Trump’s Lawyer (Inadvertently) Makes the Case for Seating Doug Jones Right Away

Mitch McConnell said the senator-elect from Alabama wouldn’t be seated before the end of the Senate session.

Senator-elect Doug JonesBrian Cahn/ZUMA

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.

Democrat Doug Jones pulled off the upset of the year in Alabama’s special Senate election on Tuesday. But don’t expect to see him in the US Senate anytime soon.

First, the state of Alabama has to certify the election results, which could take several weeks. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) told reporters this week that Sen. Luther Strange, the Alabama Republican currently in the seat, would remain there until the end of this year’s session, which could stretch until Christmas. (Strange, who was appointed to the seat after Jeff Sessions left to become attorney general, lost to Republican nominee Roy Moore in a primary this fall.)

What this means is that it’s highly unlikely Jones, whose election narrows the GOP majority to 51-49 in the Senate, will get to Congress before Republicans ram through their slapdash tax legislation. Democrats say Jones should be seated as soon as possible. “I call on Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell to listen to the people of Alabama and seat @GDouglasJones without any delay,” Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) tweeted Tuesday night.

Republicans, save for McConnell, have been silent on whether to seat Jones before the tax bill gets passed. But here’s the rub: When it was a Republican senator-elect waiting to be seated, and the consequential legislation under consideration in the Senate was Obamacare, conservatives howled over the delay in seating their new senator. 

Look no further than Jay Sekulow, who now serves as one of President Donald Trump’s private attorneys. Writing a mere week after Massachusetts Republican Scott Brown’s stunning victory in the January 2010 special election to fill the late Ted Kennedy’s seat, Sekulow said it was “outrageous” that Brown had not yet been seated and allowed to participate in the health care debate:

Here’s the troubling reality: It’s been nearly one week now since Scott Brown was elected to the U.S. Senate by the voters of Massachusetts. And, Senator-elect Brown has not yet been seated. He is not yet a member of the U.S. Senate and can’t participate on the work currently underway in the Senate itself.

In my view this is an unacceptable delay tactic on the part of the Senate leadership a tactic that disenfranchises the voters of Massachusetts who sent a strong message in the election of last week.

Theres absolutely no reason to wait to seat Senator-elect Brown and with each passing day he is prevented from participating in the legislative process. This delay tactic along with reports that top Democrats continue to plot passage of health care reform show that its business as usual in Washington ignoring the will of Massachusetts voters and moving forward with a disturbing health care plan that America simply does not want.

No word yet on whether Sekulow supports Jones’ immediate seating in time to weigh in on the GOP tax bill now barreling toward passage.

Democrats, for their part, showed some restraint when it came to Brown, whom Trump named ambassador to New Zealand and Samoa this year. Then-Majority Leader Harry Reid said after Brown’s victory that the Senate wouldn’t proceed further on health care until Brown had taken his seat. “We’re going to wait until the new senator arrives,” Reid said, “before we do anything more on health care.”

Reid’s comments owed more to the political shockwaves caused by Brown’s election than any courtesy on Reid’s part. That said, it doesn’t look as though McConnell will extend the same modicum of courtesy to Jones.

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate