We had fully intended to begin today's column with the news from Georgia, to celebrate Senator Raphael Warnock's re-election. At some point, we would have gotten around to some snark directed at Joe Manchin, since he wouldn't be such a pivotal vote any more, given the 51-seat majority Democrats will now enjoy. And as an afterthought, we would have tossed in Kyrsten Sinema's name as well, since she deserves a heaping helping of snark as well.

But this morning, Sinema decided she didn't want to continue to play second fiddle to Manchin and inserted herself into all of today's headlines. Sinema is always looking out for number one, and she certainly eclipsed Manchin to become that in today's news cycle.

Many are looking at Sinema's move through the lens of her re-election chances. She was definitely going to be challenged in the primary (she is up for re-election in 2024), and she might well have lost, since Arizona's Democrats are not exactly pleased with all her antics since they sent her to Washington. Actually, not much of anyone in Arizona is pleased with Sinema right now, which is why her unfavorable rating among the state's electorate is well above 50 percent.

So the pundits are now gaming out why she might have made her move so early. It is true that as an Independent, Sinema will not face a primary and will skip over that step on her way to appearing on the general election ballot. But it'll almost certainly be a three-way race at that point. If she expects the Democratic Party to not put up a viable candidate in solidarity with her (as does indeed happen in Vermont and Maine, home to the other two Independent senators), she is not just sorely mistaken but downright delusional. So the horserace is gamed out as whether Sinema stands a chance against a MAGA-style Republican and an actual Democrat, or whether either of them would split the opposition vote enough to beat her.

Personally, we think this is the wrong way to look at it, but we do realize we're going out on a limb on this one. We have long believed that Kyrsten Sinema is only in politics to benefit Kyrsten Sinema. And with her propensity to welcome with wide arms all corporate donors, we are convinced that she will not even seek a second term, because she wants to move on more quickly to the much-more-lucrative business of being a former politician -- or "a lobbyist," in other words. That's where the real money is, and it is money that doesn't have to conform with campaign rules either.

So we're not too concerned about the 2024 Senate race in Arizona. And we're not really all that concerned about the impact Sinema's move will have on the Democrats' continued control of the Senate for the next two years. What is she really going to do differently, after all? She's so far been a big supporter of President Joe Biden's judicial picks; she has said she is not going to caucus with the Republicans, so even if she doesn't formally caucus with the Democrats the power split will still be in their favor (50-49); and she's keeping her committee assignments so she's still going to be in the conversation and have a seat at the table.

Sinema actually used to be a Green Party member, a while back. She railed against corporations and Wall Street when she ran for the Senate in the first place. But then she got into office and realized that corporations were quite willing to give her mountains of cash for her campaign efforts and so she became as fervent an anti-tax politician as anyone on the Republican side of the aisle. She insisted that nothing contained within the tax cuts passed under Donald Trump be changed. She insisted that her Wall Street buddies not be taxed the same rate most workers are taxed, but allowed to keep right on paying roughly half the rate anyone earning a paycheck pays. She protected drug manufacturers and other corporations who have been making out like bandits. She just didn't make quite as big a nuisance of herself on television while undermining the entire Democratic economic agenda as Joe Manchin did.

About the only thing which might now change is that the media will likely start obsessing over: "What will Sinema do?" more than they do over what Joe Manchin might be up to. Which seems to be Sinema's entire purpose in her switch, at least to us.

We don't hew to the editorial fashion of putting an elected official's party and state parenthetically right after their name in our articles here, but we're going to make an exception just this once. Because now that "Senator Kyrsten Sinema (D-AZ)" is no more, she needs a new label (for the other publications which do follow this particular editorial style). Our humble suggestion is to start calling her an "Independent Senator," but rather than use two letters (which would be confusing, since it would result in "IS," and "Kyrsten Sinema (IS-AZ)" is just so wrong...) let's just combine the "I" and the "S" into one symbol instead. Fortunately, there's a perfect combination already in use (albeit for other purposes). So we would urge all publications to immediately start referring to her as "Senator Kyrsten Sinema ($-AZ)." If the shoe fits....

The big (and very relieving) news of the week, however, was that Senator Raphael Warnock won his fourth election in the space of two years -- and because he won he will not have to run again for a full six-year Senate term. He was originally elected in a special election to finish out a term, but now he has won the right to represent Georgia in the United States Senate for six more years.

This was big news for many reasons (some of them quite snarky), but we're going to delve into them elsewhere in the column, so we just mention it here in passing.

As usual, there's plenty of news on the "Trump's legal woes" front to get to, so we'll just whip through it all as quickly as possible.

This week -- the same day Trump watched his hand-picked candidate lose in Georgia -- a jury found the Trump Organization guilty on all counts of tax fraud and other assorted charges. While this will only mean a maximum $1.6 million fine (which is peanuts, to Trump), it will forever tarnish the company in the banking world and beyond (if it hadn't already been tarnished enough, that is). And Trump's problems with his company's taxes are just beginning, as there is also a civil case and a possible criminal case for Trump himself percolating in New York.

Elsewhere, Trump's lawyers essentially served a search warrant on themselves, and hired an outside firm to search all the other places Trump keeps his stuff. Lo and behold, they found two more documents marked classified in a storage locker in Florida. What a surprise!

This is all an attempt to convince the courts that Trump really, really means it this time when he says all pertinent documents have been returned (as the original subpoena -- issued long before the actual search warrant -- required of him). But there is a sticking point, because it seems that no lawyer who works for Trump is willing to stand up and sign a document legally swearing that the subpoena has been complied with in full -- which is a real testament to Trump's lying powers, since even his own lawyers don't trust him. Nobody's willing to pick up the hot potato of being named "custodian of records" in this case, which has now led to the Department of Justice asking the judge to find all of Trump's lawyers in contempt of court. Stay tuned!

In a separate case Trump is appealing, his lawyers argued that he should be immune from any lawsuits even if he had called on his followers to "burn Congress down," intimidate citizens at polling stations to prevent them from voting, or seek to "destroy our constitutional system." The chutzpah is strong, in this one.

Trump did not, however, file an appeal to the special master being unceremoniously chucked out in the documents case, which is odd for him (he usually appeals everything for as long as legally possible). Maybe he's having trouble paying his legal bills, now that the R.N.C. has stopped doing so? Makes you wonder, that's for sure.

Meanwhile, a House committee is looking into one particular deal done by Jared Kushner, which strikes us as "too little, too late," but whatever....

The big Trumpian news this week came early, however, as last week he posted something on his pet social media service which was pretty jaw-dropping, even for Trump:

So, with the revelation of MASSIVE & WIDESPREAD FRAUD & DECEPTION in working closely with Big Tech Companies, the DNC, & the Democrat Party, do you throw the Presidential Election Results of 2020 OUT and declare the RIGHTFUL WINNER, or do you have a NEW ELECTION? A Massive Fraud of this type and magnitude allows for the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution. Our great 'Founders' did not want, and would not condone, False & Fraudulent Elections!

He followed this up, in all-caps: "UNPRECEDENTED FRAUD REQUIRES UNPRECEDENTED CURE!" just in case anyone had any doubts.

This brought the usual response outrages from Trump usually bring: a condemnation from the White House, strong denouncement from Democrats, and a pathetic handful of Republicans willing to stand up and say out loud that the United States Constitution is more important than Donald Trump. As usual, Liz Cheney put it clearest: "No honest person can now deny that Trump is an enemy of the Constitution."

Some Republicans tried to have it both ways, saying they didn't agree with Trump's remarks... but that they'd certainly support him in 2024 if he wins their party's nomination.

Representative Paul Gosar was fully on board, however, agreeing with Trump in a tweet: "Unprecedented fraud requires unprecedented cure." This tweet was swiftly taken down, however, but we all know what Gosar really thinks now.

What else has been going on? The Supreme Court heard a case which could have profound implications for how states conduct their elections, but thankfully there didn't seem to be enough radicals willing to go along with such an interpretation of the Constitution.

The family of a police officer who died after the January 6th insurrection refused to shake either Mitch McConnell's or Kevin McCarthy's hand during a ceremony awarding all the brave cops who fought that day for democracy the Congressional Gold Medal. This was precisely the level of respect that both McConnell and McCarthy have earned, it almost goes without saying.

Workers at the New York Times staged a one-day strike this week, the first in a very long time.

And the youngest member of Congress was turned down for a D.C. apartment because his credit rating went haywire during his successful run for Congress.

But we wanted to end on a high note today, so we leave you with an excerpt from one of the two most interesting articles we've read since the midterms (the other is excerpted down in the Talking Points). The article points out, in detail, how a ballot measure in Michigan changed their redistricting from a partisan free-for-all to being handled by nonpartisan independent commission rather than the state legislature. Sowing this change reaped big results, as you can see:

What changed this year? Fair maps made all the difference. In 2018, Michigan voters amended the state constitution and put an end to gerrymandering. And then Michiganders -- and the entire nation -- got to see what happens when district lines are drawn by an independent citizens commission, and not wired by politicians to select winners and losers before anyone casts a vote.

Here's what happened: When 49.9 percent of Michigan voters backed Democrats for Congress, and 47.6 percent preferred Republicans, this year's outcome turned out as fairly as possible. Democrats won seven seats and Republicans took six, exactly in line with each party's share of the vote. Compare that to a decade ago, in 2012, when Democratic candidates won some 240,000 more votes, but Republicans controlled nine of the 14 seats.

The independent commission delivered a fair outcome for the state legislature as well. Democrats narrowly won more votes for both the state House and the state Senate and won narrow majorities in each -- 20-18 in the Senate, 56-54 in the House. That connection between the popular will and political control had been severed over the last decade; Democrats, for example, won more votes for the state House in 2012, 2014, 2018 and 2020, but on tilted maps never managed to translate a majority of votes into a majority of seats.

Here's hoping more and more states decide to go this route (this movement has been slowly building for the past decade or more). Voters should get to pick their politicians, rather than the politicians picking their own maps of voters.

Some weeks it is tough to pick the most impressive Democrat, and some weeks it is easier. This week it was virtually automatic. There can be only one choice, really.

Senator Raphael Warnock was easily the Most Impressive Democrat Of The Week, winning his fourth election in Georgia in four years by roughly 100,000 votes. Runoff elections in Georgia were specifically designed to dilute the power of the Black vote, so it was impressive indeed to see -- for the second time in a row -- that things didn't work out as designed (which they had been, for 50 years or so). Democratic voters overcame all the restrictions placed on them by Republicans. The plan to move the runoff election a month forward (from the last time around) seems to have backfired on the GOP as well.

Of course, it certainly helped matters that Warnock was running against the most patently unfit for office candidate in the entire 2022 midterm cycle -- which is really saying something, considering the rest of the lunatics the Republicans nominated elsewhere. But ex-jock Herschel Walker was truly in a class by himself in this regard. He was a flawed candidate who ran a flawed campaign because at his core he is a very flawed human being. Plus, he is dumb as a bag of hammers. Warnock's campaign made most of their strongest points in television ads just by running Walker's own comments and then asking the voters if they really wanted a guy like that representing them in Washington. Which worked wonders, since the concept was so cringeworthy to begin with. Even Walker's own son was overjoyed to see him lose, which really says something about his "family values."

Warnock's win was also impressive because Walker was personally not just endorsed but actually recruited into running by Donald Trump. Most of the candidates Trump did endorse for Senate were just transactional matters to Trump, but a handful of them were almost "Mini-Me" Trumps -- candidates with zero political experience who wanted to coast into office on the power of being a celebrity already. Mehmet "Dr." Oz was the other most prominent example (and he lost, too).

Will Georgia represent the turning point for the Republican Party, when they finally realize how much damage to the party one megalomaniacal huckster can cause? Will they all begin to see the light now? Will the fever finally break?

Those are all unanswered questions for now, but there is a chance that Walker's defeat could be looked back on later as Trump's Waterloo. Many Republicans are already (to twist Trump's own phrase) "tired of all the losing." The place in time it reminds us of was when the national inside-the-Beltway media finally started to ignore what Sarah Palin had to say. There was a time, just after she and John McCain had been defeated in their presidential bid, when all of Washington hung on her every utterance. Palin was seen as the future of the GOP, a fresh new face that had attracted an oversize following based on nothing but sheer personality and charisma. For the next few years, people avidly sought her endorsement and always checked in to see what Palin thought about the next election. And then it just all... stopped. Suddenly she wasn't being sought out as a voice of the future anymore. She couldn't even manage to win the race for a House seat from Alaska this year, as she attempted a belated comeback. She became irrelevant to the Republican Party's future.

Donald Trump, of course, isn't going to just fade away. He's already announced his third presidential bid, he is under investigation by multiple entities in multiple jurisdictions for multiple possible crimes, and he still has an iron grip on his core MAGA base. So if Trump ever does reach the "fading away" point, it will be at some future date and not now.

Even so, if Trump never does climb quite back to the prominence he enjoyed in the 2022 midterm election cycle, future historians will certainly point to Georgia's runoff as "when things really began to change in a big way." That is not guaranteed, but it is certainly now possible.

Senator Warnock is going to return to Washington and he is only going to grow in stature from this point on. He could easily be a presidential nominee in future years for the Democrats (who have been searching for a candidate that might win some surprising states in the South ever since Bill Clinton's time). He has more than earned his right to serve a full six-year term. From Georgia. That is about as impressive as can be imagined, which is why he was our easy choice for this week's Most Impressive Democrat Of The Week this week.

[Congratulate Senator Raphael Warnock on his Senate contact page, to let him know you appreciate his efforts.]

This one is as easy as it is self-evident.

Our Most Disappointing Democrat Of The Week is none other than Senator Kyrsten Sinema ($-AZ).

With her announcement timed to steal the thunder from the Democrats' big win in Georgia, she has proven what anyone who has been paying attention knew all along: Kyrsten Sinema stands for one thing above all else, and that is advancing the fortunes of one Kyrsten Sinema.

At least the Democrats did win in Georgia -- who knows if Sinema would have made this announcement even if that hadn't come to pass? That would have thrown the control of the Senate into question, but at least now her move will have only limited consequences.

Personally, we can't wait for her eventual announcement that she is going to retire from politics to spend more time with her piles of cash back at home. Because that truly is the endgame she seems to covet the most.

[Contact Senator Kyrsten Sinema on her Senate contact page, to let her know what you think of her actions.]

Volume 688 (12/9/22)

We begin the Talking Points segment with some scheduling news: this will be the final Friday Talking Points column of the calendar year. Next week, join us back here for the first installment of our two-part year-end awards columns (feel free to make nominations for the categories on yesterday's post, too). And then we are taking a break between the holidays so there will be no new column on the last Friday of the year. So we'll see you all back here in 2023, and hope everyone has a great holiday season!

   Best midterms since F.D.R.

Let's just put this in some perspective, shall we?

"Democrats just had the best midterm election cycle since 1934, when Franklin Delano Roosevelt had his first midterm. For the first time since then, zero Democratic incumbents in the Senate lost their seats, and Democrats lost control of zero legislative chambers in statehouses across the country. In fact, they actually picked up one Senate seat. They picked up two governorships as well. They gained control -- a 'trifecta' -- of both houses of the Michigan statehouse as well as the governor's office for the first time in 40 years. And Michigan wasn't the only place they secured trifectas, or supermajorities, or just flipped at least one chamber of the state legislature. Since World War II, the average loss in the House during midterms was 40 seats. Democrats lost only nine -- and, sadly, control of that chamber. But even with that taken into consideration, Democrats just had their best midterm cycle in the past 88 years. So much for that 'red wave,' eh?"

   Character matters

Rub this one in, because Republicans used to do so on a regular basis. Turnabout is fair play, after all.

"The big message the voters sent to the Republican Party in this election cycle is easy enough to see: character matters. The voters weren't impressed by the celebrity of some quack doctor on television, or some ex-jock who could barely get a coherent English sentence out of his mouth. They weren't impressed with tinfoil-hatted lunatics who insisted that their pet conspiracy theory was more important than American democracy. They weren't impressed with people who bought into Donald Trump's Big Lie. What they voted for instead were candidates who were solid, sane, and rational. They rejected the extremism of Donald Trump in favor of a party who is working hard to actually get things done for the American people instead of eternally searching for some scapegoat to blame all ills upon. The Republican Party can either learn this lesson or it can repeat the mistakes that brought it candidates like Christine O'Donnell, Todd Akin, 'Dr.' Oz, and Herschel Walker. And they can go right on losing Senate races that they might have easily won if they had put up someone reasonable and intelligent. It's really their choice, but as they used to say to Democrats a few decades back, character does indeed matter to the voters."

   At least we are not extremists

This is an excerpt from one of the most interesting articles we've seen since the midterm results came in. The whole thing is worth a read, but here is the crux of the matter:

Instead of droning on about infrastructure, Democrats can spend the next two years declaring bluntly that a vote for any Republican candidate, no matter how moderate, is still a vote for a party that bans abortions, treats transgender Americans as second-class citizens, makes it harder for Black people and those in urban areas to vote, dumps undocumented immigrants off in left-leaning areas without any consideration of their well-being, bans the works of Black and LGBTQ authors from public schools -- and questions election results, particularly those from heavily Black areas, when they lose.

   Gee, wonder how that happened!

Hoo boy. This is just too, too funny.

"Republicans seem to have realized that they made a bad mistake in telling all their voters not to vote early and not to use mail-in ballots. Lots and lots of them are now saying so. But it's like they're in the room with an 800-pound gorilla and can't quite bring themselves to use the word 'gorilla.' Here is what Sean Hannity had to say about this mysterious phenomenon this week: 'I think Republicans have been unwilling, for whatever reason... to [embrace] voting early and voting by mail.' Huh. Gee, Sean, I wonder how that happened! It's almost as if someone with a whole lot of influence within the Republican Party repeatedly told GOP voters not to use mail-in ballots -- even while using one to vote himself. I just love the angst of conservatives combined with their inability to identify the culprit and chief architect of their woes. I mean, 'for whatever reason,' Sean? Really? You honestly can't identify one reason why that might be true? C'mon, give it a try, I bet you can think of one eventually!"

   Haters gotta hate

Republicans once again showed their absolute lack of humanity.

"President Joe Biden, in the midst of a land war in Europe, successfully negotiated the release of an American being held in the Russian gulag -- so you'd think most Americans would be glad to hear such happy news. But, of course, you would be wrong. Because Biden's got a 'D' next to his name, Republicans can never say a nice word about anything he does. Instead of offering their thanks that this young woman has now been returned to the U.S.A., they instead decided to attack her for being insufficiently American. That is a disgrace. They are angry because she did one of the most American things imaginable -- she protested what she felt needed political attention. She did so without being jailed because this is America, where every citizen's right to protest is written into our founding document. But this was somehow not jingoistic enough for the GOP, so they all trashed her in public rather than do what every American with a shred of humanity was doing -- welcoming her back home."

   The death of DOMA

This is a big legislative win for Biden during the lame-duck Congress, and should be touted as such.

"The Republican Party back in the 1990s latched onto a 'wedge issue' that successfully split Democrats for over a decade, by predicting the skies would fall and the oceans would boil if same-sex couples could ever actually get married to each other. They used scare tactics and demonization to their benefit and it worked so well it terrified Democrats into backing down (not that many of them had ever really been out front on the issue to begin with). It was President Bill Clinton who signed the mean-spirited 'Defense Of Marriage Act,' after all. This week, Congress took the final step towards burying DOMA forever. We are closing this shameful chapter in American history for good, with the passage of the Respect For Marriage Act, which not only throws out DOMA but codifies both gay marriage and interracial marriage into federal law for the first time ever. It's not perfect, it could have even been better, but for the time being it should be seen as a gigantic step forward and protection against future radical rulings from the Supreme Court. Joe Biden deserves a lot of credit for convincing other Democrats it was acceptable to support marriage equality in full, back when he was vice president. And now he's going to get to sign it into federal law. That is indeed worth celebrating!"

   Loser!

We're going to make this one extra-short, because we all know he has such a short attention span.

"Donald Trump has proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that he is nothing more than a loser. A sore loser, to be sure, but a big fat loser no matter what. He is the losingest loser the Republican Party has seen in a very long time. All he does is lose, it seems, no matter which direction you look. Sooner or later the Republican Party will come to the conclusion that everyone else has: Donald Trump is a loser. Tired of all the losing yet, guys?"

-- Chris Weigant

Follow Chris on Twitter: @ChrisWeigant

Cross-posted at: Democratic Underground