Sen. Kyrsten Sinema rejects the phony diversity of the Democratic Party

Well played, Democrats.

You took the first person in your party to win a U.S. Senate seat in Arizona in 30 years and turned her into an independent.

You required – no, demanded – that she march in lock step with every U.S. senator with Democratic offices in Manhattan and Boston and San Francisco.

There’s only one way to play Brand D, you said. You must be liberal to a fault. You must spend to the hilt. You must genuflect to every Gen Z inanity that pops out of TikTok.

And you must never, never compromise with Republicans.

What a delight it was to watch the most partisan Democrats on Friday jam the electric cables into their ears and turn into porcupines.

SINEMA DID WHAT!

If you could keep up with all the frothing blue-checks and their F-bombs, the entertainment was off the charts.

Democrats claim tolerance, but they aren't

The Democratic base loves to flaunt its tolerance for every letter of the LGBTQ alphabet, every race and ethnicity, every gender on the spectrum from non-binary to demi-girl, but the moment any of these people stray from the liberal orthodoxy they must be burned at the stake.

These Democrats don’t care how you identify, so long as they control your minds.

Another view:Sen. Kyrsten Sinema just stuck it to Democrats

Well, they didn’t control Sinema, who is about as diverse a package as you’ll ever find. She was Code Pink, she was Green Party, she is bisexual, she is a friend to immigrants, she was Mormon-raised with military siblings. She’s an Ironman triathlete who takes gigglish delight in eccentric fashion.

She would seem everything the modern Democratic Party represents, except for one colossal shortcoming.

She thinks for herself.

Be obedient? That's not Sinema's style

If you are a U.S. Senator with a D after your name, you are expected to vote for trillions of dollars of spending on the slimmest of governing majorities – one vote.

This means you are spending trillions of American taxpayer dollars solely on Democratic Party priorities.

If you are a Democrat who thinks maybe the other half of America should have a little say in the way you’re spending their money, you must be shunned. You must be destroyed.

The Democratic orthodoxy also demands that all of their U.S. senators vote to remove the legislative filibuster. When Sinema took a longer view and warned that Democrats will one day be in the minority and might appreciate filibuster protection, she was skinned alive.

Kyrsten Sinema has been one of the most vilified Washington politicians in the last quarter-century because she believes Arizonans didn’t send her to Washington to play cigarette girl to Chuck Schumer’s pinstripes.

Democrats like their senators, even women senators, obsequious and obedient, and that’s just not Sinema’s style.

Sinema isn't the only one tired of groupthink

She’s ferociously independent, as her entire life attests. But she’s also good natured and decent, and will not engage in that favorite Washington sport of knifing your rivals. She doesn’t sling mud. She makes an effort to get along with people who come to Washington with different lifestyles and different values and different politics.

Like her party faithful she preaches tolerance. Unlike them she also practices it.

She proved that working with Republicans she could pass major initiatives on infrastructure, on guns and microchips. But she wasn’t going to blink on the filibuster so her party could pack the Supreme Court and create even greater division in a country already boiling over with conflict.

So, the Democrats started raising money to defeat her in the 2024 Democratic primary.

She could read the horizon and chose to exercise her options.

She is leaving the Democratic Party and its group think and its cult-like conformity for the warmer plains of intellectual freedom.

And she is not alone.

The ranks of independents in this country are growing because Americans have had it with the extreme polarity of the two major political parties.

As an earlier generation of Americans once did, they’re rejecting Puritanism.

And they’re leaving their bonnets behind.

Phil Boas is an editorial columnist for The Arizona Republic. Email him at phil.boas@arizonarepublic.com.

This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: Kyrsten Sinema has rejected Democrats' phony diversity - for good