Everyone’s talking about Kshama Sawant’s actions throughout the recent process of appointing a new temporary city council member.

She was “grandstanding.”

She was “exploitative and mean."

She “lost the plot.”

Meanwhile, her fellow council member Sally Bagshaw is hammering on her for hosting a town hall in city council chambers about rent control, which Bagshaw told the Seattle Times was actually a "political rally." Council member Tom Rasmussen is criticizing her on the dais, and council member Bruce Harrell is openly campaigning for one of her opponents in this fall's election, Pamela Banks.

What’s going on here?

An uncomfortable airing of grievances in public? In Seattle City Hall? With no Mike McGinn in sight? This is a refreshing change for those of us who get sick of watching everyone pretend to get along all the time, but it’s not standard practice for this council.

Something fundamental is breaking down in the relationships on the second floor of City Hall. I’m not delusional enough to think Sawant’s fellow council members are only now realizing they don’t like her, but a switch has flipped—maybe it's as simple as the fact that it's an election year—and now they're willing to air their unhappiness in public.

Bagshaw’s concerns about the rent control forum seem to be as much diplomatic as substantive. In a council meeting on Monday, she said she thought the event was sponsored by the whole council, but arrived to see only “two chairs” at the front of the room for Sawant and council member Nick Licata, who co-hosted the forum.

“I was directed to the audience to sit and listen,” Bagshaw said, “and I ended up standing over here for an hour and I did not feel that that was a city council event… I did not feel that any of us were warmly welcome if we were here to listen and have an alternative viewpoint or conversation. I just want the people to know that I really felt personally slighted by that.”

(Goldy, by the way, feels slighted too—by Bagshaw’s charge that the forum, where he spoke, was a political rally. Hurt feelings everywhere. Although, full disclosure on Goldy's behalf: He helped write Sawant's forthcoming book.)

Sawant responded to Bagshaw at the Monday meeting by saying her invitation to council members was “genuine” and that she was “deeply apologetic” if it didn’t seem that way. But she also didn’t backtrack from the tone of the forum, which was undeniably pro-rent-control.

“It’s a political thing,” Sawant told Bagshaw. “If you’re hosting the town hall with us, then [that] implies that you are in agreement with our points of view… If you’re still thinking about the measures that we are convinced of, then that’s fine, but if you sit there with us it conveys the impression that all of the council members who are sitting in the front are in support of this resolution, are in support of city owned housing, in support of the tenant bill of rights, in support of the maximum linkage fee. These are political positions. This is not a formalistic question of who’s hosting.”

Sawant drew a comparison to Mayor Ed Murray, who attended a town hall she hosted in February about hate crimes on Capitol Hill, but sat in the crowd because he “didn’t want to necessarily by suggestion or by implication accept the positions that I was accepting, but he was there to listen and engage.”

In an interview later on Monday, Sawant responded directly to the charge that the event was a political rally and managed to bring it back to her own talking points about who represents whom.

“It was definitely a political rally to advocate for housing justice and to present the resolution,” Sawant told me. Later, she added: “When [Bagshaw] or other council members go to the chamber’s retreat during the budget season, they’re making a statement, they’re going to a politically rally, except it’s a rally for the chamber of commerce. We’re hosting a town hall for the vast majority of the people of Seattle and I think that’s a good thing.”

Bagshaw, joined by an anonymous tipster, has also complained to the Seattle Ethics and Elections Commission that Sawant’s campaign violated city rules because they had signs for her reelection at the rent control meeting and were also gathering signatures to get her on the ballot at the event (candidates can gather about 1,200 signatures in lieu of paying the $1,200 filing fee.). Although Sawant herself was not asking for signatures within City Hall, it’s unclear whether she could still be fined for indirectly campaigning on city property. Wayne Barnett, executive director of the Seattle Ethics and Elections Commission, won't discuss that until his office makes a ruling on the complaints, which he said should be within a “couple weeks.”

Another council confrontation happened later on Monday, when, in response to Sawant’s criticisms of new council member John Okamoto, council member Tom Rasmussen said it was “unfortunate [Sawant] has to stoop so low.”

Some of this is nothing new, of course. Sawant’s whole schtick is to wear her grievances on her sleeve and call out her fellow council members for their supposed allegiances to the corporate class. (And, by the way, come up with totally quotable ways to express this. On Monday she called the Port of Seattle a “cesspool of corruption.” Back in January she said, regarding ground settlement near Bertha, “I would like to ask WSDOT that very question before there is a danger that Pioneer Square sinks into Elliott Bay like Atlantis.” Politicians, take note: At less than 140 characters, that is a very Tweetable quote.)

Sometimes, Sawant is successful in pushing the conversation leftward. See, especially: last year's budget and the minimum wage. But the question people are asking now is can she simultaneously rail against her colleagues and still convince them to work with her?

For all the noise on Monday, Sawant (and council members Nick Licata and Mike O’Brien) lost the battle when establishment favorite John Okamoto was appointed.

Sawant and Licata were also in the minority on another vote on Monday, against an expanded Business Improvement Area in the University District.

And Sawant’s latest battle cry—the new “15 Now Because the Rent Won’t Wait”—is laser-focused on rent control, a ridiculously controversial idea that will require first that the state legislature—where a Republican from Spokane singlehandedly blocked a bill on raising the minimum wage to $12—vote to repeal the current statewide ban on rent control, after which Seattle lawmakers would have to actually craft a rent control policy.

Sawant and her supporters will argue that raising the minimum wage seemed just as insurmountable when that discussion started, and she may have a point there, but there’s still no getting around the differing logistics surrounding rent control. It will be much harder—both politically and in terms of the sheer number of people they’ll have to convince—to advance dramatic progressive policy in Olympia than it was to push a higher minimum wage through Seattle's city hall.

But victory may not be necessary for Sawant politically, at least in the near term.

That's because Sawant wins even when she loses. When she’s drowned out by the establishment, she’s painted as the underdog fighting on behalf of working people up against the entrenched status quo. When she prevails, she’s the effective activist who forced the status quo to do something it didn’t want to. (As she said at the town hall last week, “It’s not a question of waiting for politicians to do it. It’s a question of us building a movement to force them to do it, whether they like it or not.”)

Even when she lost the battle over the new council appointee Monday, it was the rest of the council her true believers in the crowd booed and complained about for their refusals to compromise or discuss changing their votes.

So, has Sawant even risked anything at all by getting in fights over the new appointee, or by rallying hundreds of people for a state policy change that might not happen for years, or even, theoretically, breaking a rule about campaigning on city property?

When Bagshaw inappropriately brought pro-park district literature to a city event last year, it cost her just $150. For Sawant, that may be a small price to pay to keep us talking all this time—however tangentially—about her issue of the day.