Congress Is Going to Be Able to Do Whatever Trump Wants
Congress Is Going to Be Able to Do Whatever Trump Wants
Plus: Arizona Democrats performed well, but were morally devastated.
PHOENIX, ARIZONA—The only corner of the Arizona Democrats’ election night party that stayed busy the whole night was the open bar.
Chain-smoking political staffers paced around outside in the dry desert cold. Attendees filtered out as the bad news continued to pour in. Smiles turned to expressions of bewilderment and angst. By 10 p.m., all that was left at the convention center at the previously packed Phoenix Hilton was a scattering of professional Democrats.
It wasn’t all doom. There were positive signs for Arizona’s down-ballot Democrats. Senate candidate Ruben Gallego is poised to beat Republican Kari Lake. Multiple House races across the country are shaping up to become Democratic pickups, though likely not enough to flip the chamber. With races still yet to be called, it looks like an overall good night for the Arizona Democratic Party itself. In a solidly red state, it managed to make tangible inroads.
Still, the one thing on everyone’s mind was the presidential election, which over the course of the night went from bad to calamitous. From the outset, Donald Trump victories in key states began eliminating Kamala Harris’s pathways to victory. Remaining attendees watched in anguish as it became clear that Donald Trump would be heading back to the White House.
As I exited the venue at the end of the night, Phoenix Mayor Kate Gallego’s security team scanned the outer steps of the convention center in preparation for her departure. But all they saw was one couple sharing a single cigarette.
With his eyes glued to his phone like the infamous Matthew McConaughey meme, the man let out a simple, “fuck.”
The great enablers
It’s easy to dwell on Trump’s victory and what it will mean for his future. But it’s also important to look at what happened to Congress on Tuesday.
Republicans flipped the upper chamber and then solidified a strong Senate majority by holding on to their most vulnerable seats and securing victories in the several battleground states over Democratic incumbents or retirees. The loudest Republican voice against Trump—Utah Sen. Mitt Romney—will leave office in January.
The one GOP candidate explicitly running as an antidote to Trump—Maryland’s Larry Hogan—failed miserably against Democrat Angela Alsobrooks. The GOP candidates who won, from Bernie Moreno in Ohio to Tim Sheehy in Montana, were the ones Trump wanted.
These victories will allow Trump to handily push through nominations, whether they be for the Supreme Court (the possibility of a Clarence Thomas retirement now looms) or to place dangerous and unhinged ideologues in key positions. Beyond that, a Republican Senate majority means some of the chamber’s most partisan actors will be given chairmanships and plum committee assignments. Ted Cruz, fresh off his re-election win, will take over the reins of the Senate Commerce Committee from Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.). Commerce has broad authority, from regulating media and technology companies to climate change and manufacturing.
Lindsey Graham will control the Judiciary Committee, Marco Rubio will helm the Intelligence Committee (though he also didn’t close the door on serving in a Trump administration), and Rand Paul will wield the gavel on Homeland Security. The Senate is known for its collegiality, but the new additions to its leadership roster will mean that some of its most aggressive partisans now occupy senior roles.
Confirming nominations that could include Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Michael Flynn, or other wholly unqualified cranks will be difficult—every administration loses at least a few. But already, Republicans are indicating a smooth path for any nominee. As Marco Rubio put it on CNN this morning:
Well I think the Senate is gonna give great deference to a president that just won a stunning—what I think—is an Electoral College landslide, when all is said and done, and a mandate. He’s been given a mandate to govern. And I think presidents who are given a mandate to govern deserve from the Senate the opportunity to surround themselves with people that are gonna help them execute their policies.
As for what the sweeping victories mean for legislation, Trump’s going to have wide latitude to implement almost any agenda item. The filibuster remains a hurdle. But the party can move items through reconciliation, which lowers the threshold to 50 votes, provided they’re deemed pertinent to the budget. Currently, the likely outcome for the Senate will be a 53- or 54-seat Republican majority. Back in 2017, Trump enjoyed a 52-seat majority.
Perfect attendance to avoid tie-breaking votes on bills and nominations by JD Vance will be an afterthought. If both Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski feel compelled to vote against their party, as both have done in the past, it still won’t be enough to stop something from going through.
In the House, Republicans turned the 118th Congress into one of the least effective legislatures in generations. While the House’s fate will take days to determine, the trends at the presidential and Senate levels suggest they will be able to keep a slim majority, barring disastrous performances in the more conservative areas of California. Republican incumbents have performed much better than anticipated, particularly in New York, which delivered Republicans their House majority in 2022.
For the past two years in the House, Republicans struggled to elect a speaker, deposed him, and struggled even more to elect his successor, resulting in three straight weeks of turmoil. They deliberately tanked their own rule votes—a previously unheard-of form of self-sabotage. Must-pass legislation only got over the finish line with necessary help from Democrats. Committees engaged in nakedly political witch hunts to drag down their opponents and fuel content creation for their favored propaganda outlets.
There is reason to think that, early on at least, the good vibes from election night will allow Speaker Mike Johnson to retain his gavel. But from there, it gets trickier. As Brendan Buck, a top adviser to former speaker Paul Ryan, noted, the caucus remains fractious, and there are some big-ticket items (debt ceiling increase, government funding, and the extension of the Trump tax cuts) that will require legislative attention.
But the larger picture should not be glossed over. Americans saw this chaos, dysfunction, and impotence in the House, and it appears they decided they wanted more.
From my sister in Connecticut.
A beautiful read for you guys: my niece’s friend’s mama is a precious pastor in Asheville, NC. She wrote this today:
for you, if today your heart is broken
if today your heart is broken for this country, you are not alone. if you could only open one eye half-way to the breaking of this next day—you are not alone if you are curled fetal in your soul. you are not alone if you are heart-broken for everyone including the crows and the dogs and all the children in the red, white, and blue.
if today you are afraid for this country, for democracy, for what is to come, you are not alone. you are not alone if you fear for our brown skin, our daughters, our queers, our selves. they/them, you and me, we are not alone.
if today, even more than yesterday, you hurt for the water and the forest, you are not alone. if you grieve today a world that will not be, you are not alone.
and you are not alone if you are holding hot coals of anger for disinformation and the seeds of our division, which can be traced back generations at least to when race became a thing, a construct we lived. we were meant for better - the paleos didn’t make war on each other. if your coals burn for every bomb dropped and each life disregarded (dead children), you are not alone if you are shaking your fist at the patriarchy, the unchecked egos, at a world sacrificed to the bottom line, at whatever god (or none) collects your prayers.
you are not alone if you are so sorry we didn’t listen inside us better and walk deeper into our brokenness and toward one another. you are not alone if you are sorry we haven’t given more for each other and for the future we want for every single child. you are not alone if you are sorry this morning to the whole wide world.
you are not alone if this is not the road you expected or wanted or chose. you are not alone if you don’t want to travel this road, if you don’t want this road for your colleagues or friends or the people that voted it into being. you are not alone if you wanted so much more for your country—more compassion and solidarity. more trees and cleaner water.
if you woke this morning with a broken heart, you are not alone because i am still here with one eye open. and i am not alone because you are next door. later we will be together at the gas station and grocery store and today my son will sit on a school bus next to a kid whose parents didn’t vote like me. those boys will not know what i know, so they will be free to laugh into the moment of their shared humanity which is what i vow to remember this day and every day to come.
if your heart is broken this morning, pray don’t let it harden. we are not alone—we can vow to stay soft, to break even more because breaking can take us to our knees, and sometimes that is a prayer and somedays that is all we have to help us with the truest truth that the enemy is also a construct. we will never distain our brothers and sisters into another way being. with broken hearts, we are still here, and we must still show up for all of us.
November 6, 2024
the single most important thing to me is to understand why so many dems stayed home compared to 2020, which made all the crucial difference....