The Reason I Can’t Sleep Tonight
This election in Georgia, it’s not over until it’s over, and right now it’s hard to trust in the path that leads to Ossoff and Warnock seated in the Senate. Of course we have to count the remaining votes, but it is looking pretty likely that the vote count will give a slim majority to two Democrats from Georgia.
But that’s not all. In the good old days, once the votes were counted you could expect the losing candidates to concede. Right now, I’m not counting on that. The Ossoff/Perdue contest in particular might come down to a fraction of a percent, triggering a recount. Or some question of ballot legitimacy, founded or unfounded, could throw the results to a court cases. But even if none of that works, why should we expect Loeffler or Purdue to concede? We have already seen them bow to a myth that if Democrats win, the election must be illegitimate. It’s not a stretch that one or the other would adopt that theory for their own benefit as well.
Concession isn’t required by law. Really all that’s required is for the Secretary of State to certify the election and present the results to the Senate so that the two new delegates can be seated. In the Presidential election, there was a limit on how long before results had to be certified — the deadline provided by the Electoral College vote. But there’s no such forcing function for Senate elections, especially for special elections. I’ve searched the Georgia Secretary of State site and their 2021 calendar lists no deadline by which certification must take place. Again, what’s in it for Raffensperger to hurry through this, more death threats from members of his own party?
But, best case, two new Georgia senators show up. In 2009, Ronald Burris came to the Senate with certification unsigned by the Illinois Secretary of State, and was not seated until the Illinois Supreme Court ruled that the appointment had to be certified. Could that happen here, could a court case be required to force Georgia to certify? And then what? The Secretary of the Senate, an officer appointed by the Republican majority, has to accept the credentials and the Senate has to swear in the new members. After the demonstrations of adhering to democratic norms that we’ve gotten from the PA state legislature and the respect for Senate traditions and popular will that McConnell has shown us since the Merrick Garland nomination, what are the odds that this all runs “by the book”, by the procedures we’d expect in anything like normal times? Even then, one of the Republican candidates could contest the results before the Senate despite the state certification. This has happened before in American history (or so I learn from Wikipedia, in the case of Louis Wyman in 1974), leading to months of contentious debate and finally a new election. But surely that couldn’t happen here.
And then, in this 50–50 divided Senate, where the Vice President will be casting the tie-breaking vote, we are going to smoothly take the power of the Majority Leader from Mitch McConnell and transfer it to a Democratic senator. There is no way for McConnell to throw some procedural sand in the gears because democracy and playing fair and tradition, and also I DO believe in fairies.
Even in the best case of waking up in the morning with the count solidly in favor of both Ossoff and Warnock, the Senate stays hamstrung waiting for ths to all resolve, for quite a while to come. But this grim and upsetting nonsense is still better than the alternative. If both Ossoff and Warnock don’t win, McConnell has promised that the Senate stays hamstrung for the next two years.
