Lawrence O'Donnell shreds Kyrsten Sinema for her 'relentless ignorance' and 'constitutional vandalism'
Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-AZ) isn't long for the U.S. Senate, if polling back home is any indication and her speech before Mitch McConnell's center of politics didn't make it much better. Claiming to share the same "values" as McConnell, who is anti-choice and anti-equality, Sinema misquoted the Constitution, purporting to be an expert on the 60-vote supermajority that has nearly brought down the ability of the U.S. Senate to function properly.
Speaking about Sinema's speech, MSNBC's Lawrence O'Donnell unleashed a brutal fact-check on the one-time progressive activist. He began with the quote from Sinema saying, "those of you that are parents in the room know that the best thing that you can do for your child is not give them everything they want. Right?" Sinema doesn't have children, has never been a parent and is divorced.
"Kirsten Sinema is not one of the parents, and a note to Sinema's speech writers, most parents are not open to parenting advice from politicians who are not parents, or politicians period," O'Donnell shot down. "Needless to say, Sen. Sinema's parenting advice was every bit as bad as you would expect from somebody who has no idea what she is talking about."
Her logic explains that because no one should ever get everything they want is the reason that she believes there should always be a 60-vote supermajority to vote on everything in the Senate.
"So numbers -- she thinks that the 60 vote threshold ensures that nobody gets everything they want. There is not a single senator in the history of the United States Senate who has gotten everything that he or she wants, not ever," said O'Donnell, who spent more years working in the U.S. Senate than Sinema. "Sen. Sinema did not give a single example of a bill being passed with less than 60 votes that was then repealed when there is a change in power in Congress and the White House. Not a single example of her theoretical justification for a voting threshold in the Senate that was not yet provided for in the Constitution, and which defies democracy."
Sinema advocated restoring the 60-vote threshold for the Senate for all votes, including judges.
"Not everybody likes that because it would make it harder, harder for us to confirm judges, and it would make it harder to confirm executive appointments in each administration," she confessed. In the case of executive appointments, Donald Trump simply had a slew of "acting" Secretaries because he couldn't get them approved. So, a 60-vote threshold would simply ensure each president would be able to have whoever they wanted in their administration, regardless of their level of extremism.
"But I believe that if we did restore it, we could actually see more of that middle ground in all parts of our governance. That's what I believe our forefathers intended," said Sinema falsely.
If the Founding Fathers intended for there to be 60 votes to pass a bill, however, they likely would have mentioned something about it in the Constitution. They likely also would have indicated their desire for a 60-vote majority somewhere in the thousands of papers, letters, and documents that all of them wrote over the course of their lives after writing, debating and signing the Constitution.
"Our forefathers, as she called them, intended that women never be Senators," O'Donnell explained. "Our forefathers intended that women never have the right to vote. Our forefathers did not intend for a place called Arizona to be represented in the United States Senate. When the Founding Fathers were writing the Constitution, the place we call Arizona was Spain. And the authors of the Constitution expected it to remain Spain. In 1821, when Mexico secured its independence from Spain, the place now called Arizona was in Mexico. When the United States took that land as the spoils of war, which is how we got Arizona, the Arizona territory eventually became the 48th state in 1912. Pretty late in the game. But that was the same year the constitutional amendment finally overruled the Founding Fathers, and allowed the United States Senators to be elected by the voters of the state, instead of the state legislatures, as the founders wanted them to be."
He went on to say that if Sinema truly believed in what the forefathers advocated she would actually be staunchly opposed to the 60-vote majority, as the Constitution she purports to admire was very specific about the requirement of a majority vote, with the exception of treaties and impeachment convictions, which take a two-thirds vote.
"The number 60 never appears in the Constitution, which seems to live in her imagined version of the Constitution," O'Donnell explained. "The simple majority vote is a dangerous and fickle threshold for governing in a democracy. Why should only five members of the United States Supreme Court get to decide the final interpretation of the law of the land? Why doesn't Sen. Sinema advocate a minimum of a 60-vote threshold in the United States Supreme Court, instead of a majority? Why is the United States of America the only country that has a 60 percent threshold to win a vote in a national legislative body?"
O'Donnell also noted that the United States Constitution also says that "the President shall nominate, and with the advice and consent of the Senate, shall appoint judges of the Supreme Court. The Constitution does not say that Mitch McConnell shall prevent a nominated Supreme Court Justice from even being considered by the United States Senate for its consent as Mitch McConnell did to Merrick Garland in the last year of the Obama presidency."
It's worth noting, McConnell didn't need 60 votes to do that either.
"Today, Kyrsten Sinema traveled to Kentucky to celebrate Mitch McConnell's constitutional vandalism, and her own relentless ignorance, by saying this about Mitch McConnell," he closed.
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