Commentary

I ask for your indulgence with this blog piece as I focus on Arizona politics.  I wouldn’t do it, however, if it didn’t have national meaning and consequences.

Our two senators, Democrats Kyrsten Sinema and Mark Kelly, need no introduction.  They’ve been in the news lately because they hold the key votes if the Democrats are going to pass the $3.5 trillion bill.

Sinema became the darling of the left-leaning columnists on the Arizona Republic. She was going to carry the mantle of leadership they perceived the late John McCain held for years.

It didn’t take long for supporters to change their views.  Just three months into the Biden-Harris administration, they came down on her when she made her position on the Senate filibuster known.

In a Washington Post op-ed, she said she’s long been for keeping its 60-vote requirement in place.  “If anyone expected me to reverse my position because my party now controls the Senate, they should know that my approach to legislating in Congress is the same whether in the minority or majority.”

A dozen or so of her campaign field and regional organizers signed an opinion piece who worked “knocking on doors in sweltering desert heat” because they saw her as someone who would fight for issues they cared about.

They wrote of volunteers who had conversations with voters about the change they wanted to see in this country – in health care, gun control, reproductive freedoms, climate change, voting rights, immigration and more.

Meanwhile, Senator Kelly, seldom heard from on issues, refused to say if he would or would not help eliminate the filibuster.  Last month, Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia said he would not break the filibuster on a voting rights bill.

As one might expect, Sinema has made her position known on the Democrat’s $3.5 trillion budget plan.  She doesn’t support it in its current form.  She supports traditional infrastructure – roads and bridges – but not Biden’s “human infrastructure” – a massive giveaway package that includes expanding Medicare and care-giving for the disabled and elderly, funding universal pre-K and paying for climate change initiatives.

Radical progressives Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, and Rashida Tlaib were among Democrats critical of her position.

Kelly also supports an investment in roads and bridges, expanding broadband, and improving western water infrastructure and forest management.

The left is spending millions of dollars on advertising directed to both Sinema and Kelly to vote for the $3.5 trillion bill, but I think it will be all for naught.  For Kelly, it will have a different focus as he will be up for reelection in 2022.  I see Kelly voting the party line.

An Arizonan Attacks Biden

I still view Meghan McCain, daughter of the late John McCain, as an Arizonan, although she now lives in Washington DC with her one-year-old daughter and husband Ben Domench.

I must admit my surprise to see her referring to President Biden as “unfit to lead,” adding, “I have been physically ill, more depressed than I have since the beginning of the pandemic and filled nothing short of pure rage and anger since the calamity of a pull out which will be seen as one of the greatest foreign policy catastrophes of my lifetime.

“I am furious our president was so incompetent not to see what every expert on the planet could have seen coming,” she said, “I am furious for my friends and family who have been fighting in these wars since I was 16, many who have lost limbs, had their life terrorized by PTSD from their experience in war and deployments, or worse.”

Writing about the “shame, dishonor and embarrassment the Biden administration has brought to our country,” I couldn’t help but recall Biden’s long, rambling eulogy he delivered at John McCain’s Phoenix memorial.  Excuse me, but I never saw McCain as a buddy of Biden, but that’s what Biden wanted us to believe.

He spoke of traveling to far off places with John as fellow senators, the long conversations on airplanes and on the floor of the Senate. 

“Character is destiny … John had character,” Biden said. While others will miss his leadership, passion, even his stubbornness, Biden said he would miss that hand on his shoulder.

Reading the eulogy again, Biden said “We never hesitated to give each other advice.  He could call me I the middle of the campaign and he’d say, ‘What the hell did you say that for?  You screwed up, Joe.’”

If John McCain were alive today, is there any doubt what he would have said during a call to President Biden regarding his incompetence in handling the Afghan withdrawal?  I think Meghan came close.

Now, more than ever … may God continue to bless the United States of America.