For over a year, Arizona Democratic senator Mark Kelly, who is up for reelection in 2022, has avoided taking a position on abolishing the Senate’s 60-vote threshold for legislation.
Just yesterday, Kelly dodged when asked about the filibuster.
Supporting the nuclear option — effectively scrapping the 60-vote rule with a simple-majority vote — would put Kelly at odds with Arizona’s senior Democratic senator Kyrsten Sinema, who has bucked party leaders and the Left as she consistently argued that the 60-vote rule protects the country from swinging from one extreme to the other. But opposing the nuclear option would earn Kelly the ire of the Left and a possible primary challenger.
By choosing to hold a doomed vote on changing the rules, Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer finally forced Kelly to pick a side, and Kelly decided to side with Schumer and the Left over Arizona’s senior senator.
“I’ve considered what rules changes would mean not just today, but years down the road, for both parties and all Arizonans,” Kelly said in a statement on Wednesday. “If campaign finance and voting rights reforms are blocked again this week, I will support the proposed changes to pass them with a majority vote.”
The senator’s apparent hope that maybe Democratic leadership would spare him from having to take a difficult vote was dashed last night. Schumer has now made Kelly’s reelection more difficult in Arizona — a state that likes mavericks, and where Democrats were already facing considerable headwinds in 2022.