For anyone freaking out about a Franken scenario, keep in mind that the original vote counts was within 215 votes. Ossoff will have a couple of magnitudes more than that margin.
Skipper
1730
@triggercut posted what matters for Georgia though, which is cresting over .5% in order to avoid a recount. Once over that, not only is he in the clear, we’re done with this election baloney.
It’s expected he’ll even hit 1% majority vote.
Recount shmeecount, that’s not going to move the needle enough if he comes in at +20k or whatever. We had months of individual ballots being challenged in court because it was so tight with Franken. That won’t happen.
Goddamn! This is great news to wake up to!
BTW, a recount in Georgia would likely take less than a week.
Remember, in November they did a hand audit of all votes and recounted. Then they waited 2-3 days. And then they did a full machine recount. And got all of that done by November 20th.
Any recount requested by a losing candidate within the half-a-percent threshold is a machine recount. They just run stacks of ballots through the scanners again.
This was a death of a thousand paper cuts, though. So many factors. Including DJT initially refusing to sign a stimulus package and demanding $2,000 and Pelosi getting the House to vote for that…and Mitch not letting it get to the floor for an up/down vote.
Menzo
1735
Another thing control of the Senate means is that we won’t be subjected to endless show hearings about “election security” in which Trump’s garbage people are given free airtime.
For two years, at least.
Hopefully the democrats hold some Benghazi hearings. I really think someone should get to the bottom of what happened.
Thank you Georgia (and especially any QT3 folks living/voting there)! Waking up this morning I feel like a weight is lifted. The Biden Administration will not face a first two years hamstrung by Mitch McConnell and a GOP Senate majority, and the blame lies squarely and very visibly at Trump’s feet. Win-fucking-Win.
While you can argue the procedural details all day, the simple fact is that having Democrats in control of the Senate means it becomes much harder (and costly) for the GOP to sit back and play obstructionist politics for the next 2 years. Sure, you still need 60 votes to pass meaningful legislation, but now that Democrats are in control of the narrative they need to use it effectively. Craft legislation that clearly benefits Americans and pass it through the House, then bring it to the floor in the Senate. Make the GOP go on voting record as being opposed to things that a majority of people would want to see passed. Undercut their centrist support even further. Four years of Trump has done a wonderful job of that already, and this Electoral vote count fiasco today will help as well, but there is still more room to convince working class and suburban voters that today’s GOP isn’t what they seem to think it is, and doing so will create more Georgia style results in the next election cycle.
In the meantime, simple majority is all that is needed to make appointments to federal positions, and aside from COVID-19, the most urgent matter facing the Biden Administration the morning after the inauguration is going to be filling the literally hundreds of empty offices across all the departments of the federal government that either have outgoing Trump appointees or have sat empty for much of the Trump administration. Appointing professional people with actual experience to head those departments means those people can then fill the rest of the empty offices with people who know what the hell they are doing, and that alone will go a very long way to restoring normalcy to what has become a very dysfunctional federal government.
Houngan
1738
And now the poor suckers have to pull back on the stick and clean up the mess, per usual. Get ready for screaming manbabies when new taxes are proposed.
Matt_W
1739
From the transcript:
n the Senate, majority party leadership does not use the same set of rules as the House to bring bills to the floor. One way the Senate can take up a bill is by agreeing to a motion to proceed to it. Once a Senator – typically the majority leader – makes such a motion that the Senate proceed to a certain bill, the Senate can then normally debate the motion to proceed. If it eventually agrees to the motion by a majority vote, the Senate can then begin consideration of the bill. Â Alternatively, the majority leader can ask unanimous consent that the Senate take up a certain bill. If no one objects to such a request when it is made, then the Senate can immediately begin consideration of the bill in question. (When the leader refrains from making such a request because he has been informed that a Senator would object, it is often said that a Senator has placed a hold on the bill.)
Anything the majority leader can do in that paragraph, any other Senator can also do. (Where it says “typically the majority leader”, you can interject “but not always”). Any authorities granted to the majority leader in the Senate Rules (mostly having to do with committee governance) are also granted to the minority leader.
This video from the same source is pretty good:
Overall, these rules and practices governing floor debate and amending in the Senate provide significant leverage to each individual Senator. But rather than relying on the formal rules like cloture, frequently the Senate can more effectively act using unanimous consent agreements. Such an agreement is a structured plan for limiting debate and amending – a plan that can be tailored to each bill that comes to the floor (somewhat akin to a special rule in the House). Through the use of these agreements, the details of which all Senators have agreed upon, the Senate can more effectively process its business while protecting the procedural rights of each of its members.
You skipped this:
Once a committee has reported a bill, it is placed on one of the respective chamber’s calendars. These calendars are essentially a list of bills eligible for floor consideration; however, the bills on the calendars are not guaranteed floor consideration. Many will never be brought up on the floor during the course of a two-year Congress. It is also possible, although less common, for a bill to come directly to the floor without being reported and placed on a calendar.
Matt_W
1741
The ML has no control over which bills show up on the calendar. The calendar is a procedural document. Bills show up there automatically when introduced (by any Senator), when they’re read on the floor, and then again when they get referred out of committee.
Here’s why floor votes are a chimera: even with a successful cloture vote a bill gets 30 hours of floor debate. There are about 2000 legislative floor hours in a session. The Senate considers about 15,000 bills and many tens of thousands of nominations over the course of a 2 year session. It typically votes on several hundred bills. Floor time is mostly too precious to waste on political gestures that won’t result in legislation and won’t be noticed by 99% of people.
Sigh, I just got alerts from both WaPo and NYT that it’s still “too close to call” while DDHQ is all:
Tired of the need to keep it a race in the media. Fuck.
robc04
1743
I think they said there could be 17,000 military / overseas votes arriving by Friday. Not sure how many votes outstanding from rural areas. In any case, celebrate how awesome GA is!
Thinking about picking up some Atlanta Dream merch…though that will probably go into Loeffler’s pockets.
mono
1745
Maybe just wait on it a little bit…
Aw, hell yeah. Kelly and her husband may need the free cashflow what with the SEC and possibly senate committees sniffing around their asset transactions over the last two years.
Romney had a rough flight to D.C., which may have further hardened his feelings:
