Kentucky’s Mitch McConnell to host Arizona Sen. Kyrsten Sinema for bipartisanship lecture – By Morgan Watkins (Louisville Courier Journal) / Sept 23, 2022
Arizona Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, a Democrat who has faced criticism within her party for sometimes helping Republicans stymie progressive legislation, will join Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell at the University of Louisville on Monday morning to give a lecture on bipartisanship.
The 10 a.m. event — 7 a.m. Arizona time — is hosted by the McConnell Center, which Kentucky’s longtime Republican leader founded over 30 years along with university officials. It isn’t open to the public, but people can watch her speech live on YouTube.
Sinema and West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin often have been thorns in the side of many of their fellow Democrats since their party won a razor-thin majority in the Senate in early 2021. That’s largely because their votes have been crucial to determining the fate of some of Democrats’ highest priority legislation — and sometimes they’ve withheld that needed support.
Sinema and Manchin’s steadfast refusal to get rid of the filibuster, a 60-vote threshold the Senate must meet to advance most bills, has had especially high consequences. It has allowed the McConnell-led Senate Republicans to block major Democratic proposals, such as a bill that would’ve made significant changes to federal elections and expanded access to voting.
