Congress met for its 117th session on Sunday, swearing jurors in the midst of extraordinary political turmoil as Republicans worked to topple Joe Biden’s victory over Donald Trump, a crucial second round of the Senate in Georgia was approaching and the rise in the coronavirus imposed strict limits on Capitol family ceremonies.
Democrat Nancy Pelosi was re-elected as mayor. But most of the attention was turned to the Senate, where Mitch McConnell could be carrying out his final acts as the leader of the Republican majority.
If Democrats John Ossoff and Raphael Warnock oust Republicans Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue in Georgia on Tuesday, the chamber will split by 50-50. As vice president, Kamala Harris would then have a casting vote, raising Biden’s hopes of legislative success.
In an extraordinarily bitter campaign, early voting broke second round records, with 3 million votes cast. African-American participation, critical to the Democrats’ chances, has been robust: about a third of the ballots came from black voters who identified themselves, against about 27% in the November contests, which did not produce conclusive winners.
On Sunday, Stacey Abrams, the Democrat defeated in Georgia’s 2018 governor elections who now defends the right to vote, told ABC’s This Week program that his party “did very well in the mail vote, we did very well in the vote initial, but we know that election day is going to be the likely high participation day for Republicans, so we need Democrats who did not vote to attend.
“What excites us is that we keep reaching out to those voters. Millions of contacts have been made, thousands of new records have been made. We know that at least 100,000 people who did not vote in the general election are now voting in this election. “
Harris would campaign in Georgia on Sunday, with Biden following on Monday. Trump alarmed Republicans with attacks on Republican Party state officials and the integrity of the second rounds, as part of his baseless allegations of electoral fraud in November. In a bombshell report, the Washington Post detailed a call on Saturday when Trump pressured Georgia’s secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, to overturn the presidential result, saying that a failure to do so could hurt Republicans’ chances in the second round. of the Senate.
However, on Monday, Trump will meet in support of Loeffler and Perdue.
Perdue remains in quarantine after contact with a person infected with Covid-19. However, the four candidates were at each other’s throat.
On Fox News Sunday, Loeffler, a major Trump ally, released allegations in Warnock regarding an investigation of child abuse and domestic violence and continued to deny his claims that she got rich by trading in shares after private Covid-19 briefings.
“Why did he refuse to denounce Marxism and socialism?” Loeffler said. “He attacked our policemen, calling them gangsters, bandits and bullies, said ‘You cannot serve God and the military’, praised Fidel Castro [and] Karl Marx.”
Warnock and Ossoff seized allegations of improper trading of shares by Perdue, who disposed of assets damaged by the pandemic and bought cheap shares that Covid-19’s restrictions then raised in value.
In competitions where black voting is so important, race has also taken on a central role. Warnock is a senior pastor at the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, where Martin Luther King Jr once preached. Loeffler ran attack ads using excerpts from Warnock’s sermons.
“The Republican attack is not just against Warnock, it is against the black church and the black religious experience,” Rev. Timothy McDonald III, pastor of the First Iconic Baptist Church in Atlanta and assistant pastor of Ebenezer from 1978 to 1984, told Reuters.
McDonald described Warnock’s views as consistent with the church’s opposition to racism, police brutality, poverty and militarism.
“I don’t care what you think about Warnock,” he said. “We have to defend our church, our preaching or prophetic tradition, our involvement and engagement in the community. We will defend this. “
Loeffler said in a tweet last month that he was not attacking the church. “We simply explained his history in his own words,” she wrote.
Ossoff was controversial when he recently accused Loeffler of “campaigning with a Klansman”. In fact, Loeffler posed, she said without knowing it, with a former member of the far-right group.
Asked about CNN’s State of the Union whether it was “important for candidates to speak the truth,” Ossoff said: “Yes. And it is even more worrying that this is not an isolated incident.
“Kelly Loeffler repeatedly posed for pictures and was seen campaigning alongside radical white supremacists. And I believe they are attracted to your campaign, because your campaign consisted almost entirely of racist attacks on the Black Lives Matter movement and the Black Church.
“… And it is happening at the same time that Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue and the Republicans of Georgia are mounting a violent attack on voting rights in Georgia, process after process to deprive black voters, purge the lists, remove the ballot boxes.
“And I believe that one of the reasons why we are seeing such a huge turnout … is that Georgians are challenging efforts to pluck up their voting rights and standing up and saying, ‘Let’s make our voices heard’. “
The events in Washington also affected Georgia’s races. Loeffler and Perdue supported Trump’s demands for Congress to raise $ 600 for Covid to $ 2,000, which McConnell blocked.
Ossoff took the opportunity to point out Perdue’s “hypocrisy” for opposing last year’s first $ 1,200 relief payment and “obstructing” efforts to provide more direct relief for more than eight months.
The candidate who wins a ticket to Washington will join a new Congress that is already home to a politician from the ends of Georgia’s politics. Among the newcomers to the House who took office on Sunday was Marjorie Taylor Greene, who supported the Q-Anon conspiracy theory and was among a group of Republicans who recently visited Trump at the White House to discuss the attempt to undo the election.