Kyrsten Sinema Says She Won’t Become a Republican

Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, D-AZ, speaks during a hearing to examine nominations of Shalanda D. Young, from Louisiana, to be Director and Nani Coloretti, from California, to be Deputy Director of the Office of Management and Budget at the US Capitol in Washington, DC on Tuesday, February 1, 2022. Photo by Bonnie Cash/UPI

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.Arizona senator Kyrsten Sinema, who this winter changed her party affiliation to independent, says she may be done with the Democrats, but she’s not about to become a Republican either. Speaking on CBS’ Face The Nation on Sunday morning, Sinema described both parties as “broken.”
Sinema began her career in politics as a left-wing activist, protesting the Iraq war in the early 2000s and joining the Green Party, before morphing into an almost unrecognizable centrist Democrat, who found herself under pressure last year from her Democratic colleagues to embrace some of President Joe Biden’s key pieces of policy. Along with West Virginia’s Joe Manchin, Sinema consistently has spent most of the last two years acting as a roadblock to many of the Democrats’ top agenda items: she refused to vote to end the filibuster when Democrats tried to overturn it and push for voting protections; she helped kill tax hikes for Wall Street; and she stood in the way of increasing the federal minimum wage. 
Finally, in December, she announced she was leaving the Democratic Party, saying she had “never really fit into a box of any political party.” Of course, given her policy positions she also likely faced a difficult road to winning the Democratic nomination for the Senate seat she occupies.
On Sunday, though, she said she had no interest in either party.
“They’ve moved away from that center of working together and finding that common ground and they’re, they’re going towards the fringes because that’s where the money is, and that’s where the attention is, and that’s where the likes on Twitter are, and that’s where you get the clicks and the accolades,” Sinema said. “And there’s an incentive to continue to say things that are not true and not accurate.”
That applies to both parties, she noted. 
“No. I mean, I just, I’m laughing because I literally just spent time explaining how broken the two parties are,” she said in response to whether she would join the GOP. “So you don’t go from one broken party to another.”
Sinema also used the interview to blast Biden for his border policies, saying his recently announced plans to send 1,500 troops to the border and expand processing centers for people crossing the border, were “not adequate.”