Joy Reid Slams Kyrsten Sinema on Filibuster: She Knows What Republicans Are Up To ‘And Wants It To Proceed’
MSNBC’s Joy Reid opened her show Wednesday by taking aim at the two most prominent Democratic supporters of the filibuster: Sens. Kyrsten Sinema (AZ) and Joe Manchin (WV). In order to begin and end debate on most bills, 60 “aye’ votes are required. The most recent example of legislation failing to meet this procedural threshold came last week, when the Senate came six votes short (54-35) of starting debate on a bill that, if passed, would have created a bipartisan commission to investigate the January 6 Capitol riot.
Reid cited President Joe Biden, who seemed to call out the two senators (though not by name) during a speech in Tulsa on Tuesday. He alluded to “two members of the Senate who vote more with my Republican friends.”
She then played a clip of Sinema defending the filibuster to reporters yesterday. Appearing with Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) to tour border facilities in Arizona, Sinema claimed the filibuster “protects the democracy of our nation.” She then falsely claimed, “It was created as a tool to bring together members of different parties to find compromise and coalition.”
In fact, the filibuster was created seemingly inadvertently during a revision to the Senate rules in 1806, and it went unnoticed and unused for decades.
Reid took Sinema to task, especially in light of the fact the senator represents Arizona, where Republicans have authorized a highly dubious audit in Maricopa County in order to determine if the baseless claims of widespread voter fraud have any merit. (They don’t.)
She understands what’s happening in her own state. I can only conclude that she supports what they’re doing and wants it to proceed because she says – she’s on the bill – she’s a cosponsor [of the For the People Act that addresses voting rights]. That’s real convenient to let her show up at Black churches on MLK Day, so she can cover herself that way. But I can not conclude other than that what she sees happening that Republicans are doing, she’s for it, because she’s not for changing it. She’s not for stopping it. I don’t know what else to conclude.
Guest Al Franken called Republican efforts to restrict voting “an existential threat to our democracy.”
“This is about our democracy,” said the former senator. He said if Republicans are allowed to overturn elections, it would be the end of democracy in America.
“It wouldn’t be Hitler,” he said. “It wouldn’t have been Tojo, it wouldn’t have been the Confederacy. It’d be Mitch McConnell who ended our democracy.”
Watch above via MSNBC.
