Sen. Jacky Rosen (D-NV) isn’t saber-rattling at the Biden administration like Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV). She hasn’t angered the Left like Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (I-AZ).
But Rosen is nonetheless one of a growing number of Senate Democrats causing headaches for President Joe Biden as the GOP forces swing-state senators to take a series of tough votes ahead of the 2024 election.
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Rosen has largely stayed out of the limelight in her first term in office, focused on crafting bipartisan legislation tailored to issues in her home state of Nevada.
That’s not to say she shies away from the culture wars — she’s among the most outspoken defenders of abortion rights in the Senate.
But her decision to join Republicans on several votes this year has largely been overlooked as more vocal Democrats grab the headlines.
The biggest thorns in Biden’s side in the last Congress were Manchin and Sinema, two centrist Democrats who stood in the way of the president’s “Build Back Better” agenda.
The pair eventually handed Biden a win with the pared-down Inflation Reduction Act, but their refusal to take a wrecking ball to the filibuster continued to draw the ire of progressives.
Democrats hoped the two would play a diminished role after the party expanded its 50-seat majority with a midterm pickup in Pennsylvania. But, somewhat ironically, the president’s troubles have only multiplied in the new Congress.
Republicans, now controlling a majority in the House, keep peeling off enough Senate Democrats to send bills to the president’s desk. What’s more, Democrats have helped torpedo a growing number of Biden’s nominees.
The president’s chief antagonist continues to be Manchin, a red-state Democrat who is joining Republicans on just about every effort to roll back his regulatory agenda. He has even threatened to help the GOP repeal the Inflation Reduction Act, the very healthcare and climate bill he helped pass.
His feud with Biden has sucked the oxygen out of the room as he lashes out at the president over everything from his energy agenda to the crisis at the southern border.
But Rosen, along with a handful of centrists in her party, has been quietly exercising independence from the president as well on a number of GOP-led votes.
She voted with Republicans on Tuesday to repeal the District of Columbia’s policing reforms, and in March, she joined their effort to overturn Biden’s environmental rule on clean waterways.
Both were sent to Biden’s desk despite the threat of a veto.
The votes, in part, reflect the issues that Rosen’s voters care most about. She opposed the water rule out of concern for how it would affect Nevada’s ranchers and farmers.
Her votes on legislation to repeal the president’s Iraq War powers — she supported GOP amendments to take a hard line on Iranian proxies in the region — are not entirely surprising either. Rosen, a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, represents a state where 1 in 10 residents served in the military.
“Nevadans sent me to the Senate to be a voice for them, and I’m always going to do what’s best for our state, even when that means breaking with my own party,” she told the Washington Examiner in a statement. “I am always willing to work with Republicans, Democrats, and Independents to pass bipartisan legislation and deliver real results.”
The votes are also being cast against the backdrop of a tough reelection cycle for Rosen, who launched her campaign for a second term in April. Her Senate colleague, Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto (D-NV), hung on to win reelection last year in Nevada by less than 10,000 votes.
Rosen is not alone. The 2024 map does not favor Democrats or the independents who caucus with them. Three are up for reelection in states that former President Donald Trump won in 2020, while five must compete in states Biden only won narrowly.
Most of these senators, in particular Manchin, Sinema, Jon Tester (D-MT), and Angus King (I-ME), have joined Republicans on at least a handful of votes. In total, eight senators crossed the aisle to help the GOP repeal the district’s police reform bill.
It’s not novel for centrists to buck their party on occasion. But Republicans have been surprisingly effective at forcing tough votes on what feels like a weekly basis using “privileged” resolutions that are guaranteed to come to the floor whether Democratic leadership wants them to or not.
The cumulative effect is the sense that Democrats are stymying the president’s agenda left and right.
Sen. Gary Peters (D-MI), the head of Senate Democrats’ campaign arm, says his colleagues are doing nothing more than reflecting the interests of their voters.
“These votes clearly show that they are independent voices for their state and are trying to do what’s right for the people they represent,” he told the Washington Examiner.
Yet it’s hard to discount the pressure members are feeling ahead of 2024.
The measures are sometimes wonky or obscure, such as votes on whether to roll back protections for the lesser prairie chicken. Others touch hot-button issues such as policing in America and the COVID-19 pandemic.
It’s on those two issues that Rosen has created the greatest daylight between herself and the administration.
She was one of almost two dozen Democrats to vote to end the COVID-19 national emergency. But she also joined Republicans last year on more divisive votes to repeal mask mandates, both on public transportation and in preschool classroom settings.
Rosen does largely vote with her party; her record in the last Congress aligned with the president 93% of the time. But that figure is one of the lowest among Democrats in the Senate.
Rosen is no Manchin — she has largely flown under the radar in her first term and has staked her electoral prospects on bipartisanship over bombast.
Instead of needling the president, she has sought to cultivate her reputation as a centrist by co-sponsoring bills on topics that can attract GOP support, whether that be broadband access or national security. The Lugar Center at Georgetown rates her as one of the most bipartisan senators.
She hasn’t stayed out of the fray entirely, however. On Wednesday, she became the latest Democrat to challenge Sen. Tommy Tuberville’s (R-AL) blockade on promotions for senior Pentagon officers over the department’s abortion policies.
Rosen, formerly the president of a synagogue in her home state, also condemned Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI), a member of the progressive “Squad” in the House, for hosting an anti-Israel event at the Capitol last week.
The senator, unlike Sinema, who left the Democratic Party in December, isn’t standing in the way of progressive priorities such as eliminating the filibuster. Rosen supports carveouts for issues like voting rights legislation.
But her willingness to criticize members of her own party suggests a desire to forge a center-left path in a chamber that has become increasingly partisan. For the most part, that means finding areas of common ground with her Republican colleagues.
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“We are in a political environment, and everybody knows that,” Sen. Shelley Moore Capito (R-WV), who worked with Rosen on funding for STEM education, told the Washington Examiner. “And so, I think that you want to be cognizant that, you know, she’s a friend but wearing a different jersey, so to speak, and so, there are ways to do that.”
“I think we can maintain the friendship and still have your political shirts on when you need to have them on,” she added.
