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Monday, September 26th, 2022
Are we a January 5th nation, or a January 6th nation? We Americans must decide, Senator Raphael Warnock tells Seattle crowd
The events of January 5th, 2021 yielded a small, cogent piece of evidence that the promise of America is slowly being fulfilled: The senior minister of Ebeneezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, the pulpit of Martin Luther King Senior and Martin Luther King Junior, now sits as a U.S. Senator from Georgia.
Senator Raphael Warnock is a top Republican target this November and was in Seattle on Sunday for a brief fundraising foray. Such are the man’s responsibilities, as senator and pastor, that the event for givers was repeatedly postponed, but finally held on a drop-dead gorgeous day at a home on Lake Washington.
Senator Raphael Warnock explains how the United States would benefit from an expanded Democratic U.S. Senate majority and continued Democratic control of the U.S. House (Photo: Andrew Villeneuve/NPI)
“I’m on to you: You tell the rest of the country it’s dark out here and rains all the time,” joked Warnock.
Preachers begin with humor, but Warnock got serious.
The senator-reverend’s way of thanking donors was to raise spirits of what remains possible in this country, and the role of an enlightened government in making that possible.
He grew up the son of an auto mechanic in public housing as the eleventh of twelve children.
He credits the Upward Bound program with getting him college ready and credits Pell Grants and student loans with allowing him to attend Morehouse College.
He would go on to earn a master’s degree and doctorate in philosophy from Union Theological Seminary.
Over thirty years later, after a special election put two Georgia Democrats in the Senate, and flipped control, Warnock found himself in the White House, pleading with President Biden for student loan forgiveness.
Biden decided to offer $10,000 in relief, but Warnock believes he helped persuade our 46th president to raise relief to $20,000 for Pell Grant recipients.
The theme of his remarks on Sunday: Public office allows you to work at close quarters to make good things happen. The United States experiences “a poverty not of resources but of moral imagination,” Warnock argued, and is “a nation that has neglected itself.” Examples: creaky water systems in minority communities, and a lack of broadband access for many of the nation’s poor.
The 2022 election, said Warnock, will make a massive difference.
Democrats in the Senate succeeded in putting a Child Tax Credit into Biden’s American Rescue Plan, to which Warnock attributes a forty percent reduction in child poverty. A Democratic-controlled Congress would extend it.
The Inflation Reduction Act put a $2,000 cap on drug costs to seniors.
Medicare can now negotiate drug prices with Big Pharma.
The bill also capped costs for seniors on insulin. “If we can hold my seat and get a couple more, we can cap insulin costs for everybody,” said Warnock.
“I’m here because we have more to do,” said Warnock.
An upbeat crowd turned out on a gorgeous, sunny Sunday morning in Seattle to support Senator Warnock (Photo: Andrew Villeneuve/NPI)
The senator stressed particulars, what Democrats have managed to accomplish in a Senate divided 50–50 with Vice President Kamala Harris showing up to break ties.
But Warnock backed up to survey the big picture, dwelling on two days in winter. The dual Senate runoff elections in Georgia held on January 5th, 2021 were necessitated by a state law requiring wining candidates to get fifty percent of the vote.
The Republicans (David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler) had come out ahead in the November vote, but both fell short of a majority.
Wall-to-wall TV commercials saturated local Georgia TV channels in December. Donald Trump came to Georgia, supposedly to boost Perdue and Loeffler, but mainly to attack American democracy. Election Day saw Warnock and Jon Ossoff win both Senate seats from the Peachtree State. Warnock was elected to fill out an unexpired term, so he had to turn around and run again this year.
“We got the last laugh but we’ve been doing the work for a long time,” said Warnock. Flying to Washington, D.C., he was deluged with network interviews, joking: “I knew I had arrived when I went on ‘The View’ with Whoopi Goldberg.”
It was, of course, January 6th, 2021, with a mob assembled at the White House, hearing fiery speeches from Donald Trump and e‑New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, and then marching on the U.S. Capitol to which Warnock and Ossoff had just been sent to serve. The insurrection and bid to overturn the 2020 election remains a chilling episode in the American experience.
We will, and should, never forget January 6th. But Warnock challenged his listeners to remember what happened in Georgia on January 5th.
A state once the bastion of segregation, home to segregationist strategists Senators Richard Russell and Herman Talmadge, sent an African-American and a young Jewish guy to represent them in the world’s greatest deliberative body.
“We are a January 6th nation, and we are a January 5th nation,” said Warnock.
“We must choose who we are.”
Such are the stakes in 2022.
Warnock did not mention his Republican foe Herschel Walker, a Trump-backed ultra MAGA Republican who has lied about his education, his business record, his charitable donations and even the number of children he has sired (while championing what he says are family values).
Trump is unleashing money from his warchest to back Walker.
“2022 is going to be the moment we save our democracy,” ex‑U.S. Ambassador to Switzerland Suzie LeVine said in urging the assembled crowd to give more.
On the Senate floor, just before the vote to confirm the country’s newest U.S. Supreme Court Justice, Ketanji Brown Jackson, Warnock and Senator Cory Booker, D.-New Jersey, were talking to Vice President Harris.
“She would not even be sitting here (for confirmation)” if Republicans still controlled the place, the Vice President told them.
She challenged Warnock to write a letter to his two daughters, explaining what was being accomplished that day, confirmation of the first African American woman to serve on the high court.
Harris pulled out paper to which Warnock put pen.
He had made a difference, and on a bright and sunny Sunday, reflected: “Legislation at the end of the day is a letter to your children.”
# Written by Joel Connelly :: 8:30 AM
Categories: Elections
Tags: GA-Sen
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