Georgia’s Senate election on Tuesday, December 6, could give left-wing Democrats a lot more power. Right now, the Senate is divided 50-50 between Democrats and Republicans, so Senate committees are equally divided between the two parties. That has kept a lot of bad, costly, progressive bills from making their way out of committee to be passed by the full Senate.
But that will change if Democrats win tomorrow’s special election for a Georgia Senate seat. It is a close race between Democrat Raphael Warnock and Republican Herschel Walker. If Warnock wins, in January, the Democrats will have 51 seats in the Senate, and the Republicans only 49 seats. Because the Democrats will have more seats, committees in the senate will have a Democratic majority, meaning Democratic bills will easily pass out of committee and reach the Senate floor to pass the full Senate, even when they would cost taxpayers a lot or have radical outcomes.
Even now, Democrats have something of an edge, because if a measure reaches the Senate floor, it can pass with Vice President Kamala Harris, a Democrat, casting the tie-breaking vote. But Democrats’ edge will increase a lot if they control a majority on all the Senate’s committees.
Moreover, right now, Biden sometimes hesitates to appoint an extreme left-wing person to a key government post, like powerful agencies and federal courts, because one of the Democrats — West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin — may not vote for the most radical nominees. But if the Democrats pick up a seat in the Senate, Biden can appoint whomever he wants, no matter how radical, and that nominee will get confirmed, even if Manchin votes with Republicans against that nominee. (A few other Democrats, such as Kyrsten Sinema, occasionally vote against radical left-wing bills, but neither Sinema nor those others votes against radical left-wing nominees. In fact, a radical with ties to Senator Sinema was appointed to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals despite sitting on the board of a group that wants to abolish prisons and release dangerous inmates).
So if Warnock wins tomorrow’s election, Biden can pick really radical judges and cabinet secretaries, and nothing will stop him, because those nominees will get 50 votes, and Kamala Harris can then provide the tie-breaking 51st vote.
Warnock will also sponsor left-wing, soft-on-crime U.S. district judges in Georgia if he remains in office. Warnock is very left-wing on crime. Warnock has called for releasing many dangerous people from jail without bail. He has said, “open up the jails.”
In an undercover video, Raphael Warnock’s campaign staff said he “absolutely” would defund the police — “these suckers in blue” — although Warnock has avoided saying that publicly.
“So, he avoids using defunding the police, because he knows that the Republicans are gonna try to grab onto it and attack, right?” Derrick Bhole, finance assistant with the Warnock campaign, told an undercover investigative reporter. “But in reality, his whole platform with police reform is along the lines of the same people who are saying defund the police.”
Sasha Williams, director of small business development for the Warnock campaign, told the reporter Warnock is “absolutely” on the side of activists who would defund the police. “But he is on our side for defunding these suckers in blue, these police?” the undercover journalist asked Williams in a conference call.
“Absolutely! Absolutely!” she replied. “You know, police officers are not all good, you know what I’m saying? Most of them are bad, we know that.”
In practice, Senators of the President’s party often pick the federal trial judges who are appointed in their state, even though the President technically nominates those judges. That’s because the President tends to pick whoever Senators of his own party want to be appointed to trial court positions in their state, while the President’s Justice Department appointees tend to pick federal appeals court judges, and the President himself actually chooses Supreme Court nominees.
As Herschel Walker notes in fundraising emails,
Democrats are spending big to win the runoff in Georgia next Tuesday, December 6th – and you need to know why…Democrat donors are funneling tens of millions into Warnock’s campaign coffers because, as Joe Biden stated, “It’s always better with 51.”
Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin went even further and said, “[Democrats have] been able to achieve a lot, but we can do even more with an additional senator.”
Raphael Warnock will do massive damage as Joe Biden and Chuck Schumer’s 51st vote.
A 51st Democrat senator would mean:
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Easier confirmation of left-wing federal judges.
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The ability to pass legislation unimpeded. Moderate Democrats would not be able to stop legislation like the Build Back Better bill from passing the Senate.
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More Democrats on each committee instead of being split half for each party.
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Earlier, the Free Beacon had a disturbing report on the grim conditions in apartments owned by Senator Raphael Warnock’s church. In essence, Warnock was a slumlord who allowed life-threatening conditions that led to the killing of a tenant by a maintenance man:
A maintenance man charged with brutally murdering a tenant. A sex offender who slept in the hallways. A dead body left in an apartment for days, found covered in flies.
These are just a few disturbing tales of the living conditions in apartments owned by Sen. Raphael Warnock’s (D., Ga.) church, gathered from interviews with residents and hundreds of pages of Atlanta Police Department, Fire Department, and court records obtained by the Washington Free Beacon.
Atlanta police and firefighters have been called to Columbia Tower and the Columbia Senior Residences at MLK Village in Atlanta hundreds of times since 2020, the records show. Responding officers have been met with corpses and people trapped in elevators, as well as fights, burglaries, and car thefts. Both buildings are owned by the Ebenezer Baptist Church, where Warnock serves as senior pastor.
The Free Beacon also learned that Columbia Tower management hired a convicted murderer now charged with killing a female tenant who lived with him at Columbia Senior Residences, which is just across the street from the apartment building.
“They hired a guy who killed his girlfriend. He was the maintenance guy who was living in the senior building and he had a record already,” a resident told the Free Beacon in October. “Why would you hire a person like that who has keys to the building? I understand second chances, but this person already had a background in murdering someone, and you give him keys to our apartment?”
The records could pose problems for Warnock, who is seeking to defeat Republican challenger Herschel Walker amid rising crime. Crime is one of Atlanta voters’ main concerns heading into next week’s midterm elections, polls show. Homicides have increased in Atlanta by at least 60 percent since 2019, according to 11Alive News, citing Atlanta Police Department crime data.
Warnock has advocated for softer crime policies, including ending cash bail. He has criticized the American prison system as a “scandal on the soul of America,” and called to end “mass incarceration.”
As the Free Beacon observes, “Emergency services have been called to MLK Village in Atlanta hundreds of times since 2020.”
Getting rid of the police, as some Warnock staffers would like to do, would increase the crime rate. After Seattle slashed police funding, virtually all sexual assaults ended up going unpunished, and only 1% of all cases were solved. The New York Post reported on this in the news story, “Seattle does not have enough cops to investigate adult sex assaults after ‘defund the police”:
Nearly two years after Seattle led the way in defunding the police, the Washington city’s force is so understaffed, it did not assign a detective to investigate a single case of a sex assault on an adult last month, according to a report. The depleted department now only has four detectives in the squad handling sex assaults, nearly all dedicated to child abuse cases, local NPR station KUOW revealed.
Not a single sexual assault case involving an adult was given to a detective throughout the whole of last month, aside from any that already had arrests, the outlet said, citing documentation from a whistleblower. “The Seattle Police Department sexual assault unit is not at all investigating adult sexual assault reports or cases unless there was an arrest,” one police department source told the station. The lack of manpower even means people reporting sex assaults are sometimes routed to an automated telephone hotline designed to handle non-urgent crimes such as stolen checks, the report said.
Seattle’s council in 2020 voted to slash the police budget and cut officers’ jobs as the city saw some of the most troubling Black Lives Matter protests in the US, including a deadly cop-free “autonomous zone.” The 1,281 deployable officers the force had at the end of 2019 were slashed to just 958 at the end of last year, after the cuts, KUOW said.
Higher police spending tends to reduce crime. Europe spends more on police than the U.S., and has a lower crime rate. America already has far fewer police per homicide than other Western countries, as criminology professor Justin Nix has noted.
Warnock’s desire to slash incarceration would raise the crime rate by leaving dangerous criminals fee to roam the streets. Most inmates in state prisons are there for “violent offenses,” not drugs. As a lawyer argues:
Releasing dangerous criminals increases the crime rate, both by freeing the particular offender being released to commit crimes again, and by reducing disincentives to commit crime in the first place. That reduces the deterrent effect of the criminal justice system.
Studies show that keeping offenders in prison longer deters crimes from being committed, saving innocent lives. For example, California’s murder rate fell after the passage of Proposition 8. It increased penalties for repeat offenders who commit willful homicide and other major crimes. The violent crimes covered by Proposition 8 [such as murder, robbery, and rape] fell a lot after it became law, especially compared to crimes not covered by Proposition 8.
Warnock once praised Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan for supposedly opening black preachers’ eyes to the fact that Christianity is a “white religion.”
