Say America wakes up tomorrow morning and - whoa, one party (either the Ds or Rs) now has a 435-0 majority in the House (is it even mathematically a “majority” if the opposition has no seats?) and a 100-0 majority in the Senate. And they have the presidency, too.
They only get this for two years, though. The midterms are coming up in two years and all House and Senate seats will be put up for grabs, per the rules of the hypothetical.
What would each party do in those two years of carte blanche power?
D’s - probably expand Supreme Court from 9 to 13 justices, put in universal single-payer healthcare, codify abortion into federal law…what else?
Republicans - Carve up several deep red states into numerous new states so they gain permanent and uncontestable control over the Senate forever.
Repeals the Voting Rights Act and 1964 Civil Rights Act.
Imposes a nationwide abortion ban.
Pass legislation ending the green card lottery, formally ending the refugee program.
Repeals the current Immigration & Naturalization Act and replaces it with one that largely only allows middle income or higher white migration under permanent residency, additionally modifies most visas so that they never have a pathway to citizenship, makes naturalization process almost impossible to complete. Creates a guest worker visa to allow businesses to import agricultural workers in large quantities, as well as factory workers for traditional fields dominated by immigrants (chicken processing etc), but the visas granted give no path to citizenship.
All Democratic appointed judges at all levels of the Federal judiciary would be impeached in mass show trials and replaced with Republican judges.
Democrats: Codify Roe on Day 1. Spend next two years in intraparty squabble over omnibus spending bill where the two sides are apart by five dollars. Nothing else gets passed.
Republicans: Pass law that mandates that all state redistricting be taken over by the Republican Congress. Voter ID law imposed nationwide and residents of big cities may only obtain their IDs in person at a location at the other side of the state in offices that are only open from 7:00-7:15 am on days of the month that are prime numbers. Several billion dollars appropriated to replace the Statue of Liberty holding a torch with a statue of DJT extending his middle finger. Overruns for the gold plating on the statue’s belly are paid for by a massive tax on electric vehicles. Teachers nationwide are issued cattle prods to use on students refusing to recite the Lord’s Prayer in school. The USPS is shut down and replaced with contractors selected by highest bribe. The EPA is abolished and all public lands are made available for free for oil wells.
Along those lines though, Democrats would probably make D.C. Statehood a top priority. Lock in those two blue Senators. That’s something that is actually on their platform.
Good point. But if the House and the Senate (and presumably the WH) were legitimately voted into office with 100% from the same party it would take bucket loads of chutzpah for a governor/state house to make a unitateral veto.
DEMs impeach the GOP appointments to SCOTUS, actually impeach them all and replace the entire bench with DEM nominations who are all 25-30yo poster child progressives.
GOP do the mirror image.
Not sure if you were replying to me, but statehood is a power of Congress under Art IV and doesn’t require an amendment. Furthermore amendments don’t require 100% of the state governors, nor of state reps.
D’s: Would get embroiled in internal bickering between the more militant progressives and more moderate factions; in the end, would get nothing done. Also, Bernie Sanders gets hit in the face with a tomato thrown by Kyrsten Sinema right in the Senate chamber.
R’s: Would get a lot done, all of it wrong and stupid, sending America to hell in a handbasket. Would also set standards for “free and fair elections” which, remarkably, guarantee that Republicans keep getting re-elected forever. Also, there is a $500,000 minimum annual income requirement for white voters, and Blacks can no longer vote at all.
If you posit that the Republicans have the power to make amendments, then its all over. Forget two years of unlimited power, try two decades minimum. They can re-write the constitution so that the state or federal lawmakers have unlimited power to decide how elections are run up to and including who counts the votes. They will probably be able to make the changes obscure and subtle enough that the average American won’t realize the the game is totally and completely rigged, but a Democrat will never be elected again.
They will need to do that such that it works for Republicans in red states, while not so much for Democrats in the blue states. They will find a way to do that, of course.
In Missouri the Republicans have a Republican governor and a veto-proof (i.e., more than 2/3) majority in both the General Assembly and the state Senate. Not surprisingly, they get tripped up in their own intra-party squabbles. In the just-completed session, the legislature failed to get a relatively innocuous bill on sports betting passed, and a dispute between two state senators from the same county stalled Congressional redistricting until the last day of the session.
In the post I was replying to the OP posited that the GOP had all the state houses too. If we alter that to only assume they own 3/4 (so enough to get amendments but not total power) than they can just vest all the power in the federal government and cut out the states entirely.
Yeah, the hypothetical question of “What would happen if a party had ultimate power for two years” is kinda pointless because the answer is “They would make sure they have ultimate power forever.” Really need some limits to make it interesting.