I wasn’t a fan of Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-AZ) when she ran for Senate. I was fearful that she was going to be too far left based on her history.

She’s still obviously to my left politically, but I have to say I’ve been gratified that she’s turned out to have some principles and I’ve been impressed with how she’s expressed herself when she’s spoken out formally about those principles.

Today, she issued a statement in response to the radical leftists who stalked her over the weekend at a hotel where she was having a fundraiser and at Arizona State University where she was teaching a class. As we reported, they even followed her into the bathroom and filmed her and other women in there, and then followed her back to her classroom. This raised a lot of questions about how they were able to get into the building and whether they committed a crime in filming her and other women in the bathroom, as we noted. One of the people involved even posted a manic rant claiming to be justified in her actions.

Sinema gave the perfect response with her statement.

Statement Following Events at ASU on Sunday pic.twitter.com/4d3BF9P8CO

— Kyrsten Sinema (@SenatorSinema) October 4, 2021

“Yesterday, several individuals disrupted my class at Arizona State University,” Sinema said. “After deceptively entering a locked, secure building, these individuals filmed and publicly posted videos of my students without their permission — including footage of myself and my students using a restroom,” she said, echoing some of the language of the statute forbidding filming in a bathroom “without consent.”

“In Arizona,” Sinema continued, “We love the First Amendment. We know that it is vital to our democracy that constituents can freely petition, protest or criticize my policy positions or decisions. The activist group that engaged in yesterday’s behavior is one that both my team and I have met with several times since I was elected to the Senate and I will continue engaging with Arizonans with diverse viewpoints to help inform my work for Arizona.

“Yesterday’s behavior was not legitimate protest,” Sinema declared, chastising the organization for making its members do such a thing. “It is unacceptable for activist organizations to instruct their members to jeopardize themselves by engaging in unlawful activities such as gaining entry to closed university buildings, disrupting learning environments, and filming students in a restroom.”

“In the 19 years I have been teaching at ASU, I have been committed to creating a safe and intellectually challenging environment for my students. Yesterday, that environment was breached. My students were unfairly and unlawfully victimized. This is wholly inappropriate.”

“It is the duty of elected leaders to avoid fostering an environment in which honestly-held policy disagreements serve as a basis for vitriol — raising the temperature in political rhetoric and creating a permission structure for unacceptable behavior.”

Exactly. The problem here is not just the radical leftists behind this action itself, but the Democratic leaders who are not only not calling this out but acting as though this is acceptable behavior. Many on the left came out not in support of Sinema’s right to privacy but in support of the crazy activists who followed her into the bathroom. This needs to be condemned forcefully and vigorously — but you know that it won’t be.

Sinema sounds like she’s laying out the legal case for pursuing action here. Let’s hope that’s the case, because that will be a strong message not to engage in such conduct again. They may have committed a crime by filming people without their consent in the bathroom, as I previously said. She also lays out something else that wasn’t clear before — saying that they had deceptively gotten into the locked building which could also be a trespass charge potentially. She also suggests that they’re liars, as well, since they claimed they pursued her into the bathroom because she wasn’t responding to them, but she said she has met with them in the past.

This needs to stop before it gets even crazier and someone gets hurt.