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He likes bourbon. She, wine. He’s been in the Senate for nearly four decades. She, since 2019. But, at the end of the day, both Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and Sen. Kyrsten Sinema are big fans of an upper chamber gummed up by arcane rules.
Sinema made the pilgrimage on Monday to Kentucky to speak at the McConnell Center at the University of Louisville, a familiar stop for Senate institutionalists to pay a polite nod to the chamber’s top Republican and master of its byzantine nature. And, once at McConnell’s alma mater, she was treated to a Brink’s truck of praise for her unwillingness to fall in line with the rest of her Democratic Party. It wasn’t entirely magnanimous.
“She is, today, what we have too few of in the Democratic Party: a genuine moderate and a dealmaker,” McConnell said in his introduction, which also described her as “the most effective first-term senator I’ve seen.”If obstruction is a proxy for efficacy, then there’s little room for argument. Sinema helped to tank changes to Senate rules that would have allowed for a simple-majority to advance certain measures that her party considered priorities. In turn, preserving the Senate tradition of lawmakers killing legislation by simply threatening to filibuster it derailed a voting rights proposal. She also wasn’t on board for President Joe Biden’s infrastructure packages or an effort by the progressive wing of her party to boost the minimum wage to $15 an hour.
In turn, she got a hero’s welcome from a host who similarly enjoys thwarting Democrats’ best-laid plans, including a Supreme Court nominee in 2016.
Typically, Democrats make the trip to McConnell’s turf when they’re on the mend or…
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Source : time
