Overall things are going to get much much worse. While the House majority will keep him in check legislatively, he’s going to become increasingly agitated and eventually he’ll completely rent the already weakened social fabric of the United States.
His newly forged congressional handcuffs are going to drive him absolutely bonkers and his angry rhetoric against the Dems will reach all new heights. He’ll blame us for everything and unfortunately we’re going to appear obstructionist to the undecideds (especially regarding the middle class tax cut lie). Mueller’s findings will probably polarize the nation further. If by chance he loses in 2020 he’ll claim voter fraud which I guarantee will end in some degree of riots. He’ll than start a right wing media company and continue his cult leadership from Trump Tower. Magical Sky Pixie help us all when the recession happens. And not even she’ll help with the job dislocations coming from automation. That’s when the civil war starts (though that’s prob 6-10 years away).
We all agree that the ACA is not the best that it could be. We have some disagreements, sure on whether it should be fixed or if it should be scrapped, but no one is really happy with it.
So, the republicans voted how many times to repeal it when they knew that they had no chance to actually pull the trigger? This was popular with the base, and allowed them to demonize the democrats further by showing their blocking of repeal.
Democrats should start writing and passing updates and fixes to the ACA, maybe even start from scratch if that serves the purpose better. But put it out there, show the constituencies what they will do if they have power in 2020 to carry through.
They can delay things with lawsuits. In the 2008 Minnesota Senatorial election, Al Franken beat Norm Coleman. But Coleman refused to concede and challenged the voting results in court. The case took months to resolve and the result was that Minnesota didn’t have a second Senator from January 3, 2009 (when Coleman’s term ended) until July 7, 2009 (when Franken was finally able to assume the office). The Senate only had ninety-nine members and the Democrats only had a fifty-nine seat majority until Franken took his seat, which meant they didn’t have the sixty votes necessary to override a Republican filibuster. It also meant that Franken had less seniority than all of the other Senators, including those who were elected on the same day as he had been.