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We still dont know whether Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, I-Ariz., will seek a second term next year. What we do know is that she has spent a lot of time rubbing elbows with the wealthy donors whose support shed count on if she did.

Those fetes are crucial, particularly because of her decision in December to leave the Democratic Party and become an independent. She still officially caucuses with Senate Democrats, despite Republicans blatant overtures to cross over. But a new article by Politicos Jonathan Martin shows that while Sinema has worked tirelessly to cultivate a bipartisan, above-the-fray mien in public, behind the scenes she has been busy burning bridges in a way that will leave her not just independent but isolated.

The column is filled with tidbits about Sinemas behavior behind closed doors at Republican-heavy events, where she has opted to belittle her Democratic colleagues, shower her GOP allies with praise and, in one case, quite literally give the middle finger to President Joe Bidens White House.

Behind the scenes, Sinema has been busy burning bridges in a way that will leave her not just independent but isolated.

Among the many snide comments attributed to Sinema are digs at Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., and her pro-filibuster buddy Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va. (she feels she has better tax policy ideas than he does). The barb most people have latched onto is about the weekly Democratic caucus lunches, which shed already rarely attended even before she went solo:

Those lunches were ridiculous, she told a small group of Republican lobbyists at a reception in Washington this year in explaining why she had stopped attending her caucus weekly luncheons in the Capitol, according to an attendee.

First off, she explained, she was no longer a Democrat. Im not caucusing with the Democrats, Im formally aligned with the Democrats for committee purposes, Sinema said. But apart from that I am not a part of the caucus.

Then she let loose.

Old dudes are eating Jell-O, everyone is talking about how great they are, Sinema recounted to gales of laughter. I dont really need to be there for that. Thats an hour and a half twice a week that I can get back.

I spend my days doing productive work, which is why Ive been able to lead every bipartisan vote thats happened the last two years, Sinema reportedly said. In fact, as writer Kyle Tharp pointed out on Twitter, Sinema has apparently decided that productive work is selling her used stuff on Facebook Marketplace. Because its certainly not meeting with her constituents. While she may appear at these fundraisers and at gala affairs like the World Economic Forum at Davos, Switzerland, lets not forget that Arizonans had to chase her into a bathroom just to ask her about whether she supported Bidens agenda back in 2021.

Its not clear who many of the sources for Martins reporting are, but that matters less than that Sinema felt willing to say these things in front of these crowds at all. Its evidence of extremely poor judgment, especially when so much of the Senates activity is built on personal relationships. The bipartisan wins in the last Congress arent replicable in this one, not when House Republicans have already lambasted their Senate counterparts for being too open to compromise. Her willingness to bad-mouth her supposed allies makes it even less likely that shell be spearheading any deals in the near future.

Moreover, it seems Sinema was unaware that many of the people she was entertaining with her riffs on her colleagues dont have her best interests at heart. It may say I next to her name now, but so long as she still provides a vote for Democratic interests, shes a problem for many of the Republicans in the crowds. And while she has a long history of political shapeshifting, she cant change her scales enough to win a GOP primary against someone like failed gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake.

Meanwhile, Rep. Ruben Gallego, D-Ariz., has already announced that hell run for the Democratic nomination to replace Sinema. For all her pandering to the supposed middle-of-the-road Arizonan, polling on behalf of Gallegos campaign last year had her crashing and burning in a potential three-way race. Thats on top of previous polling that had showed her with a net unfavorable rating among basically every demographic in the state. And just last month, Gallego was well ahead of his competition in both head-to-head and three-way races.

It may say I next to her name now, but so long as she still provides a vote for Democratic interests, shes a problem for many of the Republicans in the crowds.

Im not sure how Sinemas hobnobbing with elites will do much to change those numbers, no matter how much money big donors throw at her. Sinema may be banking on the newly established No Labels Party in her state to help counteract the structural disadvantages of running as an independent. Or maybe she hopes being able to contrast herself with a far-right extremist like Lake leaves her enough votes to eke out a victory. Or she may just be betting on her shilling for bankers to land a cushy gig once her term expires.

But for all her self-regard as an indispensable, savvy dealmaker, Im just not sure that Sinema is very good at this game. Washington is a town that doesnt forget slights easily, and if someone else is sitting at her desk come 2025, I doubt any Democrats will be heartbroken.

Hayes Brown is a writer and editor for MSNBC Daily, where he helps frame the news of the day for readers. He was previously at BuzzFeed News and holds a degree in international relations from Michigan State University.

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Kyrsten Sinema is a problem for Republicans, Democrats, and herself - MSNBC

A majority of Americans approve of Democratic Senator John Fetterman taking a leave absence from the Senate in order to recover from depression, according to a new poll.

A Redfield & Wilton Strategies poll conducted on behalf of Newsweek among 1,500 eligible voters on March 22 found that 33 percent of respondents strongly approved of the senator taking leave, while a further 28 percent said they approved of the move.

The polling came as Fetterman spokesperson Joe Calvello told The Philadelphia Inquirer on Friday that the Democrat should be out of the hospital "soon," but didn't provide an exact timeline.

"John will be out soon. Over a week but soon," Calvello said, adding that "recovery is going really well."

Fetterman is being treated for clinical depression at the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Maryland. He checked himself into the facility on February 15.

Pennsylvania Republicans have questioned Fetterman's ability to serve and on February 28, the Washington County Republican Party released a statement calling on Fetterman to appear on camera to "show us he is alive and well, and if he is unable to do so, we call upon our elected Representatives in Washington, Senator [Bob] Casey and Congressman [Guy] Reschenthaler, to intervene immediately."

Sean Logue, chair of the Washington County Republican Party, told Newsweek earlier this month that they had not received the video of Fetterman they requested.

"We have been professional and polite, but the only responses we have gotten are hate mail or calls where our request has been twisted into an attack on people with mental-health challenges," Logue said.

"The campaign lied about Senator Fetterman's fitness for office, and threatened anyone who questioned it," he added.

Nonetheless, the Redfield & Wilton Strategies poll appears to show that a majority of eligible voters support Fetterman's efforts at recovery from depression.

The survey found that just 3 percent of respondents said they would disapprove of Fetterman taking leave from the Senate and another 3 percent said they would strongly disapprove.

A further 24 percent said that they would neither approve nor disapprove and 9 percent responded "don't know."

There also appeared to be broad agreement among those who voted for President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump in the 2020 presidential election, with 32 percent of Biden voters saying they would strongly approve of Fetterman taking leave and 30 percent saying they would approve.

Just 1 percent said they would disapprove, and another 1 percent of Biden voters said they would strongly disapprove, while 28 percent said they neither approved nor disapproved and 8 percent answered "don't know."

It was a similar picture among Trump voters, with 37 percent saying they would approve of Fetterman taking leave, 25 percent saying they would approve the move and 18 percent saying they neither approved nor disapproved.

A further 6 percent of Trump voters said they would strongly disapprove of Fetterman taking leave, while 5 percent said they would disapprove and 8 percent responded "don't know."

Newsweek has reached out to Fetterman's office via email for comment.

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John Fetterman Receives Boost as Republicans Grill Him Over Health Woes - Newsweek

You may have heard the phrase parents rights.

It sounds unobjectionable of course parents should have rights which is probably why its become the term of choice for the conservative effort to ban books, censor school curriculums and suppress politically undesirable forms of knowledge.

When House Republicans introduced a bill that would require public schools to notify parents that they are entitled to access course material and lists of books kept in school libraries, they cited parents rights as the reason.

Thats what today is all about: Its about every parent, mom and dad, but most importantly about the students in America, Speaker Kevin McCarthy said. Several Republican-controlled states have either proposed or passed similar measures.

The official name for Floridas infamous Dont Say Gay bill, prohibiting classroom discussion about sexual orientation or gender identity, is the Parental Rights in Education Act. And the states Stop WOKE Act short for Wrongs to Our Kids and Employees, which outlaws any school instruction that classifies individuals as inherently racist, sexist, or oppressive, whether consciously or unconsciously, was framed, similarly, as a victory for the rights of parents.

By signing this legislation, which is the first in the nation to end corporate wokeness and Critical Race Theory in our schools, we are prioritizing education, not indoctrination, Lt. Gov. Jeanette Nuez said in a statement. We will always fight to protect our children and parents from this Marxist-inspired curriculum.

It should be said that this movement for parents rights in Florida has empowered certain parents to remove books, films, even whole classes that threaten to expose their children to material that might make them uncomfortable. In Pinellas County, for example, a single complaint about the Disney film Ruby Bridges about the 6-year-old girl who integrated an all-white New Orleans school in 1960 led to its removal from an elementary school.

In his 2021 campaign for the Virginia governors mansion, Glenn Youngkin made parents matter his slogan, and he has asserted parents rights in his effort to regulate the treatment of transgender children and end divisive concepts such as critical race theory in schools. His early moves included new history standards that removed discussions of racism and downplayed the role of slavery in causing the Civil War.

And at this moment, Texas Republicans are debating a bill backed by Gov. Greg Abbott and Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick that, according to The Texas Tribune, would severely restrict classroom lessons, school activities and teacher guidance about sexual orientation and gender identity in all public and charter schools up to 12th grade. Texas parents, the Tribune notes, already have the right to remove their child temporarily from a class or activity that conflicts with their beliefs or review all instructional materials. This bill would further empower parents to object to books, lessons and entire curriculums.

Parents rights, you will have noticed, never seems to involve parents who want schools to be more open and accommodating toward gender nonconforming students. Its never invoked for parents who want their students to learn more about race, identity and the darker parts of American history. And we never hear about the rights of parents who want schools to offer a wide library of books and materials to their children.

Parents rights, like states rights, is quite particular. Its not about all parents and all children and all the rights they might have.

The reality of the parents rights movement is that it is meant to empower a conservative and reactionary minority of parents to dictate education and curriculums to the rest of the community. It is, in essence, an institutionalization of the hecklers veto, in which a single parent or any individual, really can remove hundreds of books or shut down lessons on the basis of the political discomfort they feel. Parents rights, in other words, is when some parents have the right to dominate all the others.

And, of course, the point of this movement the point of creating this state-sanctioned hecklers veto is to undermine public education through a thousand little cuts, each meant to weaken public support for teachers and public schools, and to open the floodgates to policies that siphon funds and resources from public institutions and pumps them into private ones. The Texas bill I mentioned, for instance, would give taxpayer dollars to parents who chose to opt out of public schools for private schools or even home-schooling.

The culture war that conservatives are currently waging over education is, like the culture wars in other areas of American society, a cover for a more material and ideological agenda. The screaming over wokeness and D.E.I. is just another Trojan horse for a relentless effort to dismantle a pillar of American democracy that, for all of its flaws, is still one of the countrys most powerful engines for economic and social mobility.

Ultimately, then, the parents rights movement is not about parents at all; its about whether this country will continue to strive for a more equitable and democratic system of education, or whether well let a reactionary minority drag us as far from that goal as possible, in favor of something even more unequal and hierarchical than what we already have.

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Opinion | What the Republican Push for Parents Rights Is Really About - The New York Times

Even before they had taken control of the House, House Republicans were promising payback.

Using the powers of the various congressional committees that they would soon take over, ultraconservative House Freedom Caucus members, led by Reps. James Comer of Kentucky and Jim Jordan of Ohio, were pledging investigations of everything: the Biden familys business practices, Hunter Bidens laptop, the origins of the coronavirus pandemic, alleged government bias against conservatives, and the Biden administrations border policies.

But so far, these investigations seem to be flopping. They dont seem to be sticking in the public consciousness. They havent uncovered page one news about Hunter Bidens laptop, or about the origins of Covid-19, or about a supposed government conspiracy to silence conservatives on Twitter. A bit more than two months into Republican control of the House, plenty of these investigations are well underway. Hearings have been held, letters sent, witnesses summoned, and hours spent appearing on Fox News.

The House GOP investigations also arent making the presidents reelection campaign untenable many Democratic operatives suspected that was their goal and they dont seem to be damaging the president as many Republicans had hoped.

Of course, its still early, and in the more than year and a half before the 2024 presidential election, Republicans could still weaponize their committee investigations into better political cudgels. A handful of additional hearings are on the calendar, but more remain unscheduled. If Republicans had hoped to establish the same kind of cloud of confusion and innuendo that they did during the Obama years to tarnish the presidents reputation and hurt Hillary Clintons presidential hopes, they have yet to achieve that with Biden.

New polling provided to Vox by the progressive research group Navigator further demonstrates this trend: Half of American adults believe Republicans are overreaching in their oversight of the Biden administration, up from the 46 percent who said so in a February poll and the 30 percent who said so in January. The number who view the GOPs investigations as a form of overreach is also rising among political independents, while Republican support for the investigations is remaining steady.

The presidents approval rating remains virtually unchanged (though its trended up since the midterms). House Republicans continue to be tremendously unpopular. And more Americans today see the House GOPs oversight investigations negatively when compared to when they took control.

The big reason these investigations dont seem to be breaking through is pretty simple: They just arent that popular, and never really were. And its not just Navigators polling that shows Americans arent very receptive to whatever comes out of these hearings. Since January, a series of Pew, NBC, and Public Policy Polling surveys have shown that most Americans dont see these investigations as priorities for Congress, or would rather Republicans spend less time pursuing these lines of inquiry in favor of addressing more tangible, everyday issues (first among them being inflation and the cost of household goods).

For example, when Pew Research asked Americans in mid-January how they felt about the GOPs new focus on investigating the Biden administration, the answers were pretty definitive 65 percent worried Republicans would focus too much, while 32 percent thought they wouldnt pay enough attention. Even Republicans were split closely; 42 percent of Republican adults said they thought Republicans would focus on oversight too much, compared to the 56 percent who feared lawmakers wouldnt go far enough.

Navigator also found that a plurality of Americans dont see these inquiries as serious, good-faith efforts at oversight including 38 percent of independents who think they are political stunts.

Navigators chief of polling, Bryan Bennett, told me that in the runup to and aftermath of the midterms, Republicans may have misjudged just how much to play up their proposed investigations, and made a strategic error hyping up the investigations that are of least interest to Americans.

In Navigator voter focus groups in Wisconsin, Virginia, and Texas, voters seemed most open to investigations into the origins of the coronavirus pandemic, China-US trade practices, and the withdrawal from Afghanistan.

But those arent the investigations that House Republicans have prioritized. The panel investigating the origins of the coronavirus, for example, has only met once, earlier in March, and a second hearing is scheduled for Tuesday (scrutinizing school closures). The Foreign Affairs Committee, which is investigating the Afghanistan withdrawal, meanwhile, has sent letters to the State Department requesting more information and held one hearing on the fall of Kabul, but it did not have any witnesses from the executive branch testifying. Meanwhile, James Comer, the chair of the oversight committee, has spent hours on Fox News pushing the committees investigation into Hunter Bidens laptop and the Biden familys business practices. Theyve held one hearing already and have more planned.

These hearing topics, Bennett said, are the ones that independent voters are most likely to view with disdain and distrust. The reasons that were cited for that included that there was kind of this broad perception that it was seen as being like a revenge list or a tit-for-tat, or a get even list, and that it wasnt really particularly focused on the priorities that people want Congress to focus on.

Comer has also managed to become Republicans standard-bearer for investigations, assuming the role of chief White House congressional antagonist on Fox News, Newsmax, and One America News. But the decision to take on that role also poses a problem not many people know him outside of conservative circles, and scrutiny into his past has dredged up old allegations of abuse of a girlfriend and a shady track record of political maneuvering. (Comers office did not respond to a request for comment.)

Beyond the general unpopularity of these investigations, Republicans have some other structural and political obstacles. Democrats are not letting these probes go on unanswered, a lesson from the Benghazi investigations during the Obama years. A collection of Democratic and progressive groups, like the Congressional Integrity Project, are working hard outside of government to paint these Republican investigations as illegitimate and the investigators as abusers of congressional power.

The White House itself is also proactively responding to various Republican lines of attack with frequent conversations with reporters, led by Ian Sams, the White Houses chief spokesperson on these investigations. Sams and the White House Counsels office have also gotten ahead of other potential vulnerabilities, like the discovery of classified documents at Bidens home and private offices, by preemptively briefing reporters and blasting out clips and quotes of Comer, Jordan, and other Republicans talking about the political nature of these investigations.

Theres also a problem of novelty and nicheness. Many of the subjects that Republicans have pledged to investigate dont feel fresh or new. Hunter Bidens laptop and his business dealings were a 2020 matter; the Afghanistan withdrawal and coronavirus pandemic feel like years-old issues; and the questioning of social media companies and alleged government bias against conservatives are issues that may only truly resonate with the most partisan, internet-pilled Republican voters.

The oversight committee, especially, may simply be picking too many targets to pursue its also investigating the conditions of January 6 defendants in the DC jail, the capital citys legislative work, the impact of progressivism on the military, pandemic relief fraud, and coronavirus school closures, among many other things.

The American public is already tired of these, Brad Woodhouse, a senior adviser to the Congressional Integrity Project, a group of Democratic operatives, told me. I understand theres some support within the Republican base, but the American public writ large are already tired of these extreme tactics.

There are also real questions about productivity: The committees simply havent held that many meetings, and none have featured people who have enough of a high profile to garner attention beyond niche conservative spaces. I havent seen a single guy sweating under the bright lights, Fox News host Jesse Watters complained in early March. Are we gonna drill down on anything? Are we going to see anybody squirm and cough up the truth or at least plead the Fifth or something, so that we can start showering these goons with subpoenas? Where are the bombshells? Have the investigations even started?

Donald Trump himself is also sucking up the energy and attention of the political press and the American public. As his presidential campaign blunders on, and a number of federal, state, and local investigations into his dealings with campaign money, classified documents, liability for January 6, and potential obstruction of justice continue, he has reinforced himself as one of Democrats best tools for diverting attention from the House investigations.

Finally, Republicans will also face a longer-term problem of political inertia. Given how unfavorably the public has been viewing these probes so far, they have limited time to change opinions, Bennett said. The longer that you have these kind of [negative] ratings, the more entrenched that view is going to become, and the harder its going to be to recover.

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Why House Republicans investigations are flopping - Vox.com

The economy, moreover, is a ripe political issue. Yes, unemployment remains astonishingly low, but inflation is still rampant and hopes of a soft landing are beginning to diminish. Wages have grown but havent kept pace with rising prices. The economy remains phenomenally unequal. And Republicans have a very recent example of exploiting a weird, mixed economy for electoral gain: Back in 2016, Donald Trump won the election in part by hammering the fact that millions had been left behind by economic changes wrought by globalization, promising to bring back millions of jobs, and grow the economy by 4 percent. That message resonated, particularly with voters who lived in areas where the economy was struggling and in the industrial Midwest.

None of that happened, of coursein office, Trumps economic agenda was mostly bog-standard GOP policy (tax cuts for corporations and the rich) with a tariff or two thrown in. Nevertheless, his platform in 2016tariffs, rolling back globalization, bringing back manufacturing jobsworked as catnip for the GOP base. Republicans have since abandoned it.

A big reason why is that Donald Trump managed to turn Republican voters away from the old GOP economic agenda of lowering taxes on the rich and gutting everyone elses earned benefit programs without ever fully replacing it with anything that resembled the populist vision he briefly touted on the hustings. Trump made it clear that rolling back Social Security and Medicare was not a winning electoral argument. Republicans have listened, and have made half-hearted, dishonest pledges to protect those arguments. But this promise has merely slid next to a contradictory onethat the party will reduce the deficit and balance the budget.

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Why Republicans Abandoned Their Economic Message - The New Republic