Georgia Rhythm - 2022 Edition

The 2022 midterms are finally over.  Last week, in the Georgia runoff, Democratic U.S. Senator Raphael Warnock won a full six-year term against Republican challenger Herschel Walker.  Warnock's victory gives the Democrats a solid majority (including Kyrsten Sinema, who just became an independent - more on that later)  that doesn't have to share committee seats equally with Republicans, doesn't need Republican permission for subpoena power, and doesn't have to rely on Kamala Harris casting a tie-breaking vote over and over.

It also gives the Republicans a valuable lesson in the fact that putting up a guy against a black Democratic candidate just because the GOP candidate is also black does not endear you to black voters, who were offended at the idea that they were expected to vote for Walker on the basis of his race while white Republican voters voted for him on the basis of his political affiliation.  

It makes since that Warnock, as pastor of Atlanta's Ebenezer Baptist Church, was elected primarily because people judged him on the standard a guy who had Warnock's job - Martin Luther King, Jr. - elevated . . . the content of one's character, not the color of one's skin.

It turns out that Herschel Walker had a bit of character himself, in that he conceded graciously and that he said he saw himself and his supporters as winners because they participated in the democratic process.  (Only an athlete could say that the most important thing about politics is not winning but taking part.)   Still, I don't know why Donald Trump recruited his old United States Football League pal to run for the Senate.  If Trump wanted to foil Warnock with a black opponent, couldn't he have found a black Republican in Georgia who at least looked - and sounded - the part of a U.S. Senator? 

Peachy Keen

In a closely watched U.S, Senate campaign in Georgia, a state with two black Senate candidates form the two major parties, the Democratic incumbent is an articulate, well-spoken intellectual Baptist minister who pastors Martin Luther King, Jr.'s congregation and walks his faith like he talks it and his Republican opponent is an Heisman Trophy-winning idiot football player who played for Donald Trump's New Jersey Generals team in the United States Football League (created, according to Paul Slansky, under "the assumption that what America needs is more football") before going to the NFL and the Dallas Cowboys, fathered numerous children with different women with a sexual bravado that would embarrass Stephen Stills, cannot put a single sentence together, and supports pushing "bad air" to China to deal with global warming in America.  So you would think the Democrat would win going away, right?

Wrong.  Senator Raphael Warnock is so barely ahead of Republican Herschel Walker in the U.S. Senate election campaign that the margin is statistically insignificant.  How can that be?  Because this is Georgia, not New Jersey.  If the original United States Football League had succeeded, and Walker, a native Georgian, had made his home in New Jersey, and had run for Senate against Cory Booker - like Warnock, black, intentionally bald, well-spoken, and better dressed than Walker - it would be Booker by a mile.

Warnock has held his own against Walker on the campaign trail and in the debates, citing economic concerns and crime (unlike most Democratic candidates this year) against Walker's failed businesses and honorary law enforcement badge, but he's been slipping lately.  Left with no choice to take the low road, Warnock has released ads bashing Walker for his hypocrisy on being anti-abortion buy paying for one of his baby mamas to abort a child, a charge Walker denies despite the evidence against him.  And Walker supporters are sticking by him, despite the evidence against him - because the Republicans need to flip this Senate seat if they want the Senate majority they are now so tantalizingly close to. 

Warnock may actually be in a better position for November, because of the black vote in Fulton County, where Atlanta, the most populous city in Georgia, is, and because Georgia black voters in general don't want a nimrod like Walker discrediting, not uplifting, the race.  But thanks to a third-party candidate in the campaign, the election my go to a runoff if no candidate gets a majority. 

If Warnock loses, he can always go back to his day job as pastor of the Ebenezer Baptist Church.  If Walker loses, well, maybe a future Republican President will give him a diplomatic post.  Maybe he'll make him ambassador to Georgia - but then what happens when Walker shows up in Atlanta instead of Tbilisi? 😄

Georgia Rhythm - A New Beginning

In the same way that Friday the 13th, Part V was a new beginning. Just when you think voter suppression, like Jason Voorhees, is dead, well, like Jason, it comes back.

The Republican-majority Georgia legislature passed - and the illegitimate Governor Brian Kemp signed - a new law tightening the screws on restricting he vote in the state. The law now mandates, among other things, voter ID for absentee ballots, a limit on the number of mail-in drop boxes, and the right of the state to take over a local elections board where fraud is "suspected."   It also bans giving food and drink to people waiting in line to vote on the grounds that it constitutes electoral bribery.

President Biden has vowed to do everything he can to fight voter suppression in Georgia and elsewhere - 42 other states, including my home state of New Jersey, have some form of voter restriction legislation pending in their legislatures - which is a way of saying he can do very little.  The President of the United States cannot unilaterally overrule a state's election laws (though Trump tried), and the voter-right law in Congress can't pass without eliminating the filibuster in the Senate, something Democratic Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia isn't prepared to support.  I have also heard - I don't know how true this is - that Senate Democrats have suggested excepting any legislation related to voting rights from the filibuster rule, but Manchin reportedly doesn't even want to make that exception.

Senator Raphael Warnock (D-GA), who was elected in a runoff for a special election to complete an unexpired Senate term, has made getting this legislation through and to President Biden's desk for his signature a priority, and he plans to persuade Republicans who are on record as having supported renewals of the 1965 Voting Rights Act.  If Warnock, above, can do that, he should consider selling ice cubes to Eskimos.  Because Republican senators are no longer in Congress to vote in favor of the interests of the general public.  They're there to satisfy the far-right GOP base.  And the base wants stricter voting requirements to stop Democrats from stealing elections (which Democrats do by voting legally). 

Senator Warnock is noncommittal on the issue of boycotts of Georgia-based businesses and calls to move events scheduled for Atlanta, or Augusta (like the Masters), elsewhere, preferring instead to focus on what he can do about voting rights in Washington.  I say, he's fated to lose his fight and also lose his bid for a full six-year Senate term in 2022, thanks to the new law - and will have be content with just continuing to pastor Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta come 2023.  The odds are simply against him.  But then, what do I know?  Three months ago this time, I didn't think he'd even get elected to the Senate in the runoff.

Georgia Rhythm - The (Not Really) Final Chapter

Lost in the noise made by the Trump supporters who stormed the Capitol last week was the fact that Democrats managed to win not one but both of the U.S. Senate seats up for election in a pair of runoffs in Georgia.  They were given at best the chance of winning one of those seats, which would not have been enough for the Democrats to take control of the Senate, as winning both seats was (with incoming Vice President Kamala Harris casting the tie-breaking vote).  Thanks to Stacey Abrams and her relentless drive to get voters in Georgia to the polls, however, incoming President Joe Biden now has a chance to get the most sweeping Democratic agenda since Lyndon Johnson's Great Society program passed.  And Georgia couldn't have chosen two better individuals to help him.

Raphael Warnock is the pastor of Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s old job.  And like Dr. King, Reverend Warnock has been committed to social justice, having demonstrated for human rights and universal health care in particular and having campaigned and protested (and gotten arrested) for his beliefs.  He is a genuinely caring and magnanimous pastor, and he will work hard for the interests of all Georgians. 

Jon Ossoff got what few Democrats who lose elections get - a second chance at public office.  Having been the nominee in a special election to fill a U.S. House seat in 2017, he lost a contest that many felt he should have won, and he was written off as a one-hit wonder, like so many other failed Democratic nominees for public office.  But Ossoff, who was an intern with the late Georgia congressman John Lewis and has worked as an investigative journalist and documentary producer exposing human rights violations around he world, was undeterred by his loss.  Using the same dogged determination that he applies to his work as a documentary filmmaker, he worked hard to get a seat in the Senate to bring his liberal values to Washington, and his relentlessness paid off.  If he works as hard for Georgia as a U.S. Senator as he did to get elected - and he will  - Georgia will be all right.

And now that the Democrats have won the Senate, all of those Democratic Senate candidates on other states who came up short can be forgiven. And forgotten.  Jamie Harrison in South Carolina turned out to be a paper tiger, and no one is going to give Cal Cunningham in North Carolina, after his "sexting" scandal, another shot at a Senate seat when the retiring Richard Burr's seat is up in 2022.  Sara Gideon in Maine, whom Democrats pinned so many of their hopes on to oust Susan Collins?  Girl, you're through.  If you can't beat Susan Collins, you need to get out of politics and find another line of work.

To think that many Democrats put more of an emphasis on Maine than Georgia.  It looks like they focused on the wrong state famous for its pine trees.  

Power Plays and Loose Ends

The past week showed how the great civilizations of Europe have long since gotten their acts together after three thousand years of history and how America is neither great nor civilized.  While Great Britain and the European Union have successfully finalized their separation, the United States Congress has torn itself asunder for no good reason other than for political power plays.  Trump was  pushing for more COVID stimulus money, something Democrats want (for which I give him credit) and he also pushed for a repeal of the regulation that protects Internet platforms - platforms like Twitter - from lawsuits against what their users - uses like Trump - post, along with a call for a voter-fraud investigation, neither of which Democrats want (which instantly cancels out that credit).  Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell (below) proceeded to put all of that into one bill, knowing that the Democrats wouldn't vote for it (and thus the stimulus money wouldn't pass, McConnell's preferred outcome) and knowing also that Democrats would go on record as having opposed more money for Americans in desperate need.  Democrats immediately called this out, letting McConnell and their constituents know that they would not be played, and Vermont senator Bernie Sanders demanded (forcefully, but unsuccessfully) that the extra COVID stimulus money be voted on separately.  And after all that, the old Congress expired, as did the COVID extra-stimulus legislation. 

And meanwhile, the COVID vaccinations are going so slowly in the U.S. that we may be dealing with the bug for the rest of the decade - and it's only 2021.

McConnell also did this to allow Georgia's two Republican senators, David Perdue (currently in quarantine after being exposed to someone with COVID) and Kelly Loeffler, to vote for the extra money and thus improve their standing with voters in the Georgia U.S. Senate runoff elections being held tomorrow, but their respective Democratic opponents, Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock, have been vehement in calling out their duplicity, and they've been persistent in pushing the issue of fairness and decency at a time when Republican power plays are anything but that.  Heck, they might just pull it off and win tomorrow, giving the Democrats the Senate! 

It'll take awhile to count the votes in Georgia, though, and even if Ossoff and Warnock win, we can expect policies in 2021 to be a messy affair in which loose ends are left untied or tied very sloppily in the 117th Congress.

Georgia Rhythm - The Sequel

Georgia has not one, but two U.S. Senate runoff elections scheduled for January 5, the first Tuesday of the new year.  And what's going on now in the Peach State could affect the election later.

Democrats Raphael Warnock (left) and Jon Ossoff are respectively challenging Republican incumbents Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue, the former matchup being a special election to determine who completes a term that expires in January 2023.  Despite the numerous and numerously valid charges of corruption against the Republican senators, they are both favored to win at this point because Georgia is just such a Republican state and because Democrats don't normally vote in off-elections.  And here's the thing.  The Republicans just need one of these seats to win control of the Senate in the 119th Congress; the Democrats have to win them both.

But there's more.  Although Georgia has certified its results for the presidential election and given its 16 electoral votes to Joe Biden, Donald Trump's lawyers promising a lawsuit of "biblical proportions" that they say will "blow up" the state, a suit expected to implicate Republican Governor Brian Kemp and Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger as part of a plot with a voting machine company to commit major fraud. This could affect the runoff election in two ways.  (The Trump campaign has already requested a third vote count in Georgia in an effort to overturn the result.)  On the one hand, this move could embolden already angry Georgia Republicans to turn out and put Senators Loeffler and Perdue back in their seats.  On the other hand, it could tear up the Republican Party in Georgia and allow Democrats to help Warnock and Ossoff win the elections, as many Republican voters would be turned off by the Trump team's antics and many of them wouldn't even bother to vote.

Either way, this blog endorses both Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff, for all the obvious reasons.