politics

[hudebnik]

Yesterday in a special election, the people of Alabama narrowly elected moderate Democrat Doug Jones over an openly racist, sexist, homophobic, Dominionist pedophile named Roy Moore who, as a Federal judge, had been removed from office twice for putting his own interpretation of the Bible ahead of the law of the land and Supreme Court precedent. President Trump, after tepidly endorsing the establishment Republican Luther Strange, had deleted all of his tweets to that effect after Moore beat Strange in the primary and come out strongly in favor of Moore -- after all, he only says and does the same things we all really feel in our hearts, right, and who doesn't like a bit of teenage pussy? and most importantly, he'll vote along the Republican party line. There were hundreds of complaints of voters (I think mostly black, but I haven't seen statistics) being turned away from the polls, and Alabama's voter-ID law (passed years ago, but never enforced until after the Supreme Court defanged the Voting Rights Act because it obviously wouldn't have passed muster) presumably helped to keep down the black turnout (at one point Alabama had closed down the DMV office in every county with a large black majority, making it difficult for blacks without drivers' licenses to get them). But Jones's reputation for prosecuting the Birmingham church bombers presumably persuaded blacks to overcome those obstacles, and 96% of them voted for Jones, while something like 27% of white men voted for Jones.

I'm not sure when the results of the special election take effect, and have found no information on the Web yet to answer that. It makes a big difference, because this will narrow the Republican majority in the Senate from 52-48 to 51-49, and the Senate is still trying to pass an enormously unpopular tax bill that blows up the Federal budget deficit in order to give large permanent tax cuts to corporations and billionaires, a small temporary tax cut for many other people, and a tax increase for most lower- and middle-class people starting in ten years. To pass it, they need to pacify five dubious Republicans, each of whom has his/her own reason to possibly vote against it. So they desperately want to get that done before Jones is seated. Anyway, there's that.

Comments

[alienor]

The senate is in recess from roughly 12/22 (maybe earlier) to 1/3. Most estimates indicate there's no chance he'll be seated before recess, but it's likely the election certification will be done so he can be sworn in when they resume.

(There's a chance they'll cancel the recess if they can't get the budget stuff done, but it's more likely they'll do another CR until January)