LOEFFLER—HOW THE GOP’S GREAT WHITE HOPE MAY DO DEMOCRACY AN INADVERTENT FAVOR

As the Georgia run-off looms, there are a couple of things Georgians might want to remember about Kelly Loeffler. First, her racist dog whistles have gotten to the place where they are no longer such. They are now blatant, and coming through as loud and clear as the president's. After Rep. Ilhan Omar publicly expressed her backing for Loeffler's opponent, Raphael Warnock, the incumbent Georgia senator falsely claimed Omar had been seen “smiling and laughing while talking about al-Qaeda and 9/11”, and suggested that Congresswoman Omar should be removed from office because of her status as a Muslim and as a naturalized American born in Somalia.

The fact is that, whether Senator Loeffler likes it or not, Ilhan Omar is what the United States looks like—or at least, what it should look like, since conservatives are lately loath to talk about the great American “melting pot” of nations, races and religions that is the United States of America, and that was so often referred to, by politicians and journalists alike, when I was a boy growing up in the fifties and sixties. Ilhan is a former war refugee, who found security and freedom in America and is literally living the American Dream by running for and winning national office to represent her district in Minnesota. Omar is the first Somali-American, the first naturalized citizen from the African continent, and the first woman of color to represent Minnesota in Congress. She is also one of only two Muslim women the Legislature, a woman of non-Christian descent in a Christian-majority country that, nevertheless, champions—at least on paper—freedom of religion and separation of Church and State. She is, then, a textbook example of what the United States is supposed to be all about.

Rep. Ilhan Omar

Loeffler, meanwhile is the richest member of the Senate, bar none. The fifty-year-old senator has an estimated personal net worth of eight hundred million dollars, and commutes between her Atlanta home and Washington in a private jet that she reportedly bought for that specific purpose. Just before she was recently accused of insider trading for the sale of millions of dollars worth of stocks that stood to be hurt by the coronavirus pandemic, her net worth was reported to be “only” about half a billion.  

Questions of insider trading were raised because Loeffler sold off the vulnerable stock—some of which she owned jointly with her husband, billionaire Jeffrey Sprecher—the sixty-five-year-old founder and CEO of the Inter-Continental Exchange (ICE), a sixty-billion-dollar financial, and energy and commodities trading firm, and chairman of the New York Stock Exchange—the same day that she joined other senators at a classified briefing on the coronavirus outbreak. Th
e meeting took place before the seriousness of the pandemic was known to the public at large.

Kelly Loeffler

Although the Senate Ethics Committee looked into the matter and despite calls for an FBI probe, in a political world where Mitch McConnell reigns supreme, and with Trump hand-puppet William Barr then at the head of the Justice Department, officials found insufficient evidence of wrongdoing to take disciplinary measures or to bring federal charges against Loffler. This, despite the fact that the public release in March of federal disclosure documentation showed that Sprecher and Loeffler had also purchased stock in a company that stood to gain from shelter-in-place orders that governors and mayors eventually issued as a result of the pandemic of which Loeffler had prior and privileged knowledge.  Meanwhile, her husband’s company has seen a twenty-two percent rally over the course of the pandemic.

The other thing that’s interesting to recall is that Loeffler has only been a senator since just before the start of the pandemic, since she was not elected to office. Indeed, she was appointed by Georgia Governor Brian Kemp in December of 2019 to complete the term of Republican Senator Johnny Isakson, who resigned his office early because of failing health. She would later bite the hand of Kemp by joining Trump in accusing the governor and his Republican secretary of state of rigging the election against the incumbent president in Georgia. She continues to refuse publicly to accept the fact that Joe Biden in president-elect of the United States.

Jeffrey Sprecher

Since taking office a year ago, Loeffler has apparently spent no time whatsoever considering a stance on any issue under Senate consideration, merely mimicking whatever Trump’s current tweets have indicated his policy was. This is true to such an obvious extent that the president has praised her for having a “one hundred percent Trump” voting record throughout her single year in Congress.

In recent days, however, this loyalty to the mad king Trump caught her on her back foot, since she had followed the lead of Mitch McConnell and other leading GOP senators in voting to cut benefits to a COVID-strapped nation in half, compared with the first stimulus bill which had provided six hundred dollars a week in unemployment benefits plus a one-time twelve-hundred-dollar check to the worst-hit segments of the population. While Democrats wanted to extend the jobless benefits at six hundred a week and provide a stimulus check of at least twelve hundred, if not expanding it to two thousand, McConnell Republicans posited that many unemployed people would make more staying at home than working at that rate—the point here being that six hundred dollars for a forty hour work week implies a fifteen dollar an hour minimum wage and, let’s be honest, the business-beholden GOP didn’t want to give lower class non-union workers any big ideas. And, since they apparently live in a country-club bubble and have no idea (nor do they care) what’s happening even a block from the Capitol, let alone in lower-class America as a whole, they felt another twelve-hundred-dollar stimulus check was “excessive”. All of which Trump seemed to be on board with, as long as he could stick it to the Democrats.

But at the last minute, as a hollow bone thrown to his working-class base and as a means of kidney-punching Republicans, including McConnell, who had dared to admit (in the face of overwhelming evidence) that the president had lost the election, Trump suddenly, if only briefly, joined with Democrats in demanding a two-thousand-dollar stimulus check, vetoing the new stimulus bill that Loeffler had voted for in lockstep with the GOP leadership, thinking that in doing so, she was doing Trump’s bidding. Now, a couple of days away from the run-off that will define her political future, Trump has left her, with her feet dangling in the air, scurrying to explain why she voted to hack COVID crisis benefits to Georgians in half and is now seeking to disavow that vote, claiming, like Trump, to think the stimulus check should have been two thousand, when it’s too late to do anything about it, because the Senate leadership has spoken and Trump’s veto has been overturned.

If all of this means that both Loeffler and her fellow Georgia Republican David Perdue—who is spending the last days of his campaign in COVID quarantine—lose the run-off in Georgia, which it appears they well might, perhaps both Trump, with his mindless trash-talking about the Republican administration in that state, and Loeffler, by kowtowing to the president’s insane conspiracy theories instead of defending her own constituency, will have done an inadvertent service to democracy, by handing the Senate to the Democrats and forcing Mitch “Stonewall” McConnell to step down, after the most disgraceful administration in history.