senate

9Dec

By THEIRL1ADMIN01No Comments

POLITICS

Sinema Out, Warnock In – Democrats Narrowly Control The Senate And Republicans The House, But Gridlock Won’t Be The Biggest Problem For The New Congress

In the wake of the 2022 U.S. midterm elections, a general sense of the political landscape in the upcoming 118th Congress has taken shape. With Sen. Kyrsten Sinema’s announcement that she is leaving the Democratic Party and Sen. Raphael Warnock’s victory in Georgia’s runoff, Democrats will maintain control in the Senate, while Republicans will take control of the House. Divided government sparks fears of gridlock, a legislative standstill. At face value, this makes sense. Given the different policy priorities of the two major parties, you might expect to see each party passing legislation out of the chamber it controls that has little chance in the other chamber – and thus no chance of becoming law. Logically, this means a less productive legislature than one in which a single party with...

The Historic US Senate Win Of Rev. Raphael Warnock Broke More Barriers Than You May Think

When Rev. Raphael Warnock prevailed in the special election on Jan. 5, he was the first African American from Georgia to win a U.S. Senate seat, and the 11th African American to serve in the U.S. Senate. But as a political scientist who has studied African American candidates seeking statewide offices like governor or U.S. senator, I know that Warnock’s real victories were as an African American candidate who had no previous elected experience and won a Senate seat, and he became the first African American to defeat a sitting senator or governor. Neutralizing the ‘radical’ label It’s no accident that few Black candidates who have run for the Senate or a governorship have won. They often face overt racism. For instance, in 2006, Tennessee Democratic Senate candidate Harold Ford Jr. was re...

Impeachment comes to the Senate

Editor’s Note: The House of Representatives has impeached President Donald Trump. Attention now turns to the Senate. Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, a Kentucky Republican, is known as a master of the Senate’s rules, and has been raising campaign donations with ads touting the power he would have over impeachment proceedings. Constitutional scholar Sarah Burns from the Rochester Institute of Technology answers some crucial questions already arising about what McConnell might be able to do, to either slow down the process or speed things along. 1. Will the Senate even take up a House impeachment? The Constitution does not give any details about exactly how an impeachment trial should proceed. Instead, the Senate itself has set rules that govern the process. The first of those rules says th...