Vincent Gallo Praises Kyrsten Sinema as ‘Free Thinking, Sensitive, and Thoughtful’

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The provocative filmmaker said he “typically would prefer a very conservative republican,” but appreciates the Democratic senator.

Vincent Gallo, the director of “Buffalo ’66” and “The Brown Bunny,” has finally found a liberal that he likes. The outspoken independent filmmaker recently took to Instagram to praise Senator Kyrsten Sinema, the controversial Democrat from Arizona, where Gallo resides.

“I live in Arizona. Who my senators are means a lot to me,” Gallo wrote. “Typically I would prefer a very conservative republican in my home state. And frankly in every state. However Kyrsten Sinema is free thinking, sensitive, open minded and thoughtful. A liberal politician that adds productive ideological diversity and balance to our beautiful country. Her brand of liberal thinking is rare and I am happy she represents my state.”

The two Arizona residents are certainly no strangers to controversy. Gallo has enjoyed making provocative right-wing statements ever since the breakthrough success of his debut film, “Buffalo ’66” made him a public figure. Those statements have only become more extreme in recent years, as he openly supported the presidency of Donald Trump. In an essay from 2020, he wrote that “I like Donald Trump a lot and am extremely proud he is the American President. And I’m sorry if that offends you.” He is also an outspoken opponent of the Black Lives Matter movement, and recently sold t-shirts on his website that complained about protests for racial justice.

Sinema was once beloved among progressives for winning a senate seat as a Democrat in a famously red state. But the goodwill did not last once she arrived in Washington. She has attracted ire from the left wing of her party due to her relatively moderate approach to economic spending and her steadfast commitment to maintaining existing senate rules. In a thinly divided senate she often serves as a deciding vote on key issues, and is frequently portrayed as a roadblock to passing partisan democratic legislation. Critics of Sinema often complain that her motivations are unclear and ever-changing, making it difficult to predict her endgame or determine what political lane she is trying to occupy. It remains to be seen how the endorsement of Gallo will fit into her political plans.

Sinema Rejects Changing Filibuster, Dealing Biden a Setback

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And it raised the question of what Mr. Biden would do next, given that Republicans are all but certain to use a filibuster a fifth time to block the voting rights measures, and that Democrats lack the unanimous support needed in their party to change the rules to enable them to muscle the bills through themselves.

“Like every other major civil rights bill that came along, if we miss the first time, we come back and try it a second time,” Mr. Biden said after emerging empty-handed from his session with Senate Democrats. “We missed this time.”

But his visit to the Capitol was reminiscent of his experience last fall, when he twice made the trip up Pennsylvania Avenue to appeal to House Democrats to quickly unite behind the two major elements of his domestic agenda — a $1.2 trillion bipartisan infrastructure bill and a roughly $2 trillion social safety net and climate package — only to be rebuffed both times. He eventually won passage of the public works bill, but the other measure remains in limbo because of objections from Senator Joe Manchin III, Democrat of West Virginia, who like Ms. Sinema reiterated his opposition on Thursday to doing away with the filibuster to push through the voting rights legislation.

It was a disappointing turn of events for a president who has emphasized his long experience as a senator and his knowledge of how to get things done on Capitol Hill.

In a last-ditch effort to bring the two on board, Mr. Biden met with Ms. Sinema and Mr. Manchin at the White House on Thursday night to discuss the voting rights measures, though neither of them had appeared to leave room in their statements for compromising on Senate rules.

Finding Kyrsten Sinema

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In a dusty basement of Brigham Young University’s Harold B. Lee Library, on a shelf of blue books with gilded trim, between a tract on the history of cosmetic surgery and a study of mystical metaphors in medieval poetry, rests the 1995 honors thesis of one Kyrsten Sinema. “Career Aspirations and Humanitarianism Among Gifted College Students” is a forgotten memento from the Arizona senator’s two years of undergraduate studies at BYU. Long before she became the most confounding actor in the drama of the Biden era, she was an Ezra Taft Benson scholar who completed her bachelor’s degree at 18. A child prodigy who, her thesis suggests, was very concerned with people like herself.

“It is ironic that part of our society suffers from a lack of resources,” the teenage Sinema writes, “yet we have within ourselves an often unrecognized, highly useful minority — the gifted.” A couple years earlier, at 16, she had graduated from high school as co-valedictorian. That is, she was gifted.

In the past year, practically every national media outlet in America has dedicated thousands of words to grapple with what, exactly, motivates Kyrsten Sinema. The New Yorker asked, “What does Kyrsten Sinema really want?” CNN had a nearly identical question on its mind: “Unsolved mystery: What does Kyrsten Sinema want?” Even “Saturday Night Live” got in on the action, with Cecily Strong donning a bright red dress, blue pearls and thick glasses to ask, “What do I want from this bill? I’ll never tell. Because I didn’t come to Congress to make friends — and so far, mission accomplished.”

No one can fully discern why Sinema has positioned herself as one of two Democratic senators opposing the party-approved social spending agenda, least of all her left-wing constituents, some of whom feel betrayed and plan to launch a primary challenger when she’s up for reelection in 2024. She hasn’t done much to ingratiate herself, with her obnoxious thumbs-down vote on a federal minimum wage increase, her lackadaisical approach to issues like immigration reform and voting rights, and her much-maligned defense of the filibuster, causing protests outside her Phoenix office, at a wedding and, most notoriously, inside a bathroom on Arizona State’s campus.

Yet the Biden administration needs Sinema’s vote to accomplish much of anything in the Senate, where the one-vote Democratic majority will get no support from Republicans on controversial legislation. Unlocking the Sinema puzzle could hold the key to the president’s success or failure. Though Sinema doesn’t seem too worried about his fate. Her college thesis and the story she has told herself and others suggest, rather, that she’s long believed she was destined to be an answer to the country’s woes — a humanitarian concerned with helping people less fortunate, the rare leader who can deliver our nation from partisan squabbles and enact meaningful, lasting change. If only others could see it. As she inquired in her thesis, “How do we find the gifted?”

Or, How do we find someone like Kyrsten Sinema? Late last year, I traveled to Florida and Arizona to try to figure that out.

Here’s the story Sinema tells about herself. Once, in Tucson, a girl enjoyed a middle-class existence until, one day, her father lost his law license. Her parents divorced. Her mother married a man named Andy Howard, who moved the girl, her mother and two siblings to Florida, to his hometown, in search of work and opportunity. But the work was nowhere to be found.

The girl, now eight, and her family were forced to live in an abandoned gas station, owned by Howard’s parents. The building didn’t have water or electricity or a reliable place to cook. In their time of need, the family turned to the local ward of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints for food and clothing. By the time the girl turned 11, though, the family’s situation improved. Howard found work and the family moved into a proper house. The girl excelled in school; she even skipped her junior year at Walton High School and graduated as co-valedictorian at 16. She used her academic gifts to earn a BYU scholarship and pursue higher education. She wanted to give back to people who had struggled, as she had, so she studied social work.

After a master’s degree from Arizona State in 1999 she got involved in local politics, first as a Green Party activist who fiercely opposed the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. She ran for a seat on the Phoenix City Council in 2001 and lost. She lost again a year later, running as an independent for the Arizona state House.

But Kyrsten Sinema was no quitter. In 2004, the same year she graduated from law school, she ran as a Democrat and finally won a seat in the state House. Early on, she struggled. Sinema tells us so in her 2009 autobiographical treatise, “Unite and Conquer: How to Build Coalitions That Win and Last.” She was a “bomb thrower” — someone who makes fiery, indignant speeches that accomplish nothing. So she reinvented herself. The new Sinema was a deal-maker unafraid to work with anyone on anything she saw as productive. Her strategy helped pass more legislation — and also boosted her political career. After six years in the House, she jumped to the Arizona Senate for two years, then to the U.S. House of Representatives in 2012. And when Jeff Flake vacated his Senate seat in 2018, she jumped on it, too.

She’s always been upfront about who she is, and that starts with being different. She wears colorful wigs and sleeveless shirts on the Senate floor, in part to express this core component of her identity. She’s America’s first openly bisexual senator; a woman who is unafraid to bushwhack her own path — starting first and foremost with an ethos of “getting things done” in a gridlocked political system. She’s never been a fan of the so-called “identity politics” that have taken root in both parties. Her book dedicates an entire chapter to “Shedding the Heavy Mantle of Victimhood,” which concludes by railing against political tribalism.

She sees herself as a fearless, thoughtful leader who’s more concerned with crafting quality legislation than engaging in partisan blood sport. More in touch with real America, not the swamp. And her upbringing, she tells us, is a big part of that. “There’s really no other country in the world,” she once told a crowd in Phoenix, “where a little girl who grew up homeless living in a gas station could ever dream of serving in the United States Congress and run for the United States Senate.”

There it is. The building from the stories. White and blocky, with a triangular roof and rusted light fixtures atop a weathered metal pole — the converted gas station where Kyrsten Sinema grew up. The woman who would eventually become a U.S. senator lived a cinder block existence here off a county highway near DeFuniak Springs, a Florida panhandle town of about 6,000. And beside the old shack, across from a bristling cotton field, John Howard stands beside his red pickup truck.

John is a relative of Sinema’s stepfather, Andy. He’s lived in or around DeFuniak Springs his whole life, including when Sinema’s family lived in what’s now his personal workshop. “We’re all Republicans,” he tells me. “I’m 73, and the last Democrat I voted for was Jimmy Carter.” Sinema usually leaves that part out when she talks about this place, and she talks about it plenty. This, after all, is the cornerstone of the story she presents to the world about her humble beginnings. John offers me a look inside.

“This was the livin’ room,” he says, pointing at the corner to the left, nearest the door. “They had a wood-burnin’ stove over here.” It’s hard to glean much, he admits, because he’s remade the space. It’s now just one big room, which wasn’t the case when Sinema lived here. In the other front corner, he says, was Sinema’s brother’s room. Beside that, she and her sister shared a room. John says the next spot over was the kitchen. Some of the beige, diamond-patterned tile still remains, chopped irregularly at the edges and speckled with either white paint or drops of plaster. And in the far right corner, opposite from Sinema’s parents’ room, is where a bathroom once stood. The remnants are all there: A crack in the concrete foundation where the tub once rested; paint-spattered pipes jutting from the walls; a concrete-filled hole for the “commode,” as John calls it; and the dusty, fraying remains of a dark-brown floor made of little six-sided tiles.

Seeing the fossilized pipes and remembering Sinema’s claims, I put the question to John Howard: Did Sinema and her family have power and water? “Oh, yeah,” he says, nodding his head and smirking. He’s not alone in disputing her story. New York Times reporter Jonathan Martin called her account into question when he discovered records showing her parents paid utility bills while they lived there. Sinema has proven extremely sensitive and defensive about the facts in question. Her website features testimony from her mother, stepfather, aunt and childhood friend, all backing up her version. But maybe the precise details don’t matter much in this instance, as Martin observed. “What is not in doubt,” he wrote, “is that Ms. Sinema and her family were living in deeply trying circumstances, relying on assistance from the local Mormon church to which they belonged.” John doesn’t dispute that, though he does seem as puzzled by his stepniece as just about everyone else. He offers this parting thought: “I keep hoping,” he says, “she changes to an independent or a Republican.”

Down the road at Walton High School, old yearbooks tell of someone intelligent and ambitious. In her three years at Walton, Sinema participated in the French club, the math club, color guard and a service organization called the Anchor Club. She was the vice president of her sophomore class and signed her name with an asterisk over the i. She was the co-valedictorian in 1993. But no one around town seems to remember her, save for at one secluded spot.

At the DeFuniak Springs ward of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints — the ward where Sinema grew up — the congregation is in the middle of a funeral lunch, but an older man with a powder-white beard and a pinstriped gray suit still has plenty to say. He introduces himself as Sandy Jack Brown, “the nicest guy in town.” He was Sinema’s Sunday School teacher, and he promptly corrects me when I call her Kursten. “It’s KEER-sten,” he says. “She’s one of the smartest gals I’ve ever had (in class).” From there, darn near everyone at the table wants to chime in, though always with the preface that they knew her long ago and don’t remember many details now. From across the table, Wendell Mitchell points toward the far side of the room. “I remember her dad coming and baptizing her, right down the hallway there.” Patricia Pollard recalls her being a very lively kid, always running around with the others. “And you knew she was gonna be smart,” she adds. “No doubt about it.”

The women at the table seem very impressed with Sinema, regardless of her political affiliation. “She was just vibrant, and she always cared about other people,” Meta Ambrose recalls, adding how proud she is whenever she sees Sinema on TV. “To see how she grew up — she became what she is. She didn’t just talk about it; she actually did it.” But as a bearded fellow with a ball cap proclaiming “I love my country but I fear my government” looks on, Mitchell pipes up from across the table to echo John Howard. “We’re really rootin’ for her to stick to her guns,” he says.

Sinema thanked a handful of teachers and mentors in the acknowledgments of her BYU thesis. One was Karen Gerdes, a social work professor. Gerdes eventually left BYU for Arizona State, where Sinema earned her four graduate degrees. “Kyrsten is wicked smart and very charismatic,” Gerdes says via email. “I experienced her as a hardworking and dedicated student and later the same as a colleague.” Sinema’s early associates from her time in Arizona agree. They have their criticisms of her recent decisions, but they have no doubt that she’s very intelligent and very driven.

David Wells met her shortly after joining the faculty at ASU in 1998. He was aiding the formation of a group called the Arizona Advocacy Network, whose goal at the time was to bring progressive groups together for better dialogue and better results. Sinema, Wells recalls, wasn’t a part of any particular group, but she was energetic, passionate and smart. Back then, while running her first campaign for elected office, she was the sort who likened taking donations of any kind to “bribery.” She and Wells became leaders in the Alliance for Peaceful Justice, which opposed the George W. Bush administration’s wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. That’s how she met Elizabeth Venable, a fellow left-wing activist who would eventually volunteer for Sinema. “She’s intensely smart. She seemed very compassionate — especially with the social work background,” Venable says. “She seemed to be very principled.”

During those early activist years, Gerdes asked Sinema to speak to her community practice class. It was 2003, and Sinema had just lost her second election. Gerdes remembers she brought an interesting perspective to the class — which was about creating positive change in communities — because of her electoral failure. “The students loved it!” she says. The lecture focused on what it takes to succeed within a particular environment, and how to change course when necessary — a common topic in the social work world.

That lecture became practical for Sinema following her “bomb thrower” phase — though some of her fellow legislators don’t remember her speeches as particularly radical. “The role that she played there was much more than simply bomb throwing,” says Martin Quezada, an Arizona state senator who was a legislative staffer when Sinema was first elected. He admits that some people make a loud, obnoxious point for its own sake, but Sinema never did. “All of her big, impassioned speeches were on point.” But where Quezada and others saw an important contribution to the state’s political atmosphere, Sinema saw failure, and her activist friends noticed a new attitude taking shape.

“Her approach to power sort of changed along the way,” says Venable. “She started out as a Green Party candidate, which is hardly an approach leaning toward power. … I feel like that’s changed a lot.” Looking at her now, Gerdes can’t help but think back to that lecture about succeeding in a given setting. “My guess is Kyrsten understands better than any of us the environment she is in,” she says. “Not the national one or even the Arizona one, but the one in D.C., amongst the senators. (She knows) how to work within that particular system of people to be effective and productive.”

It’s precisely this inclination that’s allowed her to win every election since 2004 and the respect of some Republican colleagues — while also shrouding her political future in uncertainty.

When Mitt Romney became a senator in 2019, he didn’t know anything about Sinema. But since she was a fellow BYU grad and a fellow first-time senator from a neighboring state, he inquired with his friend Paul Ryan. The former Republican House Speaker served alongside Sinema throughout her three terms in the House of Representatives, and the way Romney remembers it, Ryan was a fan. He told Romney he had a lot of respect for her as someone who didn’t much care about partisan identity and focused instead on finding common ground. Romney has since seen it himself, along with the dazzling intellect that even her friends-turned-critics still find impressive.

“She obviously is a lot smarter than me because she graduated a lot faster than I did,” Romney says. “I mean, one of the smartest people in the building. And I don’t know that people recognize that, but she is a brilliant individual. … As we negotiate on various topics, she digs down deeper and gets an understanding of the details in a far more comprehensive way than most of the other people in the negotiations,” he adds. “She can advance the project we’re working on in part because she understands it better than most people.”

Sinema often cites John McCain as a role model who was unafraid to buck his party for the sake of the country, but Arizona-based Democratic political consultant Adam Kinsey cites another pair of role models among the ghosts of Arizona senators past: Carl Hayden and Barry Goldwater. Hayden was a Democrat, Republican Goldwater the godfather of modern conservatism. In the 1960s, the two teamed up to deliver Arizona the water infrastructure that makes the state habitable today. If there’s any cohesion to Sinema’s political philosophy as backed up by her decisions, it’s informed by situations like that: Renewing a spirit of cooperation that’s been largely dead since the mid-’90s. “I think she loves the idea of building bridges and bringing back the old way the Senate used to do things,” Kinsey says, “where there was a little more working across the aisle.”

Her willingness to work with senate Republicans has courted both admiration and skepticism. Cameron Adams, president of the ASU Young Democrats, was a fan when Sinema was elected in 2018. The then-freshman even campaigned for her. But now a senior, Adams is tired of Sinema’s posturing. Adams wants to see results — not just compromise for its own sake. “Even the more moderate members of our group are kind of done with her now,” she says. “She talked a lot on her campaign about working for everyone to get things done. … But she’s talking a lot and not getting anything done. There’s nothing, no results to justify her actions anymore.”

And even when her approach succeeds, it isn’t hard to find examples of its shortcomings. The $1 trillion infrastructure bill she championed passed the Senate with 69 yeas, including Minority Leader Mitch McConnell. But in the House, only eight Republicans signed on, and 26-year-old Republican Rep. Madison Cawthorn, dubbed by the New Republic as the “future of the Republican Party,” promised to “primary the hell out of ” any Republicans who supported it. Cawthorn’s approach fits the zeitgeist of the moment better than Sinema’s, both within the Republican Party and American politics. “If one could really poke a hole in (Sinema’s) whole argument about trying to move on to a post-partisan, bipartisan new era in the Senate, I think that’s it,” Kinsey, the Arizona political consultant, says.

In an era where politicians are more cultural warriors than diplomats, bipartisanship, the thinking goes, can only accomplish so much. “(Bipartisanship) sounds nice. It’s a nice kind of sales pitch,” Quezada says of Sinema’s approach. “But it is definitely ignoring the reality.”

Still, as a long-professed champion of a living wage for all citizens — despite voting down a Democrat-endorsed provision in a COVID-19 relief bill to raise the federal minimum wage to $15 per hour — Sinema has been working with Romney on a bipartisan proposal that would increase the federal minimum to $11 per hour. The fact that she and Romney share a cultural heritage makes cooperation especially easy. When a recent measure was brought to the Senate floor, Romney observed, “I think they’re kicking against the pricks,” a Biblical phrase familiar to Latter-day Saints. “Absolutely,” Sinema agreed. No one around them had any idea what they were talking about. “She knows the church hymns. She knows the church culture. She knows church doctrine. And so we have spoken about those common experiences,” Romney says.

Their friendship even resulted in a joint Halloween costume where he dressed up as Apple TV+ icon Ted Lasso and Sinema dressed up as his shady boss, Rebecca Welton — an idea, Romney says, that came from his staff and that Sinema agreed to. Her strategy makes tense negotiations easier, which is how she and Romney were able to propose their federal minimum wage increase bill and work together on the infrastructure bill. “She is very much driven by what she wants to accomplish for her state and for the country, regardless of the source,” Romney adds. “Whether it’s from a Republican or Democrat is less important to her than whether it’s right.”

Sen. Bill Cassidy, a Republican from Louisiana who worked with Sinema on a parental leave plan, admires her bipartisanship as a value in and of itself. She’s willing to put aside large chunks of what she wants in favor of the even larger chunk that she and her Republican colleagues have in common, which Cassidy says is a rare feat in today’s Washington. She always searches out the positive, even in negative situations, and is a “gifted” listener whose greatest virtue is finding common ground. “Normally, we pay those people and call them arbiters,” he says. “She does it for free.”

Ironically, Sinema has also garnered a reputation for silence and noncooperation. Many grassroots organizations in Arizona that used to work well with her now say they can’t get an audience. Sinema disputes that characterization, but there’s no doubt that that’s the perception. “She sort of has spurned the activists who helped get her into office,” says Wells.

Early in 2021, Quezada and the Democratic leadership in the Arizona Senate requested a private meeting with Sinema. At first, Quezada says, her team said no. Then they agreed, but only virtually, and they required all the questions in advance. “So it wasn’t a conversation,” Quezada says. “It was more like an interview where she knew all of the questions first.”

And it’s not just about specific policy positions; the questions about what she believes are bigger, Wells says. “I’m not sure what her core values are anymore.”

On a Wednesday last fall, Fred Hernandez sat in a pavilion at the entrance to the Apache Wash Trail, which Sinema ranked as her favorite Arizona trail in 2018. An Arizona Cardinals lanyard dangled from his pocket. Binoculars hung from his neck. He comes here darn near every day, he told me, to listen to music and take in the landscape. With gray hair and a matching mustache and goatee, he looks good for a 79-year-old man who once worked in the mining and drilling industries. But his body is betraying him.

He only has one kidney, and he takes a prescription called Rayaldee to combat the effects. He pays about $400 per month for it. He voted for Sinema in part because of her promise to reduce prescription drug prices. When I spoke to him, that promise had gone unfulfilled. “I’m having second thoughts,” he says. “She promised she was gonna do something about that, but she hasn’t yet, and I don’t think she’s going to.”

Folks like Hernandez — the voters whose daily lives are impacted most by Sinema’s decisions in Washington — will decide her political future. “I’m gonna have to really think before I vote for her again,” Hernandez told me. As pretty much every political observer will tell you, that could change in the two and a half years before she’s up for reelection. It could change plenty in three months or even three days, too. But for that to happen, Sinema will have to convince voters that her commitment to bipartisanship above any particular policy goals is a worthwhile pursuit — and that’s a hard, high-minded sell.

Pretty much right after I spoke with Hernandez, though, the wins for Sinema started piling up. Aside from the infrastructure bill, she also threw her support behind instituting a corporate minimum tax and lowering prescription drug prices after months of stalling. But her drug pricing proposal is classic Sinema: Rather than the $450 billion House Democrats hoped to save on prescription drug prices, her preferred plan will save $200 billion. Why did Sinema fight to seemingly do less? Is she committed to moderation for moderation’s sake? She’ll have to answer those questions for people like Hernandez, who accuse her of being in the pocket of the pharmaceutical lobby.

Everyone has offered hypotheses to explain the cognitive dissonance. Branko Marcetic, writing in Jacobin magazine, charges that she’s chosen to “abandon everything she ever believed in and do the bidding of the country’s rich and powerful.” Politico Magazine’s Hank Stephenson offers a compelling case for raw ambition as the fuel for Sinema’s confounding positions. And many — perhaps most formidably Ryan Grim at The Intercept — have made the case that she’s simply a sellout to corporate cash.

Yet for all the confusion and questions about what she wants, Sinema tries to make it clear — especially to her colleagues. “She definitely cuts a different profile,” Sen. Chris Murphy, a Connecticut Democrat, said in an interview with Politico. “But in dealing with her colleagues she’s not the enigma that the punditry wants to make her out to be.” Romney agrees. “I think her life and personality have given her the capacity not to be swayed by the crowd,” he says. “She grew up in a religion that was a minority. Her sexuality is a minority. Her gender is a minority in the Senate. Her style is different than the standard in the Senate. And she’s comfortable with walking her own path. … You know, we call that backbone, but I think it’s a degree of confidence in herself that is unusual and admirable.”

In short, her critics and some of her colleagues may not appreciate it, but Kyrsten Sinema trusts herself to do what’s best for everyone. That’s been clear for years, maybe all the way back to her BYU honors thesis, where the child prodigy observed, “Gifted individuals are a resource our society has only begun to tap.”

This story appears in the February issue of Deseret Magazine. Learn more about how to subscribe.

‘SNL’ wastes no time joking about Kyrsten Sinema and Joe Manchin as ‘Spider-Man’ villains

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Saturday Night Live” returned for its first episode of 2022 and wasted no time making jokes at Sen. Kyrsten Sinema’s expense.

Sinema as Spider-Man villain? Sort of.

The jokes, told in the show’s cold open, not surprisingly centered on Sinema’s refusal to support some of President Joe Biden’s policies. Just last week she said on the Senate floor that she would not back down on upholding the filibuster, likely spelling doom to Democratic voting-rights legislation.

It was a big day on the Sinema front. The Surge, online publication Slate’s “guide to the most important figures in politics this week,” ranked the Arizona senator No. 1.

“As Senate Democrats barreled toward a weekend vote on eliminating the filibuster in order to pass voting rights legislation, Sinema snuffed out whatever tiny hope remained,” Jim Newell wrote.

The headline was, “It was Kyrsten Sinema, in the Capitol, With the Dagger!” Love a Clue joke. And it was funnier than what “SNL” came up with.

The ‘SNL’ cold open revolved around Biden and ‘Spider-Man’ references

James Austin Johnson reprised his Biden portrayal on the show, hosted by “West Side Story” star Ariana DeBose, with musical guest Bleachers. Johnson played the president conducting a press conference. The bit revolved around a single joke in various permutations: If we want to stop the COVID-19 pandemic, people must stop seeing “Spider-Man: No Way Home.”

“Think about it,” he said. “When did ‘Spider-Man’ come out? Dec. 17. When did every person get omicron? The week after ‘Spider-Man’ came out.”

He kept going back to that, like when a reporter asked if he were suggesting that people not go to movies at all. “I didn’t say don’t go to the movies,” he said. “I said stop seeing ‘Spider-Man.’”

He himself had seen the first half-hour of “House of Gucci,” he said (he couldn’t get tickets to “No Way Home”).

“That’s more than enough movie for anyone.”

That wasn’t bad, actually.

Later a reporter asked, “Mr. President, isn’t the real reason you can’t pass the Voting Rights Act because members of your own party refuse to get rid of the filibuster?”

“It’s true,” Johnson’s Biden said. “Spider-Man has his villains. I have Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema. The only difference is if one of Spider-Man’s villains saw Kyrsten Sinema they’d be like, ‘Hey honey, that outfit’s a little much.’”

‘SNL’ let Sinema off pretty easy, all things considered

It’s not the first time Sinema’s wardrobe has been the subject of discussion. Some people love her style; some do not. Either way, it has definitely brought her attention — and it did Saturday night.

That was it for Sinema on Saturday’s show — she got off pretty easy, all things considered. The sketch continued with Pete Davidson showing up as a multiverse version of Biden “from the real universe.”

Maybe in that one the cold open was funny, because it wasn’t in this one.

Reach Goodykoontz at bill.goodykoontz@arizonarepublic.com. Facebook: facebook.com/GoodyOnFilm. Twitter: @goodyk. Subscribe to the weekly movies newsletter.

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Police: Kyrsten Sinema intentionally went into a bathroom to dodge activists filming her at ASU

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U.S. Sen. Kyrsten Sinema speaks during a United States Senate Committee on Finance hearing on Oct. 19, 2021. Photo by Rod Lamkey | Pool/Getty Images

On the morning of Oct. 3, Sen. Kyrsten Sinema gave her students in an advanced fundraising class at Arizona State University a break. She stepped out of the classroom to go move her car to another location near the downtown Phoenix campus, but instead found a group of four activists waiting to talk to her.

As the four organizers recorded the confrontation on their phone, Sinema didn’t stop to listen to the activists, some of whom had shown up to her Phoenix office months earlier to ask to meet with her. Sinema ignored them and, instead of going to move her car as planned, she made her way to a nearby bathroom.

The move was intentional and calculated: Sinema told ASU police she intentionally went into the bathroom because she believed that recording someone inside a bathroom is a crime, Sgt. Katie Fuchtman wrote in a police report the Arizona Mirror obtained under the state’s public records law. The senator’s comments in it have not been reported on before now.

“Sinema stated this was not her first time being approached in this way and that is why she entered the bathroom, knowing it was illegal for someone to record another person inside the bathroom,” Fuchtman wrote.

One of the activists, whose identity police couldn’t confirm, is an organizer with Living United for Change Arizona, a community organization that has mobilized working class and majority-Latino neighborhoods to vote. She told Sinema her name is Blanca in the video she filmed at the entrance of the bathroom. The video went viral. Some condemned the LUCHA organizers for recording the Democratic U.S. senator inside the bathroom. Others claimed Blanca should be deported.

After the incident, Sinema told police officers that she believed the activists had committed a crime by breaking a state law that barrs surreptitious filming — the law she said prompted her to seek refuge in the bathroom. That law applies in cases where the victim is filmed while “urinating, defecating, dressing, undressing, nude” or engaged in a sexual act.

After an investigation, ASU police said they disagreed with Sinema. The agency announced on Oct. 20 that it recommended Maricopa County Attorney’s Office prosecutors charge four people with misdemeanors, but not for the felony of recording a person in a bathroom that Sinema told officers the activists committed and should be “held accountable” for.

But prosecutors returned the investigation back to police and requested more information on the case. ASU police are still investigating the case, ASU PD spokesman Adam Wolfe said on Jan. 11.

Three months after the incident, Sinema still believes the activists committed a crime, her office told the Mirror in an email.

If police or prosecutors were to agree with Sinema, Blanca, who has no immigration status, could face deportation.

The Mirror knows Blanca’s identity, but is not disclosing her full name because she fears for her safety.

An arrest or charge could result in end DACA privileges

Standing at the bathroom entrance, Blanca spoke to Sinema. Blanca talked about being brought to the country when she was 3. How her grandparents were deported in 2010 during the Senate Bill 1070 years in Arizona. How she was unable to attend her grandfather’s funeral because she can’t leave the country and be allowed back in. Why a pathway to citizenship was crucial to include in the Build Back Better proposal.

“There’s millions of undocumented people just like me who share the same story. Or even worse things that happen to them because of SB1070 and because of anti-immigrant legislation, and this is the opportunity to pass it right now and we need you to.

“We need to hold you accountable to what you told us you were going to pass when we knocked on doors for you. It’s not right,” Blanca said.

🔴BREAKING: Blanca, an AZ immigrant youth confronts @SenatorSinema inside her classroom, where she teaches @ ASU. “in 2010 both my grandparents got deported bc of SB1070…my grandfather passed away 2 wks ago & I wasn’t able to go to Mexico bc there is no pathway to citizenship.” pic.twitter.com/JDZYY2fOD2 — LUCHA Arizona (@LUCHA_AZ) October 3, 2021

Blanca has temporary deferral from deportation and a two-year work permit through the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program. Those with DACA, also known as dreamers, are a low priority for deportation. But that protection could end with an arrest for a crime, even if the case is later dismissed.

“One of the ways to quickly lose DACA is to get arrested for any crime,” said Ruben Reyes, an immigration attorney. “Even without a conviction, simply the arrest record… may complicate the renewal case for DACA. That would open you up to removal by the government.”

Reyes explained that those who benefit from DACA, an Obama-era program implemented in 2012, are subject to the discretion of federal immigration officials.

“When you apply for DACA, you can have a misdemeanor on your record and still get DACA, but there is discretion that the government is going to use in deciding on whether or not you deserve it,” he said. “So, if that misdemeanor happened a long time ago… it’d be easy to argue they made the mistake, they’ve learned their lesson, and they’ve been productive members of society since then. It’s very different when they are actively engaging in conduct that leads to their arrest.”

Reyes said dreamers who engage in activism face significant risks because their future in the United States is in the hands of federal immigration agencies.

For over a decade, dreamers and other undocumented immigrants have “come out of the shadows” that their parents felt safer in and stepped into the public sphere, meeting with lawmakers in Phoenix and Washington, D.C, and, sometimes, protesting and engaging in civil disobedience to push elected leaders to reform immigration laws and provide them and their families permanence in the country.

Sinema spokesman John LaBombard said his boss told law enforcement she doesn’t want the activists to face “immigration-related consequences.”

“She expressed to law enforcement that she hopes no students would face immigration-related consequences as a result of this activity,” LaBombard said in an email.

The police report doesn’t say whether Sinema feared the activists would face immigration consequences, though Fuchtman did write that Sinema said she didn’t want the activists to have “their lives ruined.” However, she also told officers they need to be “held accountable” for their alleged crimes.

“Sinema cares about the students and does not want their lives ruined for a horrible mistake they made but agrees she wants them held accountable,” Fuchtman wrote in the report.

LaBombard didn’t respond to a question on what Sinema considers accountability in the context of a law enforcement investigation where she believes a felony was committed.

Reyes, the immigration attorney, said he isn’t convinced by Sinema’s position.

“I think she wants to be tough on crime, but also soft on immigrants — and to some extent, she’s not really convincing anyone,” he said. “In this particular issue, this is I think a consequence of making promises you didn’t keep to people who are desperate for a solution.”

Last year, a coalition of community groups in Arizona came together to push Sinema to commit to passing landmark immigration and election reform legislation by ending the Senate filibuster rule. The groups have felt ignored by their senator.

LUCHA is part of that coalition. The night before activists confronted Sinema outside the ASU classroom, LUCHA also protested outside a Phoenix fundraiser Sinema was hosting.

Alejandra Gomez and Tomas Robles, co-directors of LUCHA, said in an October statement following the backlash on the viral video that Sinema’s constituents have been “been ignored, dismissed, and antagonized.”

ASU police initially sought multiple felony charges

Police initially sought charges against three of the activists who entered the bathroom, with five counts for the felony for unlawful recording, which could result in over two years in prison, according to the police report.

ASU police also looked into charging the activists with four misdemeanor charges including criminal trespassing, harassment by communication, disorderly conduct and interference with the use of educational property. Those misdemeanors each carry sentences of up to four to six months in jail.

Besides Sinema, police identified four other victims, all women students in Sinema’s class who were in the bathroom at the time the confrontation happened. One told police she didn’t want to be part of what was happening, but felt forced to be a part of the incident. Another one told police she believed the activists were harassing Sinema, and she was shocked they did so inside a bathroom. Another student told police she felt violated for being filmed in the bathroom and that the video was posted online.

Sinema told police she felt intimidated and was scared for her class, according to the police report. She was escorted to her vehicle once the class ended.

ASU police let activist into the building where Sinema was teaching

Sinema’s class was taught on a Sunday morning on the second floor of the University Center at the downtown Phoenix campus. But the university building was not open to all students and those associated with the university that day: Only those students taking Sinema’s class could use their ASU ID cards to access the building. Some of the activists were ASU students; they tried scanning their cards to open the building, but failed, according to the police report.

ASU police used card scan logs to identify two of the activists as Arianna Reyes and Alexis Delgado Garcia.

Reyes used her ASU ID card to get into the neighboring Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication building, and asked a patrol officer to let her into the University Center. She told him she had left her laptop in the lobby. He opened the doors of the University Center for her, and returned to his post at the Cronkite building, according to the police report.

In the police report, officers said it’s unclear how one of the activists got into the University Center building. But she let Delgado Garcia and Blanca into the building. They met Reyes in the lobby, according to the police report.

The police found that the activists were in the building for less than 20 minutes.

Later that afternoon, ASU police saw several people who they believed were the activists involved in the morning incident walking near the downtown campus. They detained two women, including ASU student Sophia Marjanovic. She had stood in front of Sinema’s stall during the morning protest.

Marjanovic told Sinema she was a victim of human trafficking. On social media, Marjanovic said she identifies as a Native woman and “fell into human trafficking due to not having worker protections in the gig economy.” That’s why she wanted to tell Sinema to pass the Build Back Better Act, which – among many reforms on climate change, health care, education and housing – would strengthen the rights of workers trying to organize a union.

According to the report, ASU police detective Rustin Standage recommended MCAO charge three people – Marjanovic, Reyes and Delgado – with two misdemeanors for disorderly conduct and interference or disruption of an education institution. Each offense is considered a class 1 misdemeanor and could carry a sentence of about six months in jail.

It is unclear who the fourth person ASU police referred for charges was. Wolfe, the ASU police spokesman, did not clarify that discrepancy. He said the previous charges from October are no longer valid.

“Since this case is back under investigation, any prior recommended charges submitted to the MCAO are no longer valid. Meaning no charges will be pursued against any individuals until the current investigation is complete, and a new recommendation is submitted,” Wolfe said in a Jan. 12 email.

UPDATE: This story was updated to include more information that ASU police sent after publication.

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