Kyrsten Sinema is Why We Need Term Limits

Image Source: https://www.politico.com/news/2019/10/29/kyrsten-sinema-arizona-democrats-060187

Googling “What is Senator Sinema doing?” provides nearly ten million results (in 0.65 seconds, Chrome helpfully informs me), and none of them can agree on an answer. Politico calls her an “enigma.” The New York Times calls her “elusive.” I call her the poster child for the argument that the United States Federal Government needs term limits.

When now-Senator Kyrsten Sinema first ran for a seat in the Arizona State Senate in 2002, she was the most progressive candidate on the ballot. She also finished in last place. (Rakich) Eventually, she found success in dropping her Green Party label and aligning herself with the Democrats, winning her the house election in 2004. However, she continued to stand by her progressive convictions. A recent FiveThirtyEight article pointed to calculations of political ideology which placed Sinema in the top three “most liberal members” of the Arizona State House for all six years of her service and again when, having almost reached the state’s term limit, she ran for and won a seat in the Arizona Senate. (Rakich) In 2001, she published letters railing against capitalism and called campaign donations “bribery.” (Epstein) In 2003, she wore a ballet tutu to an anti-war protest. Even years later, as she campaigned in her first national election, she was supported by dozens of progressive activist groups, whose phone-banking and door-knocking efforts netted her hundreds of thousands of votes. (Epstein)

Sinema, apparently, has changed. In 2021, she was one of two Democrats holding up President Biden’s trillion-dollar landmark legislation which would, among other things, take action on climate change and fix infrastructure in underserved communities. (Cochrane) A recent analysis names her the second-most conservative Democratic senator. (UCLA-Voteview) The head of those progressive groups who helped get her elected told The New York Times that he hasn’t seen or heard from her since she took office. (Epstein) In fact, after months of steadily ignoring progressive calls to fall in line with the party, Arizona Democrats dislike her at almost the same rates as Republicans. (O’Donnell et al.)

It’s unlikely that Senator Sinema has had a change of heart concerning all of her deeply-held political beliefs. In fact, one of her former coworkers, speaking on the condition of anonymity, told Politico: “I don’t think her motivation for casting the votes that she does today has anything to do with what her actual true beliefs are.” (Stephenson) Sinema’s own statements on the matter are hardly enlightening. While blocking her party leader’s promised legislation from delivery, she complained about politicians “who promise things that cannot be delivered.” (Everett, Levine) Reporters from Politico, The New York Times, and The Independent have all come to similar conclusions: Sinema’s change of heart is pure ambition.

“The ultimate motivator of individual politicians is translating one’s effort into support for reelection” stated social scientists Carey, Niemi, and Powell in their 1998 article. They came to the conclusion, after conducting a study on the implementation of term limits on state legislatures, that the federal government’s indefinite terms encourage careerist behavior, and that term limits discourage it. Carey and his colleagues surveyed nearly 3,000 legislators and found that creating term limits impacted the legislative behavior of the limited members, results ironically correlative with the aggressive changes in Senator Sinema’s career as she moved from the term-limited Arizona state legislature to the national congress. When term limits are instated, for example, legislative members are more likely to attend to matters of conscience and consider the “collective good,” compared to individual districts. Sinema was a vocal advocate for climate-based reform in Arizona as a member of the Green party, but recently blocked Biden’s spending bill, which included a delegation of a huge amount of money towards nation-wide climate protective measures. Carey et al. found that term-limited members are more likely to push their own legislative initiatives than their non-limited counterparts. Sinema abandoned her personal progressive policies when she left the Arizona legislature. The findings also reported a general increase in electioneering in states with no term limits, consistent with Sinema’s courting of Arizonian Republican approval.

In the end, correlation doesn’t equal causation. There’s no way to know what’s really going on in the mind of the enigma, the elusive Senator Sinema, but her legislative history, combined with the established research on term limits, provides a perfect set of problems and solutions. We know that Senator Sinema displays three of the most prominent issues identified by political scientific research into term limits, and we know that introducing those term limits can solve them. Politicians caught in the constant cycle of election and reelection lose sight of early ideals and beliefs, and we know how to break the cycle.

Sources:

Domestic IssuesPhoebe RobinsonJanuary 9, 2022Fall 2021Comment