Arizona Sen. Kyrsten Sinema's exit from the Democratic Party means one less Democrat in the Senate, which could complicate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer's efforts to organize the Senate ahead of the next Congress.

The most important question is whether Sinema, who was first elected in 2018, will choose to caucus with Democrats. The Arizona lawmaker has hinted she will coalesce with Democrats within the Senate, but has not said so specifically.

"I don’t anticipate that anything will change about the Senate structure," Sinema told Politico. "I intend to show up to work, do the same work that I always do. I just intend to show up to work as an independent."

Caucusing with Democrats would be a big relief to that party, as it will give Schumer a 51 seat majority when the new Congress takes office in January. That would give Democrats outright control of the Senate without having to rely on the tie-breaking vote of Vice President Kamala Harris.

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It would also likely give Democrats more representation on Senate committees. After the 2020 election resulted in an evenly split Senate, Schumer and Republican Leader Mitch McConnell were forced to negotiate a power-sharing agreement.

While Democrats officially held the majority because of Harris' tie-breaking vote, Republicans were able to demand concessions since a resolution denoting how the Senate will be run needs at least 60-votes to avert a filibuster.

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That reality gave Republicans and Democrats equal representation on Senate committees, with equal budgets and office space. The agreement also made it easier for either party to put legislation on the floor if a Senate committee deadlocked.

"Since the Senate is organized on a majority basis, Democrats would have more power over committees and legislation if the majority is 51 seats," said a senior Democratic aide. "If it's 50-50, the good news is that nothing changes, but that's also not an optimal place for a party officially in control."

Sinema's office did not return requests for comment on this story. The White House said that Sinema's decision to become an independent would likely have no impact on how the Senate is organized.

"We understand that her decision to register as an independent in Arizona does not change the new Democratic majority control of the Senate, and we have every reason to expect that we will continue to work successfully with her," said White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre.

However, even if Sinema caucuses with Democrats, her exit from the party is likely to have other implications when it comes to votes.

Since joining the Senate in 2019, Sinema has cut a moderate profile by working with Republicans on infrastructure and immigration. The Arizona lawmaker has also rebutted calls by members of her party to scrap 60-vote filibuster threshold needed for most legislation to pass.

The independent streak was displayed over the past two years in the fight over President Biden's $739 billion Inflation Reduction Act. Sinema opposed an initial version of the legislation because of concerns over raising taxes.

The opposition forced Democrats to abandon gutting the Trump-era tax cuts since the Inflation Reduction Act could only pass by a party-line process known as budget reconciliation.

Elon Musk’s release of the "Twitter Files," showing behind the scenes efforts to suppress the New York Post’s bombshell Hunter Biden laptop story didn’t just break news, it was also an attempt to break the legacy media’s grip on news itself.

Instead of appearing on 60 minutes, as most CEO’s would, or giving the internal materials to the New York Times or Washington Post, Musk handed the story to independent journalists Matt Taiibi and Bari Weiss and then broke the story on his own platform. Not only that, he teased the release to create a kind of appointment viewing for the document dump.

The billionaire tycoon behind Tesla and SpaceX has not been shy about his desire to make his latest toy, Twitter, a platform on which a new kind of journalism can emerge and thrive. He has spoken up recently about the value of citizen journalism and criticized the "media elite," calling their control of the news an "oligopoly on information".

Taiibi’s pre-announced tweet thread on December 2nd utterly circumvented the mainstream media, depriving it of its usual role of curating how revelations such as the efforts to suppress the laptop story are presented to the public. This is a potential sea change in how journalism in America operates, and it's not just Musk.

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As an aide to Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, Chistina Pushaw made waves this summer by denying legacy media outlets credentials to cover the Republican Party of Florida’s Sunshine Summit. She would later say of the mainstream press, "What do we do? We cut them off. Treat them like activists because that’s what they are."

Both Musk and Pushaw are taking dead aim at one of the last major advantages that traditional news outlets have over independent media in the digital age, which is access. For as long as there has been news media, large powerful outlets have used their huge audiences to convince insiders, be they in politics, big tech, or anywhere else, to give them the big stories first. That access is now starting to be in question.

If Pushaw and others are successful in convincing conservatives to turn off the spigot of stories to the establishment press and instead use independent media outlets, Twitter and Musk could be huge beneficiaries. After all, the Blue Bird really is where indie news sites live and breathe.

In this new journalistic ecosystem the must-see news bombshell exclusively broken on Twitter could become a staple of American journalism. Tune in tonight for shocking revelations about this, that, or the other thing. And with Musk’s plans to allow longer and longer videos on the platform, as well as enhancing live interaction, like his own appearance this week on Twitter Spaces, the site could become almost an open source news network.

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The biggest obstacle to Musk’s plans to reinvent journalism is that still only a small percentage of Americans use Twitter at all, about six percent. And while the news dumps like the Twitter Files can bring the thoroughbred legacy outlets to water, it can’t make them drink. In fact, to the very limited extent that liberal news media has even mentioned the revelations about suppression of the laptop story, their general attitude has been that there is nothing to see here.

Just over a month into Musk’s leadership at Twitter, which came with the hefty price tag of $44 billion dollars, we can already see that his plans for the platform are sky-high, in his particular case, maybe even higher. Among other things he bought the space where the nation’s journalists mix and mingle, deciding on the contours of news coverage.

But maybe under Musk’s guidance Twitter can become more than the news industry’s office water cooler, maybe it can become a leader in the news industry itself. 

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