While musing on the upcoming majority in the House, and how they might pressure President Trump to shape his ship and fly a reasonably straight course, it occurred to me that the GOP, especially the GOP Senate incumbents who are ambitious to continue to serve, could begin to develop a sweat.
- The mid-term elections demonstrated that the independents are increasingly disenchanted with the GOP brand. The GOP base apparently remained true and enthusiastic, which Andrew Sullivan thinks was due to the xenophobia to which Trump applied the quirt in the form of the Honduras caravan[1]. But the independents are in charge of the fate of elections, and the economy, the corporate tax cuts, the monkeying with the ACA, none of the GOP signature issues seemed to attract the independent voter. Their disgust with Trump and his close adherents was apparent in the losses suffered by many of those close adherents.
- The consequent takeover of the House of Representatives by the Democrats makes competent oversight and resultant pressure on President Trump likely. A no-brainer? Sure – but important to keep that in mind.
- Another reminder that the GOP has a holy tenet that states it’s a sin to cooperate with the Democrats on major legislation. This can be taken two ways, the first being that there will be no legislation on which the GOP can legitimately hang its hat during the next two years; or, the GOP will have little opportunity to shoot itself in the foot with regards to major legislation. This will become a talking point during the run-up to the 2020 Senatorial races. As the party facing decline, it’s important that it have achievements that it can point to as evidence of its essential health.
- President Trump no longer has any legislative punch. The House will no longer bend to his will, and the Democrats have learned that he is untrustworthy when it comes to deal making.
- This leaves President Trump with two primary levers of power.
- The first is his mouth, amplified as it is by Twitter, which he can use to stir up his base at will. He’s managed to use this effectively for three years, and while I continue to expect the GOP to leak people who have FINALLY come to their senses regarding the gross incompetence and corruption endemic to Trump, not to mention those who pass away, I don’t expect those to be large numbers in the absence of irrefutable evidence of Presidential perfidy. Even in his last days, Nixon had his supporters. According to Gallup, he was at roughly 24% approval when he left office. Trump will always have his supporters.
- The second is his power to make judicial selections. Trump does try to keep promises he considers important, and a conservative judiciary has, from the evidence, been one of them. He will continue to send deeply conservative people to the Senate Judiciary Committee for confirmation, and, given his Administration’s horrible record on vetting candidates for all positions, it won’t matter if they’re wonderfully qualified or pathetically incompetent and inept. He’ll send them.
And this is where those Senate incumbents of yore start to sweat. In order to win re-election, it’s not enough for them to win the base, but you have to have them (for those who remember formal mathematics or logic, the base is necessary but not sufficient). They have to have a good chunk of the independents as well.
But the independents are going to pay attention, and that’s where the Democrats come in. If & when Trump sends a bad candidate for the judiciary, regardless of the seat, the Democrats need to bring this up in the news. Pound on it. Trump is trying to screw America again with a bad judicial candidate.
The new neighbors, looking around the corner.
And the right will react as they always do. They’ll get behind whichever bumbler it might be and try to shove him (or her, although Trump seems allergic to the female judicial candidate) through. The GOP has the votes to put through any judicial nominee, but if a bad nominee is advertised by the Democrats, and then their individual votes pinned on the Republican Senators, they’ll find themselves between Scylla and Charybdis. Bad judicial nominees will be disastrous for both Trump and his Senators.
The 2020 election will all be about Trump. The Democrats have the early momentum, plus the GOP has many more Senate seats to defend than do the Democrats, so that’s another advantage. They don’t have an understanding of why Trump appeals to so much of the electorate, so that’s a disadvantage. But they have time to study the problem and come up with a strategy. Trump should be an easy target because, at his heart, he’s the antithesis of what the parents of most of his base were brought up to believe. Most of them are in denial.
That’ll be one of the keys.
1 And we’ve not heard of the caravan again, have we? Even the military dropped its high-flying name for the operation in which they were to assist ICE and the border patrol. It might almost make one think the caravan was arranged by President Trump. Not true, I’m sure – I hope – but possible.
