That leaves out the context of an excellent economy and the rampant gerrymandering. Democrats won a battle with the field heavily tilted against them.
Oh you.
Yeah, and I’m sure in some areas there is reasoned analysis taking all aspects into account that is being believed by the public at large. Hah, no, I can’t say that with a straight face.
Holy shit, Trump is losing his shit in this press conference, going after reporter from CNN. This is off the rails.
Telling reports to “sit down” calling them a “terrible person.”
Unhinged.
They did do this under Pelosi, when the democrats last had the house. I follow politics a lot, and even I never heard about it until years afterward when Pelosi was on a talk show, like the Daily Show or something, and she talked about all the bills her House had passed that never got taken up by the Senate. I was just surprised that I’d never heard the news about it when it happened.
I wonder if it would be a bigger deal these days and get more coverage? Especially since politics in general gets more coverage now.
Democrats are going to lose the mid terms!
(Democrats win back the House.)
Democrats lose by winning!
Yeah, under Obama, we were still in the depths of the largest recession since the depression during Obama’s first mid-terms. And as you pointed out, the Democrats had not established some massive gerrymandered advantage.
Hopefully, the Democrats have learned their lessons, and won’t ignore lower level elections in the future. Those things matter, because they directly lead to congressional redistricting, which then translates into congressional victories.
The GOP understood this, made a plan, and executed that plan masterfully. You can say what you want about them, but they fucking played the game right. The Democrats were largely idiots after electing Obama, coasting on their good feels having just elected the first black president.
This shit takes work. It takes work EVERY DAY. The world isn’t going to turn out like you want by freaking accident.
One thing to consider here, is that there’s one limit on the GOP’s ability to do this, in that any bill that increase revenue need to originate in the House.
The Senate is limited in its ability to create new bills, because most large things tend to require some sort of revenue raising.
I am personally getting more and more concerned about an Obamacare repeal during the lame duck. It seems like the smart Republican play right now. This is their last chance, so why wouldn’t they try?
Or is there some procedural rule that prevents them from bringing it to a vote in the Senate again with fewer than 60 votes?
They have a bank of never-voted-on bills they can bring up and amend to do whatever they’d like. The limitation will be the House needing to approve those bills (and also most things are still subject to filibuster).
They do seem to use budget reconcilliation an awful lot though.
Much harder to do that when you have to get it through a Democratic House, but I suppose it means that Cocaine Mitch, Donnie, and Pelosi could cut a deal without having to worry about 2020 contenders grandstanding against.
Agreed. I mostly think that nothing will get done at a federal level for the next 2 years aside from budgets and executive orders of questionable legality and unquestionable immorality.
This thread is hilarious. You’d think, reading this, that Democrats got blown out.
My suspicion is that Trump and McConnell will blame the ballooning annual deficits from the tax cuts on the House’s refusal to trim SS and Medicare. This will be their two year play and the press will report it breathlessly without context.
That’s still better than Republicans controlling the House.
Trump and the Republicans will continue to stoke white America’s fear of a black and brown country until they stop drawing breath, but at least we’ll be armed to hilt with uh, the “bipartisan marketplace.” We could all find ourselves in one internment camp or another and there will be Nancy Pelosi, still asking for civility and compromise in this moment of adversity.
The Dems will instigate investigations that will result in nothing. There may be a few bills pass regarding infrastructure. The wall will not be funded (it will never be funded), Trump will continue texting and blaming everything on the Dems and the fake news media.
Then the 2020 election cycle will start.
Boy. Some people are taking political boilerplate very, very seriously.
Really? It looks to me like we learned that we’ve got (at least) two years of divided government, and people learned from the last six years of Obama’s administration that divided government does jack squat. Except for scoring political points off the other side, of course.
In this case, a divided government that doesn’t allow Republicans to advance their agenda is exactly the best I can hope for. I did not start it with the intention of making it seem like Dems got blown out, I started it to discuss what people think will happen in the coming year(s).