It's a winning night in Georgia, and it feels like winning all over the world.
With 99% of precincts reporting, Raphael Warnock leads by 1.2%. Jon Ossoff leads by 0.4%, and with a fair share of the remaining ballots in deep-blue Atlanta counties, his lead will likely hold up too. Republican attack ads could darken the black preacher's skin and lengthen the Jewish filmmaker's nose, but they couldn't stop Georgia from making them its new Senators.
This gives Joe Biden a 50-50 Senate majority. With Kamala Harris breaking ties, Mitch McConnell can't block the budget. The filibuster still threatens to hold up any larger business by requiring 60 votes to close debate, and some centrist Democrats like Joe Manchin want to keep it. Our best hope is that McConnell obstructs Democrats enough to change their minds.
The House is organized to pass whatever can get through the Senate. Nancy Pelosi just won another term as Speaker, with votes from young left-wing Congresswomen Rashida Tlaib, Katie Porter, Cori Bush, and Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez. Pelosi just assigned all four of them to the powerful Oversight and Reform Committee, as I learned from a happy AOC tweet.
A new DNC Chair will be chosen soon. I don't know if Stacey Abrams wants the position -- she may be focused on running for Governor of Georgia in 2022. But after developing a voter turnout operation that saved the first two years of Biden's presidency and gave Georgia its first black Senator, she would be a spectacular person for that job.
