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In mid-January, EMILY’s List publicly threatened to dump Arizona Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, a Democrat, for her refusal to support amendments to the filibuster needed to pass voting rights legislation. The national news media, which covered the decision by EMILY’s List, somehow missed the most critical piece of the story: A coalition of small and relatively under-funded Arizona advocacy organizations successfully pushed EMILY’s List–one of the largest PACs in the Democratic Party universe, and the single largest funding platform for pro-choice Democratic women candidates–to drop Sinema.
Donors should take note.
EMILY’s List was Sinema’s single largest donor in 2018 and has maintained its support throughout the filibuster fight. But after a relentless, focused campaign run by grassroots organizations made up of Sinema’s own constituents, EMILY’s List finally presented her with an ultimatum: Support changes in the filibuster to allow passage of voting rights legislation, or lose support from EMILY’s List. Sinema has nonetheless refused to support filibuster reform, even to pass legislation she has co-sponsored.
Pressure from Arizona
While national news outlets were abuzz with the Sinema/EMILY’s list split, most appeared to have missed the opening act: a widely circulated open letter to EMILY’s List coordinated by the Arizona Coalition to End the Filibuster galvanized public pressure against the PAC. The letter, signed by more than 70 politically active Arizona Democratic women and elected officials, called on EMILY’s List to step up. Kai Newkirk, one of the organizers behind the effort, told Blue Tent that once the letter went public, EMILY’s List’s donors immediately jumped on the bandwagon. It took just four days, over a holiday weekend, for EMILY’s List to change its position on Sinema. “It was quick, but it should have been quicker,” said Newkirk, the founder of For All, a center for nonviolent organizing and action and a co-founder of the Arizona Coalition to End the Filibuster. Newkirk noted that the coalition was on the verge of launching a petition targeting EMILY’s Lists’ donors when the organization announced its change of heart.
The Coalition didn’t stop with EMILY’s List. It has also issued another open letter, this one to the Human Rights Campaign, the largest and probably wealthiest organization claiming to represent the rights of the country’s LGBTQ+ communities. HRC, like EMILY’s List, depends heavily on wealthy individuals and corporate donors to fund its work. The coalition has not yet shared news of any response from HRC, but say they are considering a public call to HRC’s donors to withhold funding if the organization does not commit to withdraw support from Sinema until she reverses her position on the filibuster. Notably, HRC-Arizona was asked, and refused to sign, an earlier coalition letter urging Sen. Sinema to support amending the filibuster to allow passage of the Equality Act, federal legislation to protect the rights of LGBTQ+ communities that Sinema has co-sponsored and that HRC itself claims to strongly support.
The Arizona Coalition to End the Filibuster is composed of more than 30 organizations, most of them small, and some of them so informal they haven’t filed the paperwork to achieve legal recognition. The budgets of these groups added together equal a fraction of the bottom line of either EMILY’s List or HRC. But the story of how these Davids banded together to make the EMILY’s List Goliath back down—and whether or not they’re able to score a similar victory with HRC—offers small and mid-sized progressive donors a case study of the problem with corporate-funded “progressive” organizations and a view on where the real action is on fighting for progressive values in Arizona.
Close corporate ties
The average observer would have good reason to believe that, at least on paper, supporting filibuster reform would be a simple decision for both EMILY’s List and the Human Rights Campaign. Using the filibuster in its current form, Senate Republicans can kill any and all progressive or human-rights-focused legislation that directly and indirectly affects LGBTQ+ equality and abortion rights alike.
Both organizations, like Sinema herself, however, have close ties to and receive funds from entities that may well benefit from use of the filibuster to, for example, easily swat down an increase in the minimum wage or achieve other progressive goals. The Corporate Partners page on HRC’s website proudly proclaims that Amazon, Apple, Lyft and financial industry giants like Morgan Stanley are donors, all of whom have, for example, opposed federal legislation to increase the minimum wage. EMILY’s List is similarly connected to donors that may also benefit from filibuster-enabled congressional deadlock on critical reforms. With a lot of money on the line, it’s perhaps unsurprising that EMILY’s List, ostensibly a single-issue organization dedicated to reproductive rights, published Sinema’s June 2021 Washington Post op-ed defending the filibuster on its website (a post that was removed the same day the Arizona Coalition’s open letter was published). And given the millions of dollars involved, not to mention the HRC staff who used to work for Sinema, is it really that shocking that HRC would rather refrain from taking a stand than to push for reforming the rules standing in the way of passing the federal Equality Act?
While groups like EMILY’s List and HRC may struggle to decide which promises to keep—to the small donors who believe they are advocating for a cause, or to the wealthy hands that feed them—the 30+ organizations that make up the Arizona Coalition to End the Filibuster are small, diverse, and collectively work on a wide range of issues. For example, one of the larger coalition signatories to the HRC letter, Poder Latinx, works in three states to build the power of Latinx communities and is still small enough to be fiscally sponsored by Tides Advocacy.
Poder Latinx Arizona State Director Josué Andonaegui said he signed the HRC letter on behalf of his organization because “we work through the lens of intersectionality”—in other words, LGBTQ+ and Latinx identities are obviously not mutually exclusive. Other signatories include local Arizona Indivisible groups, the Arizona Students’ Association, and tiny, more informal LGBTQ+ supporting organizations like Equality Squad and Arizona Trans Alliance.
A “break of trust”
The fact that the coalition had to push so hard to get EMILY’s List to finally break with Sinema on the filibuster, and that HRC hasn’t yet taken a stand, has led to “a break of trust” with the national organizations, said Karina Ruiz De Diaz, executive director of the Arizona Dream Act Coalition. ADAC, a signatory on the HRC letter, fights for the rights of immigrants in Arizona, including immigrants’ access to higher education. “When moments like this happen, where the moment calls for more bold action, really action that is going to get us to the finish line, and they decide to just stay on the sidelines, it helps us reevaluate who was on our side, right?”
What does this mean for the donor who wants their investment to make an impact on LGBTQ+ rights? “I would much rather deal with people who have no money but a passion for change than people who are kind of well-paid and see it as a career opportunity,” said Erica Keppler, an organizer with Arizona TransAlliance. “My perception of HRC is that they’ve become more of a money machine. They’ve become established in their business model within the nonprofit industrial complex.”
As for EMILY’s List, the challenge over its support for Sinema and the filibuster is “a great opportunity for [the organization] to change their ways and to show us that their true interest is not to protect the corporate neoliberal status quo,” said Eva Putzova, the founder of Catch Fire Movement, a progressive movement-building organization. Putzova, who helped coordinate the EMILY’s List letter, is a former Flagstaff City Council member and candidate for Congress. In the meantime, she said, “we invite donors to consider organizations that may be smaller,” but that are actually committed to democratic ideals.
Newkirk, speaking specifically of the current fight against Sinema’s filibuster obstruction, could easily have been sounding a broader warning for Democratic candidates and affiliated organizations alike—as well as a call for small and mid-sized donors to take special heed of what their money is supporting.
“We’re at a point where Democrats, voters and activists across the country need to call the question with any institution or elected official within the world of Democratic Party politics that is continuing on by their active support or their silence to enable Sinema’s obstruction,” he said.
“That goes for any organization [and] any elected official, and the costs are only going to grow for those who hold off on that because they’re going to stand out more and more and be more and more isolated.”