This guy must be a lot of fun to play poker with.
Basically the story, as reported by the blog Not Larry Sabato, goes like this. Democrats currently control the Virginia State Senate, 21-19. But Virginia’s Lieutenant Governor is Bill Bolling, a Republican, and he would be a tie-breaking vote in the event of a 20-20 split. Today, one of the Democratic State Senators, Ralph Northam, agreed to switch sides, a move that would give the Republicans in the Senate a much greater share of power.
And they would have gotten away with it, too, if it hadn’t been for this moron, Jeff Frederick, who is the Republican Party Chairman of Virginia and the owner of a shiny Twitter account! Frederick, upon hearing the news, tweeted the following:
What King of the Dimwits Jeff Frederick failed to take into consideration is that, by tweeting this information, he was tipping off the Senate Democrats about this bit of parliamentary prestidigitation. And once they found out, Majority Leader Dick Saslaw adjourned the session so that it couldn’t happen. And then, the Senate Democrats gathered together and promptly browbeat the ever-loving daylights out of Northam.
If they had pulled it off, this would have been a HUGE political coup for the Virginia GOP in the same year that the people of the state are going to elect a new governor. Incumbent Tim Kaine is term-limited and will move on to running the DNC full time after he leaves office. There’s a three-way race for the Democratic nomination, while the Republican candidate is running unopposed. Republicans had an opportunity to reboot with a narrow Senate majority in a state that has elected two consecutive Democrats to the governor’s mansion and voted for a Democratic president for the first time in more than four decades.
Something tells me that Jeff Frederick won’t be privvy to sensitive internal deliberations or strategizing from now on.
Update: An NRO reader suggests the perfect headline for this story. “Loose Twits Sink Shifts.”
Icepicks and Nukes 