Senator Johnny Isakson of Georgia has announced that he’ll be stepping down at the end of the year due to an accumulation of health problems. I don’t have positive things to say about any currently serving Republican senators, but Isakson is pretty close to the least objectionable of the bunch. He at least takes his job as a legislator seriously, not that this matters so long as Mitch McConnell is running the show.
He is the chairman of the Veteran’s Affairs Committee and co-chair of the Ethics Committee, and he also serves on the HELP committee, the Foreign Affairs Committee and the prestigious Finance Committee. That’s a pretty heavy workload, and his presence will be missed next year when he’s replaced by some Republican interim appointment.
A permanent replacement will be elected in November 2020, making Georgia ground zero for control of the Senate. That’s because Georgia’s other senator, freshman David Perdue, will be up for his regularly scheduled reelection.
Naturally, everyone’s first reaction to this news is to ask whether Stacey Abrams will be willing to run for either of the two Senate seats. She says she is not interested and is going to continue with her commitment to lead a national voter protection effort. It’s not hard to see why. She still feels like she was robbed of the governorship of the Peach State by shenanigans orchestrated by her opponent and now governor Brian Kemp. And she has plenty of reason to hold firm to that conviction:
To find a clue about what might have gone wrong with Georgia’s election last fall, look no further than voting machine No. 3 at the Winterville Train Depot outside Athens.
On machine No. 3, Republicans won every race. On each of the other six machines in that precinct, Democrats won every race.
The odds of an anomaly that large are less than 1 in 1 million, according to a statistician’s analysis in court documents. The strange results would disappear if votes for Democratic and Republican candidates were flipped on machine No. 3.
It just so happens that this occurred in Republican Brian Kemp’s home precinct, where he initially had a problem voting when his yellow voter access card didn’t work because a poll worker forgot to activate it. At the time, Kemp was secretary of state — Georgia’s top election official — and running for governor in a tight contest with Democrat Stacey Abrams.
It’s never an easy thing to win an election when your opponent is the Secretary of State and in charge of the voting process in your state. There are plenty of perfectly legal ways for such an opponent to give themselves an unfair advantage, and little to stop them from crossing the line into illegal behavior.
Hopefully, we’ll get to the bottom of what happened in Georgia so there won’t be any repeats next year. The Democrats could easily win both of these Senate seats and that would vastly improve their chances of taking control of the Senate. Perhaps Abrams can do more to assure that outcome in the role she’s adopted than as a candidate. Yet, she’s the strongest candidate the Democrats have.
There will be plenty for people to keep their eyes on here, including the Democrats’ recruiting efforts. I’d like to see a Democrat take Isakson’s seat in January 2021, but I also see his departure as another small blow to the quality of the Republican senatorial caucus. They are almost down to zero on people who are in Washington to legislate, and it’s a big problem.
Martin, What has Isakson done about Trump’s 3 Mar-a-Lago pals who are “advising” the VA ?
Probably nothing.
Ed Kilgore has a nice appreciation over at nymag.com for Isakson and the (ever-diminishing) pre-“Southern Strategy” Republican party tradition in the South.
I think it’s increasingly clear that the revival of a Republican party that can legislate and govern and function as a “loyal opposition” is not going to come from within the Republican party. Or at least, not without a long, long period in the political wilderness.
Instead, Democrats are (I think) going to have to learn from parties like the Radical Republicans of the 1860s and 70s, and the Democrats of the 1930s (any other examples out there?) about how to seize power from the oligarchs and wield it to transform and revive the nation’s political vitality and institutions.
(In Rhode Island, for example, it took the hardball politics of the “Bloodless Revolution” of 1935 led by Gov. T. F. Green to wrest control from the rural, Republican minority that had controlled state politics for decades. http://smallstatebighistory.com/robert-e-quinn-and-the-political-revolution-of-1935/ )
thanks for this, Martin. I will be grateful for any light you can shed on how jerry-rigged, sabotaged, or otherwise jimmied the 2020 elections will be, thanks to easily hackable voting equipment, Russian thumbs on the social media scale, local Republican shenanigans, possibly Republican collusion with Russian troll farms, and who knows what sorts of remote Republican hacks on voting machines (all of this pure speculation on my part). I foresee a thousand million little Brooks Bros. riots spread nationwide, contesting every single result if the R’s lose. Am I wrong?