The worst case in November would be very bad indeed.
The worst case in November would be very bad indeed.
I t’s far too early to make confident predictions about what will happen in November, but at this point, things are looking good . . . for the Democrats. The maps over at RealClearPolitics have the party leading the race for the presidency and the House and facing a toss-up in the Senate. The betting market PredictIt has the Democrats favored to win the White House, the House, and the Senate — and roughly even odds to win all three at once.
If the Dems just win the White House and keep the House, that will mean divided government. A future Biden administration can do a lot of things through executive action, just as Obama and Trump have, but major left-wing legislation will be off the table, and the Senate will be able to block bad judicial nominees. But if this election goes so poorly for the GOP that the party loses the Senate too, Democrats will be positioned to spend two years giving the country a good hard shove to the left. With a big enough margin, they could even eliminate the legislative filibuster, as Biden has already threatened, and enact any law they wanted on a party-line vote.
The possibility of full Democratic control should scare the living hell out of conservatives and moderates, very much including those who can’t stand Trump. For God’s sake, people, don’t vote for down-ballot Democrats just to punish the GOP for Trump.
Joe Biden was a “moderate” only in the context of the broader 2020 Democratic field. He may not want to defund the police, and he may not be dumb enough to sign on to something like the Green New Deal, but in every way that matters he’s solidly a man of the Left. He wants huge spending, higher taxes, gun control, abortion on demand, you name it.
As Bloomberg Businessweek recently noted, his spending plans amount to massive new taxpayer funding for everything under the sun, even though he’s been a deficit hawk in the past. He wants to spend trillions transitioning the U.S. to clean energy, for example, and hundreds of billions on domestic manufacturing.
On health care, Biden has stopped short of endorsing single-payer — but his vice president, who has a good chance of taking over before the next election rolls around, hasn’t. And Biden does support a surge in funding for Obamacare, plus adding a “public option” that would undermine private insurance and could pave the way to single-payer eventually. Once government benefits expand, it’s very hard to roll them back, as the effort to repeal Obamacare showed, so I wouldn’t be too confident that a backlash would give Republicans the votes to reverse these policies at a later date.
Biden further wants to raise taxes by $4 trillion over ten years. The wealthy would bear the brunt of these costs, but the Tax Foundation estimates the taxes would reduce overall GDP by 1.5 percent over the long run — and reduce after-tax income by about the same amount for those at the lower end of the income spectrum. It would be one thing to increase taxes to reduce the debt we’re already drowning in, but the goal here would be to fund an even bigger government.
One thing that could stop a President Biden from doing all these things? A Republican Senate, which would simply refuse to pass them.
A GOP Senate would also be key to maintaining some sanity at the Supreme Court, where the federal battles over abortion and guns will largely be waged. Biden played a starring role in trying to kill Clarence Thomas’s nomination; his running mate enthusiastically joined in the attempt to derail Brett Kavanaugh’s. Both are enthusiastically pro-choice and anti-gun. There can be no doubt what kinds of nominations will come out of this administration. A Democratic Senate will happily sign off on whatever picks the administration sends its way; a Republican Senate will fight.
The GOP has spent decades working toward a Supreme Court majority that will faithfully apply the laws that come before it, rather than reading progressive social goals into the Constitution and the statute books. This process has involved several backfires, nominees who drifted to the left soon after joining the Court — and the body’s originalist majority is precarious even now, with the conservative justices taking turns voting with the progressives in many key cases.
A Republican Senate can force a Biden administration to moderate its picks to maintain some balance in the judicial branch. If that doesn’t happen, the Court could be gone again, for a long, long time.
To be sure, this is all hypothetical for the time being. Republicans might be in much better shape come November. But for now, a Democratic “clean sweep” looks like a real possibility, and anti-Trump moderates and conservatives should think hard before helping to make that happen.