Let’s start with a sobering stat. It’s an insult to the human race that roughly 1.7 million people – allegedly with brains in their heads – actually cast ballots in Georgia’s Senate runoff for unprecedented moron Herschel Walker. Most sickening of all is that a landslide share of white evangelical Christians voted for the dolt who paid for abortions, lied with Trumpian alacrity, serially abused women, and, on matters of policy, couldn’t find his own tush with both hands.
But on a far brighter note, the ’22 humiliation of the MAGA GOP is now complete. The cult comes away from the midterms with fewer governorships, fewer state legislative seats, a dental-floss-thin House majority, and one less Senate seat. For the latter, we can thank the not-yet indicted thief of nuclear secrets, who promoted and endorsed a roster of freaks and buffoons like Mehmet Oz in Pennsylvania, Blake Masters in Arizona, Don Bolduc in New Hampshire…and a has-been jock, famous for being famous and dumber than your family dog, who will probably wake up tomorrow and expect someone to give him a Senate badge.
I intend no offense to last night’s runoff winner and senator for the next six years, Rev. Rafael Warnock, by suggesting that a Republican more qualified than Walker would likely have won the contested Georgia seat. But as Forrest Gump said, stupid is as stupid does; when a party insists, despite repeated warnings, on being tethered to an imbecilic albatross like Trump, it’s gonna tilt like the Titanic.
The upshot, of course, is that Democrats will ring in next year with a 51-49 Senate majority, which is more consequential than it sounds. They will control all the chamber’s committees, making it easier to advance legislation and conduct oversight investigations. They’ll have more power to block whatever carnival bills the House GOP gins up. They’ll be less dependent on squeezing support from “centrists” Joe Manchin and Krysten Sinema. They’ll be able to accelerate the confirmation of President Biden’s federal judicial nominees, to further check and balance the MAGA judges from Mitch McConnell’s assembly line. Farther down the road, they can even afford the loss of one seat in 2024, when Democratic incumbents West Virginia’s Manchin, Montana’s Jon Tester, and Ohio’s Sherrod Brown are up for re-election in red states.
Yes, we can thank Trump for his help in giving us two blue senators from Georgia (Jon Ossoff is the other guy). But the biggest kudos go to the state’s Black voters. They have truly done a great service to the entire nation – tangibly so. If not for their voting prowess and landslide verdicts for Warnock and Ossoff in the Senate elections at the tail end of the ’20 cycle, there would have been no blue Senate majority, and without that blue majority, Biden would not have been able to sign into law historic infrastructure and climate change investments; or the federal pandemic aid that saved millions of livelihoods; or the law that boosts semiconductor chip manufacturing on our own shores; or the measure that allows Medicare to negotiate lower prescription prices for seniors.
Herschel Walker is free to go off and do his thing, debating whether he’d rather be a vampire or a werewolf. Trump is free to stew in his juices as usual, undoubtedly fuming that a jury has officially designated his company to be a criminal enterprise. But others – people with real power, like Senator Warnock – are properly busy. They have real governing to do.