National Review Online
Monday, October 26, 2026
Few things are as predictable in politics as the party
that wins the White House suffering losses in the subsequent midterm elections,
especially when the president is unpopular.
With about a week to go before Election Day, Republicans
clearly aren’t escaping this familiar dynamic. Barring a miracle, the GOP is
going to lose control of the House, while its Senate majority rests on a
knife’s edge. But the margins and Senate control obviously matter — to the rest
of President Trump’s term and to the gigantic political and ideological clash
coming in 2028.
Rather than moderating after their humbling loss to Trump
in 2024, Democrats are more inflamed and radical than ever before. They haven’t
given an inch on trans issues or identity politics and show little sign of
having truly learned from Joe Biden’s immigration debacle (although there are
murmurs of regret here and there). Medicare for All is back in fashion, and the
DSA is increasingly influential in Democratic ranks, making support for Israel
radioactive in the party.
If Democrats take the House, they will subpoena everyone
in sight (unfortunately, President Trump and his circle have given them plenty
to investigate) and put further upward pressure on federal spending, while
trying to defund the Iran war and interior immigration enforcement. If they
also get a Senate majority, confirmations of Trump executive-branch appointees
and judges will slow and perhaps grind to a halt. If there’s a Supreme Court
vacancy, Democrats will try to force Trump into making a poor choice or hold
the seat open in the hopes of winning the presidency in 2028 and putting a
progressive jurist on the Court.
Unified control of Washington is the ultimate goal.
Should Democrats get it in two years, they will attempt to eliminate the
filibuster and unlock the path in the Senate for radical, self-serving changes
to the system. Even establishment Democrats are talking of adding Puerto Rico
and Washington, D.C., as states, and it has become nearly party orthodoxy that
the Supreme Court should be “reformed,” either with age limits to jettison
conservative justices or by expanding the number of justices.
This is an agenda to overturn the constitutional order
for partisan and ideological advantage. The legitimacy of the Senate, with four
more arbitrarily added Democratic seats, and the Supreme Court would never be
the same. Many Democrats also want to trash the Electoral College, and who
knows what else they’d come up with should they take over Washington.
In short, they want to make changes that would be hard to
reverse, would entrench them in power, and would poison our politics for years
to come.
The number of seats that they gain this year will help
determine their strength to try to effect these changes if they win the
presidency in 2028.
Over the last two years, the GOP Congress has cut taxes
and deregulated, while many Republican governors have pursued worthy reforms,
from eliminating state income taxes to easing up on rules around the
construction of new housing, to advancing school choice. All that is to the
good, but much of this has been blotted out for voters by President Trump’s
protectionism, the higher fuel prices owing to the Iran war, and his sundry
idiosyncratic priorities and initiatives of dubious legality.
The best political argument that Republicans have had
this election cycle is that, whatever the public’s discontents, the Democrats
are much worse, a line that, to paraphrase Henry Kissinger, has the added
advantage of being true.
No comments:
Post a Comment