Former Senator Kyrsten Sinema takes a well-deserved victory lap.

Welcome back to Forgotten Fact Checks. This week, we look at Democrats’ flip-flopping on the use of the Senate filibuster, and cover more media misses.

Sinema’s Well-Deserved Victory Lap

Former Senator Kyrsten Sinema took a well-deserved victory lap over the weekend after many of the same Democrats who attacked her for supporting the Senate filibuster suddenly changed their tune.

Sinema and former Senator Joe Manchin (D., W.Va.) voted against a measure to end the 60-vote threshold in the Senate in 2022, splitting with the rest of their party. At the time, Democrats hoped to bypass the filibuster to pass legislation codifying Roe v. Wade. Their decision to preserve the filibuster led to widespread outrage among fellow Democrats.

Last week, many of those same Democrats suddenly embraced the 60-vote threshold as a means to block a Republican-backed spending bill, which ultimately passed after Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and nine members of his caucus decided that passage was preferable to a government shutdown.

Sinema shared an article about Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez criticizing Schumer for saying he would vote for the CR.

“Change of heart on the filibuster, I see!” Sinema wrote.

Ocasio-Cortez, for her part, argued she was not being hypocritical.

“Still no,” she replied. “In fact, the same Dems who argue to keep the filibuster ‘for when we need it’ do not, in fact, use it when we need it. It’s only used to block Dem policies. Never to block harmful GOP ones. Could have proved us wrong. Instead they proved the point.”

But Sinema wasn’t having it.

“Literally zero Senate Democrats support the filibuster. 38 voted to filibuster the continuing resolution yesterday. 8 who previously voted to eliminate the filibuster (1/19/22) did not filibuster. 1 who previously campaigned against the filibuster did not filibuster.”

Sinema also took aim at progressive Representatives Ro Khanna and Pramila Jayapal.

She shared a screenshot of a column Khanna wrote for the Washington Post in 2021 arguing against the filibuster. Her post was made in response to Khanna saying that Schumer sold the party out by not filibustering the CR.

She also slammed Jayapal for demanding the Senate vote “no” on cloture and on final passage of the CR.

In fact, Sinema shared an entire spreadsheet offering a look at the senators who voted to abolish the filibuster but then voted to filibuster the CR:

Sinema can be forgiven for her meticulous scorekeeping; she was attacked relentlessly by members of her own party and their progressive allies in the press for standing in the way of their short-term thinking.

“How Dumb Does Kyrsten Sinema Think We Are?” the New Republic asked at the time, accusing her of offering an “illegible defense” of the filibuster.

The Nation claimed that “Sinema’s Position on the Filibuster Echoes Goldwater’s Case Against Civil Rights.”

Meanwhile, Vox predicted that the Democrats’ “failure on filibuster reform will haunt them,” while NPR tracked Sinema’s political evolution from “progressive to filibuster defender.”

Sinema was also hit by attack ads from Just Democracy at the time to the tune of $1.2 million. “As the GOP tries to silence our voices, she’s just standing by, supporting a Jim Crow relic instead,” the narrator says in the ad. “You’re refusing to stand with us, Sen. Sinema. Why should we stand with you?” 

Meanwhile, then-Washington Post columnist Greg Sargent accused Sinema of “misleading her constituents” on the issue.

Her “misleading” comments? “When you have a place that’s broken and not working, and many would say that’s the Senate today, I don’t think the solution is to erode the rules,” she said in an interview after two constituent events in Phoenix. “I think the solution is for senators to change their behavior and begin to work together, which is what the country wants us to do.”

Sargent, now a writer for the New Republic, had this to say on Democrats supporting the CR: “Again, Marco Rubio signaled straight out on Twitter that the administration is going to simply ignore Congressional spending directives that Trump and Musk don’t like. So voting for this is a vote to emasculate yourselves, Democrats. It doesn’t matter that it’s politically hard to hold the line. You are expected to do hard things when the moment demands it. This is one of those moments.”

Headline Fail of the Week

The New York Times was widely panned on social media on Sunday for an opinion column titled, “We Were Badly Misled About the Event That Changed Our Lives.”

In fact, former NR writer Kyle Smith suggested the title, which refers to the Covid-19 pandemic, should be amended to read, “We Badly Misled You About the Event That Changed Our Lives.”

The column, authored by Times columnist and Princeton sociology professor Zeynep Tufekci, is about five years too late in acknowledging that the scientific community “badly misled” the public on the Covid lab-leak theory.

But it’s worth noting that the Times itself had a major role in suppressing the lab-leak theory, with its science writer at the time dismissing the idea as “racist.”

Media Misses

• MSNBC host Lawrence O’Donnell is so exhausted from covering just 50 days of Trump’s term that he is taking a week off. “I know you’ve pledged to cover and be here for the first hundred days of the Trump presidency. I hope you noticed that I did not make that same pledge,” O’Donnell told MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow.  “This is day 52. I thought it was day 92. It turns out it’s day 52, Rachel, and I’m exhausted at day 52, and so I’m going to take next week off. And I’m telling you that now because I know you don’t like it when I just drift away. I’m just taking next week off, then I can come back and go with you all the way to the hundred days.”

• Former CNN anchor Don Lemon was once again insulting Trump supporters over the weekend, this time taking aim specifically at black MAGA voters. “I don’t think you can be Black and be a rational MAGA person; I think you can be Black and be a Republican,” Lemon told Bill Maher. He said Trump’s supporters are “really f***ing racist.” When Maher suggested that black Trump supporters would find his comments “very insulting,” Lemon replied, “Well, the truth is often insulting.”

• Former Obama admin official Brandon Friedman offered this word of advice to blue-state governors over on Bluesky: “I am begging blue state governors to have lunch this week with your adjutant general of the National Guard. Cannot stress enough how important this relationship is going to be in the near future.”