Georgia on my mind

It seems like a million years ago now, but just 48 hours ago the balance of power in America shifted. 

Late on Tuesday night Raphael Warnock moved ahead of Kelly Loeffler in the first of two Senate runoff races in Georgia, and then early Wednesday morning, Jon Ossoff overtook incumbent Republican senator David Perdue for good. The pair of improbable Democratic Party victories in this formerly, ruby-red state has flipped control of the United States Senate.

Although I believed Warnock and Ossoff had a good chance to win given that the Trump base was likely to stay home as long as there deity was not on the ballot, I never allowed myself to fully believe it until it actually happened. This result is going to allow Joe Biden to have a real chance at governing effectively and it might actually allow for the Republican Party to reclaim its position as a legitimate conservative party. That last part remains to be seen. 

Georgia's results give the Biden administration the opportunity to get his people confirmed to key positions in a timely manner, and his judges appointed as long as they are qualified. This result also prevents Moscow Mitch McConnell from hijacking the Biden agenda the way he did President Barack Obama's.

The Democratic House of Representatives in the last Congress passed over 150 pieces of legislation, but McConnell, the self-proclaimed grim reaper, refused to take up any of this legislation. He didn't even allow these bills to be debated on the senate floor. I am sure that some of these bills could have been passed in a bi-partisan basis, but they never had a chance as long as McConnell and Republicans were in control - much to the detriment of the United States citizenry.

Now that the Democrats are in control, the Senate can finally get back to being the world's most deliberative legislative body. The Democrats can not run amok because they still need to get Republican support for their agenda in order to meet the 60-vote, filibuster-proof threshold. This means that the two sides will have to compromise in order to get anything done.

My advise to the new Democratic majority is to forget the meaning of the word comprehensive. Politicians, especially Democratic ones, love to throw the word comprehensive before every type of legislative package. Democrats love to say things like comprehensive immigration reform, or comprehensive gun reform, or comprehensive tax reform. Instead, they should understand that incremental reform is still a positive thing, and could go a long way to help the American people. 

As an example, we might want comprehensive gun reform, but getting a stand-alone Federal background check law passed would go a long way to preventing the sale of guns to criminals. We might want comprehensive immigration reform, but getting DACA codified in law by itself would be a great accomplishment. 

Besides the legislative advantages to these victories, Georgia also rebuked Trumpism by handing defeats to two more Trump co-conspirators, Loeffler and Perdue. This tandem joins Martha McSally and Cory Gardner, who also lost their senate seats for blindly following Trump during his disastrous administration. The politicians who allowed Trump to trample the U.S. Constitution need to pay with their jobs, and this is another positive step in that direction. 

More of these sycophantic Republican politicians should have lost in the November, but they were carried across the finish line by the Trump base, who only seem to come out in support of Trump himself, and any Republican on the same ballot, but when he is not on the ballot, the Republicans have paid dearly - see 2018 midterm elections. It is important, as an educated electorate, that we not forget who these co-conspirators are and that we make them pay when their name again appears on the ballot in 2022. 

Again, from the bottom of my heart, thank you Georgia!