Georgia Senator Jon Ossoff is leading the rise of the rude Democrat. More should follow his lead.
In recent weeks, I’ve been fortunate enough to observe two competing visions for Democratic senators should they retake the upper chamber in next month’s midterm elections. On the one hand, we have Senators Martin Heinrich and Sheldon Whitehouse, who announced at the end of September that they were teaming up with their Republican counterparts Mike Lee and Shelley Moore Capito on the Bipartisan American Affordability and Jobs Act of 2026, which the quartet believe will “reform the federal environmental review and permitting process.” Per their press release, “This groundbreaking agreement will deliver cheaper energy, more jobs, and responsible growth across the United States.”
On the other hand, we have Senator Jon Ossoff, who has taken the debate stage twice in recent days to tell his Republican opponent to his face that he’s a racist scumbag.
My paraphrasing here is more blunt than the rhetoric that Ossoff has been using, but only just. In the pair’s first debate, Ossoff threw daggers, accusing Representative Mike Collins of hiring “half the Third Reich to staff [his] congressional office,” adding, “If John Lewis were marching today from Selma to Montgomery, Mike Collins would be grabbing a billy club.” During Tuesday night’s debate, an embittered Collins tried to play the civility card, claiming that Ossoff’s incendiary statements about Collins’s very real embrace of white supremacy had led to death threats. Ossoff breezily brushed away the accusation and went back for more. Referring to Collins’s son-in-law, a white-nationalist influencer, Ossoff jabbed: “Can you commit for just three weeks to stop the production of neo-Nazi propaganda from your home?”
This is like watching a fever finally break, and it’s not just Ossoff. In the Michigan Senate race, Abdul El-Sayed has gone at Mike Rogers with both barrels, repeatedly referring to the former congressman as weak and cowardly. In Maine … well, let’s just say that I wished Troy Jackson had a bit of that dog in him, but he doesn’t. Still, I can tell he’s trying, and his better moments against Senator Susan Collins, like telling her “You can’t eat road salt,” at least have a bit of a surly edge. At any rate, the rise of rude Democrats has got me believing in the potential cure for one of our greatest civic maladies: degenerative Senate brain, the very condition that leads a Sheldon Whitehouse or a Martin Heinrich to work with MAGA filth bent on desecrating the constitutional order.
Jason Linkins, The New Republic
