The real reasons Georgia should reelect Warnock
At campaign stops, Democrat Raphael G. Warnock often reminds his Georgia constituents of the time he joined forces with his ideological antipode, Republican Ted Cruz of Texas.
It happened during the debate over the $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill that President Joe Biden signed into law last year. Cruz had been frustrated in attempts to win support for a new interstate highway, I-14, that would cross Texas. Warnock worked with Cruz to craft an amendment designating a corridor for I-14 that stretches eastward all the way through Georgia. The measure passed the Senate by unanimous consent, and Georgians who live in Columbus, Macon and Augusta will have a new interstate.
That story illustrates the best reason to reelect Warnock in the Dec. 6 runoff: He is a good, effective senator. He is also a talented politician and gifted orator who has sought to voice unifying themes and find common ground in a state that could hardly be more polarized. Perhaps as should be expected from the pastor of Atlanta’s Ebenezer Baptist Church, Warnock frequently uses metaphorical language of the pulpit — even when talking about highway construction.
“There is a road that runs through our humanity,” he told a crowd in the conservative northwest corner of the state in August, “that is larger than politics, bigger than partisan bickering, certainly bigger than race, bigger than geographical differences.” He said that “my job as a legislator, and our job as citizens, is to find our way to that road that connects us to one another.”
In what should have been hostile territory, Politico’s Michael Kruse reported, Warnock got enthusiastic applause.
Warnock doesn’t just preach that journey. In the Senate, he’s practiced it. In doing so, he’s demonstrated that bipartisanship is more than a symbolic, insufficient salve to our national hurts — it’s an approach that has real, practical power.
He worked with Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, on keeping down the cost of insulin, for example, and with Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., on efforts to better safeguard maternal health. Warnock has pushed the Biden administration to deliver more student debt relief than the president has been willing to offer, and he joined with a Republican congressman from Georgia, Rep. Earl L. “Buddy” Carter, to fight the Biden administration’s plans to shut down a training center at the Air National Guard Base in Warnock’s native Savannah.
There are limits to what any freshman senator can accomplish in his first two years in a chamber where seniority still matters so much. And there are limits to what any senator, regardless of tenure, can accomplish in an era when the imperative of denying Democrats and the Biden administration a “win” has led Republicans to vote against legislation they once might have supported or even sponsored.
Cruz, one of several Republican senators who would like to run for president in 2024, was in Georgia last Tuesday campaigning for Warnock’s opponent and warning that Warnock’s reelection was a threat to “your liberties and mine … your rights to religious liberty, your rights to free speech, your Second Amendment rights.” He acknowledged having worked productively with Warnock on the highway bill but portrayed Warnock’s assistance as an exception to the rule.
But Cruz’s stump speech reveals the weakness of the Republican case against Warnock. They have to argue against him in generic, national terms because it’s so hard for them attack the work he’s done for Georgians. Claiming that Warnock’s opponent would be a more effective representative for the state is one thing; proving that will be much harder.
Georgia voters, you have an eloquent senator who has worked across the aisle and delivered real benefits. Go to the polls, please, and do the right thing — if not for the country as a whole, then for yourselves.