President-elect Donald Trump has a Republican Senate and House with which to work. Dear Democrats: Things are about to go from bad to worse. Buckle up.
Democrats came into 2016 with the belief that winning back the upper chamber was an eminently doable task, a sentiment that feels like it existed eons ago now that the party has been obliterated in races across the country and a man uniquely unfit for the presidency has managed to win it despite their best efforts. The reason for such optimism was they needed just four pickups during a year in which Republicans were defending far more turf thanks to the GOP’s 2010 wave. And they thought there was a big anchor at the top of the ticket.
But things didn’t go to according to plan, in so many ways.
First, Democratic challengers in Ohio and Florida barely registered, giving Sens. Rob Portman and Marco Rubio easy wins. This has been baked into the cake for quite a while, but will still inevitably lead to some Monday morning quarterbacking amongst the blue team considering how far ahead of their party’s presidential nominee both ran.
Former Sen. Evan Bayh then fumbled what was supposed to be a pickup in Indiana. It turns out that not really living in a state and spending most of your time buckraking isn’t a way to endear yourself to its voters, no matter your family’s long history there. A winnable race in North Carolina also got away, as Republican Sen. Richard Burr hung onto his seat.
Perhaps the biggest Senate shock was Sen. Ron Johnson’s easy win in Wisconsin. Senate prognosticators all took that one for granted as a Democratic pickup for former Sen. Russ Feingold. But it was the punditry that took a hit, not Johnson. The failure of the polling industry up and down the ballot is a theme that is going to be harped on for quite a while, I’d wager.
An expected Democratic pickup in Illinois materialized, with Rep. Tammy Duckworth unseating Sen. Mark Kirk. And in Nevada, Democrats defended their only truly vulnerable seat, with Catherine Cortez Masto winning the right to succeed retiring Democratic leader Harry Reid.
But that’s where the good news ended. In Pennsylvania, Sen. Pat Toomey hung on to win, as did Sen. Roy Blunt in Missouri. As of this writing, New Hampshire’s race between Sen. Kelly Ayotte and Gov. Maggie Hassan was still too close to call, but either way, the AP called the Senate for the GOP at about 1:20 a.m.
Republicans, of course, held onto the House, too. Considering the mountain Democrats had to climb to win the lower chamber back, let’s file that away as the least surprising part of a very surprising night.
So what happens now? First, expect quite the fight over the currently open Supreme Court seat. The Republican bet that holding open, for months on end, the vacancy left by the death of former Justice Antonin Scalia has paid off, as they now have the opportunity to fill it with the nominee of their choice. Win one for sheer obstruction and cynicism, I guess.
The next big question, then, is to how much of Trump’s agenda, such as it is, are GOP senators willing to accede? Muslim bans and walls? National stop and frisk? His giant tax cut is surely coming down the turnpike, but what else from his thin policy portfolio will make it onto the floor of Congress?
And how much of Speaker of the House Paul Ryan’s favored vision for the government — or lack thereof, really — will the GOP decide to bring through? How much of the Affordable Care Act — President Barack Obama’s signature domestic policy achievement — will stay on the books?
This was the gamble those “well, yeah, I guess Trump” Republicans made: That a President Trump wouldn’t actually care about the bills they passed, but would just sign them. Ryan now has an opportunity to cash in, as Trump might say, big league.
Of course, there’s no telling if Trump is even interested in working with a Speaker Ryan or if he would prefer someone else in that role, but that’s a tale for a different day. Perhaps the saving grace for Democrats will be the fact that Trump seems to hate Republicans just as much as he hates Democrats and so won’t want to play ball with the dread “establishment.” But who knows?
If the GOP Senate leadership were smart, they’d blow up the filibuster now — which Democrats have already removed from presidential appointments and lower-court judicial appointments, remember — to make their task that much easier from day one. While that would probably be better for democracy in the long run, it would be decidedly not so great for the Democratic minority come 2017.
For Democrats, though, the ability to filibuster the worst of Trump’s excesses will certainly be small comfort. There’s really no way to sugarcoat this. It was a night of gut punches. Failing to win the Senate certainly isn’t the biggest one. But it will come back to haunt them, like so many things about the 2016 campaign.
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Republicans Give President Donald Trump a GOP Senate originally appeared on usnews.com
