Jake Tapper Unimpressed by Wedding Crashers Protesting Sen. Sinema: ‘Do People Like That Think That This Is Effective?’

Jake Tapper was openly skeptical of protesters who crashed a wedding because Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-AZ) was a guest, asking his panel if they thought the protesters really expected their tactics to successfully convince Sinema to support President Joe Biden’s legislative agenda.

Sinema, along with fellow moderate Democrat Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV), has drawn progressives’ ire over their objections to the multi-trillion dollar price tag of the spending bill, as well as some of the specific agenda items in the legislation.

Tapper introduced a clip of the protesters, noting that Sinema had confirmed that the video was real. In the video, the mother of the bride tearfully pleads with the protesters to “please just go down to the corner for one hour, please.” She even expresses sympathy and solidarity with the protesters’ cause, but begs them to please stop disrupting the wedding.

The newly married couple were “not a political couple at all,” said Tapper, but the bride was friends with Sinema and had invited her.

Tapper asked his panel what they thought about the protesters’ tactics. “Do people like that think that this is effective, that this does anything other than anger somebody like Senator Sinema?”

Politico White House correspondent Laura Barrón-López replied that there was “a lot of frustration” especially among “more left-leaning Democrats” who really wanted the bill to get passed, noting that several provisions of the bill “when you take them out individually can have some 70 or 80 percent support across the country” but they were being blocked by two senators from West Virginia and Arizona.

Democratic voters, said Barrón-López, were realizing that a 50/50 Senate was just not going to give them what they want.

Tia Mitchell, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s Washington correspondent, added that for the protesters, it wasn’t just that Sinema was viewed as “a centrist who stood in the way of some of these policies,” but that “she has not really been as transparent as some of her constituents and progressive activists would like her to be on where she stands, period.”

“Again, not saying it’s right for a wedding to be disrupted or for her to be followed to the bathroom,” said Mitchell, “but what the activists on the left are saying is that’s all they can do because she won’t speak. She isn’t transparent. She isn’t engaging people to let people know where she stands.”

Barrón-López remarked that progressive activists also viewed Sinema as politically vulnerable, “potentially weak in terms of her re-election” because “they could potentially primary her” with a more liberal candidate, as compared to West Virginia, where former President Donald Trump “won by some 30 to 40 points,” and a candidate to the left of Manchin’s centrist views would be highly likely to fail.

Tapper said he still thought the protesters’ efforts would backfire. “I think an event like that might actually cause Kyrsten Sinema to –”

“Hunker down,” interjected National Review’s Ramesh Ponnuru.

“It’s not going to change her,” said Tapper, and “it also might engender sympathy for her.”

Watch the video above, via CNN.