The Georgia Senate Runoffs Will Determine Whether Anything Gets Done in Congress
We are nearing the whimpering conclusion to the president's nearly month-long tantrum in response to his decisive loss in the 2020 election, a neat microcosm of these last few years of American life where a country of over 300 million people has been continually held hostage to the daily eruptions of one man's damaged psyche. The pandemic is surging, businesses and citizens are in desperate need of financial aid, but the president has now reduced the job down to what he's always seen as its most essential dimensions: watching television, playing golf, grifting some cash, and complaining that the whole world is unfair to him. In these death throes of egotism, the president is currently railing against Governor Brian Kemp on the basis that the Georgia Republican isn't...using "his emergency powers"...to "overrule his obstinate Secretary of State"...to order "a match of signatures on envelopes"...to expose "a 'goldmine' of fraud."
The president's attempt at a Stupid Coup has failed, which is not evidence it was always going to fail, considering the ongoing complicity of almost all Republican officeholders and how readily his base of support swallowed the indigestible crud that makes up these voter-fraud conspiracies. Despite the calls from Fox & Friends dipshits, Donald Trump will not be able to seize Georgia's 16 Electoral Votes, or any others. But the worst effects of this assault on democracy itself—this attempt to render any democratic process that ends with a Republican loss as illegitimate, a robbery perpetrated against Real Americans—are likely still to come. There will be an attempt to Birtherize the presidency of Joe Biden, but you also have to wonder what Republican secretaries of state like the "obstinate" Brad Raffensperger will do when it comes time to administer elections going forward. Will they prioritize holding a free and fair election, knowing they may face career consequences if even the vast voter-suppression efforts long underway in Republican-controlled states like Georgia fail to stop a Democratic victory?
Perhaps we will find out in the coming Georgia Senate runoff elections, which Raffensperger will again be tasked with overseeing in January. (At a press conference Monday, the SoS was once again commendable in his no-nonsense approach to Trump's firehose of bullshit, though he did reportedly announce "investigations into three outside groups registering out-of-state voters for the Jan. 5 US senate runoffs." We'll see what comes of that.) The question has added weight because these contests will determine who controls the Senate—and, beyond that, whether we will have a divided government. There is some resurgent optimism that Congress will be able to Get Things Done in that scenario, and maybe there's some proof of that in the current bipartisan push in Congress to crack down on money laundering through shell corporations. The theory is that, if Democrats basically abandon their plans to raise taxes on the wealthy, Mitch McConnell's Republican Senate might agree to some deficit spending on infrastructure and the like. Or that the two parties could find real agreement on issues of monopoly power or criminal-justice reform.
We've seen this movie before, however, and it's hard to see it ending differently than it did in Barack Obama's second term: McConnell ruthlessly obstructs the Democratic agenda on the belief that his party won't be punished, while the party most broadly perceived to be in power—the one holding the White House—will be. Democrats aid and abet this effort by failing to communicate to the public that it is McConnell who is preventing action on the major issues of the moment. The media flails in its coverage, depicting this as Both Sides Fail to Compromise instead of Senate Majority Leader Pursues Deadly Megalomaniacal Nihilism. Republicans pick up seats in the midterms. A fully Republican Congress foils Biden's legislative agenda still further, weakening the incumbent before the 2024 elections. And all the while, the nation's most powerful interests—the donors that make up McConnell's real constituency—rest easy, knowing nothing will fundamentally change.
This is, of course, assuming that Joe Biden wants anything to fundamentally change, which is not what he told rich donors during the Democratic primary. But if he's interested in at least an infrastructure bill, it's unlikely to happen unless both Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock win on January 5. Considering they are running against a couple of Republican millionaires who were both—both!—investigated for insider-trading as members of the Senate, you'd think it would be fairly easy for their opponents to find a populist economic lane in which to run against them, not unlike Obama did against Mitt Romney in 2012. But America is a wacky place, and Democrats are Democrats.
That latter issue is exacerbated by at least one emerging theory of the 2020 election: that a key segment of Joe Biden's coalition—college-educated whites who hate Trump—did not fully translate down-ballot. It seems plenty of people may have voted against Trump, but also for the Republicans they normally vote for elsewhere on the ballot. Meanwhile, Democrats lost some support among Latinos and Black men. Is the 2020 Democratic presidential coalition translatable to these contests? Is it even a real coalition at all? Does it have any unified agenda beyond revulsion at Trump?
You'd hope so, but it's hard to say. So the two Democrats in Georgia should probably keep it simple: If we are elected, things will get done. If we don't, nothing will get done. Maybe enough Georgians want something—anything—to actually happen at the federal level that it might work. (Republicans Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue are primarily waging conspiracy-addled culture-war campaigns, but even if you think Stopping Socialism is a legislative agenda, as a practical matter, their candidacies represent gridlock.) Or maybe enough of the president's fans will join the boycott of these elections—which involves Trump voters sitting it out, or writing in his name instead of voting for Loeffler or Perdue—to put Warnock and Ossoff over the top. That would at least be incredibly funny. The prospect of four more years of insufficient action on climate, corporate power, and inequality is less so.
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