Kyrsten Sinema of the Sinema Party was never the best friend to the Biden administration, but she did consistently vote to confirm the president’s judicial nominees. That was your go-to answer to the trivia night question “What good is Kyrsten Sinema?” Now, she’s broken the streak.
The senior senator from Arizona voted against confirmation of Judge S. Kato Crews for the US District Court in Colorado. She offered no explanation for her opposition, but perhaps not-so-coincidentally Republicans recently launched an attack ad branding Sinema as a “liberal Democrat” who’s in President Joe Biden’s hip pocket.
A narrator ominously intones, “Sinema voted for President Biden’s agenda 100 percent of the time, backed Biden’s green energy bill, even helped pass Biden’s American Rescue Plan.”
Not only is the last part of this true, but Sinema loves to brag about it and hog the credit. Her office declared in August 2022, “Sinema-Shaped Inflation Reduction Act Signed Into Law.” (The wording is simultaneously vainglorious and hella weird.) Shockingly, the Republican attack ad doesn’t mention how Sinema held up the IRA’s passage until the multibillion-dollar carried interest tax break was preserved. Not that it would help, as a recent poll shows that a majority of Arizonians are less likely to support her when they learn about her Wall Street ties.
According to FiveThirtyEight, Sinema has voted in line with Biden 93.4 percent of the time, which is significant considering Biden’s narrow margin of victory in 2020. Sinema shivved her political career by needlessly alienating Democrats, and her aggressive, Wall Street-friendly centrism hasn’t won over a significant number of Republicans.
So maybe she’s bolstering her “maverick” resume and Judge Crews was an easy casualty. It’s not a smart move, although that would’ve been a first for Sinema. Whenever Joe Manchin opposed a Biden nominee, it was at least consistent with his own politics. The nominee was either “too partisan” or wasn’t sexually attracted to coal. Crews is in no way controversial. He was already a federal magistrate judge and the first Black magistrate judge in his district. He received his law degree from the University of Arizona and previously served as a staff attorney at the National Labor Relations Board.
Colorado’s US Senators Michael Bennet and John Hickenlooper — both considered centrists — recommended Crews in 2022, and they effusively praised him on the Senate floor during his confirmation.
“Judge Crews will approach this role from the rich perspective of both a litigator and a judge,” Bennet said. “Throughout his career, Crews has practiced law for the government and firms big and small. He’s tried cases from the perspective of employers and employees; for clients with a lot of resources and for clients with none at all. With his experience, intellect, and character, Judge Crews will make a remarkable addition to Colorado’s District Court.”
“Judge Kato Crews’s experience, intellect, and integrity will make him a judge for all of Colorado,” Hickenlooper added.
Forty-nine Democrats voted to confirm Crews, including Manchin and Arizona’s junior US Senator Mark Kelly. (Democratic Sen. Maria Cantwell didn’t vote, but we assume she would’ve shown up if necessary.) Republicans Lisa Murkowski and Susan Collins made the party bipartisan, which is normally enough for Sinema. Instead, she joined 47 other Republicans and voted against Crews for apparently no good reason. Perhaps Sinema knew something about Crews everyone else missed — like he was secretly big into hot tubs. If so, she should’ve brought that up during the confirmation.
Sinema previously voted for 95 of Donald Trump’s judicial nominees, almost all of whom achieved early admission in the Legion of Doom. They have grotesquely anti-choice, anti-gay, and anti-worker records but Sinema still didn’t oppose them. We’re forced to consider what made Judge Crews different.
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