“Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell” Has Such a Nice Ring To It

Yesterday was a very good day in Georgia. Final votes are still being counted but Reverend Raphael Warnock has been declared the projected winner in the runoff Senate election over his opponent Kelly Loeffler (who I guess can go back to owning a WNBA team that openly hates her full-time now).

The race between Jon Ossoff and David Perdue hasn’t been officially called yet but Ossoff has a substantial lead that is only growing as more mail-in ballot results come in. Because that’s what happens when Republicans spend months telling their constituents not to vote by mail.

If and when Ossoff wins his race, the two new lawmakers will give the Democrats a majority in the Senate. Technically, it will actually be a tie with 50 Republicans and 50 Democrats. (Okay, even more technically, it’s 48 Democrats and two Independents who caucus with the Dems.)

That means that in the case of a tie vote in the Senate, it will be Vice President Kamala Harris’ job to break that tie.

Warnock’s win is historic. He is Georgia’s first-ever Black senator and there have only been ten (now 11) Black senators in the country’s history. The only other Black senator from the south to be elected since Reconstruction is sitting Republican for South Carolina Tim Scott.

Republicans in the state worked hard to demonize Warnock throughout the race, trying to paint him as a scary radical socialist. That approach appears to have backfired spectacularly.

Thanks pretty much entirely to Stacey Abrams and the work of Black women organizers, the Democrats’ newly gained majority also means that Mitch McConnell—the man who has stood in the way of so many pieces of legislation that could have helped people in America for so long—has lost his position as Senate Majority Leader.

Current Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer already referred to himself in a statement issued Wednesday as the majority leader, calling this a “brand new day” in Washington.

“For too long, much-needed help has been stalled or diluted by a Republican-led Senate and President Trump. That will change with a Democratic Senate, Democratic House, and a Democratic President,” Schumer said.

This also means that Democrats are going to be made chairs of all the Senate committees currently headed by Republicans.

All in all, the Senate is about to see is giant shake-up and Mitch McConnell is definitely very, very angry.

(image: Tom Brenner-Pool/Getty Images)

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Vivian Kane

Vivian Kane (she/her) is the Senior News Editor at The Mary Sue, where she's been writing about politics and entertainment (and all the ways in which the two overlap) since the dark days of late 2016. Born in San Francisco and radicalized in Los Angeles, she now lives in Kansas City, Missouri, where she gets to put her MFA to use covering the local theatre scene. She is the co-owner of The Pitch, Kansas City’s alt news and culture magazine, alongside her husband, Brock Wilbur, with whom she also shares many cats.

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