Kyrsten Sinema stands up for America’s most embattled class, the single-digit million-dollar earners

It’s almost impossible to overstate what a ridiculous and destructive person Arizona’s senior senator is:

Joe Biden campaigned on a package of well-crafted reforms to restore fairness to the tax code, only to watch his handiwork eaten alive by a handful of centrist Democrats who are hypersensitive to any change that would even slightly inconvenience the rich. Perhaps the most tragicomic encapsulation of this process is contained in a line in today’s Washington Post: “To meet the demands of Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.), the White House agreed to drop a proposed 3 percent tax on taxpayers earning over $5 million, instead agreeing to target the higher tax to those earning more than $10 million.”

[…]

Even though the $400,000-a-year line was arrived at through contentious negotiations with Republicans, Democrats eventually embraced it as their new line. Biden campaigned on a promise that nobody earning below $400,000 a year would pay a dime in higher taxes. Since earning $400,000 a year would put you in the top one percent of the income distribution, this put Biden on presumably safe political ground, as he could promise 99 percent of the taxpayers his plan would not touch them at all.

However, centrist Democrats have balked at these proposals, and none has been more difficult to placate than Sinema. The Arizona senator blew up even the watered-down version of Biden’s plan that had managed to survive intense lobbying. It was a concession to Sinema that the White House scrapped its plans and replaced them with an income surtax on the ultrarich.

And now, Sinema reportedly told the administration that raising taxes — by a mere 3 percentage points! — on households earning more than $5 million is too onerous. Sinema would only accept a tax on the real rich people who earn $10 million a year or more, not the working schlubs pulling down a mere $8 or $9 million a year.

Imagine this being how you choose to use the de facto veto you have over legislation as a Democratic senator. There’s certainly no political rationale for this, and there’s nothing that can reasonably be called a policy rationale. She just apparently really likes currying favor with rich people, and is willing to do anything she can to do it.