself (Canada has a similar approach) isn't necessarily bad, but the GOP version was tilted heavily towards the big airlines and their demands. But Sinema hadn't been seen as a big aviation policy person and wasn't on the Transportation Committee. It was widely seen as "Oh there's Sinema doing whatever the corporations want."
One of the only other Democrats to back the idea at the time? Josh Gottheimer.
Her political instincts seem heavily influences by corporate lobbyists and their view of the world. That's been clear recently with the reconciliation fight, but it's been apparent for some time from her House career. Just no one cared when she was just one House member.
I really do think journalists sometimes underestimate the possibility that some politicians are just not very bright. After all, the #1 quality that gets you elected is not intelligence or policy savvy, but social skills. Sinema seems like a perfect example of this.
The intelligence of the average public figure is chronically under-estimated.
The dimmest major politician of my life, 39 years old, was Sarah Palin. A few important things stand out about Palin:
1. While she was Governor of a state, it only had a 700k people.
2. It was a one-party state and her primary opponent was severely damaged by scandal.
3. She only became a VEEP nominee because (i) Party didn't do a normal evaluation; (ii) Party feared a landslide and wanted to role the dice on a high risk/high reward candidate.
Her rise to power had a huge element of luck. She was unable to stay on the national stage after the election. She randomly resigned and quickly slid to right wing obscurity.
___
This is the dimmest national figure but I still put her in the top half for population. And people like Sinema are *significantly* more impressive.
My sense is that she thinks for herself and if a lobbyist provides a strong argument she doesn't dismiss it based on the source. Ideological purity is way overrated.
What lobbyist is supporting cuts to food stamps? If you're a Senator styling yourself an independent thinker who is convinced by a Heritage Foundation lobbyist that cutting food stamps is a good idea, you shouldn't be in the Democratic Party.
Depends what the alternative option was. I'd like to hear what she has to say about that vote. She probably shouldn't be in the Democratic party, but a two party system doesn't lend itself to a reasonable spectrum of political beliefs. Arizona does it's own thing politically, like many other states. I'm not that interested in the DC opinion of Sinema. Arizona has grown quickly in part by being corporate friendly and lower social benefits. It's hardly surprising that an Arizona Senator feels similarly.
Gallego explored a run in 2018, but forces behind the scene seemed to favor Sinema. I don't think it was necessarily the ideology, I think the direction of the party from 2012 onward favored recruiting a female candidate for the Senate race, given that McSally was the expected GOP nominee.
Also, Lieberman was primaried by a relatively normal Democrat (who is now CT's governor).
But Lieberman then ran as an independent and won with the implicit backing of the states Republican party, in a similiar way to how Murkowski won her write in campaign.
Sinema clearly can't pull something like that off, AZ Republican's will not be willing to give up a chance of an R winning the seat to back her in the general election the way Alaska Dems or CT Republicans were, as AZ is a purple state.
Agreed. I've been following you from ThinkProgress days and when I read this I was starting to have Deja Vu although I can't find that article where you talked about Lieberman holding up Obama's agenda. I think a lot of the TP archives have disappeared of the Internet
However, I do question Sinema's sincerity given that she started her political career as a hippie Green Party activist.
I recently read an in depth profile of Sienna over at Mother Jones, and while yes she was a Green Party activist, I got the impression she was mainly drawn to the movement for conservationist and anti-war reasons. The article even mentions that her views on other issues at the time are unclear and one source been claimed she described herself as having libertarian leanings at the time.
The other person that I would describe in those same terms recently, whose clearest political motivation is an anti-war one, that has endeared her to the far left, but who ended up with a lot of rightist tendencies, is Tulsi Gabbard. I don't think of Gabbard and Sinema as very similar, but maybe I should think more about the parallel.
At least Lieberman told us what he wanted (the removal of the public option). By all accounts Sinema just seems to want to obstruct for obstruction's sake. I'm really hoping her buddy Manchin can reason with her (assuming he can be reasoned with, which seems likely per the latest reportage).
My only defense of Sinema here is that carbon taxes are very good and, while true, it’s a damn shame they’re so unpopular. The Shor-pill eventually comes for all, I suppose.
Given expert consensus on the issues I'd like to say that everyone who disagrees with her stance that we should lower corporate taxes and replace the revenue with a carbon tax is being Against Science™
You don't even need polling to find public's revealed climate preferences. NY closed a nuclear plant. WA carbon taxes all failed. Coastal Cities full of liberals are super NIMBY on development.
Liberals who purport to care about climate aren't willing to pay any price for climate.
Cost based approach to dealing with climate are politically hopeless. Sadly
This isn't just America. Look at this chart, Kevin Drum, produced comparing Europe to the US. Austrailia failed too. Voters aren't willing to pay significant prices for carbon mitigation.
> But if you know anyone involved in elite levels of conservative movement economic policy (which frankly and sadly, few progressives actually seem to)...
This is what we pay you for, Matt: To endure the unendurable on our behalf.
Not only Can I imagine it. This is exactly what I expect.
“ But you can imagine a world where Sinema-ism takes over, and Democrats become an upscale suburban party that supports free trade and balanced budgets. A party that doesn’t rock the boat and taxes and spending. Where everybody reads “Lean In” and “White Fragility” and makes sure the company they work at runs DEI seminars. And, where you are constantly losing elections due to the lopsided nature of the Senate map, but even when you do govern, you’re just a kind of technocratic clean-up crew that doesn’t really try to tackle major social problems.”
"The Prudential Financial Democratic Party, sponsored by GlaxoSmithKline, and made possible by contributions from The MacArthur Foundation and Capital One. CapitalOne: What's in your wallet?"
Yeah, that'll really attract voters. The GOP would have 70 senators and two-thirds of the House.
That intro is just totally indistinguishable from any sponsor segment on the otherwise progressive-echo-chamber-ified NPR or PBS these days. Bodes well!
It's not just what I expect, it's very close to what I'm trying to contribute to in my own little way. I'm a Paul Ryan-esque libertarianish former R re-affiliated as D and intend to try to sway the D party in exactly this direction, if only at the margins.
Well, rest assured I'll be there, too, pushing back, and trying to build a Democratic Party centered on service and the middle class, rather than the Ryan-esque wealthy investor class.
I am the opposite. I have become more economically liberal, but retain a little big of social conservatism.
I can see a scenario where the Democratic and Republican party effectively swap like what happened in the South.
It's not likely, given Republicans path, but if the Democratic Party becomes the part of the wealthy an educated (mostly white), how do they keep the tent big enough to embrace the social democrats. People think they want higher taxes... until they have to pay higher taxes.
Then, all it would take would be a charismatic blue collar oriented conservative to cement it as the working class party, possibly drawing in larger numbers of hispanics and blacks. Basically a Trump like figure with more intelligence.
I'm not saying its likely.... just that its possible.
In that case, where do the social democrats go...
I've never understood why Republicans don't embrace unions... especially trade unions.
If you don't widen appeal on cultural issues and guns, this is the only way to broaden the base: target economic conservatives who tolerate progressive cultural agenda.
The funny thing is, most people still seem to associate the hardcore identity politics with economic liberalism. Meanwhile, the centrists/party hacks are #metoo-ing economically populist challengers to the throne.
Democrats seem to finally be catching on to this, when even idiots were capable of foreseeing it from the outset. A distressingly common phenomenon (really, this is true in any environment that suppresses open debate.)
I don't think that there are any guiding principles behind her behavior in office. I think she loves the attention and the power to jerk people around.
My goodness Matt, you're letting your social Democrat flag fly. I agree with the thrust off this article. But, the subtitle is misleading. "She believes everything she says" does not actually characterize her views. Remember, her career started in the Arizona Green Party. I would suggest she believes in precisely one thing, the career of Kristen Sinama. We have a sufficient supply of narcissistic politicians in both parties, we don't need her.
If she wanted to support her career, it's not clear that this level of brinksmanship is the way to do it. If she does eventually vote for the bills, then maybe the attention will on net turn out to have been good. But if she ends up being the reason the reconciliation bill fails, and if her delay on the reconciliation bill ends up causing the progressives to tank the bipartisan infrastructure bill, then I think her career is not long for this world.
The difference between opposing higher taxes generally and opposing price controls or burdens that target the pharmaceutical industry specifically is about distortion. Higher taxes of general application don't single out high value activities like drug development and punish them. Even with higher taxes in general, money will still flow towards higher value investments. And pharmaceutical development has such high returns because it's such a socially valuable activity. It's the last industry we should single out for punishment, especially while leaving unaddressed all the other less socially valuable rent-seeking in healthcare.
They're not price controls, but price negotiations. Pharma would still be allowed to charge whatever price they like to the private sector, it's just that Medicare/Medicaid will be allowed to negotiate discounts like any other large buyer.
A negotiation where one side says "here is the price. Accept it, or we will slap you with a 95% excise tax" is not a negotiation in any real sense of that word.
This isn't what the law says. The law says "Here is the price that makes you profitable in other rich nations. We will pay you a premium over this price (much higher than shipping costs) to make sure that our drugs are the most expensive on Earth. But if that's still not good enough for you, we'll slap you with a 95% excise tax.".
I agree with your characterization. But that is not a "negotiation". That is a price control. A price control that could be (or should be, likely in your view) acceptable to the pharma company. But not a negotiation.
I think we're going into semantics here, and English isn't my first language so I don't want to argue too much about this. However, I would think that price control means "you can't charge more than $100 for this", which isn't what the law does. I think the law says "you can't charge one customer more than another customer for this". This is more like how menus at restaurants work, no?
It would be if it wasn't for the tax. The tax makes it essentially a price control. Imagine if NYC said that restaurants in the city must offer prices no more than 20% of the equivalent meal prices in Mobile, Alabama and any price you charge over that will be taxed at 95%. If you could buy a steak (insulin) in Mobile for $20, then the most a restaurant in NYC could charge for a similar steak would $22. If they charged more than that, they would be taxed (starting at 65% and rising to 95%) on all sales of the steaks they sold.
Having seen that, it appears that maybe pharma companies could just raise prices to compensate - so that they could just come back and start charging $400 for what they previously charged $20 for. The resulting 95% tax would bring their overall profit back down to $20.
If its not that bad of a bargain than why does it need the tax?
Another way of thinking about it: Airlines core audience is business travellers, but they also sell tickets to vacation travelers for often much lower prices as a marginal add on. The plane is already going to be in the air, might as well fill the last few seats for whatever price you can. If the government went to airlines and said "you can only charge business flyers a little bit more than you charge vacation travellers, we would (hopefully) all recognize this would be a major issue and the result would be airline tickets across the board would go up - and the number of people flying would go down - and some airlines would probably go out of business as a result. I would expect the same to happen with pharma drugs in that drug prices for the other countries will go up, usage will go down, and some drugs that would have been introduced will no longer do that. It may be worth doing to save the government a large amount of money that can be spent elsewhere for more value, but we should at least be honest about the tradeoff.
Another thing I would like to add, however, is that the law should ban my insurer from paying above Medicare/Medicaid prices for drugs.
The government bans me from Medicare/Medicaid (which would have been my preference) and forces me to contract with a private insurer (technically, it forces my employer). I expect that they would at least ban said insurer from buying drugs at ridiculous prices.
per the bill " The negotiated prices must be offered under Medicare and MA and may also be offered under private health insurance unless the insurer opts out."
So it appears that the prices will apply to private insurers unless they opt out.
The bill would confiscate 95% of the manufacturer's revenue from sales of the drug in the US if they don't accept the "negotiated" price. And it's not just Medicare/Medicaid - mfgrs are also required to sell at that price to private insurers. It's just dishonest to present it as some kind of free negotiation rather than what it is - national price controls.
And dumbest of all, the bill doesn't even solve the thing patients actually care about - their out of pocket costs. Even with this bill, patients will still have to pay higher copays and coinsurance for drug treatments than for other kinds of healthcare, because the bill doesn't change that.
I understand your point, but then what do you call the current regime in which Medicare will pay literally any price that the pharma companies ask for any drug that passes FDA muster, even if that drug provides no marginal clinical benefit (or, like aducanumab, no benefit at all)? Isn’t that distortionary? From the news stories about diabetics dying of a cheaply treatable disease because they’re unable to afford insulin, I would say that we’re already seeing very little return in terms of social value from pharma “innovation”.
Maybe Congress should ask someone why insulin is so expensive. They might start by asking why the barriers to entry to produce off-patent insulin products are so high. (Hint: It’s not from a dearth of regulation.)
In my view it doesn't make much sense to describe the healthcare market as being too heavily or too lightly regulated. The government is such a huge buyer and so necessarily implicated in safety and IP regulation that the only question is whether it's regulated well or regulated poorly. I would contend that it's regulated extremely poorly at the moment. Price setting is a common feature in other countries' healthcare systems and it works. If we want to subsidize innovation there are better ways to do it than to pay through the nose for drugs of dubious benefit.
If we can lower the price of insulin by removing regulatory barriers-to-entry that don't pass a cost/benefit analysis, then great, let's do that. Point conceded.
That doesn't address the argument that our current way of financing drug development makes no sense. One of the ways it makes no sense is exactly that it doesn't allow for any cost/benefit analysis. Medicare will buy any drug that passes FDA approval. Private insurers will, too, for fear of PR blowback. In a situation like that, price setting makes sense. I would note that in other markets where there is a crucial commodity with a high barrier-to-entry, we use price setting and it works.
Medicare doesn't "literally pay any price" the mfgr asks. But there is some distortion for drugs covered under Part B and used predominantly by senior citizens because Part B pays the average price paid in the private sector but if the private sector market is very small mfrs will sacrifice private sector sales volume in favor of a high price in order to keep the average price up. Not such an issue for drugs where there large private sector market and competition - those "me-too" drugs people criticize but which actually allow for price competition.
But you're wrong about innovation - for example, cancer drugs are an area that money has been pouring into and though it's slow going and you can find examples of drugs that don't do much more than briefly extend life at a high price, in the aggregate it's making a real difference, and a lot of that investment wouldn't be happening but for the lure of high potential profits.
That doesn't explain why Pfizer was unable to innovate on its own and had to enlist a German company to develop the vaccine. If Pfizer knew that their US margins aren't so high that they could stay profitable without innovating, I believe they would have managed to develop the vaccine on their own.
Genuine question: I thought that the pharmaceutical industry can be critiqued for focusing too heavily on drugs that solve problems for rich old people rather than poor young people (thinking globally here). Does that factor into your "such a socially valuable activity" assessment of big pharma R&D?
"The pharmaceutical companies produced the most papers on cancerous tumours that caused fewer than 10% of global disability-adjusted life-years (DALYs), a metric of time lost due to premature death and poor health. Infectious and parasitic diseases had the largest toll, accounting for around 17% of global DALYs."
There is nothing wrong with favoring a point on the growth/redistribution trade off that is less redistributionist than other people in your party. What is odd is not being willing to negotiate on the issue.
Holding 100% of your caucus together is very unusual. Republicans barely passed the TCJA and failed to repeal the ACA with 2 senators to spare. Democrats have 0.
Sinema will not be the last centrist Democrat to go off the reservation.
This reinforces to me the desperate need to find some way of winning more senate seats, so the leader can indulge these mavericks with the occasional no vote without the whole legislative agenda failing.
Kyrsten Sinema has been a disappointment, to put it mildly. Manchin has, at the least, made public what he's for, and I like much of what he wants. He says he supports raising taxes (good), he says he supports expanding the Child Tax Credit (also good). He wants to means test as much as possible (eh, I can take it or leave it), and he wants a lower top line figure (fine). That's at least a start. I am confident Schumer, Pelosi, and the Progressive Caucus can inch Manchin up.
I have no idea what Sinema is doing, and she's running against her own platform. That's not smart politics.
I don't want to lose your broader (strong) point, but would it be so bad if Democrats spent a little bit of their windows of government control focused on strengthening existing programs and improving governance?
I appreciate that it's not *fair* to put the good functioning of the government onto Democrats but (a) Republicans certainly aren't going to do it and (b) Democrats are the ones who think we should expand government. I do think there are lots of voters *cough* Biden voters *cough* that would really like to see a responsible government with limited new policy ambitions focused on making the government work effectively and efficiently rather than just slamming a few trillion into new programs built on top of the existing shaky foundation.
I’m not sure basic good governance combined with limited policy ambition is a sustainable platform in the long run. It’s broadly popular, yes, and individual governors and presidents can succeed by running on it (e.g. Clinton, Baker), but that kind of politics doesn’t seem to build support for a broader party or movement. If anything, it may make voters complacent about the real differences between the parties.
In a world where Republicans are both uninterested in governance and leaning in an authoritarian direction, Democrats have shoot higher. The goal needs of be to maximize electoral success over the next 10-15 years, not just make Biden mildly popular but let Republicans sweep downballot as happened to Bill Clinton in the 90s.
The social problem at hand is inequality, which is perfectly well solved by taking money from rich people and lighting it on fire. You don’t see much concern for how effectively taxes are converted to social benefit because that’s totally beside the point. It’s a relative equalization, distributive justice concern.
I disagree that inequality is a problem in and of itself. Whether or not Jeff Bezos can strap himself to a rickety rocket to space does not impact my life in any negative way (in fact, I actually am glad to see it). Whether or not my parents can get dental covered by medicare is. Reducing inequality by making everyone worse off is a pretty shitty deal if you ask me.
Everything is fine when a condition is simply untreatable. The invention of a new treatment that is only available to rich people makes everyone else worse off, since now in addition to being sick they are also unjustly deprived of care.
Sinema strikes me as someone who either believes what she says, or believes she has to be a moderate to win Arizona, and chooses the issues where she cares less about the Democratic platform to be the ones she is moderate on.
And the (left-leaning) issues she cares about most are the social ones - LGBTQ+ rights, DEI initiatives, all that sort of thing. I suspect that because she is bisexual and doesn't go to church, she also understands that she cannot credibly appeal to "family-values voters" on the right.
Hm Matt is saying she’s attracted to the parts of liberalism that don’t have to do with taxing rich people and expanding welfare. I know green stands in for ‘further left than Dems’ but it’s really consistent with this view. In 2000, for example, it was pretty clear that a gore win would mean higher taxes and more social spending than a bush win. Greens were not satisfied with this as the axis of us politics.
If we're talking about Nader's 2000 run, he was running on sharply left-wing economic policies.
>Nader campaigned against the pervasiveness of corporate power and spoke on the need for campaign finance reform. His campaign also addressed problems with the two party system, voter fraud, environmental justice, universal healthcare, affordable housing, free education including college, workers' rights and increasing the minimum wage to a living wage.
--
Nader wasn't much of a social warrior, in fact he angered the pro-choice community for derisively referring to abortion as gonadal politics.
Yes his argument was that higher taxes on the rich and more spending on welfare programs was indistinguishable from lower tax on the rich and less spending on welfare. Instead he wanted to ‘address corporate power’. And the party more broadly was filled with people who also thought the difference between high and lower taxes and more or less spending was basically irrelevant to politics.
I will say the weakest part of Matt’s argument is that sinema is substituting ‘woke’ values. I see little evidence of that. And greens were not especially woke either. Their views were somewhat incoherent, much like sinemas now. It a constant is the idea that these ‘modest’ changes in tax and spending levels —which are the main thing that changes between Dems and republicans — are not that important
Exactly this. And if you look at Europe, most green parties have exactly this type of split. Indeed the German Greens co-leader is pretty clear that he would prefer a coalition with the CDU than the SDP.
I have two thoughts from this post that aren't that related to Kyrsten Sinema but I'll write them anyway.
1) Right now so many things are so difficult because everyone is understaffed. Restaurants are plagued by bad service. God help you if you need a plumber or an electrician or concrete poured. People see "Help Wanted" signs everywhere. My linkedin is a steady stream of people trying to hire... and these are for decent paying, white collar jobs too. While there are plenty of popular things in the bill, I wonder if we're underrating the pushback from upper-middle class Democrats who see everything understaffed and chafe a bit at a lot of the spending in the bill. I don't know. I don't care how big it is honestly, but every week I run into "I'm sorry, we're a little understaffed" from someone and imagine that annoyance carries over into people's opinions on how much we should be funding some of these programs.
2) A Democratic Party that's (most of the educated white people) + (virtually all of the black people, most of whom don't have college degrees) + (a large but pretty rapidly declining Latino population, most of whom don't have college degrees) is pretty weird.
His point is, there's just as good a case that Joe Manchin is a DINO. He's not hunting Sinema *because* she's a DINO. He *likes* DINOs when they can do things like hold a WV senate seat!
But Sinema seems to be causing problems with the big Democratic initiatives, with no clear demands other than one or two things that would make them less popular across the board (unlike Manchin). He's hunting her for *that*, and the fact that she's a DINO is in some ways beside the point.
Seems like Sinema is trying to emulate McCain’s maverick persona, e.g. his thumbs down on ACA repeal. But the thing is, McCain almost certainly would have lost his next primary. Also… there is a difference between voting down unpopular bills and standing in the way of popular bills.
Anyway, I think it’ll be important for the “primary Sinema” movement to frequently contrast Sinema and Kelly (“while Mark Kelly is fighting to lower prescription drug prices, Kyrsten Sinema wants to keep prices high to protect her donors”). Bolsters Kelly’s popularity while also making the objections to Sinema seem more reasonable, not just far-left complaining.
Yes, I think it’s crucial to see this as coming from a mainstream Biden Democrat kind of place.
I wish to God we had a faction of the Democratic party that was culturally conservative but wanted to tax yuppies. So that voting for the Democrat was a way of giving the middle finger to college graduates and their (our) sensitivities.
There are people like that in Germany who really compete with the far right for votes (they hate NATO, like Putin, want to tax rich people & think that under the Communist dictatorship at least you could get a good job in a factory with a pension). But even they just got shellacked everywhere outside the East. Left wing politics shouldn't be fancy person politics. They aren't in the US in minority communities at least, but even that seems to be changing.
Will the administration begin sending signals or supporting exploratory committees? I doubt it.
If we reach 23 with no legislative accomplishments because of Sinema I think the administration would support a primary.
Your take on her intentionally being a maverick in the McCain mold and learning the wrong lesson from it is my take as well. And I think she is naturally a contrarian and even somehow more personally quirky than she displays (like that winery internship).
Arizona can be a funny place but I can imagine Gallego entering as the favorite despite Sinema's incumbency.
Two Sinema episodes from her House career standout, and I think demonstrate that she may very well be sincere, but politically stupid.
Back in 2013, as a freshman member, Sinema voted for the original GOP Farm Bill which famously failed on the floor (https://www.politico.com/story/2013/06/how-the-farm-bill-failed-093209) because a significant share of Republican members felt like the bill didn't cut spending enough, while the cuts to food stamps had alienated the Democratic caucus.
But 24 Democrats did vote for the bill, and they are largely the moderate to rural Democrats from farm-oriented districts. And then there was Sinema, from a suburban Phoenix House seat, voting for cuts to food stamps for ... reasons? To be politically moderate?
It didn't really make sense, and the reports at the time were that she cried on the floor, overwhelmed by the vote to cut food stamps while reflecting on her own time growing up as a child homeless and dependent on government assistance. She sincerely felt like she had to vote yes, even though it was "difficult" for her.
Less compelling, but still interesting, a few years later, Sinema is one of the only Democrats to back a weird proposal from House Republicans to privatize the air traffic control system (https://thehill.com/policy/transportation/341367-crunch-time-for-air-traffic-control-push). It's a bit wonky, and the idea itself (Canada has a similar approach) isn't necessarily bad, but the GOP version was tilted heavily towards the big airlines and their demands. But Sinema hadn't been seen as a big aviation policy person and wasn't on the Transportation Committee. It was widely seen as "Oh there's Sinema doing whatever the corporations want."
One of the only other Democrats to back the idea at the time? Josh Gottheimer.
Her political instincts seem heavily influences by corporate lobbyists and their view of the world. That's been clear recently with the reconciliation fight, but it's been apparent for some time from her House career. Just no one cared when she was just one House member.
Sheesh.
I really do think journalists sometimes underestimate the possibility that some politicians are just not very bright. After all, the #1 quality that gets you elected is not intelligence or policy savvy, but social skills. Sinema seems like a perfect example of this.
It's possible that journalists overestimate their own intelligence.
The intelligence of the average public figure is chronically under-estimated.
The dimmest major politician of my life, 39 years old, was Sarah Palin. A few important things stand out about Palin:
1. While she was Governor of a state, it only had a 700k people.
2. It was a one-party state and her primary opponent was severely damaged by scandal.
3. She only became a VEEP nominee because (i) Party didn't do a normal evaluation; (ii) Party feared a landslide and wanted to role the dice on a high risk/high reward candidate.
Her rise to power had a huge element of luck. She was unable to stay on the national stage after the election. She randomly resigned and quickly slid to right wing obscurity.
___
This is the dimmest national figure but I still put her in the top half for population. And people like Sinema are *significantly* more impressive.
She was valedictorian of a 700-800 student High School at 16.
A college graduate at 18.
She also completed a PHD.
She accomplished all that despite coming from nothing. That requires significant intelligence. Probably 90th Percentile as a floor.
Fair enough. Though you can be plenty smart academically but still irrational and shallow in your political worldview.
My sense is that she thinks for herself and if a lobbyist provides a strong argument she doesn't dismiss it based on the source. Ideological purity is way overrated.
What lobbyist is supporting cuts to food stamps? If you're a Senator styling yourself an independent thinker who is convinced by a Heritage Foundation lobbyist that cutting food stamps is a good idea, you shouldn't be in the Democratic Party.
Depends what the alternative option was. I'd like to hear what she has to say about that vote. She probably shouldn't be in the Democratic party, but a two party system doesn't lend itself to a reasonable spectrum of political beliefs. Arizona does it's own thing politically, like many other states. I'm not that interested in the DC opinion of Sinema. Arizona has grown quickly in part by being corporate friendly and lower social benefits. It's hardly surprising that an Arizona Senator feels similarly.
Yep. And dollars to doughnuts K Street figured this out long before anybody else.
Why run her to be a senator?
Gallego explored a run in 2018, but forces behind the scene seemed to favor Sinema. I don't think it was necessarily the ideology, I think the direction of the party from 2012 onward favored recruiting a female candidate for the Senate race, given that McSally was the expected GOP nominee.
I feel like this is the political journalism equivalent of putting the horse's head at Sinema's doorstep.
Yes, I too have been watching mafia-related films in anticipation of the Sopranos prequel.
I don't think I've ever seen Matt target a politician this harshly since Joe Lieberman although I think he is correct and this is a deserved post.
Lieberman was a very similar case IMO where like if he was holding down a senate seat in Arkansas à la Mark Pryor you’d say we’re lucky to have him.
Also, Lieberman was primaried by a relatively normal Democrat (who is now CT's governor).
But Lieberman then ran as an independent and won with the implicit backing of the states Republican party, in a similiar way to how Murkowski won her write in campaign.
Sinema clearly can't pull something like that off, AZ Republican's will not be willing to give up a chance of an R winning the seat to back her in the general election the way Alaska Dems or CT Republicans were, as AZ is a purple state.
Agreed. I've been following you from ThinkProgress days and when I read this I was starting to have Deja Vu although I can't find that article where you talked about Lieberman holding up Obama's agenda. I think a lot of the TP archives have disappeared of the Internet
However, I do question Sinema's sincerity given that she started her political career as a hippie Green Party activist.
I recently read an in depth profile of Sienna over at Mother Jones, and while yes she was a Green Party activist, I got the impression she was mainly drawn to the movement for conservationist and anti-war reasons. The article even mentions that her views on other issues at the time are unclear and one source been claimed she described herself as having libertarian leanings at the time.
The other person that I would describe in those same terms recently, whose clearest political motivation is an anti-war one, that has endeared her to the far left, but who ended up with a lot of rightist tendencies, is Tulsi Gabbard. I don't think of Gabbard and Sinema as very similar, but maybe I should think more about the parallel.
Point being, she may be sincere but simply n out particularly thoughtful or intelligent about politics and ideology.
At least Lieberman told us what he wanted (the removal of the public option). By all accounts Sinema just seems to want to obstruct for obstruction's sake. I'm really hoping her buddy Manchin can reason with her (assuming he can be reasoned with, which seems likely per the latest reportage).
Yeah, but as Lieberman hater I just want to state for the youngs he wanted to kill the public option just to stick it to liberals for the 06 Primary.
My only defense of Sinema here is that carbon taxes are very good and, while true, it’s a damn shame they’re so unpopular. The Shor-pill eventually comes for all, I suppose.
Given expert consensus on the issues I'd like to say that everyone who disagrees with her stance that we should lower corporate taxes and replace the revenue with a carbon tax is being Against Science™
That probably wasn't super clear but this explains it: https://fsymbols.com/tm
You can use alt and then num pad 0153 to get the ™.
>>>Carbon taxes are unpopular and there's no realistic path to enacting a politically durable version of them.<<<
Certainly not in a veto-laden polity with elections every two years.
You don't even need polling to find public's revealed climate preferences. NY closed a nuclear plant. WA carbon taxes all failed. Coastal Cities full of liberals are super NIMBY on development.
Liberals who purport to care about climate aren't willing to pay any price for climate.
Cost based approach to dealing with climate are politically hopeless. Sadly
This isn't just America. Look at this chart, Kevin Drum, produced comparing Europe to the US. Austrailia failed too. Voters aren't willing to pay significant prices for carbon mitigation.
https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2019/02/heres-my-super-abridged-green-new-deal/
> But if you know anyone involved in elite levels of conservative movement economic policy (which frankly and sadly, few progressives actually seem to)...
This is what we pay you for, Matt: To endure the unendurable on our behalf.
Not only Can I imagine it. This is exactly what I expect.
“ But you can imagine a world where Sinema-ism takes over, and Democrats become an upscale suburban party that supports free trade and balanced budgets. A party that doesn’t rock the boat and taxes and spending. Where everybody reads “Lean In” and “White Fragility” and makes sure the company they work at runs DEI seminars. And, where you are constantly losing elections due to the lopsided nature of the Senate map, but even when you do govern, you’re just a kind of technocratic clean-up crew that doesn’t really try to tackle major social problems.”
"The Prudential Financial Democratic Party, sponsored by GlaxoSmithKline, and made possible by contributions from The MacArthur Foundation and Capital One. CapitalOne: What's in your wallet?"
Yeah, that'll really attract voters. The GOP would have 70 senators and two-thirds of the House.
That intro is just totally indistinguishable from any sponsor segment on the otherwise progressive-echo-chamber-ified NPR or PBS these days. Bodes well!
If the Democratic party gets as many votes as PBS has viewers, it's not so clear how well this bodes....
It's not just what I expect, it's very close to what I'm trying to contribute to in my own little way. I'm a Paul Ryan-esque libertarianish former R re-affiliated as D and intend to try to sway the D party in exactly this direction, if only at the margins.
Well, rest assured I'll be there, too, pushing back, and trying to build a Democratic Party centered on service and the middle class, rather than the Ryan-esque wealthy investor class.
I am the opposite. I have become more economically liberal, but retain a little big of social conservatism.
I can see a scenario where the Democratic and Republican party effectively swap like what happened in the South.
It's not likely, given Republicans path, but if the Democratic Party becomes the part of the wealthy an educated (mostly white), how do they keep the tent big enough to embrace the social democrats. People think they want higher taxes... until they have to pay higher taxes.
Then, all it would take would be a charismatic blue collar oriented conservative to cement it as the working class party, possibly drawing in larger numbers of hispanics and blacks. Basically a Trump like figure with more intelligence.
I'm not saying its likely.... just that its possible.
In that case, where do the social democrats go...
I've never understood why Republicans don't embrace unions... especially trade unions.
If you don't widen appeal on cultural issues and guns, this is the only way to broaden the base: target economic conservatives who tolerate progressive cultural agenda.
The funny thing is, most people still seem to associate the hardcore identity politics with economic liberalism. Meanwhile, the centrists/party hacks are #metoo-ing economically populist challengers to the throne.
Democrats seem to finally be catching on to this, when even idiots were capable of foreseeing it from the outset. A distressingly common phenomenon (really, this is true in any environment that suppresses open debate.)
Pain
Unimaginable pain
I don't think that there are any guiding principles behind her behavior in office. I think she loves the attention and the power to jerk people around.
My goodness Matt, you're letting your social Democrat flag fly. I agree with the thrust off this article. But, the subtitle is misleading. "She believes everything she says" does not actually characterize her views. Remember, her career started in the Arizona Green Party. I would suggest she believes in precisely one thing, the career of Kristen Sinama. We have a sufficient supply of narcissistic politicians in both parties, we don't need her.
If she wanted to support her career, it's not clear that this level of brinksmanship is the way to do it. If she does eventually vote for the bills, then maybe the attention will on net turn out to have been good. But if she ends up being the reason the reconciliation bill fails, and if her delay on the reconciliation bill ends up causing the progressives to tank the bipartisan infrastructure bill, then I think her career is not long for this world.
The difference between opposing higher taxes generally and opposing price controls or burdens that target the pharmaceutical industry specifically is about distortion. Higher taxes of general application don't single out high value activities like drug development and punish them. Even with higher taxes in general, money will still flow towards higher value investments. And pharmaceutical development has such high returns because it's such a socially valuable activity. It's the last industry we should single out for punishment, especially while leaving unaddressed all the other less socially valuable rent-seeking in healthcare.
They're not price controls, but price negotiations. Pharma would still be allowed to charge whatever price they like to the private sector, it's just that Medicare/Medicaid will be allowed to negotiate discounts like any other large buyer.
A negotiation where one side says "here is the price. Accept it, or we will slap you with a 95% excise tax" is not a negotiation in any real sense of that word.
This isn't what the law says. The law says "Here is the price that makes you profitable in other rich nations. We will pay you a premium over this price (much higher than shipping costs) to make sure that our drugs are the most expensive on Earth. But if that's still not good enough for you, we'll slap you with a 95% excise tax.".
I agree with your characterization. But that is not a "negotiation". That is a price control. A price control that could be (or should be, likely in your view) acceptable to the pharma company. But not a negotiation.
I think we're going into semantics here, and English isn't my first language so I don't want to argue too much about this. However, I would think that price control means "you can't charge more than $100 for this", which isn't what the law does. I think the law says "you can't charge one customer more than another customer for this". This is more like how menus at restaurants work, no?
It would be if it wasn't for the tax. The tax makes it essentially a price control. Imagine if NYC said that restaurants in the city must offer prices no more than 20% of the equivalent meal prices in Mobile, Alabama and any price you charge over that will be taxed at 95%. If you could buy a steak (insulin) in Mobile for $20, then the most a restaurant in NYC could charge for a similar steak would $22. If they charged more than that, they would be taxed (starting at 65% and rising to 95%) on all sales of the steaks they sold.
Having seen that, it appears that maybe pharma companies could just raise prices to compensate - so that they could just come back and start charging $400 for what they previously charged $20 for. The resulting 95% tax would bring their overall profit back down to $20.
If its not that bad of a bargain than why does it need the tax?
Another way of thinking about it: Airlines core audience is business travellers, but they also sell tickets to vacation travelers for often much lower prices as a marginal add on. The plane is already going to be in the air, might as well fill the last few seats for whatever price you can. If the government went to airlines and said "you can only charge business flyers a little bit more than you charge vacation travellers, we would (hopefully) all recognize this would be a major issue and the result would be airline tickets across the board would go up - and the number of people flying would go down - and some airlines would probably go out of business as a result. I would expect the same to happen with pharma drugs in that drug prices for the other countries will go up, usage will go down, and some drugs that would have been introduced will no longer do that. It may be worth doing to save the government a large amount of money that can be spent elsewhere for more value, but we should at least be honest about the tradeoff.
I agree that the tax isn't a good idea!
Another thing I would like to add, however, is that the law should ban my insurer from paying above Medicare/Medicaid prices for drugs.
The government bans me from Medicare/Medicaid (which would have been my preference) and forces me to contract with a private insurer (technically, it forces my employer). I expect that they would at least ban said insurer from buying drugs at ridiculous prices.
per the bill " The negotiated prices must be offered under Medicare and MA and may also be offered under private health insurance unless the insurer opts out."
So it appears that the prices will apply to private insurers unless they opt out.
The bill would confiscate 95% of the manufacturer's revenue from sales of the drug in the US if they don't accept the "negotiated" price. And it's not just Medicare/Medicaid - mfgrs are also required to sell at that price to private insurers. It's just dishonest to present it as some kind of free negotiation rather than what it is - national price controls.
And dumbest of all, the bill doesn't even solve the thing patients actually care about - their out of pocket costs. Even with this bill, patients will still have to pay higher copays and coinsurance for drug treatments than for other kinds of healthcare, because the bill doesn't change that.
We could do that but this current proposal is negotiation in name only
I understand your point, but then what do you call the current regime in which Medicare will pay literally any price that the pharma companies ask for any drug that passes FDA muster, even if that drug provides no marginal clinical benefit (or, like aducanumab, no benefit at all)? Isn’t that distortionary? From the news stories about diabetics dying of a cheaply treatable disease because they’re unable to afford insulin, I would say that we’re already seeing very little return in terms of social value from pharma “innovation”.
Maybe Congress should ask someone why insulin is so expensive. They might start by asking why the barriers to entry to produce off-patent insulin products are so high. (Hint: It’s not from a dearth of regulation.)
In my view it doesn't make much sense to describe the healthcare market as being too heavily or too lightly regulated. The government is such a huge buyer and so necessarily implicated in safety and IP regulation that the only question is whether it's regulated well or regulated poorly. I would contend that it's regulated extremely poorly at the moment. Price setting is a common feature in other countries' healthcare systems and it works. If we want to subsidize innovation there are better ways to do it than to pay through the nose for drugs of dubious benefit.
“In my view it doesn't make much sense to describe the healthcare market as being too heavily or too lightly regulated.”
Do you know what regulations cover insulin manufacturing?
If we can lower the price of insulin by removing regulatory barriers-to-entry that don't pass a cost/benefit analysis, then great, let's do that. Point conceded.
That doesn't address the argument that our current way of financing drug development makes no sense. One of the ways it makes no sense is exactly that it doesn't allow for any cost/benefit analysis. Medicare will buy any drug that passes FDA approval. Private insurers will, too, for fear of PR blowback. In a situation like that, price setting makes sense. I would note that in other markets where there is a crucial commodity with a high barrier-to-entry, we use price setting and it works.
“Medicare will buy any drug that passes FDA approval. Private insurers will, too…”
Untrue.
“I would note that in other markets where there is a crucial commodity with a high barrier-to-entry, we use price setting and it works.”
Such as…?
Please elucidate the reasoning behind that conclusion.
Medicare doesn't "literally pay any price" the mfgr asks. But there is some distortion for drugs covered under Part B and used predominantly by senior citizens because Part B pays the average price paid in the private sector but if the private sector market is very small mfrs will sacrifice private sector sales volume in favor of a high price in order to keep the average price up. Not such an issue for drugs where there large private sector market and competition - those "me-too" drugs people criticize but which actually allow for price competition.
But you're wrong about innovation - for example, cancer drugs are an area that money has been pouring into and though it's slow going and you can find examples of drugs that don't do much more than briefly extend life at a high price, in the aggregate it's making a real difference, and a lot of that investment wouldn't be happening but for the lure of high potential profits.
https://nyti.ms/3kIBJ1T
That doesn't explain why Pfizer was unable to innovate on its own and had to enlist a German company to develop the vaccine. If Pfizer knew that their US margins aren't so high that they could stay profitable without innovating, I believe they would have managed to develop the vaccine on their own.
Genuine question: I thought that the pharmaceutical industry can be critiqued for focusing too heavily on drugs that solve problems for rich old people rather than poor young people (thinking globally here). Does that factor into your "such a socially valuable activity" assessment of big pharma R&D?
What drugs do poor young people need?
Malaria drugs and tuberculosis drugs.
https://www.npr.org/2021/10/06/1043788270/the-worlds-1st-malaria-vaccine-gets-a-green-light-from-the-world-health-organiza
"The pharmaceutical companies produced the most papers on cancerous tumours that caused fewer than 10% of global disability-adjusted life-years (DALYs), a metric of time lost due to premature death and poor health. Infectious and parasitic diseases had the largest toll, accounting for around 17% of global DALYs."
https://www.natureindex.com/news-blog/drug-research-priorities-at-odds-with-global-disease-toll
As far as I can tell you didn’t attempt to answer my question.
Also, this is bizarre:
“…the research investment portfolios of big pharmaceutical companies are guided by commercial considerations, and not by a drive to save lives.”
It’s a common misunderstanding about how the world works, but bizarre nonetheless.
I also note the the article fins the same phenomenon in public institutions and major research universities.
There is nothing wrong with favoring a point on the growth/redistribution trade off that is less redistributionist than other people in your party. What is odd is not being willing to negotiate on the issue.
Holding 100% of your caucus together is very unusual. Republicans barely passed the TCJA and failed to repeal the ACA with 2 senators to spare. Democrats have 0.
Sinema will not be the last centrist Democrat to go off the reservation.
This reinforces to me the desperate need to find some way of winning more senate seats, so the leader can indulge these mavericks with the occasional no vote without the whole legislative agenda failing.
Perhaps if we verbally abuse the moderates, they will vote our way!
Kyrsten Sinema has been a disappointment, to put it mildly. Manchin has, at the least, made public what he's for, and I like much of what he wants. He says he supports raising taxes (good), he says he supports expanding the Child Tax Credit (also good). He wants to means test as much as possible (eh, I can take it or leave it), and he wants a lower top line figure (fine). That's at least a start. I am confident Schumer, Pelosi, and the Progressive Caucus can inch Manchin up.
I have no idea what Sinema is doing, and she's running against her own platform. That's not smart politics.
I don't want to lose your broader (strong) point, but would it be so bad if Democrats spent a little bit of their windows of government control focused on strengthening existing programs and improving governance?
I appreciate that it's not *fair* to put the good functioning of the government onto Democrats but (a) Republicans certainly aren't going to do it and (b) Democrats are the ones who think we should expand government. I do think there are lots of voters *cough* Biden voters *cough* that would really like to see a responsible government with limited new policy ambitions focused on making the government work effectively and efficiently rather than just slamming a few trillion into new programs built on top of the existing shaky foundation.
I’m not sure basic good governance combined with limited policy ambition is a sustainable platform in the long run. It’s broadly popular, yes, and individual governors and presidents can succeed by running on it (e.g. Clinton, Baker), but that kind of politics doesn’t seem to build support for a broader party or movement. If anything, it may make voters complacent about the real differences between the parties.
In a world where Republicans are both uninterested in governance and leaning in an authoritarian direction, Democrats have shoot higher. The goal needs of be to maximize electoral success over the next 10-15 years, not just make Biden mildly popular but let Republicans sweep downballot as happened to Bill Clinton in the 90s.
The social problem at hand is inequality, which is perfectly well solved by taking money from rich people and lighting it on fire. You don’t see much concern for how effectively taxes are converted to social benefit because that’s totally beside the point. It’s a relative equalization, distributive justice concern.
I disagree that inequality is a problem in and of itself. Whether or not Jeff Bezos can strap himself to a rickety rocket to space does not impact my life in any negative way (in fact, I actually am glad to see it). Whether or not my parents can get dental covered by medicare is. Reducing inequality by making everyone worse off is a pretty shitty deal if you ask me.
Historically, war has been the greatest leveler of inequality. Certainly a sub-optimal solution.
Everything is fine when a condition is simply untreatable. The invention of a new treatment that is only available to rich people makes everyone else worse off, since now in addition to being sick they are also unjustly deprived of care.
Sinema strikes me as someone who either believes what she says, or believes she has to be a moderate to win Arizona, and chooses the issues where she cares less about the Democratic platform to be the ones she is moderate on.
And the (left-leaning) issues she cares about most are the social ones - LGBTQ+ rights, DEI initiatives, all that sort of thing. I suspect that because she is bisexual and doesn't go to church, she also understands that she cannot credibly appeal to "family-values voters" on the right.
Sinema was a hippie liberal who began her political career as part of the Green Party. None of this is sincere.
Hm Matt is saying she’s attracted to the parts of liberalism that don’t have to do with taxing rich people and expanding welfare. I know green stands in for ‘further left than Dems’ but it’s really consistent with this view. In 2000, for example, it was pretty clear that a gore win would mean higher taxes and more social spending than a bush win. Greens were not satisfied with this as the axis of us politics.
If we're talking about Nader's 2000 run, he was running on sharply left-wing economic policies.
>Nader campaigned against the pervasiveness of corporate power and spoke on the need for campaign finance reform. His campaign also addressed problems with the two party system, voter fraud, environmental justice, universal healthcare, affordable housing, free education including college, workers' rights and increasing the minimum wage to a living wage.
--
Nader wasn't much of a social warrior, in fact he angered the pro-choice community for derisively referring to abortion as gonadal politics.
https://www.counterpunch.org/2005/07/23/gonadal-politics-and-the-democrats/
Yes his argument was that higher taxes on the rich and more spending on welfare programs was indistinguishable from lower tax on the rich and less spending on welfare. Instead he wanted to ‘address corporate power’. And the party more broadly was filled with people who also thought the difference between high and lower taxes and more or less spending was basically irrelevant to politics.
I will say the weakest part of Matt’s argument is that sinema is substituting ‘woke’ values. I see little evidence of that. And greens were not especially woke either. Their views were somewhat incoherent, much like sinemas now. It a constant is the idea that these ‘modest’ changes in tax and spending levels —which are the main thing that changes between Dems and republicans — are not that important
Exactly this. And if you look at Europe, most green parties have exactly this type of split. Indeed the German Greens co-leader is pretty clear that he would prefer a coalition with the CDU than the SDP.
How is promoting carbon taxes over corporate taxes not green?
I have two thoughts from this post that aren't that related to Kyrsten Sinema but I'll write them anyway.
1) Right now so many things are so difficult because everyone is understaffed. Restaurants are plagued by bad service. God help you if you need a plumber or an electrician or concrete poured. People see "Help Wanted" signs everywhere. My linkedin is a steady stream of people trying to hire... and these are for decent paying, white collar jobs too. While there are plenty of popular things in the bill, I wonder if we're underrating the pushback from upper-middle class Democrats who see everything understaffed and chafe a bit at a lot of the spending in the bill. I don't know. I don't care how big it is honestly, but every week I run into "I'm sorry, we're a little understaffed" from someone and imagine that annoyance carries over into people's opinions on how much we should be funding some of these programs.
2) A Democratic Party that's (most of the educated white people) + (virtually all of the black people, most of whom don't have college degrees) + (a large but pretty rapidly declining Latino population, most of whom don't have college degrees) is pretty weird.
"...everyone is understaffed..."
See, that'll be fixed by the Democrats massively increasing the welfare state.
"I am the furthest thing in the world from a DINO hunter"
-Matt Yglesias, while aiming down his sight at a DINO
Well, I gather his point is, when even a NON Dino-hunter like M.Y. says someone's bad, they're, erm, bad.
His point is, there's just as good a case that Joe Manchin is a DINO. He's not hunting Sinema *because* she's a DINO. He *likes* DINOs when they can do things like hold a WV senate seat!
But Sinema seems to be causing problems with the big Democratic initiatives, with no clear demands other than one or two things that would make them less popular across the board (unlike Manchin). He's hunting her for *that*, and the fact that she's a DINO is in some ways beside the point.