The likeliest outcome as forecasted is that Democrats will capture the House by a substantial majority but Republicans will keep the Senate narrowly.
If so, I think we will see Trump and the Republican House try to ram through as much legislation as they can before the new incoming Democrats take office in January. Impeachment is still unlikely to happen (and would still be futile; no way 2/3 of Senators vote to remove Trump from office; in fact, perhaps not even 50% of representatives in the House would vote for impeachment.) But Trump and the GOP can kiss any hopes of passing major new legislation goodbye for the remainder of his 1st term - perhaps his whole presidency.
In the meantime, a great deal of Democratic-initiated legislation in the House will probably fail to pass the Senate, and/or get vetoed by Trump.
If Trump is serious about his 2nd tax cut (the one he says would involve a 10% decrease for the middle class,) it probably would get rammed through between now and January as well.
SCOTUS and other judge nominations would remain unchanged; Trump and the Republicans would still get them passed by the barest of margins in the Senate, should Ginsburg or Breyer leave a vacancy.
There’s no point in talking about impeachment before any investigations have finished. We have Mueller’s investigation no matter who wins, and if the Democrats win either House, there will be a host of investigations into various possible violations of the law by Trump and his cronies. The findings of these investigations could lead to very little or very substantial evidence of illegality – and if the evidence is strong enough, it is indeed possible that Trump would either resign or there would be sufficient Republican support for impeachment. Of course, “strong enough” for these Republicans might require Trump, on tape, physically throttling a child to death, but there’s always the possibility of things changing, especially if enough Republicans think that they might lose an election if they don’t make a change.
Trump is not serious about a middle class tax cut. But he is serious about another upper-class tax cut, which he’ll pretend is a middle-class tax cut to appease his base. Likewise for all of the Trumpists in both houses of Congress.
How? The slight Senate majority wasn’t enough to ram through even GOP priorities for the majority of the two year period. There’s not enough support for ending the legislative filibuster within the GOP caucus in the Senate to make it a practical option. GOP Senators already ignored even Trump’s twitter tantrums calling for it’s end when they could have used it to good effect earlier in this Congress.
In terms of passing legislation, the Senate has required, and likely will continue to require. bipartisan support to pass bills. The GOP hasn’t had a meaningful majority that enabled passing partisan legislation. The only exception is for anything that can’t be done under once a year budget reconciliation.
In theory they could try to slip in a budget reconciliation bill since we are in FY19 since October 1st and it hasn’t been used yet this year. There’s one necessary step to accomplish first. It’s a big step. Congress still hasn’t finished FY19 appropriations. There’s bipartisan agreement on some agencies budgets but they passed a Continuing Resolution to fund the government into December. We sort of need that budget in place before we reconcile it. If they don’t want at least a partial government shutdown for Christmas, Congress has a lot of post-election work already waiting in DC. I suppose it’s possible they finish the budget and try to roll right into reconciliation the next day. I’d put my money on them finalizing the budget, giving high fives at press conferences, and a very quick transition to heading home for holiday recess.
I’m not counting on a substantial Democratic win. But if there is one, it’ll be noticed in Washington and have an effect. If the Republican Senators who didn’t run for re-election this year see the voters shifting away from Trump, they’re not going to rush to put forward his agenda. Instead, they’re going to start trying to put distance between themselves and Trump in hopes of coming more into alignment with the voters before they have to run again in 2020 or 2022.
This was supposed to happen in 2007, after the Dems took both houses of Congress. But instead, the Republicans in Congress rallied around Bush, and the Senate Republicans in particular filibustered everything in sight just to keep Bush from having to veto stuff himself. (That was really when use of the filibuster became standard rather than exceptional.)
I’m really at a loss for a reason why it should be different now. If anything, the conservative coalition has become noticeably** less **tolerant of dissent from the remaining shreds of its moderate wing than it was in 2007.
Intra-party politics trump general politics in the GOP. The Tea Party and whatever it’s metastasized into learned from the NRA: “You’re with us 100% or we’ll do everything we can to prevent you from getting the nomination.” Even if it means nominating morons like Christine O’Donnell who are likely to lose the general election.
Or they could just pretend they’ve already done that, and use reconciliation anyway. Would that really be any more extreme than pretending that the tax cut would decrease deficits, so they could push those through?
The real takeaway isn’t what they’ll get through. They’ll get nothing through.
Here’s how it’ll go:
Jan 2: The new House is sworn in. We’ll know the committee members and chairs by then.
Jan 3: The investigations begin, including the request for Trump’s tax records by the head of the Finance and Judiciary committees
Jan 3.0000000000001: Trump’s tax records are leaked to The Washington Post
Yup. Middle class will be everyone that makes more than 10 million a year. Anyway, it’s unlikely that trump even remembers saying/tweeting it. Someone else told him to say it anyway.
If this tax cut is seriously proposed, Trump supporters will cheer it on. The cut won’t give his base a dime, but will enrich himself and his ‘friends’.
And that’s fine. The idea is to tie him up until we get a favorable Senate map in 2020. Maybe allow him - depending on what’s found by the investigations - to dangle on a string - to keep railing against things.
The most interesting thing to me will be to see how politically savvy he actually is. Will he flip and try to cut a deal with democrats on certain things or will he double down on the conservative agenda?
I’m just guessing, here, but: doesn’t his default approach come to mind?
Let’s say — as the odds indicate and you seem to be figuring — that the Dems take the House while the GOP presumably holds on to the Senate; what do you figure Trump would say, literally every time something less-than-optimal happens? Because I figure it’s that he’d blame somebody else. You know, by ranting about Democrats, while talking up how great he is and his ideas are: just declaring, at every turn, that he can fix it, if only those obstructionists who hate America weren’t more concerned with helping illegals instead of helping you, or whatever. (He doesn’t, you understand, have an incentive to actually fix anything; he just needs a story he can tell about how it didn’t get fixed because of them. Though anything that goes right, he can still cheerfully take credit for.)
Am I wrong, or is there ample reason to figure that’d be his go-to move?
Of course it will be his go-to move. He doesn’t want to fix anything, he just wants the adoring crowds of morons to think he will, so they will keep cheering.
IF the D’s win the House — a big IF, I fear — it will have limited legislative effect. (Recall that the R’s in the House were already split between two factions: the hateul greedy Trumpists and the know-nothing Ayn Randian crazies who voted No to even the ugliest most spiteful budgets so that D’s had to vote with the haters just to keep the government functioning.)
Where it MAY make a difference is the power of subpoena. For example, Jerry Nadler will be Chairman of the U.S. House Committee on the Judiciary with the power to force witnesses to appear and discuss the conduct of Donald J. Trump and the other criminals now running the government.
If they don’t want at least a partial government shutdown for Christmas, Congress has a lot of post-election work already waiting in DC. I suppose it’s possible they finish the budget and try to roll right into reconciliation the next day. I’d put my money on them finalizing the budget, giving high fives at press conferences, and a very quick transition to heading home for holiday recess.