As the chairman of the Senate Budget Committee, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders has a large role in promoting the $3.5 trillion reconciliation bill. Sanders has decided that he wants to bully his way to passing it.
Sanders’s latest move was refusing to sign on to a joint statement condemning the protesters who hounded and filmed Arizona Sen. Kyrsten Sinema in a bathroom as “plainly inappropriate and unacceptable.” According to Sanders’s communications director, the senator would sign the statement only if it was prefaced by mentioning that Sinema opposes the reconciliation bill.
Sanders apparently thinks he can win over Sinema’s support by trying to pressure her in a statement disguised as a genuine condemnation of the political harassment she has received. It’s not surprising that a socialist would lack the moral clarity to state unequivocally that what happened to her is wrong (take a look at any of his defenses of brutal communist regimes). But that Sanders doesn’t have the strategic awareness to try and win Sinema over when he is in the minority shows just how deluded he really is.
Sanders continues to assert that the will of 48 senators should be treated as a majority, simply because he is among them. This, incidentally, is what “democracy” means to socialists — that you use harassment, shaming, and even mob violence until a majority acquiesces.
When West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin, a centrist Democratic, said that Sanders wanted to create an “entitlement society,” he was more right than he knew. It isn’t just his preferred policies: Sanders feels that any legislation he supports is entitled to pass, even when the majority of the Senate opposes it. He doesn’t feel that he has to win over Manchin and Sinema, even though Democrats cannot pass the legislation without their votes. He would rather berate them instead.
On top of being a hypocrite, a communist sympathizer, and generally just bad at math, Sanders is also an awful politician. And he is the one that Democrats have put in charge of the Budget Committee. Is it any wonder that the Democratic Party’s spending plan is flailing as the party stares down massive losses in the 2022 midterm elections?
