From the "Oops" File

There's a fascinating story coming out of Mississippi from the Mid-Term election there. But, no, it's not that a Democrat actually has a serious chance to win the race for U.S. Senate. It's related to that, but it's not the story.

Scott Colom, who is district attorney for Mississippi's 16th Judicial District, is currently leading the sitting-senator Cindy Hyde-Smith. So, that makes his chance absolutely serious. But the margin is razor thin. As I write this, Scott Colom leads Cindy Hyde-Smith by just 1,813 votes with 95.7% of the votes cast. That's a whopping margin of 1%.

But as I said, that's not the fascinating story.

The thing is, by all rights, Scott Colom probably shouldn't even be running in the race. That's because in 2022, at the age of 40, he was nominated by President Biden to be a U.S. District Judge for the Northern District of Mississippi.

He'd had an impressive career. As the Wall Street Journal wrote, "At 28, Colom was appointed Lowndes County’s youngest and first Black justice court judge, and later became Columbus’s first Black prosecutor. At 32, he ousted a district attorney incumbent who had held the job since 1989, with a platform that focused on criticisms that the justice system has punished too many young people too harshly. He has been district attorney for a district that includes Columbus since 2016."

The thing is, there is a tradition on Capitol Hill where a U.S. Senator has the right to place a "blue slip" on judicial nominations, as long as the nominee is from the senator's own state. And so, Scott Colomb was blocked from having a lifetime appointment as a federal judge. And without that, it seems likely he be spending his career as a judge and not running for the Senate.

But that's not the fascinating story.

The fascinating story is that the Mississippi senator who placed the "blue slip" on Scott Colomb, blocking his lifetime appointment to the federal bench and opening the path for him to run against Cindy Hyde-Smith was -- Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith.

Yes, really.

And, once again, Scott Colomb is currently leading Ms. Smith by 1,813 votes. Which wouldn't have been the case if, sitting there safe and comfortably on Capitol Hill, she hadn't blocked him from being a federal judge.

This is also notable because the last Democrat to be elected U.S. Senator in Mississippi was the far-right and openly-Segregationist John Stennis in 1982, 44 years ago. But that doesn't do justice to the reality, because Stennis was first elected to the Senate 35 years earlier, in 1947. So, that's 79 years ago. And that doesn't do full justice to the reality either. Because the last time a Black man was elected a senator from Mississippi was Blanche Bruce during Reconstruction, in 1875. A mere 126 years ago.

It's still uncertain how the final 4.3% of votes will play out. Nor what the results will be in what will surely be a recount.

But there's one thing we can be certain of: Cindy Hyde-Smith wouldn't be in this position, on the edge of losing her Senate seat -- to a Black Democrat, in a state not known for electing Democrats or Black politicians to national office -- if it wasn't for Cindy Hyde-Smith.