After the vote was over, Mitt Romney went over to Sinema and told her, “I respect your strength and character. Congratulations,” he recalled minutes later, and she replied, “Thank you.” The Republican senator, who voted twice to impeach Donald Trump, told Intelligencer that Sinema’s vote “was an act of an extraordinary political courage, the likes of which I have not seen in my political career.”

In Sinema’s view the key threat facing the country is “the underlying disease of division,” as she put it during a defense she offered of the Senate floor last week, and she argued for a “long-term approach as serious as the problems we seek to solve – one that prioritizes listening and understanding.” The smirk on Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton’s face was nearly a mile wide as he cheerily mingled with other Republicans after her remarks. Not only had she derailed the Democratic push to reform Senate rules to pass voting-rights legislation but did so only minutes before Joe Biden arrived on Capitol Hill to lobby on the issue…

“I don’t know how she wins a Democratic primary for Senate,” Andres Cano, a Democratic state representative Tucson from told Intelligencer. “There comes a point where we have to question whose interests that Senator Sinema will pay attention to” after noting her lack of town hall meetings and non-responsiveness to concerns about voting rights raised by constituents. In his view, her opposition to voting rights and other progressive priorities was a “direct affront” to the grassroots effort that made Sinema Arizona’s first Democratic senator in decades.