Arizona’s Freshmen Reps: What’s Going On Here?

Kirkpatrick, Sinema & Barber all voted with the Republicans for CISPA

Is Steve Israel or Steny Hoyer calling the shots, or did Arizona’s three freshman reps reach these cynical heights all on their own? It’s hard to say, but my bet is on Israel or Hoyer. Or maybe it's the New Dem operation. Otherwise, it’s hard to fathom the votes we’re seeing from Kirkpatrick (AZ-01), Barber (AZ-02) and Sinema (AZ-09).

Regardless, the progressive base in Arizona (and, yes, there is one) is not amused. Blog For Arizona features a collection of progressive bloggers. At the start of the session, that group showed admirable restraint in the wake of Sandy Hook. Strangely enough, the reaction to that tragedy by Ron Barber, who took a bullet in Tucson two years earlier, was to pay homage to the Second Amendment. They could have jumped all over Barber, and few would have blamed them. Instead, they mounted a petition campaign to encourage Barber to lead the charge for sane gun laws. Barber actually responded positively for awhile, then went silent once out of the spotlight.

But the admirable patience of Arizona’s progressives has worn thin. It’s easy to understand why. Start with United Solutions, a supposedly "bi-partisan" group of freshmen reps that is about two-thirds Republican. And, no, we’re not talking moderate Republicans here. Joining the group were Arizona’s Kirkpatrick and Sinema. Here’s Sinema bragging about her membership (and lying about the composition of the group, which is far more heavily Republican than she lets on, and her role in founding the group, which was actually formed by lifelong Republican/New Dem Patrick Murphy and far right North Carolina Republican Robert Pittenger):



It was about that time that Bob Lord, posted this at Blog For Arizona: AZ Freshman Reps Sweep Gold, Silver and Bronze. Lord was referring to the Progressive Punch scores of the Democratic Freshman class. In that group, Kirkpatrick was worst, Barber was second worst, and Sinema was in a group tied for third worst.

Since then, the Arizona freshmen have continued to follow Steve Israel’s lead, or perhaps their own worst instincts, and the fire from the progressive community has grown more intense. Craig McDermott, who also posts at Blog For Arizona, wrote an open letter to the freshmen on the House Financial Services Committee, a group that includes Kyrsten Sinema, explaining that doing bad work for good reasons still is doing bad work. Donna Gratehouse at Democratic Diva expanded on McDermott’s theme, urging constituents not to be accepting of bad work, whether for good reasons or not. What had these freshmen done? Basically, they’d voted for legislation drafted almost entirely by Citigroup’s lobbyist, exempting vast swaths of trades from regulation under Dodd-Frank. A few weeks after the vote, Wall Street lackey and Democratic fundraising leader Joe Crowley led the freshmen on a tour of lower Manhattan, including receptions at both Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan Chase.

Pamela Powers-Hannley at Blog For Arizona has been more direct in her criticism of Sinema, actually titling one post, Sinema Too Republican? Votes to Reduce Banking Regulations, in which she implored progressives to put the pressure on:

Not only has Sinema not supporting the Robin Hood Tax, her recent vote exempts many Wall Street trades from any regulation. This is the wrong direction for the American people. How many Wall Street bankers live in CD-9? How many people who would benefit from the revenue generated by the Robin Hood Tax live in CD-9? It's time for Sinema to do the math. Voting with Wall Street is a vote against her constituents in Arizona.

If you live in CD9, it's time to call Sinema and tell her you thought you were voting for that fiery State Senator-- not the banksters' handmaiden.

We see you, Rep. Sinema

Powers-Hannley’s depiction of Sinema may have been too specific. She appears to be doing her best not to be just the banksters’ handmaiden, but the handmaiden of corporate America at large. Amazingly, she and Barber voted with the Republicans for the failed Farm Bill, which would have cut $20 Billion in food stamp assistance, a huge chunk of which is going to children. Here’s E.J. Dionne, explaining the rank immorality of the legislation for which Sinema and Barber voted:

The bill the House voted down would have cut food stamps by $20.5 billion, eliminating food assistance to nearly 2 million low-income people, most of them working families with children or senior citizens.

This alone should have been bad enough to sink the bill. But then Republicans pushed through an amendment by Rep. Steve Southerland, R-Fla., to toughen work requirements in the program. Work requirements sound reasonable until you look at what Southerland’s amendment was actually designed to do.

As Robert Greenstein, the president of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, explained, Southerland’s proposal violated “the most basic standards of human decency” because it made no effort, as other work requirements have in the past, to create employment openings for those who “want to work and would accept any job or work slot they could get, but cannot find jobs in a weak economy.”

In fact, noted Greenstein, a longtime advocate of nutrition assistance, the amendment barred states “from spending more on SNAP employment and training than they do now.” And it created incentives for states to throw people off food stamps by letting their governments keep half the SNAP savings to use for anything they wished (including, for example, tax cuts for the wealthy).

In a more rational political world, progressives and smallgovernment conservatives might join forces to slash subsidies for agribusiness and wealthy farmers while containing market distortions bred by price supports. But when Rep Jim McGovern, D-Mass., proposed an amendment to restore some of the food stamp funding by reducing spending on crop insurance, it was defeated.

And Rep. Rosa DeLauro, D-Conn., exposed hypocrisy on the matter of government handouts by excoriating Republican House members who had benefited from farm subsidies but voted to cut food stamps.

The collapse of the farm bill will generally be played as a political story about Boehner’s failure to rally his own right wing. That’s true as far as it goes and should remind everyone of the current House leadership’s inability to govern. But this is above all a story about morality: There is something profoundly wrong when a legislative majority is so eager to risk leaving so many Americans hungry. That’s what the bill would have done, and why defeating it was a moral imperative.

Sinema signing on to a bill that would leave Americans, including many children, hungry, is stunning, given her background. If you heard her stump speech during her 2012, you would know about the years she spent during childhood living in an abandoned gas station. That story was the centerpiece of her speech. Based on that experience, Sinema would explain, governmental assistance is giving people in need a hand up, not a handout.

Finally, just last week, the House Financial Services Committee approved H.R. 1135, a bill to repeal the provision of the Dodd-Frank Act that requires public companies to report the ratio of their CEO pay to median worker compensation. As expected, the Republicans voted in lockstep for the amendment. But five of the twenty-eight Democrats did as well.

The pay ratio reporting requirement was a threat to the exorbitant pay CEO’s currently enjoy. Allow folks to compare the ratio of CEO pay to worker pay from one corporation to another, and CEO pay might be brought back to Earth. That’s why corporations had been working overtime to delay and dilute the regulations needed to implement the pay ratio disclosure. And they’d been successful on that front. But H.R. 1135 would solve this little “problem” for CEO’s entirely. And the argument for the amendment truly is Republican-esque. The pay ratio reporting, you see, would involve too much paperwork. Here’s committee chair Jeb Hensarling (R-TX) defending the amendment, according to Emily Chasan of the Wall Street Journal:

"I assume there is an infinite number of ratios some investors would find helpful to their decisions," Mr. Hensarling said. Companies might as well be required to calculate the ratio of workers with or without college degrees, the ratio of old versus young workers, or the ratio of office supplies purchased from big box retailers to local suppliers, he joked.

The individual votes on this atrocity were not easy to track down, but here they are. And who was among the five Democrats New Dems whoring for contributions from America’s CEOs? Why Arizona’s Kyrsten Sinema, of course, doing her best to make sure the great-great grandchildren of America’s CEOs never have to experience life in an abandoned gas station.

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Grassroots Voters Need To Defeat The Wall Street-owned New Dems

Wall St. shills Crowley & Himes, leading freshmen to slaughter

Early this morning we saw how California voters drove the obstructionist Republicans away from the levers of power and made it impossible for them to obstruct government. And the result was a $60 billion deficit turned into a $4 billion surplus. At the bottom of the post, though, is a video from San Francisco progressive Senator Mark Leno warning that not all Democrats are... Democrats.

An Arizona political pal of mine was grousing yesterday about the support he had given freshman Democrat Kyrsten Sinema. "She knows better," he complained about her conservative voting record. She was a Nader supporter! Her IQ is in the stratosphere." Grassroots Democrats in New Hampshire are complaining about Ann Kuster and in New York's Hudson Valley about Sean Patrick Maloney. Activists are disappointed that they helped elect candidates campaigning as progressives who then got into Congress and started voting like conservatives-- particularly on economic justice issues. Kuster and Maloney, thinking themselves "safe" inside committee votes, voted, for example, to gut the food stamps program-- by $20.5 billion. Democrats do that? Bad ones-- especially when the DCCC is constantly telling them they need to come across as moderate to win reelection. That worked out badly in 2010 when Democrats who followed that awful advice were slaughtered by the dozen as Republicans voted for their own candidates and disappointed Democrats didn't show up at the polls. The DCCC learned exactly nothing and they're setting up the same dynamic today. Who do Sinema, Maloney and Kuster think is going to vote for them? Each will have exactly one defense: "The Republican is much worse than I am." Let's revisit that in November 2014 and see how badly it works again.

And then there's obsessive and obsequious Wall Street shillery. As Robert Reich summed it up over the weekend, "Who needs Republicans when Wall Street has the Democrats? With the help of congressional Democrats, the Street is rolling back financial reforms enacted after its near meltdown." Eric Lipton and Ben Protess dealt with it at the NY Times Friday. Short version: Wall Street banksters paid for the cushy political careers of politicos on both sides of the aisle, so they get to write the legislation pertaining to their business that they want. This has been standard operating procedure for Republicans for decades. It's come into vogue among Democrats because of the toxic and corrupt New Dems who now dominate the party establishment.

Bank lobbyists are not leaving it to lawmakers to draft legislation that softens financial regulations. Instead, the lobbyists are helping to write it themselves.

One bill that sailed through the House Financial Services Committee this month-- over the objections of the Treasury Department-- was essentially Citigroup’s, according to e-mails reviewed by the New York Times. The bill would exempt broad swathes of trades from new regulation.

In a sign of Wall Street’s resurgent influence in Washington, Citigroup’s recommendations were reflected in more than 70 lines of the House committee’s 85-line bill. Two crucial paragraphs, prepared by Citigroup in conjunction with other Wall Street banks, were copied nearly word for word. (Lawmakers changed two words to make them plural.)

The lobbying campaign shows how, three years after Congress passed the most comprehensive overhaul of regulation since the Depression, Wall Street is finding Washington a friendlier place.

The cordial relations now include a growing number of Democrats in both the House and the Senate, whose support the banks need if they want to roll back parts of the 2010 financial overhaul, known as Dodd-Frank.

This legislative push is a second front, with Wall Street’s other battle being waged against regulators who are drafting detailed rules allowing them to enforce the law. And as its lobbying campaign steps up, the financial industry has doubled its already considerable giving to political causes. The lawmakers who this month supported the bills championed by Wall Street received twice as much in contributions from financial institutions compared with those who opposed them, according to an analysis of campaign finance records performed by MapLight, a nonprofit group.

In recent weeks, Wall Street groups also held fund-raisers for lawmakers who co-sponsored the bills. At one dinner Wednesday night, corporate executives and lobbyists paid up to $2,500 to dine in a private room of a Greek restaurant just blocks from the Capitol with Representative Sean Patrick Maloney, Democrat of New York, a co-sponsor of the bill championed by Citigroup.

...“I won’t dispute for one second the problems of a system that demands immense amount of fund-raisers by its legislators,” said Representative Jim Himes [vice chair of the bribe-taking New Dems], a third-term Democrat of Connecticut, who supported the recent industry-backed bills and leads the party’s fund-raising effort in the House. A member of the Financial Services Committee and a former banker at Goldman Sachs, he is one of the top recipients of Wall Street donations. “It’s appalling, it’s disgusting, it’s wasteful and it opens the possibility of conflicts of interest and corruption. It’s unfortunately the world we live in.”

The passage of the Dodd-Frank Act, which took aim at culprits of the financial crisis like lax mortgage lending and the $700 trillion derivatives market, ushered in a new phase of Wall Street lobbying. Over the last three years, bank lobbyists have blitzed the regulatory agencies writing rules under Dodd-Frank, chipping away at some regulations.

But the industry lobbyists also realized that Congress can play a critical role in the campaign to mute Dodd-Frank.

The House Financial Services Committee has been a natural target. Not only is it controlled by Republicans, who had opposed Dodd-Frank, but freshmen lawmakers are often appointed to the unusually large committee because it is seen as a helpful base from which they can raise campaign funds.

For Wall Street, the committee is a place to push back against Dodd-Frank. When banks and other corporations, for example, feared that regulators would demand new scrutiny of derivatives trades, they appealed to the committee. At the time, regulators were completing Dodd-Frank’s overhaul of derivatives, contracts that allow companies to either speculate in the markets or protect against risk. Derivatives had pushed the insurance giant American International Group to the brink of collapse in 2008. The question was whether regulators would exempt certain in-house derivatives trades between affiliates of big banks.

...[M]ost of the Democrats on the committee, along with 31 Republicans, came to the industry’s defense, including the seven freshmen Democrats-- most of whom have started to receive donations this year from political action committees of Goldman Sachs, Wells Fargo and other financial institutions, records show.

Six days after the vote, several freshmen Democrats were in New York to meet with bank executives, a tour organized by Representative Joe Crowley [one of the most corrupt men to ever serve in Congress], who helps lead the House Democrats’ fund-raising committee. The trip was planned before the votes, and was not a fund-raiser, but it gave the lawmakers a chance to meet with Wall Street’s elite.

In addition to a tour of Goldman’s Lower Manhattan headquarters, and a meeting with Lloyd C. Blankfein, the bank’s chief executive, the lawmakers went to JPMorgan’s Park Avenue office. There, they chatted with Jamie Dimon, the bank’s chief, about Dodd-Frank and immigration reform.

So should progressives help defeat bad Dems like Himes, Crowley, Sinema, Maloney and Kuster? I don't see how a progressive following the story can possibly pull the lever on election day for any of them-- or for any New Dem for that matter. In case you missed this the first time I ran it, you get a second chance now. Chris Hayes and Eliot Spitzer laughing at the corrupt Democrats on MSNBC:

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Being A Leader Is Not The Same As Being Led Around By A Ring In Your Nose

Tuesday at a House Financial Services Committee meeting, Arizona freshman Kyrsten Sinema, who's racked up one of the most reactionary voting records of any Democrat in Congress, might have thought no one was looking when she sold out her own constituents in favor of Wall Street banksters. She backed all the GOP's deregulation proposals and then touted it in the Democratic caucus. She wasn't who I was talking about here... but she certainly could have been.

Adam Pase, the corporate-oriented Executive Director of the corrupt New Dems sent around a "dear colleague" letter Tuesday, shilling an OpEd by John Delaney, an extremely wealthy New Dem from Maryland who thinks-- like Republicans-- that working people need to have the retirement age raised and that the Chained CPI is a swell idea.

The last time Congress played politics with the debt ceiling, in the summer of 2011, we wounded our economy. We sent a message to the markets that we were considering destructive actions, and they listened. The Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped 2,000 points, and August 2011 was the worst month for private-sector job creation in the past three years. For the first time ever, Standard & Poor’s downgraded the nation’s credit rating.

Instead of making the same mistake, we should do the hard work required to reach a long-term grand bargain. This means three things: (1) reforming entitlements by adopting a form of “chained CPI” to lower the long-term costs of these programs, adjusting the retirement age for those not engaged in manual labor and raising the cap on Social Security taxes; (2) generating more revenue through a “Buffett rule” approach that makes sure high-earners pay a similar rate to that of the middle class and by closing certain corporate tax loopholes while lowering corporate tax rates; and (3) adjusting discretionary and defense spending to better reflect our country’s priorities, which are vastly different than the indiscriminate cuts imposed by the sequester. With this framework, we can manage our fiscal trajectory in the next 10 years, and beyond, while also investing in our children, caring for the less fortunate and protecting our nation.

And just when the fake progressive New Dem from Phoenix was making Wall Street crooks very, very happy, Ed Markey was taking a courageous and principled stand against the Obama/Boehner scheme to wreck Social Security-- Chained CPI.

It's a complicated-sounding name that boils down to this: Social Security benefits for seniors would be cut. You could think of "CPI" as meaning "Cutting Peoples' Income."

This is a wrong-headed move. Too many seniors -- almost two-thirds, in fact -- rely on Social Security for at least half of their income. Budgeting requires compromise, but we cannot compromise by cutting Social Security.

Democrats won huge victories in 2012. We reelected President Obama. We held the Senate and made gains in the House. We don't need to roll over to the right wing when it comes to budget choices.

There's plenty in the President's budget I agree with. But Chained CPI is just a bad idea. Investing in clean energy, education, and infrastructure should not come with the price tag of going back on America's promise to our seniors.

Tea Party Republicans may have pushed the President into making tough decisions. But that doesn't mean that this budget is right or fair for the most vulnerable among us.

Don't expect heroism from the Kyrsten Sinemas of the word. Careerism... sure, but not heroism or anything remotely resembling courageousness. Steve Israel dictates her votes; he told the "Frontline Democrats" how to vote and there are only 7 of them who have followed his orders "100% of the time," to quote one of them feeble enough to send me a note about it defending a crap record. These are the 7 freshmen with 40% ProgressivePunch scores (same as right-wing sociopath Paul Broun (R-Pit of Hell)-- who have voted as a block 60% of the time against progressive positions on crucial roll calls:

• Dan Maffei (New Dem-NY)
• Bill Foster (New Dem- IL)
• Cheri Bustos (IL)
• Ann Kuster (NH)
• Sean Patrick Maloney (New Dem-NY)
• Scott Peters (New Dem-CA)
• Kyrsten Sinema (New Dem-AZ)

The only House Members with worse voting records for the current session are

• Mike McIntyre (Blue Dog/New Dem-NC)- 36.84
• Ron Barber (New Dem-AZ)- 35.0
• Bill Owens (New Dem-NY)- 35.0
• Jim Matheson (Blue Dog-UT)- 20.0

And like we watched Sinema doing in her committee today, they do more damage behind the scenes than they do with their actual floor votes. That's why Blue America refused to back Sinema last year and why we'll never back her in the future. We're looking for independent-minded progressives with backbone and good values. Today while she was on the deregulation tip for Wall Street we were blogging with a proven progressive champion from Pennsylvania, state Senator Daylin Leach, his state's Liberal Lion, who's running for an open House seat in northeast Philly/Montgomery County. If you can't go read the entire chat (at the link in the last sentence), take a look at these two questions and answers. The first one was from me:

Will getting an "F" from the NRA hurt you at all in this district-- in either the primary or the general election? Hard to imagine Toomey actually doing the right thing-- at least on background checks. Although I noticed he reverted to form when it came to banning military assault weapons and high capacity clips. Toomey voted against them.

Daylin Leach

First, if it did hurt me, I wouldn't care. This is such a no-brainer issue with stakes so high, that I would happily lose an election before I abandoned my principles on this. That said, the people of Philadelphia know the price we pay for irrational gun policies. The carnage on our streets is something they witness first-hand every day. I can't imagine that there are very many voters out there who really believe that we should NOT KNOW if someone is a violent felon before they are permitted to buy a weapon of mass destruction, or that somebody legitimately needs a 30 round clip.

And the other question came from Lynda Benigno who I don't remember ever seeing at a Blue America chat before:

Daylin, I have noticed on social networking sites Marijuana Legalization is a hot topic. Is that, along with GMO food labeling something you are looking to pursue on the federal level?

Daylin Leach

Lynda, as Sarah Palin would say, You Betcha. Prohibition is a pernicious and cruel policy which is destroying lives and costing us billions each year. And every American has a right to know what they are feeding to their families and decide what is best after being fully informed.

See if you can ever get straight-forward unambiguous answers like that out of someone like Sinema or any DCCC careerist shill. Which is why Sinema and other DCCC careerist shills are never on this page, where you can lend some support to actual Democrats from the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party, as Howard Dean put it so presciently not all that long ago.

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