Vice President-elect Kamala Harris made a brilliant choice in opening her remarks at the Democratic presidential ticket’s victory celebration with a quote from civil rights icon and former Georgia congressman John Lewis, who wrote before he died, “Democracy is not a state. It is an act.”
Lewis, who was nearly killed by racist police on the Edmund Pettis Bridge in Selma, Alabama, knew better than most of us that taking action to defend democracy can be dangerous. But he also knew, as Harris reminded us, that there is joy in the struggle.
Defeating Donald Trump was an occasion for great joy. I loved seeing people post videos of a dancing John Lewis to celebrate. But we have more actions to take, more bridges to cross, more elections to win—right now, and right in John Lewis’s home state of Georgia.
Georgia was in the rare position of having two U.S. senate races on the ballot in the same year. Both races had more than two candidates, and both races have now gone to runoff elections, according to Georgia law, because no candidate got over 50 percent of the vote.
That means that on January 5—actually for early voters starting December 14—Georgia voters have the power to decide whether the U.S. Senate will have a majority willing to work with the Biden-Harris administration on behalf of the American people, or whether we’ll be stuck with a Republican majority led by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, who brags about turning the Senate into a graveyard for legislation coming from the House of Representatives.
McConnell is the reason American families and small businesses suffering from the economic fallout of the pandemic have had no relief for months. McConnell is the reason Trump has been able to pack federal courts with the worst, most unqualified, most anti-civil-rights judges we’ve seen in a long time.
On the Democratic side, we have two Senate candidates we can be excited about.
Rev. Rafael Warnock is the senior pastor of Atlanta’s historic Ebenezer Baptist Church, where Martin Luther King Jr. and his father pastored.
