US Democrats: The Power of Unpredictability US regulators want to prevent Microsoft from acquiring Activision

No one was really surprised. But the timing is remarkable. Just three days after Georgian Democrat Raphael Warnock won the runoff for the last vacant U.S. Senate seat, his colleague Kyrsten Sinema announced her departure from the party. “I will continue to show up and do my job just like an independent,” she said. Her reason: she never really fit into any political party. “The title ‘Independent’ reflects who I’ve always been.”

It is of course interesting that you now notice this. Amid the Democratic Party’s collective sigh of relief, given that it lost far fewer seats than feared in the November midterm elections and even managed to increase its Senate majority, news is breaking that this majority is not as stable is as it was one might think.

Strictly speaking, two of the 51 senators so far attributable to Democrats in the future Congress are already non-Democrats: former Vermont presidential candidate Bernie Sanders was elected as an independent, as was his colleague Angus King of Maine. However, the two have joined the faction of the Democratic Party.

Faction discipline has a different meaning

As for Sinema, that’s not so clear, and she herself seems deliberately left in the dark about the extent to which she will support her former party going forward. To date, she has rarely attended Democratic faction meetings, and unlike Sanders and King, she probably won’t in the future. Nothing will change in the structure of the Senate, she writes in a guest article for the Arizona Republic, the largest newspaper in her home state.

But she also says that she sees herself as a lone representative of the political center in a fractured system – and that she risks exhausting this role in the Senate in the future: “Americans increasingly feel let down by rigid partisan politics,” she writes. Both Republicans and Democrats would continue to take their views to the extreme.

She has worked well with representatives from both sides in the past and wants to continue to do so, she continues. Therein lies the problem for the Democrats – and that is one they know all too well. Group discipline has a different status in the US than in Germany, especially with the tight majority ratios that now prevail in the Senate. In recent years, Sinema has voted with her party at the time in most cases. This was the only way to get these laws passed, for example on infrastructure reform. But there were many exceptions to this rule.

When it came to changing the required quorum of votes for certain votes in the Senate, she declined. The Democrats urgently needed that, for example to push through the electoral reform Joe Biden had promised his voters or to enshrine the right to abortion as a federal law after the Supreme Court reversed its earlier decision to do so. She also did not want to vote for a higher minimum wage, nor for Biden’s original version of his build-back-better reforms, which included major social measures such as an extension of child support.

Unpredictability means power

Because Sinema wants to keep her committee posts, she will in principle have to continue to work with the Democrats. And, as she assured in an interview with Politico, she won’t defect to the other side either.

This means that Republicans remain a minority by 49 seats, even in the individual senate bodies – that was the decisive advantage of Warnock’s 51st seat in Georgia, which enabled Democrats to confirm candidates for major elections without delay, for example. posts in government and the courts. Sinema has always agreed to such appointments and so far has shown no intention to change that.

Still, her departure is a nasty setback for Joe Biden and his governing party. By officially escaping factional discipline, she will be even more unpredictable than before. And unpredictability always means one thing when the majority is tight: bargaining power. Republicans are now likely to vigorously campaign for their votes in individual votes, and Sinema maintains a friendly relationship with leading party representatives in Congress such as Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell.

Someone else who has failed the Democrats much more often in the recent past than his Arizona colleague can be happy with even more attention than before. Senator Joe Manchin also does not want to change the voting rules and blocked Biden’s social, climate and economic reforms for months until only a fraction was left.

Depending on how Sinema behaves — as she adds her own votes to the 49 Republican votes on a single bill, for example — all eyes and efforts will be on Manchin to make sure he doesn’t do the same. And with a view to his possible re-election in two years, he should welcome any new opportunity to push the Biden administration ahead of him.

Sinema’s motive for all this could simply be that she would have little chance of being nominated again by the Democrats in the next congressional elections in 2024. Her ratings in the polls are poor and she has long been infamous in the party for her denial in the parliamentary group and its large donations from large pharmaceutical companies.

If she runs as an independent candidate in the future, it will make things difficult for Democrats: instead of being defeated in the party’s primary with another candidate, they now have to fear that Sinema will beat them in the actual election in November 2024 pulls out of the vote – and the Republicans win the seat, of all seats in such an important state as Arizona.

For Biden, the new year begins as the old one began: with the prospect of tough, nerve-racking negotiations. And with the certainty that after the election is before the election – no matter how well things went.

This article was first published on Zeit Online. Watson may have changed the headings and subheadings. Here’s the original.