In the Obama years, the two parties seemed to settle on a rollback of earmarks and pork-barrel spending out of some insane fealty to austerity politics, when most Western countries tried to cut their budget deficits during a global recession. The most glaring solution here is to bring back the pork. Michael M Santiago/GettyImages // Getty Images Warnock will be Georgia’s first Black senator, and only the second Black senator from the South since Reconstruction. At the very least, they should maximize budget reconciliation, which allows some tax and spending measures to be expedited through Congress. They should destroy the filibuster and any other rule that might prevent them enacting their agenda. (This is the 50+1 majority you may have heard about.) But there really are no excuses for Democrats. Schumer cannot afford to lose any of them on any vote, considering he'll need Vice President-elect Kamala Harris to serve as a tiebreaker to get anything through in the first place. There's also a possibly infinite number of Senate Democrats who will get cold feet at various junctures, particularly if they're up for re-election in 2022 and think the way to win is for voters to think of them as a Moderate Who Won't Rock the Boat. Manchin has already signaled he's going to be a problem with a completely delusional statement this morning. Nobody could hope to be as big a megalomaniacal ghoul as Mitch McConnell in this or many lifetimes, but Manchin-and perhaps Arizona's Kyrsten Sinema, the chamber's next-most conservative Democrat-will likely hold huge power within new Senate Leader Chuck Schumer's razor-thin majority. He has lost his scythe as the Grim Reaper, and will no longer be able to deal death to vital legislation addressing major national problems on the basis that "the donors want it" and "he can." That job will now fall to Joe Manchin. And it also means Mitch McConnell is now the Senate Minority Leader. But it also means that the Democratic Party will control the Senate along with the House of Representatives through Joe Biden's first two years in the White House. That means the two cartoon plutocrats they were running against, Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue, will no longer be United States senators, a job they seemed to see as a pipeline for stock tips. Raphael Warnock and the not-reverend, not-doctor Jon Ossoff have triumphed in the Georgia Senate runoffs. What's that? Is something good happening? I'm not sure what to do with my hands.
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