Remember...

...when former President Clinton's conversation with Attorney General Loretta Lynch on the tarmac in Arizona, during the time when Republicans were pursuing their witch-hunt against Secretary Clinton in Congress raised a storm of outrage? Compare that to Republican silence when President Trump called county commissioners in Michigan to ask them to vote against certifying the election in the Detroit area. Or the cry of "You lie!" during President Obama's State of the Union address? Republican lie-detectors are silent in the face of the constant barrage of lies from President Trump. It appears that Republicans have decided they don't have to espouse personal responsibility, family values or any of the other laudable principles they used to claim exclusivity over. And why should they? After all, the blue wave they feared in the last election did not materialize. The Democratic majority in the House shrank and Republicans may hold on to their Senate majority. Voters appear to have given Republicans in Congress a pass on their behavior over the past several years. Or have they? After all, they did refuse to renew Trump's White House lease. Whether you look at the popular vote or the Electoral College, Biden's win is convincing if not a landslide. Maybe congressional Republicans benefited from the well-known reluctance of voters to give either side a blank check. Maybe their merely deplorable behavior contrasted well with Trump's outrageous behavior. Be that as it may, the run-off election for the two Senate seats in Georgia will decide how things will go for the next two years. I don't think there is any doubt that Senate Republicans under Mitch McConnell's leadership will revert to unprincipled obstruction if they keep their majority. On the other hand, everything we know about Democrats in general and Joe Biden in particular tells us they are unlikely to interpret narrow majorities in Congress as a blank check. In any case, Democrats have rarely been able to act in unison. As much as Republicans like to paint Democrats as extremists, the fact is that it is Republicans who have drifted so far to the right that a centrist like Biden looks, to them, like a "socialist". Georgia voters should keep in mind that it was under Republican stewardship that the deficit has blown past the GDP and the pandemic has claimed well over a quarter million lives with no end in sight. These two issues should be enough to motivitate Georgia voters to turn out in the numbers they did for the general election. After all, if Arizona, Nevada, Colorado and New Mexico could elect two Democrats to the Senate each, there is no reason why Georgia should not.