GEORGIA, January 6, 2021 (LifeSiteNews) – Democrats appear to have cemented their takeover of the federal government Tuesday by electing Democrats Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock to the United States Senate, sending Republican incumbents David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler home and giving Democrat Joe Biden a united Democrat Congress to work with when he takes office as President of the United States on January 20, which is all but imminent.
With Biden being declared the winner of the presidential election last fall and the House of Representatives remaining in Democrat hands, the direction of America’s next two-to-four years came down to these two Senate seats, which went on to runoff elections because none of the Senate candidates broke 50% in November, per state election rules.
As of Wednesday morning, Warnock has officially been declared the victor over Loeffler, while Ossoff has a slight edge over Perdue in a race that hasn’t yet been formally called. Both Democrats have declared victory, but neither Republican has conceded defeat.
Assuming those results hold, however, Ossoff and Warnock’s victories give the Senate a 50-50 split, effectively giving Democrats control because all tie votes would be broken by very likely incoming Vice President Kamala Harris.
Democrats are expected to use unified government to pursue a litany of far-reaching agenda items, such as legislation to codify Roe v. Wade in federal law or the so-called “Equality Act.” More worryingly to conservatives, however, Democrats can also pursue a range of agenda items that could effectively immunize themselves from future elections, such as “packing” the Supreme Court, permanently increasing their Senate seats by granting statehood to Washington, D.C., and/or Puerto Rico, and granting citizenship to millions of illegal immigrants on the expectation that most would become Democrat voters.
(With such a narrow margin of control, Senate Democrats will technically still be constrained by the legislative filibuster, which requires 60 votes to pass most legislation. But while Republican Majority Leader Mitch McConnell refused to consider procedural maneuvers such as the two-speech rule to circumvent the filibuster, his Democrat successor Chuck Schumer is not expected to show any such restraint.)
It remains to be seen what role, if any, election fraud played in the race, or if Perdue and/or Loeffler will demand recounts or investigations of the results. Another factor that likely contributed to the GOP’s defeat was McConnell blocking a Trump-backed increase of COVID-19 relief checks from $600 to $2,000.