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Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, D-Ariz., walks to her office in the basement of the U.S. Capitol building on Wednesday. Her positions on the filibuster and other issues have drawn threats of a primary challenge in Arizona. Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images hide caption

Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, D-Ariz., walks to her office in the basement of the U.S. Capitol building on Wednesday. Her positions on the filibuster and other issues have drawn threats of a primary challenge in Arizona.

When Arizona Democrat Kyrsten Sinema last week reiterated her opposition to changing Senate filibuster rules, helping to doom her party's efforts to pass voting rights legislation, it only added to the frustrations of progressives in her home state.

Arizona progressives had spent months trying to convince Sinema that voting rights are important enough to alter the Senate's legislative filibuster.

The rule requires a 60-vote majority to move most legislation forward through the chamber. Republicans have used it for the length of President Biden's time in office to block voting bills that Democrats including Sinema argue are needed to combat voting restrictions passed at the state level by Republicans.

"We really are in a situation where our freedom to vote is at stake," said Emily Kirkland, executive director of Progress Arizona.

Unable to change Sinema's mind on their own, Kirkland and dozens of other Democratic women in Arizona sent a letter to an organization they hoped would have more influence: EMILY's List, a decades-old national campaign group focused on electing female Democrats who support abortion rights.

Historically, abortion advocates like EMILY's List have resisted calls to change or eliminate the filibuster. It's been used in the past to defend women's access to health care, a point frequently noted by Sinema in her defense of the Senate rule.

Kirkland said the stakes are too high for groups like EMILY's List to stay on the sidelines.

"We're in a moment where, given the threats to our democracy, we can't afford for people and organizations to be staying in their lane and focused only on one issue," she said.

On Tuesday, EMILY's List heeded the call.

In a statement, President Laphonza Butler said if Sinema "can not support a path forward for the passage of this legislation, we believe she undermines the foundations of our democracy, her own path to victory and also the mission of Emily's List.

"Right now, Sen. Sinema's decision to reject the voices of allies, partners and constituents who believe the importance of voting rights outweighs that of an arcane process means she will find herself standing alone in the next election," Butler added.

Amid mounting calls in Arizona for a primary challenger to Sinema in 2024, when she's next up for reelection, the statement marked a turning point from speculation to concrete action, not just locally, but by an organization that's steadfastly supported Sinema over the years and holds broad, national influence.

"EMILY's List is a very powerful, trusted messenger to Democrats, and to pro-choice women," said Tony Cani, a political strategist who served as deputy director of the Biden campaign in Arizona.

And it's no hollow threat. From 2015 to 2020, while Sinema was running for the Senate, no one contributed more to her campaign than EMILY's List over $400,000, according to OpenSecrets.

On Thursday, after the bid to change Senate rules officially failed, Butler made clear that EMILY's List won't endorse Sinema in the future.

EMILY's List seemed to set a tone for other organizations as well. On Tuesday, the abortion-rights group NARAL Pro-Choice America issued its own statement that, without mentioning Sinema by name, made its target clear: "We will not endorse or support any senator who refuses to find a path forward on this critical legislation," the organization said of the two voting rights bills stuck in the Senate.

And organizers with Stand Up America and Living United for Change in Arizona, also known as LUCHA, released a statement vowing to challenge Sinema in 2024 if she won't change her mind.

In her own statement ahead of Wednesday night's vote when she and West Virginia Democrat Joe Manchin joined all 50 Senate Republicans in blocking a proposed change to the filibuster Sinema brushed aside the criticism, as she had a week earlier, chalking it up to honest disagreements over policy and strategy.

Sinema later issued a statement touting her vote for voting rights legislation, but also explained why she blocked the only path forward at the time to actually pass the bills.

"I also maintained my long standing opposition to separate actions that would deepen our divisions and risk repeated radical reversals in federal policy, cementing uncertainty and further eroding confidence in our government," she said.

Arizona Democratic Sens. Sinema and Mark Kelly, along with Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, center, listen during a roundtable about infrastructure and supply chain problems at Mesa Community College in Mesa, Ariz. on Nov. 19, 2021. Sinema helped craft the bipartisan infrastructure law, and has made her mark in the Senate working across the aisle. Jonathan J. Cooper/AP hide caption

Arizona Democratic Sens. Sinema and Mark Kelly, along with Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, center, listen during a roundtable about infrastructure and supply chain problems at Mesa Community College in Mesa, Ariz. on Nov. 19, 2021. Sinema helped craft the bipartisan infrastructure law, and has made her mark in the Senate working across the aisle.

Arizona strategist Cani said Sinema may believe she's doing the right thing by preserving the filibuster. But if the senator is making a political calculation, Cani said she's mistaken.

"I think that what she's missing here is that her brand is somebody who gets things done," Cani said. "And the problem right now is ... she's becoming someone who is a symbol for the type of obstruction that exists in Washington, D.C., in the Senate that is preventing reasonable laws from getting passed that the American people want."

For some Arizona progressives, Sinema's speech a week ago in defense of the filibuster had already confirmed she's a part of the problem, not the solution.

"I think she is showing the American public and Arizonans very clearly who she is standing with," said Alejandra Gomez, co-executive director of LUCHA. "And she is not standing with voters."

Sinema did help craft the bipartisan infrastructure law, and has made her mark in the Senate working across the aisle.

Arizona is a tightly contested state where centrist candidates have found success in general elections. But to win reelection in 2024, she'll first have to survive a primary.

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Many Arizona Democrats are none to happy with Kyrsten ...

By Ronald J. Rosenberg

While the states election districts were recently redrawn gerrymandered by a progressive-Democratic majority in the State Legislature for the purpose of favoring their party, gerrymandering is not a particularly new political weapon. Those on both sides of the aisle have used their power to redraw district lines, depending on who holds the majority. The practice goes back to the 1800s, but this years redrawing by is unprecedented, and comes at a time when the self-proclaimed progressives larger political agenda ranges from defunding police to bail reform to demonizing the successful entrepreneur, i.e., capitalism.As U.S. Rep. Tom Suozzi pursues his gubernatorial primary quest, his former 3rd Congressional District is now unrecognizable. The progressive gerrymander has recreated his congressional borders into what they now humorously call the Long Island Sound District. It now stretches from Smithtown in Suffolk County, along the lightly populated North Shore, into the densely populated Bronx, and ends in Democratic Westchester County. While several Long Island Democrats have announced their intentions to run for Suozzis vacated seat, they will face a growing number of New York City-based progressives who see their population density and massive Democratic enrollment in the city and its environs as bulletproof at the ballot box. The numbers speak for themselves. The Village of Northport, part of the new 3rd C.D., has some 8,000 residents. The City of New Rochelle, in Westchester, which is also part of the new district, has some 80,000.Now consider who is lining up to run in the 3rd District so far: Bronx State Senator Alessandra Biaggi, who defeated moderate Democrat Jeff Klein a number of years ago. In a December tweet, Democratic Socialist Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez had nothing but praise for Biaggi.Also in the running is Melanie DArrigo, a self-described progressive who has been endorsed by former New York City Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito, a city pol who once co-chaired the City Councils Progressive Caucus.

Ronald J. Rosenberg has been an attorney for 42 years, concentrating in commercial litigation and transactions, and real estate, municipal, zoning and land use law. He founded the Garden City law firm Rosenberg Calica & Birney in 1999.

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Long Islanders have been mugged by progressives - liherald.com

In a relatively rare move, progressive Democratic lawmaker Rashida Tlaib is planning to give a response to President Joe Biden's State of the Union speech. Her speech has raised concerns that it'll underscore party divisions as the midterm elections draw near.

The Working Families Party announced on Wednesday that it had selected Tlaib to deliver its response to Biden's address. Tlaib, who has previously clashed with party leaders and moderates, hinted that her speech will criticize the White House and Congressional Democrats for not moving more aggressively on legislative priorities while they still control the House and Senate.

"It should not be this hard to deliver on health care, climate, housing, child care, safety, voting rights, clean water and so much more," Tlaib said in a statement. "Democrats are in the majority and must set a new course that moves with a sense of urgency. Our communities deserve for us to act now."

Tlaib was first elected in 2018 to a Detroit-based House seat. As a member of the so-called "squad," a group of left-wing lawmakers, Tlaib has rankled House Speaker Nancy Pelosi for not being receptive to their approaches on the environment, health care and other issues.

More recently, Tlaib, along with other like-minded lawmakers, last year voted against the $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill after failing to link it to the expansive Build Back Better social spending package. She has also criticized Senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema as "corporate" Democrats over their opposition to the package.

The Build Back Better package, voting rights reform and other Democratic priorities have since stalled, raising debates about the party's direction as it heads into what's expected to be a bruising midterm.

Joe Walsh, a former Republican congressman turned party critic, said on Twitter that Tlaib's speech would hurt the party.

"It is highly unusual for anyone FROM THE PRESIDENT'S OWN PARTY to give a response to the SOTU speech," Walsh said. "This is a silly political mistake. This is an in-kind donation to the Republican Party. This will only help Republicans take back the House & Senate."

Although a third party, the Working Families Party rarely runs its own candidates. Instead, it typically backs candidates that support its progressive policies. The party in a statement pointed to its efforts to elect Georgia Democrat Raphael Warnock to the Senate in 2020 while electing progressive state legislators across the country.

According to the Working Families Party, Tlaib's response isn't the first time it has recruited Democrats to offer a response to the State of the Union. Previously, the response was given by Representative Jamaal Bowman in 2021, Representative Ayanna Pressley in 2020, Wisconsin Lieutenant Governor and former WFP national committee member Mandela Barnes in 2019 and former Representative Donna Edwards in 2018.

"Obstructionist Republicans and a handful of corporate Democrats have ground Washington to a standstill while child poverty spikes and costs continue to rise for housing, health care, and child care," Working Families Party National Director Maurice Mitchel said in a statement. "It doesn't have to be this way. Rashida will articulate a progressive vision for how we can meet the basic needs of the American people, and ensure all of us can thrive."

Iowa Governor Kim Reynolds is slated to give the Republican Party's rebuttal to Biden's address on Tuesday.

Newsweek has reached out to Tlaib, the Working Families Party and the White House for a response.

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Dem Division on Display as Progressives Plan Response to State of the Union - Newsweek

I recently read Jessica Troutstines Segregation by Design. Like other commentators on segregation, Troutstine discusses segregationist policies such as exclusionary zoning and so-called "urban renewal." But she also uses quantitative analysis to address factors that are associated with "segregation ... between cities rather than within them"in other words, "white flight" to suburbs. If I am reading her analysis correctly, she suggests that where central cities "elect minority mayors [and] when they spend more money" white flight increases, while "wealthy white residents choose to remain in the central city when budgets are more austere." Similarly, federal desegregation orders apparently led to more white flight.

Troutstines conclusions seem inconsistent with the conventional wisdom that liberals are pro-urban and conservatives are anti-urban. But in the name of equity, progressives sometimes favor policies that tempt affluent voters to move to suburbs. As Troutstine points out, high taxes do make cities less attractive to middle-class taxpayers (especially where the quality of government services does not keep up with tax rates). And in the 1970s, school desegregation policies favored by liberals made city schools less attractive because suburban schools were generally not subject to court orders requiring racially balanced schools. This meant that if you lived in the city, your children had to go to an allegedly desegregated school with lots of underprivileged children, while if you lived in the suburbs, you could go to a public school dominated by children from well-off households. On the other hand, when the Supreme Court refused to extend desegregation into the suburbs, the pro-suburb majority was dominated of the Courts more conservative justices, while more liberal justices favored desegregation of suburban schools. I suspect that had desegregation orders been extended into suburbia, suburban schools would have been less appealing to white parents.

Today, progressives tend to oppose exclusive magnet schools (colloquially known as "exam schools") in my city and other American cities. These schools are limited to the most academically gifted students and as a result have reputations as good as those of suburban schools, thus making the city more attractive to middle-class parents.* Conservatives tend to favor continuing these schools in their current form, thus taking what seems to me to be a pro-urban position.

Some progressives believe that the police should be defunded and that only the most serious crimes should be punished; for example, Manhattan's newly elected district attorney has suggested refusing to prosecute a wide variety of minor crimes, and that violent crimes should lead to imprisonment only when "a deadly weapon causes serious physical injury." But both in the 1960s and in recent years, declines in imprisonment rates have been followed by increased crime.** Between 1950 and 1970, the imprisonment rate fell by over 20 percent, and crime began to rise in the early 1960s. Since 2009, the imprisonment rate has fallen by 16 percent, and the most violent crime has started to rise again over the past few years. If this pattern continues and cities grow more violent, they will be less appealing to some people who can afford to live elsewhere. So if we want cities to be appealing to those people, urban politicians should perhaps pump the brakes on their desire to decriminalize and decarcerate.

More broadly, it seems to me that conservatives (or, in cities where there are almost no conservatives by national standards, moderates) tend to be focused on making a city more desirable to people who can afford to live elsewhere, while liberals are more focused on the interests of marginalized people and groups.

Having said that, conservatives tend to be anti-urban in some respects. In my citys municipal politics, progressives are more willing than conservatives to support bike lanes and pedestrian-friendly streets, while Republicans mostly represent the interests of outer-borough motorists. At the national level, liberals are relatively pro-transit, while conservatives are typically more supportive of sprawl-producing highways.

Another important issue, housing, cuts across ideological lines. Ideally, enough urban housing would be built to satisfy regional needs, thus eliminating the need for people priced out of cities to move to suburbs. But here both extremes seem to coalesce against the middle. In New York politics, the most left-wing politicians tend to oppose new housing in their neighborhoods because they fear gentrification, or at least favor creating procedural obstacles to new housing in the name of community engagement. On the other hand, many Republican politicians oppose upzoning their outer-borough neighborhoods and suburbs, perhaps because they fear that cheap housing might lead to an influx of poor households. The strongest supporters of new housing seem to be relatively moderate Democrats, such as Kathryn Garcia (who finished second in the 2021 mayoral primary).

In sum, political arguments about the proper shape and size of our cities is sometimes a liberal vs. conservative argumentbut not always.

*A common progressive counterargument is that city schools are underfunded, and that if city schools received as much money as suburban schools, they would be just as appealing and there would be no need for exam schools. But in fact, some urban school districts outspend suburbs, so this claim is misleading. On the other hand, it could be argued that low-income urban children cost more to educate than wealthier suburban children; however, I am not sure if there is any objective way of quantifying this difference, nor am I persuaded that any politically feasible level of spending will equalize achievement levels enough to make poverty-packed schools as attractive to middle-class parents as more affluent schools.

**The progressive position is that if we just spend enough money on social services, crime will decline to European levels. But poverty nosedived between 1960 and the mid-1970s, when crime exploded more rapidly than at anytime before or since. Similarly, the explosion of anti-COVID public spending was very successful in reducing poverty, but was extremely unsuccessful in reducing the U.S. homicide rate. By contrast, crime declined in the fiscally conservative, tough-on-crime 1990s and 2000s. One might argue that during the high-crime periods, crime might have increased under any circumstancesfor example, because of the 1950s baby boom. The fact remains that anti-poverty spending was not the hoped-for magic bullet.

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Conservatives, Progressives, and Cities - Planetizen

WE have said that recent debate in the House of Commons has created despair among progressives, and made the reactionaries jubilant. It remains only to add that both the despair and jubilation are premature as well as shortsighted. No single debate in the House of Commons or any other body, and for that matter no number of such debates, can alter the nature of things, the fundamental conditions that govern the destinies of a nation or determine its place in the progressive self-fulfilment of humanity. If a temporary triumph of the forces of reaction could have availed the party of vested interests, then the world would still have been in its infancy, whether politically or socially. Every student of history knows that such triumphs fill more than half the pages of the history of every known country that has successfully accomplished its transition from absolutism to democracy. There is a familiar saying which tells us that Providence is always on the side of big battalions. Whether that be so or not, it is undeniable that Providence does not, as a rule, favour the party of self-government until its strength has been tested, until the time and the conditions are ripe for a successful change from the old order. Till then there are ups and downs, attempted short-cuts to liberty followed by setbacks. The point to be borne in mind both by progressives and by reactionaries is that these setbacks are never permanent, that after each setback there is a renewed attempt more vigorous than the preceding one, that with every such attempt one more nail is driven into the corpus of the existing order of things, whose final defeat and transformation are determined by the same law which determined so many of its earlier successes.

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PROGRESSIVES AND REACTIONARIES - The Tribune India