Seventy years ago, H. L. Mencken wrote, “Under democracy one party always devotes its chief energies to trying to prove that the other party is unfit to rule — and both commonly succeed, and are right.”
In the new issue of National Review, anticipating that the midterm wave about to wash over us is going to be both blue and walloping, Jim Geraghty writes, “It’s easy to imagine Democrats rubbing their hands with glee over the prospect of oversight hearings and investigations. But the second-term Trump administration is a world champion of noncompliance.” In other words, get ready for . . . ugly battles, messy results.
Will a Democratic House attempt to impeach Trump for a third time? Almost certainly. . . . Will a U.S. Senate convict him? Almost certainly not. For some stretch of 2027 or 2028, we will sit through another impeachment drama with a preordained ending. Trump will no doubt treat a third failure to convict in the Senate as another historic victory.
In his companion cover piece, Charles C. W. Cooke points to where the real worries begin:
If the Democratic Party wins a majority in both houses of Congress in November 2026, I will be nervous, but it won’t keep me up at night. If the Democratic Party wins a majority in both houses of Congress in November 2028, I shall become a raging insomniac.
For if the Democrats also take the White House,
the next period of Democratic dominance will lead to the end of the Supreme Court as a useful branch of government, to the transformation of the Senate into a smaller version of the House, and to the admission of new states for the sole purpose of making national elections less competitive. If completed, this project will gut the heart of the American system of government.
A sampling of what else you’ll find in this issue:
- Charles Hilu went up to post-Platner Maine to talk to Susan Collins on the campaign trail: “Can Susan Collins Part the Blue Wave?”
- Elliott Abrams ponders “The Iran Conundrum”: the president has failed to win popular support for a good policy.
- Roger Zakheim explains “What Trump Can Learn from Reagan’s Military Buildup.”
- Andrew Stuttaford is talkin’ ’bout his generation: Generation Jones. “I am not, nor have I ever been, a Boomer, okay?” You got it: “OK, Joneser.”
- David Alton gives an insider account of an astonishingly successful pro-life movement: “Why Assisted Suicide Failed in Britain.”
- John R. Puri draws the line from James Madison to the Reconstruction Amendments: “How the Author of the Constitution Won, Eventually.”
- Jeffrey Blehar experiences transcendence in rereading The Master and Margarita: “On Revisiting a Great Russian Novel.”
This month’s Our Spacious Skies feature is “How the West Won Teddy Roosevelt.” In this stunning piece — both the prose and the pictures — Judson Berger recounts his trip out to the new Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library in the North Dakota badlands. Come for the TR history and the astonishing landscape, stay for Judd’s rollicking riff on the star-spangled Medora Musical.
Turning to Books, Arts & Manners, you’ll find abundant (I almost said “incredible,” but read Joseph Epstein on that overused word) riches, spanning subjects from economics to baseball to movies and TV to political animals, ancient and modern, and of course our inimitable, indispensable regulars, Richard Brookhiser and Bryan Garner.
A newcomer to NR, Ellen Massey takes the Happy Warrior to the wilds of Alaska for a floatplane piloting lesson.
If all of the above isn’t a reason to subscribe, I’m not sure what is.