Can Mitch McConnell maintain his Senate majority by refusing to seat Ossoff and Warnock?

Stage 2 of the GOP coup will be attempting to retain control of the US Senate by demanding McConnell not seat Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock.

Trump, and a growing chorus of Republican electeds, have been ranting for weeks about how his re-election was stolen in Georgia. (It wasn’t.)

They claim there was a vast conspiracy — that not only involved the CIA and dead Hugo Chavez, but also Georgia’s Trump-loving Republican governor and secretary of state — to destroy ballots, let out-of-staters and dead people vote, and to use secret computer code to switch 17,000 votes away from Trump.

Here’s a sampling of Trump’s election fraud claims from just this morning:

Nationally, at least 140 Republican members of the US House, and nearly a dozen GOP Senators, have said that they find the “voter fraud” so egregious and pervasive, they’ll try to block congressional certification of Biden’s victory on Wednesday, January 6.

The day before, Tuesday, January 5, Georgians (and, apparently, scores of dead Venezuelans) vote in a special election to pick the state’s two US Senators. But here’s the rub. By Trump’s logic, if Georgia’s election apparatus is so corrupted that Democrats were able to easily steal Donald Trump’s victory, why won’t that same dubious election apparatus be used to cheat Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue, and illegally hand the election to Democrats Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock?

Jon Ossoff photo (l) by John Ramspott. Raphael Warnock photo (r) by his campaign.

If Ossoff and Warnock win — or, if one of them wins, and Democrats convince a sitting Republican or Republican-caucusing-Independent Senator to caucus with them instead — then Dems get the Senate majority. If Donald Trump, and a growing chorus of Republican members of Congress, are willing to steal the presidency over fake Georgia election irregularities, why wouldn’t they do the same with a Georgia election that takes away their Senate majority?

Now, looking at how such a steal would play out, it’s not clear that the Republicans would or could pull it off. But first, let’s be clear about one thing: If Ossoff or Warnock win, it is a near certainty that Donald Trump will claim that the election was stolen, and demand that they not be seated.

But would it work? Let’s take a quick trip through Senate procedure land:

1. In order to become a US Senator, you have to be “duly” elected. Normally, that means your state’s governor and secretary of state have to certify your election, and then transmit that certification to the US Senate.

2. If the election is close, and there is a dispute as to who won, then those state officials may not certify, and the Senate typically will take no action until the dispute is settled.

3. If Ossoff or Warnock win, Donald Trump will likely demand that Georgia not certify. Fortunately, Georgia’s Republican Governor, Brian Kemp, and Republican Secretary of State, Brad Raffensperger, refused Trump’s earlier demands not to certify the presidential election results. Assuming no credible evidence of significant fraud in the Senate election is uncovered, Kemp and Raffensperger will likely continue to refuse to take part in Trump’s con. (Though, if the Senate elections are close, those state officials will face even greater pressure not to certify, and who knows what happens then.)

4. It would be unheard of for the Senate not to seat a Senator-elect who has been certified by their state. And one Senate procedure expert I spoke with thinks McConnell’s hands would be tied, by procedure; he’d have to seat the incoming member(s). And to the extent that McConnell had any wiggle room not to seat a certified Senator-elect, McConnell still wouldn’t go there, the expert tells me, because to politicize such a pro forma function of the Senate would be so dangerous for the Senate’s future functioning, that even McConnell wouldn’t do it. And while I wouldn’t put much past McConnell — he did steal a Supreme Court seat, after all — it is true that even though he dragged his feet on recognizing Biden as the winner, McConnell has refused to embrace, and even pushed back against, Trump’s growing coup attempt.

So that should give us some consolation. But very little. The only reason democracy may triumph — this time — is because a handful of elected officials are refusing the entreaties of a wannabe dictator. What happens when a future dictator is far more savvy; and a future governor, secretary of state, or Senate majority leader doesn’t refuse?