I dunno. The Americans stuck their hand in a blender for four years and then four years later needed to try it again. Alas, Stumpy McNubs remains long on limbs but short on memory.
"The President's party loses seats in the midterms" is a long-term trend and it seems pretty likely to hold this time.
The real question is, once the Democrats are back in control of at least one house of Congress, are they going to be sane or are they going to spend two years making such fools of themselves that we end up with another Republican President in 2028?
Alas you'll need to define "sane" first. That might be harder than expected.
Equally unfortunate is the need for 60 senate votes to actually have a meaningful say over what the president does. And in truth no part has had "control" of congress to this level for a while.
When one (or indeed both) sides are politically incapable of being bipartisan (witness the outcomes for those voting against party lines, on both sides) control of one house is meaningless and a majority in the senate (short of 60 votes) mostly meaningless.
Expecting any change in behavior after November, regardless of the results, is wishful thinking.
It takes 40 votes to prevent the other party from putting something in a bill that you're willing to do a government shutdown to prevent. That's probably a good thing. Consider what would be happening right now, when the Republicans have >50 but not >60, if that meant they could actually do whatever they want.
And the difference between 49 and 51 is still pretty damn important because "majority" has a lot of procedural consequences that are not irrelevant.
As you've seen, over, and over, and over again, this is their own internal rule they've changed it before and they can just change it again with a simple majority, the so-called "nuclear option".
None of this has any actual weight, it's all theatre. Which doesn't mean it lacks consequences, but they could at any time just sweep it aside and they choose not to.
Ironically, one thing the Senate does constitutionally need a super-majority for and can't just change the rule is Impeaching the President. Which means that so long as Republicans have enough votes and apparently still believe loyalty to one corrupt rotting bag of shit is their purpose in life he can't be impeached.
> As you've seen, over, and over, and over again, this is their own internal rule they've changed it before and they can just change it again with a simple majority, the so-called "nuclear option".
It's called the "nuclear option" because actually using it is mutually-assured destruction. They're not so stupid that they can't foresee ever being in the minority again when changing a rule where that consideration is the blatantly obvious cost.
Somehow the Democrats were that stupid and did it for judicial nominations and both parties can see how that came back to bite them.
> Which means that so long as Republicans have enough votes and apparently still believe loyalty to one corrupt rotting bag of shit is their purpose in life he can't be impeached.
The real purpose of impeachment is for when there is widespread consensus that someone so pressingly needs to be removed from office that it can't wait until the next election. It's for when they're so bad even their own side won't stand for it, not for when you hate the other party's President and catch a slight majority in the midterms.
But if you retake the legislature then maybe consider adding some new restraints on executive power to those hefty must-pass omnibus bills. It might be worth doing something about the problem in general instead of just that one specific jerk?
The thing I find irritating is that the government has been doing things as bad the things Trump is doing for decades, and those things are actually bad and shouldn't be done, but people are now acting like Trump invented them.
Don't get offended that Trump is more brazen about anything than anyone else and try to retaliate against him in particular, instead change the things that need to be changed so that nobody can do those things anymore, even when they're acting like they're not.
Yes I think some of what he's doing isn't new, and yes some of it isn't new, just more brazen, but I think there's also a lot of new.
For example, pardons are for sale. Thats pretty obvious. maybe it's been done before (?) but certainly not on this scale and not so soon in the term.
Secondly he's set up a direct method for paying him, TrumpCoin. That's different to campaign contributions. And indeed quite a bit of trumpcoin is being sold to foreign govts. I'm gonna put that in the "new" column.
In terms of international relations it's all new. He's blowing up trust in the US, via tarrifs, threats to invade a NATO country and so on. This is long term damage at unprecedented scale for no apparent actual gain.
There are plenty of laws which say he can't do any of this. Adding more laws is not the solution. A weak congress, and a weak Supreme Court unwilling to enforce the laws is the problem.
This seems like a pretty good example of how Trump is "different" but not actually different.
The traditional way this works is through prosecutorial discretion. You make friends with the politician and then when they're in office you don't get prosecuted or the case gets dropped or settled under favorable terms. Example: When Bush got elected, the antitrust case against Microsoft was effectively made to go away "for some reason" (https://www.cnet.com/tech/tech-industry/microsoft-political-...).
Doing the same thing with pardons is way more conspicuous, because instead of something that doesn't happen (prosecution) you have something that does happen, and in public view (official pardon).
Politicians traditionally care about distinctions like that because it makes it much easier to accuse them of the thing, whereas Trump DGAF. But it's fundamentally not a different thing and the actual problem isn't that Trump isn't being subtle about it, it's that they should not be getting away with it even when they are being subtle about it.
> Secondly he's set up a direct method for paying him, TrumpCoin. That's different to campaign contributions.
Eh. It's not that much different to campaign contributions and it's not really different at all to the longstanding practice of politicians or their family members owning a private company which then gets into a bunch of peculiarly advantageous business dealings while they're in office.
> In terms of international relations it's all new. He's blowing up trust in the US, via tarrifs, threats to invade a NATO country and so on. This is long term damage at unprecedented scale for no apparent actual gain.
The problem with this one is it's the hating the other party's President one. Congress passed a law letting the President set tariffs, didn't repeal it for many years, and then the President started setting some tariffs. You can argue that it's a bad policy, you can argue that they should repeal the law that lets him do it, but he ran for office saying he was going to do this, got into office, and now he's doing it.
> There are plenty of laws which say he can't do any of this. Adding more laws is not the solution. A weak congress, and a weak Supreme Court unwilling to enforce the laws is the problem.
There are two kinds of laws in this context.
The first is the ones that punish him for doing something. Those are useless in this context because the executive isn't going to prosecute itself so you're down to impeachment and for that you need bipartisan consensus.
The second is the ones that prevent him from doing something. Take away the law that lets the President set tariffs and he can't unilaterally set any tariffs.
>once the Democrats are back in control of at least one house of Congress
"Are the democrats magically going to be able to have 100% control of the government despite only holding a tiny majority in the lower house? If not, I'm going to yet again blame them for a failure that is actually just the constitution working as it clearly states"
The US system is not designed to give democrats any power by holding a small majority in a single house. The power granted in such a case is the power to prevent change.
FDR was able to reform and change things the way he was because Democrats had something like 80% control of both houses, and that's how the threat to pack the Supreme court carried weight: Because he could actually do it.
You want democrats to have power? You want them to be able to put these criminals in jail? You want to be able to reform the system to reduce the chance of this horseshit happening again?
Then you need far more than a small majority in one house. You need actual control.
It's much easier to obstruct and prevent and destroy, so Republican policy of tearing shit down and stopping normal legislative progress and ensuring our congress passes no laws to deal with obvious bullshit like rampant corporate fraud that would make Enron blush is just naturally advantaged.
> Are the democrats magically going to be able to have 100% control of the government despite only holding a tiny majority in the lower house?
They're not supposed to have 100% control of the government. Nobody is. They're supposed to prevent the Republicans from doing dumb stuff, just like the Republicans are supposed to prevent them from doing different dumb stuff because they have different constituencies. Only when they can both agree is when the government should be doing something, and even then you often need help from the courts and the states because the thing they both agree on is that someone is paying them to do something bad.
The best government is the one that does exactly what it should. The second best is the one that doesn't do things that it should; in that case someone else can do them, like the states or the market. The worst is the one that does things that it shouldn't.
> FDR was able to reform and change things the way he was because Democrats had something like 80% control of both houses
FDR was pre-Nixon and had 80% control by sweeping the South and losing New England. People forget that the original purpose of the minimum wage was to prevent black people from taking jobs from white people by offering to work for less money. Most of FDR's policies were economically illiterate or political knavery -- social security was created with the solvency of a pyramid scheme which is why the trust fund already has a negative growth rate and is soon going to run out of money now that population growth has leveled off.
That kind of authoritarian steamrolling over the opposition is exactly what nobody should be able to do, not least because it most often happens when people are heated about something and willing to start hastily implementing half-baked ideas with long-term consequences if given the chance.
> It's much easier to obstruct and prevent and destroy
If only! A major defect in the existing system is that the high bar meant to keep bad laws from making onto the books to begin with is also applied as the requirement to repeal them. Combined with the tendency for the powerful to defend the status quo that secured them that power, the result is that bad laws accumulate and how to be effective in destroying them is an unsolved problem.
"The mistake has proceeded from not attending with due care to the mischiefs that may be occasioned by obstructing the progress of government at certain critical seasons. When the concurrence of a large number is required by the Constitution to the doing of any national act, we are apt to rest satisfied that all is safe, because nothing improper will be likely TO BE DONE, but we forget how much good may be prevented, and how much ill may be produced, by the power of hindering the doing what may be necessary, and of keeping affairs in the same unfavorable posture in which they may happen to stand at particular periods."
The first time many of Trump's desires to do illegal things were somewhat restrained by non-political government employees who remembered that their oath is to the Constitution, not the President.
Based on what I've read a lot of people who voted for him subsequent times thought that would continue.
It’ll come back when there is more policy certainty, China isn’t going anywhere and they’re going to keep building. Luckily, there is manufacturing supply chain safely outside the US. China is roughly a third of global manufacturing capacity after all.
Don’t think in years, think in half decades and decades. This too shall pass.
It is not too useful to make bold unsupported claims that the current administration has the power to subvert elections. That just lowers us to their level, and the last thing we need is for a further erosion in confidence in our democratic system. The states run elections, and no matter what Trump says to get people to keep paying attention to him, they don't jump when the president tells them to. The feds have money and nukes, but States have a lot of the actual power.
> executive orders are toothless against the states and they all know it.
And judicial orders are toothless against the federal government... And the states can't lift a finger against any deployment of federal power against them, whether it's legal or not.
What recourse will a swing state in November have against ICE goons being deployed to do Kavanaugh arrests in voter lines?
Elon Musk just announced spending 300 million to make it harder to vote.
And it didn't even make the headline of the article I read it in.
And he's being spreading lies about elections for years. Again, not regularly mentioned even in critical articles about him, because it's so normalized.
Is he working in concert with the current administration on this issue? That's going to be the question with many of these new tech-billionaire/administration collaborations.
Reality check is that he has actual track record on delivering or trying to deliver on his anti-democratic impulses. In terms of personal monetary gain, he is the most successful president of history.
He is also actually successful at making Project 2025 reality. He is on the way to cause very real harm (economic, physical) to blue cities too.
> In terms of personal monetary gain, he is the most successful president of history.
And in terms of legislative impact he is the least successful president in history. I don't like the corruption one bit, but on balance it is probably the less damaging of the two.
> He is also actually successful at making Project 2025 reality
Not at all, though, on any kind of permanent basis. He is showing that you can make the executive branch do shitty things with executive orders. What he isn't managing to do is codify any of this in law. There's a reason that the universities and other 'elites' knuckle under and cut deals with him -- they know that these deals are informal and temporary, and go away with the next POTUS. If Trump took this agenda to Congress and got it enacted into law it would persist for many more years.
It's a call to have his ICE goons (armed to the teeth and trained to escalate to violence of course) operate voting stations because of all of the "illegal" voters and for DHS to administer elections instead of leaving it to the states.
He also said his polls are the best they've ever been today. Trump works hard to cultivate an aura of inevitability, but he simply does not have the power to make false things true by declaring them so.
