Well, the November mid-terms are just around the corner, and everything’s looking great for we long-suffering liberals. Trump is polling in the low thirties, dragging down the ticket. The public is pissed, bigly, mainly because of high gas, food, and housing prices, and, connected to that, a pointless war of choice in the Persian Gulf that has America trapped into yet another Middle Eastern Forever War, with no strategy to win, and no plan to get out. Meanwhile, all Donald cares about is the construction of his ballroom and triumphal arch (and let’s not talk about the devastated Reflecting Pool), plus, oh yeah, getting his name on the Kennedy Center. MAGA voters, unsurprisingly, feel betrayed – their Orange God King promised to lower prices and avoid stupid wars, and the hapless rubes honestly believed him – and the former faithful seem likely to sulk and stay home on election day. Democratic voters, by contrast, are energized, and likely to show up in droves to vote. You can feel it coming. They can too. GOP congressional candidates are ashen-faced, bug-eyed, and running scared, while the pundits are all but guaranteeing an electoral tsunami that will set the Republicans back for years to come. The way they’re all talking about it, the Dems are a mortal lock to take the House, and suddenly look good to take the Senate too, which seemed impossible just a few months ago. Yessir, the worm has finally turned for Fat Donny and his merry band of chicken-shit legislative enablers. They’re all going to get thrown out on their asses.
Gee, that sounds just fine and dandy, doesn’t it? It sure would be nice. Permit me, though, to fulfill my customary role of skunk at the garden party, and list a few grounds for caution.
A) Don’t forget that the Republicans have gerrymandered the living shit out of every state they control, and just to break even in those red jurisdictions the Dems probably have to win the popular vote by historic margins. Right now, it looks like maybe the swing really will be that big, but five weeks are forever in politics. Maybe Donald will do something popular. Maybe Iran will surrender. Maybe some boffin will invent an internal combustion engine that runs on soy beans. Assume that God is on their side.
B) The Republicans are going to lie, cheat, and steal like the unprincipled, lying, anti-democratic bastards they are, every way they can. It looks like Donald’s gambit to fuck with mail-in ballots has been judicially squelched, but he can still send ICE agents out to scare brown people away from the polls, or declare martial law and start seizing ballot boxes owing to some made up Chinese interference in the election, or God knows what else, abusing every power his corrupted office still wields. At the red state level, Governors and Secretaries of State will keep trying everything they can to purge voter rolls, make polling booths inconvenient for minorities and poor folk to access, impose ID requirements that will mainly affect Dem voters, and so on. The GOP knows it can’t win a fair fight. That’s why it hasn’t fought one in decades. With the stakes as high as they are now, expect them to be both ruthless and clever, while stopping at nothing.
C) Supposing that despite everything, the Democrats win by margins too large to deny, there’s a whole other Constitutional bag of tricks to work from, including techniques by which House Speaker and Craven Trump Toadie Mike Johnson could refuse to seat incoming Democratic Representatives. Constitutional scholar Michael Luttig rang the alarm bell on this scenario in a recent piece for the New Republic:
There are all sorts of ways that the coming blue wave can crash up against the unyielding rock of Republican skullduggery. We could be in for a rough ride.
But let’s be optimistic. There’s a school of thought positing that Donald doesn’t really care about the GOP getting wiped out in November, since he doesn’t plan to govern through Congress anyway, and knows that the Dems will never win so big that they attain the 2/3 Senate majority to convict him upon impeachment by the House. He may even gloat as the Republicans go down, boasting that it proves they can only win when he’s on the ballot. So maybe there is no federal intervention in the voting. Or maybe it all works out despite everything that Trump and his co-conspirators cook up. It could happen. You can’t prove it’s impossible.
So suppose the Dems wind up in control of both chambers. What should they do? True to form, I’ve got a couple of ideas, but unfortunately all that has to wait until we can get a Democrat into the White House (maybe in 2029?), dealing, God willing, with a Congress in which his party still holds sway – a scenario in which nobody who wishes to stay sane should invest too much hope. Until then, the Dems can pass as much legislation as they want, but it won’t amount to jack, because however big they win this November, it remains all but inconceivable that they’ll secure the bicameral 2/3 majorities needed to override Donald’s inevitable Presidential vetoes. Therefore, Blue Wave or not, it isn’t going to change a whole hell of a lot, not right away at any rate.
Sure, the Dems, once in charge of all the committees, could start issuing subpoenas and conducting investigations, but it isn’t as if Trump’s Justice Department is going to act on any referrals that result. They could, and frigging well should, impeach Trump and just about everyone in his cabinet, several times each if I have anything to say about it; they’ll never have the Senate votes to convict, but they could still make the bastards squirm for a couple of years, and I’ll happily buy premium box seats for that. More consequentially, they should be able to put an end to the war with Iran, either by cutting off funding, or invoking the War Powers Resolution, which will solidify a humiliating and geopolitically catastrophic defeat for the United States, but let’s face facts, that boat has already sailed, and keeping the war going can only make things worse. There is no path to victory.
Come 2029, if everything breaks our way, the Dems will have the opportunity to get down to serious business (please God they have the cajones). A vital first step will be the nuking of the ridiculous Senate filibuster, and next comes the stacking or reform of the wretched Supreme Court (stacking may be the only viable option since the Roberts Court is liable to declare any reform legislation unconstitutional, the pricks). With that accomplished, they can get down to the undoing of as much constitutional damage inflicted by the Roberts Court as can pass muster with a SCOTUS no longer in the grip of a cabal of right wing lunatics, through a combination of new laws, and new cases brought for the sole purpose of undoing precedent (just as the Republicans have been doing for decades): bringing back the Voting Rights Act, campaign finance reform with new laws undoing Citizens United, granting statehood to D.C. and Puerto Rico, taxing the living bejesus out of Musk and the other techbro oligarchs, getting a grip on AI research and development, doing away with Presidential immunity, and a hundred other things. All this can be attempted if a fickle and essentially witless American electorate doesn’t hand the keys right back to whatever iteration of the MAGA GOP is lying to them (in particular if the Senate flips Democratic this time around, watch for it to flip right back to the Republicans in 2028. It’s practical impossible for the Dems to keep a grip on the Senate).
Think, though, of the magnitude of the task. Trump has killed the federal bureaucracy, gutted the FBI, Justice, the CDC, and even the military. There’s almost no organ of the federal government that his regime hasn’t mauled. It would be the work of a generation to repair that devastation. America’s finances are now in such rough shape, following the MAGA GOP’s addition of twelve trillion to the national debt, that fiscal room to maneuver will be seriously curtailed, and the status of the T-Bill as a coveted international investment vehicle will be completely undermined. That means that the main business of the US Government may wind up being the servicing of high-interest debt. All over the world, Trump has already squandered all of America’s once robust soft power, torn to shreds most of its alliances, and compromised American military power. In just a couple of years, the United States has gone from global hegemon to despised and retreating regional bully, and it’s questionable whether there’s any coming back from that.
I could go on and on, but you get the idea; Trump and his Judicial and Congressional enablers have done so much damage that it might not be fixable at all, even if the Dems benefit from successive Blue Waves for the next hundred years. If they get the chance, they’re going to have to try. But it may be too damned late. Even if our dreamy dreams come true in November, and in subsequent elections into the foreseeable future, Democratic control may not matter anywhere near as much as we liberals like to think.
Plus, it’s still by no means clear that MAGA is a spent force. The whole rest of the world has stopped betting on an eventual American return to sanity. Any setbacks on the continuing march to Trumpist authoritarianism may amount, in the long run, to nothing more than blips, because look, any nation that can elect Trump twice may already be a lost cause, and certainly can’t be trusted any longer. Friendless, bankrupt, and weak, the Shining City on a Hill is perhaps better regarded these days as a smoking hole by the side of the road. The American Experiment, it turns out, isn’t so hard to destroy. God help those trying to rebuild it amid the burning wreckage, stretching to the horizon in all directions.
