Reading Jennifer Rubin’s article in WaPo sparked a thought about the future. Rubin’s sounds fairly confident about where the mid-terms are going:
However, given the numbers, the Republicans’ unwillingness to examine what is going so very wrong and make adjustments is rather remarkable. It might be possible to save some seats, yet they are doubling down on losing positions. They might be too nervous about raising the alarm given President Trump’s nonstop cheerleading and intolerance for negative facts, or they also might have lost touch with political reality, caught up in the Trump whirlwind of paranoia and tribalism. Weirdly, though, you still see a batch of right-leaning pundits declare that if they pull Kavanaugh, the Republicans are done for. The base will bolt!
They’ve already bolted. Maybe it is a grand coincidence, but the decline in GOP polling fortunes in House and Senate races coincides with a huge dropoff in support for Kavanaugh among GOP women. Trump falsely and repeatedly says he won 52 percent of women. He actually won 52 percent of white women (suggesting nonwhites are invisible to him), only 41 percent of women overall. Some of those certainly are stampeding away from the party in House and Senate races as they watch the GOP fight furiously to the death over Kavanaugh, a Beltway elite whose own calendar doesn’t support his self-image of a Boy Scout and teen feminist.
The focus is understandably on the immediate results of the midterms. But suppose the Democrats win – then what? Putting aside the problem of an incompetent President, the Democrats have been in eclipse for much of the last twenty years or more years, as the Republicans have been in control of the legislative wing for much of that time. Being in the minority makes it difficult to impress the voters, so they need to be thoughtful about how they conduct themselves.
I saw that carefully. The manner in which they conduct themselves will matter more, electorally speaking, than what is actually accomplished. As an object lesson, the Tax Reform of 2017 (or what I just call Tax Change) was passed by the Republicans in the expectation that it would be the horse on which they’d gallop to victory in 2018. The economy would be erupting with growth, money would flow like wine, and everyone would congratulate them by re-electing them.
That strategy has been abandoned as the effective messaging of the Democrats concerning the beneficiaries of that bill has had its effect on Independents and even possibly moderate Republicans. And that abandonment has left the Republicans floundering. Even their second appointment to SCOTUS, illegitimate as it is, has alienated parts of their base, as Rubin suggests.
If the Democrats win only one house of Congress, then there’s not a whole lot they can do. But if they win both, then they must do two things.
- They must conduct the business of the House and the Senate using the procedures which have been developed over two centuries of serious work. That means committee meetings, public debates, consultation with experts, acceptance of amendments, and all that heavy lifting which the Republicans didn’t want to do. Remember the House basically abdicated its Constitutional responsibility during the healthcare and tax process to the Senate? That is completely unacceptable and speaks to the incompetence of Speaker Ryan and his committee chairs. The American people can’t and shouldn’t put up with it.
- They should communicate their dedication to these processes to the American people. The technological tools are available. They need that dedication to realize that the American people will be a lot more approving of them if they’re seen as respecting the rules and procedures of Congress, and use them to good effect, rather than piddling on them. I don’t want to use that worn out word transparency, but that’s the core of this advice: to be convincing, they cannot be opaque.
If the Democrats take this seriously, then the country will benefit doubly as the Republicans are forced to kick out the incompetents currently in charge in order to begin winning elections again, maybe refuse the money flowing from corporate and foreign interests, and rebuild their leadership processes to produce people who really do deserve to be elected and help govern this nation wisely.
