Bernie Sanders has already had quite the October. He started it by insisting that the Senate should be able to pass bills with just 48 votes out of 100. Now, per Axios, he is refusing to condemn activists who followed one of his Senate colleagues into a bathroom and filmed her:
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) withheld support for a joint statement condemning last weekend’s protests against Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.) because it also wouldn’t include a rebuke of her political views, Axios has learned.
Axios suggests that this “matters” because “the move is emblematic of the hostility between the progressive and moderate members, who have been sparring over the cost and scope of President Biden’s agenda.” I don’t think that’s quite right, though. It “matters” because it’s exposing Bernie for who he really is. And who he really is, apparently, is a Leninist.
Earlier today, Sanders said that “two people do not have the right to sabotage what 48 want and what the President of the United States wants.” Which is about as wrongheaded a statement as it’s possible to imagine. First, it’s not “two people” who are holding up the 48. It’s 52 people. And second, it doesn’t matter in the slightest “what the President of the United States wants,” because the President of the United States does not get a vote in Congress.
Bernie knows this, of course, because he’s been in that Congress for 30 years. He just doesn’t care. He wants what he wants, and that’s about as far it goes.