Democrat Doug Jones was sworn in Wednesday as Alabama’s newest U.S. senator, reducing the Republican advantage to 51 to 49 and giving his party more room to impede President Trump’s 2018 legislative agenda.
Jones took his oath of office alongside former vice president Joe Biden, a longtime friend who had urged him to run last year. Tina Smith (D-Minn.) was also sworn in Wednesday to replace former senator Al Franken; she was joined by former vice president Walter Mondale.
The arrival of Smith and Jones on Capitol Hill highlighted the extent to which the #MeToo movement has swept over Washington. Jones defied the political tilt of his state by defeating Republican Roy Moore, who was accused of making unwanted sexual advances toward teenage girls when he was in his 30s. Smith’s predecessor, Franken, resigned under pressure from fellow Democrats after allegations emerged that he had touched women inappropriately.
Even before it was clear what committees Jones would serve on, the Alabama Democrat was already playing an outsize role. His presence allows Democrats to block any Trump nominee, or any legislation, by winning just two Republican defectors. Vice President Pence can break 50-to-50 ties.
Senate Republican aides privately conceded that Jones’s vote will make it nearly impossible to take another run at repealing the Affordable Care Act and may quiet talk of a push for a major entitlement overhaul this year.
Democrat Doug Jones of Alabama is greeted by a supporter after his victory Dec. 12. (John Bazemore/AP)
Jones did not telegraph what he would do with his influential position as he shuttled between engagements in the Capitol on Wednesday. As he did as a candidate, Jones presented himself as a compromiser, even though many of his views align much more closely with the Democratic Party.
“I think any good senator is a bipartisan, and that’s what I’m looking to do,” Jones said as he walked through the Capitol for his swearing-in.
Sen. Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.), who like Jones represents a heavily conservative state, said Wednesday was the first time he had met the Alabamian.
“I said ‘Welcome to the radical middle,’ ” Manchin said, recounting their chat.
Jones, 63, became the most junior member of the Senate, just behind Smith. After being officially sworn in, the two of them, accompanied by their families and guests, walked to the Old Senate Chamber for a reenactment. Biden watched from a few feet away.
“Smile, man, smile!” Biden urged. As he walked toward Jones and Pence, who administered the oath of office, Biden said that Alabama’s last Democratic senator, for whom Jones once worked, would be proud of him.
“Howell Heflin’s looking at you,” Biden of the senator, who died in 2005.
Later, Jones attended a welcome reception in the Kennedy Caucus Room of the Russell Senate Office Building, where potential 2020 Democratic presidential candidates Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) and Cory Booker (D-N.J.) were on hand. Booker traveled to Alabama during the final weekend of the campaign to stump for Jones.
As he rode a subway in the Capitol minutes after Jones was sworn in, Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.), who frequently spoke with Jones during his run, said in an interview that Jones has enough time to establish a record he can run on back home.
“He’s not to represent D.C. to Alabama,” Kaine said. “He’s to represent Alabama to D.C.”
Kaine drew a comparison between Jones’s campaign and Democrat Ralph Northam’s winning run for governor in Virginia.
“His personality is not that different from the Ralph Northam personality,” said Kaine, who faces reelection this year. “In a time where I think a lot of people are worried about the divisiveness of the president, I think they viewed Ralph, they view Doug, as somebody who can bring people together.”
Jones is a former U.S. attorney who is well known in Alabama for prosecuting two men for the bombing of a black church in Birmingham that killed four girls. It is not yet clear whether Jones will get a seat on the Senate Judiciary Committee; there is pressure in the chamber to give Sen. Kamala D. Harris (D-Calif.) the seat on the panel that opened when Franken resigned.
Some Democrats have described Jones’s win over Moore as a model for how they can take back at least one chamber of Congress in this year’s midterm elections. Republicans have described the Alabama race as a fluke, one that tipped the wrong way after Moore was nominated and faced allegations of sexual misconduct, the first of which were reported by The Washington Post.
The Democratic Party, however, has seen polling on the race that found it unusually tight even before Moore became buried by scandal. In 2016, Trump carried Alabama by 28 points; two years earlier, Democrats could not find a credible candidate to run for the seat then held by Republican Jeff Sessions, now the attorney general.
But Manchin was not looking to draw any similarities between Jones’s campaign and his own race this year, a top target for Republicans.
Jones, who is friendly with several of his new colleagues, said before and after the election that he would be an “independent” senator voting for whatever was good for his state. In an interview with The Post in the fall, Jones identified several senators who he said are models for the kind of consensus-driven governance he touted on the campaign trail: Kaine, Patty Murray (D-Wash.), Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.) and John McCain (R-Ariz.).
On most of the pressing issues the Senate faces this year, however, Jones has been critical of the Republican majority. He used his victory speech to call for the Children’s Health Insurance Program, or CHIP, to be fully funded. He has argued that hundreds of thousands of Americans brought to the United States as children should be allowed to stay and opposes the president’s demand that Congress fund a wall on the Mexico border as part of any fix.
“I don’t think that’s an expense taxpayers should have to incur,” Jones said last month.
In one interview with The Post last year, Jones also said that he wanted Congress to pass a new bill to “reinvigorate” the Voting Rights Act, that he would have cast a deciding vote to block Betsy DeVos from becoming education secretary and that he would oppose judicial nominees who came off as overly “political.”
Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) said Jones and Smith “will add to the diversity and energy of our caucus,” and he predicted that both will become influential voices in the upper chamber. He mentioned CHIP and said, “I hope we can get that done for his state.”
Republicans have already warned that Jones, who next faces voters in 2020, will create trouble for himself if he sides too frequently with Democrats. In a statement after Jones’s win, Sen. Cory Gardner (R-Colo.), who runs the National Republican Senatorial Committee, said that Jones should “do the right thing and truly represent Alabama by choosing to vote with the Senate Republican Majority.”
After the swearing-in ceremony, dozens of Jones’s guests headed to a hearing room in the Russell Senate Office Building, around the corner from the new senator’s office. Among them were Birmingham Mayor Randall Woodfin, Jones strategist Joe Trippi and political strategist James Carville.
Sen. John Barrasso (R-Wyo.), a physician who has been one of the GOP’s point people on health care, walked past the welcome party on his way to a Fox News interview. Asked how Jones’s arrival in the Senate would affect the Republican agenda, Barrasso said he had not talked to him about it yet.
The new Model 3, crucial to the company’s success, won’t hit full-scale production until the end of June, Tesla said Wednesday – nearly a year after the company began manufacturing the car in small numbers.
Throughout last year, Tesla Chief Executive Elon Musk had trumpeted a production level of 5,000 a week by December 2017. In November, he pushed that goal to the end of March 2018. Now that target won’t be hit until the end of June. The electric car maker said in an online statement Wednesday it expects to produce 2,500 a week by the end of March.
Only 1,550 Model 3s were delivered in 2017’s fourth quarter, the company said in an online statement Wednesday. That’s on top of the 220 Model 3s the company delivered in the third quarter, for a total of just 1,770 since the first deliveries in late July.
Serious problems turned up last summer at both the company’s Fremont, Calif., auto assembly plant and its “Gigafactory” battery plant in Nevada that put the company in what Musk called “production hell.”
Tesla is burning billions in cash as it struggles to achieve its vision of mass-market electric cars powered by Tesla-brand solar roofs through Tesla-brand home storage batteries.
But the roofs have yet to be produced beyond the research and development stage, and sales of the storage batteries are growing slowly.
It’s possible Tesla could pull everything together before cash runs out. Certainly the stock market thinks so. Shares have been under pressure lately but still give the company a market value of about $53 billion, analysts say. But a return to the financial markets for more billions in investment capital will be necessary. How long stock and bond investors will continue to pump sufficient funds into the company is an open question.
Tesla also said it had delivered 15,200 Model S and 13,120 Model X luxury cars in the fourth quarter, a 9% increase over third-quarter deliveries. Full-year 2017 vehicle deliveries reached 101,312, 33% higher than 2016.
Tesla’s announcement “isn’t much of a surprise” because of the automaker’s previously known Model 3 production problems, but if the bottlenecks continue they could cause Tesla serious problems, said Jessica Caldwell, executive director of industry analysis at Edmunds.com.
“Each time that happens the concern will grow” about Tesla’s ability to reach mass production with the Model 3, even though “I always felt like their production targets for this car would be a big learning curve for them,” Caldwell said.
She noted that if Tesla achieves its pushed-back goal of producing 5,000 Model 3 sedans a week by the end of the second quarter, that would equal 20,000 Model 3s per month, and Tesla just completed a three-month quarter in which it made 29,870 vehicles total, including its mainstay Model S sedan and Model X SUV.
Caldwell said that the Model 3 delay also “definitely doesn’t help” Tesla’s case with bankers and investors should it need to raise additional cash for its operations, but that Tesla was “still in a reasonable period of expectations” for eventually reaching its production goals.
Musk has a history of missed deadlines but often pulls through at the end. The Model S and Model X both suffered delays but were eventually brought to market to rave reviews. The Model 3, which the company plans to make in the hundreds of thousands and sell for $35,000 to $60,000, has raised the stakes.
“Musk has a long pattern of missing production and financial targets set not just years ahead but a few months ahead. When someone is wrong that often one must question either his honesty or his competence; personally, I question both,” said Mark Spiegel of Stanphyl Capital, who is betting against Tesla by short-selling its stock.
But Tesla short sellers have been battered as long-term investors mostly stay true.
The company has said more than 400,000 people have put down $1,000 refundable deposits on the Model 3. The delays means most of them will be waiting longer to get their cars.
Tesla has yet to detail the production problems at its manufacturing plants. The Wall Street Journal reported last year that the cars were being built partly by hand as the company struggled with its automated body-panel assembly line.
Without providing details, Musk acknowledged battery-pack assembly problems at the Gigafactory in a conference call with analysts in November. Musk is attempting to build better, cheaper batteries through advanced automation. But early versions of the Model 3 suffered battery quality problems, and it’s not clear whether those have been sufficiently resolved.
Tesla said Wednesday it’s making “major progress” addressing problems “with our production rate increasing significantly towards the end of the quarter.” During the last week of December, the company said, it made 793 Model 3s.
The company said it will “continue to focus on quality and efficiency rather than simply pushing the the highest possible production in the shortest period of time.”
On Tuesday, Musk tweeted a come-on for job candidates at the Gigafactory: “Come work at the biggest most advanced factory on Earth! Located by a river near the beautiful Sierra Nevada mountains with wild horses roaming free.”
Many of the posted jobs seek specialists in factory automation. The new job listings no longer include a job requirement that was practically boilerplate on earlier job postings: “Desire to do the impossible with a positive and professional ‘never say die’ attitude.” The words “do the impossible” no longer appear.
Tesla’s announcement came after New York markets’ closing time. In after-hours trading, the stock was down 2.05% to $317.25.
Times staff writer James F. Peltz contributed to this report.
Democrat Doug Jones of Alabama is greeted by a supporter after his victory Dec. 12. (John Bazemore/AP)
