Kirsten Gillibrand wordles her way to cringe-town, baby!!

Time to Log Off is a weekly series documenting the many ways our political figures show their whole asses online.

Senate Democrats are down bad. Sure they’re technically in the majority (for now), but what good is having 50-plus-1 votes if you can’t actually do anything with them? I mean, truly, what’s a Democratic senator to do in the face of lockstep Republican obstruction and self-aggrandizing obstinance from members of their own party?

Well, if you’re New York Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, you belatedly hop on the latest internet fad and tweet out some cringy bullshit, folks!!

First, the backstory: On Wednesday evening, Senate Democrats set up a doomed-to-fail effort designed to force Republicans to go on the record blocking the John Lewis Voting Rights Act. Then, when that measure failed to achieve the 60-vote threshold to overcome a filibuster threat, Democrats forced a vote to nix a motion to change the Senate rules in this single instance to allow for a simple majority vote on the voting rights bill. All Republicans (alongside diet-Republicans Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema) opposed that one too.

Why this was all necessary is anyone’s guess, given Republicans made little secret that they weren’t going to help Democrats pass the bill, and both Manchin and Sinema have essentially staked their national reputations on being Republican lapdogs in this instance. Anyone who says they didn’t know how the evening was going to end is either lying or astronomically stupid.

Nevertheless, so much of politics is finding new and exciting ways to convince people you aren’t simply going through the motions — which brings us to Gillibrand, who just hours before Wednesday’s vote, tweeted the following:

Wordle, you see, is a popular internet word game that has already entered the “mildly annoying to everyone on your TL” phase of its viral lifespan. And “sixty votes” is the hurdle needed to overcome the filibuster — or eliminate it altogether — to ensure a bill can pass the Senate. Why Gillibrand is making her comms team mash these two unrelated items together, well, I couldn’t tell you. Does she think the sort of people who follow a United States senator on Twitter wouldn’t already be aware of the Democrats’ debate over filibuster reform? Is she under the assumption that those same people wouldn’t know she already came out very publicly in favor of tweaking the Senate rules two months ago? Who does she think this tweet is for, exactly?

Consider instead if Gillibrand, even if she’d been absolutely committed to forcing her comms team to come up with a quirky graphic about Senate rules, had simply sent it to Manchin and Sinema, directly. They’re the ones who need reminding, not everyone else’s timeline which was already riddled with other annoying Wordle memes.

This is posturing at its worst: rehashing your already-public position rather than actually lobbying the people in a position to make the change you want. A cute “wordle of wisdom” might not be acutely harmful, but it sure isn’t helpful either. And for the energy expended pulling this whole thing together, we’d probably all be better suited if in this instance Kirsten had just logged off.