Senator Kyrsten Sinema (R), D-AZ departs from the Capitol in Washington, DC, on October 28, 2021. Photo: Mandel Ngan/AFP|| via Getty Images
What the Arizona senator’s breakup with the Democrats means for American politics
By Robert Draper
The New YorkTimes
Kyrsten Sinema was standing a few yards from the border wall with four Republican members of Congress. The men were staring balefully at a row of nearby portable toilets, wondering aloud if they could hold out for a proper bathroom on the way back to the airport. Sinema assured Representatives David Valadao of California and Tony Gonzales of Texas that they need not worry on her account.
“If you know anything about me,” she said, gesturing vaguely out into the desert, “you know that I’ll go anywhere.” The two men, who were just getting to know the Arizona senator, laughed. “I mean,” Sinema added as she pointed back to the porta-potties, “I come from humble beginnings. That there is some fancy [expletive].”
Valadao, Gonzales and the two other elected officials, Representative Juan Ciscomani of Arizona and Senator Thom Tillis of North Carolina, all wore jeans and nondescript shirts. Sinema, dressed in a black Western shirt with a white yoke and black jeans with matching spectacles and cowboy boots, exercised her full array of Republican-charming skills throughout the morning. Standing at the wall, she had a detailed exchange with a Border Patrol official for the benefit of the visitors about how Mexican drug cartels managed to ferry fentanyl into Arizona and beyond. At a round-table discussion in the Cochise County sheriff’s office, she moderated a brisk dialogue between her congressional colleagues and beleaguered local officials whose once-quiet communities were now plagued by cartel associates. When the four Republicans responded with harsh criticisms of the Biden administration, Sinema nodded sympathetically, saying: “That’s right. That’s right.”
Sinema — who four months earlier left the Democratic Party and declared herself an independent — had orchestrated this April visit for two reasons, one explicit and the other hinted at. The four men joining her at the border had been “carefully curated” by Sinema, she told me the day before. Tillis had partnered with her on important legislation in the past, and they were now collaborating on what they hoped would be the first major border-and-immigration-reform bill to become law in a generation. Sinema targeted Ciscomani, Gonzales and Valadao, all of whom served on the powerful House Appropriations Committee, as potential recruits for this effort.
