Democrat Senator Sinema accosted by protesters after Biden calls stalking of defiant lawmakers ‘part of the process’
After President Joe Biden seemed to approve of harassing Democrat senators opposed to his spending plan, activists continued to badger Senator Kyrsten Sinema (D-Arizona) on her flight back to Washington and at the airport.
A woman named Karina approached Sinema on board the flight from Arizona to DC on Monday, and demanded the senator’s commitment to amnesty for illegal immigrants. She was filmed by someone from the Arizona Dream Act Coalition (ADAC), a group advocating for granting citizenship to people brought into the US illegally as children.
Message from Karina – I am a DACA recipient from Arizona who volunteered to help elect Sen. Sinema. I asked her to follow through on her promises to immigrants in Arizona and support citizenship through reconciliation. pic.twitter.com/iw4nsrI2v7
— ADAC (@TheADAC) October 4, 2021
Upon landing at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport on Monday evening, Sinema was greeted by another group of protesters, shouting questions about the “human infrastructure package,” the $3.5 trillion spending bill proposed by the Democrats.
Sen. Kyrsten Sinema just arrived at DCA, where a small number of protestors were waiting. They asked her what she would cut from the larger human infrastructure package. Sinema did not answer. pic.twitter.com/4EXCGDxwIl
— Kyle Stewart (@KyleAlexStewart) October 4, 2021
Sinema ignored both stunts. She and her colleague Joe Manchin (D-West Virginia) have both come under pressure from Democrat activist groups after refusing to go along with the spending bill, dubbed ‘Build Back Better’. Democrats have hoped to pass it in the Senate without any Republican votes, using a procedure called reconciliation, but they need at least 50 votes for that – and without Sinema and Manchin, they have only 48.
Biden complained about that very fact earlier in the day. Asked to address Sunday’s incident when a group of activists followed Sinema into a bathroom at Arizona State University, Biden said he didn’t think such tactics were appropriate, but that “it happens to everybody,” unless they have Secret Service protection.
“It’s part of the process,” he added.
In a statement made public before Biden’s remarks, Sinema herself condemned the activists’ behavior as “unacceptable,” illegal and “wholly inappropriate.”
Living United for Change in Arizona (LUCHA), the group behind the bathroom stunt, is not just any fringe organization. Its biggest donor is George Soros’s Open Society Foundation, but it received donations from the National Education Association teachers’ union as well as Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s group FWD.us. LUCHA also received at least $12,500 back in August from Bold PAC, a fundraising arm of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus.
Three of Sinema’s Senate colleagues – Catherine Cortez Masto (D-Nevada), Alex Padilla (D-California), and Bob Menendez (D-New Jersey) – are listed as Bold PAC members, according to the conservative-leaning outlet Washington Free Beacon.
The tactics used by LUCHA and ACAD mirror the brigading of senators during the 2018 confirmation process for US Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh. One of the Republican senators, Jeff Flake, was famously cornered in a Senate elevator by activists that later turned out to be from Center for Popular Democracy (CPD), another major recipient of Open Society Foundations cash.
Democrat activists also occupied Senate office buildings on several occasions and picketed several other senators whose votes they hoped to flip, denying Kavanaugh the confirmation. Their pressuring of Flake apparently backfired, however, as he ended up voting yes.
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