Is Sinema About to Pass Biden’s Reconciliation Bill?

Is Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.) about to support the centerpiece of President Biden's domestic agenda?

Reporters from Fox Business and CNN are saying it sure sounds like it.

On Thursday, Sinema met with Rep. Richard Neal (D-Mass.). Neal chairs the all-powerful House Ways and Means Committee. The purpose of the meeting was to discuss Sinema's opposition to the tax hikes in the reconciliation bill.

Following their discussion, Neal told reporters that Sinema wanted the bill to pass. Shortly afterward came reports that the Arizona senator had reached a critical compromise.

As Hot Air reports:

Maybe Sinema looked at the calendar, looked at the publicity she's gotten from the left lately, and decided she'd better try to win the game for her team in the ninth inning after all. As we creep closer to Election Day in Virginia, with Dems frantic to pass something significant before Terry McAuliffe has to face voters, the pressure on Sinema from progressives has grown immense. This morning news broke that five military veterans who'd been advising her resigned in protest over her opposition to ending the filibuster and her refusal to make a deal on reconciliation. “You have become one of the principal obstacles to progress, answering to big donors rather than your own people,” they wrote to her, resorting to a lame and outdated line of attack in 2021. The real money in political fundraising in the Internet age isn't with corporations and big donors, it's with energized grassroots donors who'll plow small contributions into your coffers regularly.

Ask Marjorie Taylor Greene or AOC. If Sinema was looking to make bank, she would have been better off going full metal progressive on the bill and leveraging Bernie's donor army. She's doing what she's doing because she believes it's the right and responsible thing to do.

At least, she was. Maybe as the threats to primary her have grown more serious, she calculated that she'd pushed the left as far as she could push them without losing her seat:

“I think the sentiment that I'm hearing out there, voters in Arizona are upset with her, especially Democratic voters,” Rep. Ruben Gallego, a fellow Arizona Democrat, told CNN on Wednesday. “I think they support the President's agenda, and they hope that she will, in the end, support the President's agenda, pass reconciliation — the Build Back Better agenda.”

Although Gallego has an impressive pedigree, progressives would certainly be more lukewarm to challenging Sinema in 2024 if she ends up supporting the Build Back Better agenda.

How confident are you that Sinema will make a deal with congressional Democrats?