On Wednesday, America’s first black president congratulated Georgia’s first black senator, saying that the Civil Rights icon John Lewis, the man who nearly gave his life to ensure that all Americans had the right to vote regardless of their skin color was smiling down from Heaven at the news.atement
My friend John Lewis is surely smiling down on his beloved Georgia this morning, as people across the state carried forward the baton that he and so many others passed down to them. pic.twitter.com/CgVEP4Ilt8
— Barack Obama (@BarackObama) January 6, 2021
At the time of President Barack Obama’s tweet, Rev. Raphael Warnock (D-GA) had already defeated incumbent Republican Senator Kelly Loeffler, with Democrat Jon Ossoff poised to defeat Republican Senator David Perdue, giving Democrats a majority in the Senate for the first time since 2010. After four years of Donald Trump destroying the economy and the country as a whole, there’s a lot of work to be done in President-elect Joe Biden’s administration. An obstructionist Congress would have made that work impossible.
With Tuesday’s win in Georgia and another pending, Democrats are set to take control of the Senate with a 50-50 split and the first black Vice President, Senator Kamala Harris (D-CA), to serve as a tiebreaker. It’s a vast change from this time four years ago when Trump won the White House and Republicans won enough seats to dominate both the House and the Senate.
Twitter responded with joy and reverence at the name of their fallen hero, Rep. John Lewis, and celebrated the news of a new era on Capitol Hill. Read some of their comments below:
