It has taken me until now to weigh in on the election for several reasons:
1.) I’ve been sick so my personal time while Daniel is at school has been spent sleeping and trying to fight this cold.
2.) I want anything I say to be based in fact and I want to be able to point to a place where people can go to get more information.
So… here are my thoughts on the election:
1.) My life actually hasn’t changed. I live in California which is one of the bluest states in the nation. Our governor won a historic fourth term, beating his GOP opponent by 18 percentage points, and pretty much held every other electable job in the state in between his second and third terms. While we were out doing errands on Tuesday, my mother-in-law asked me if I had heard of his challenger. My answer: “Yes, but only because I saw him on TV before the primary.” The GOP pretty much abandoned him because I didn’t see a commercial or mailing for him from June until Election Day. Our two senators weren’t up for election (and are pretty hard to defeat anyway) and my congressional rep didn’t have much of a fight to be re-elected. In other words, my state is in good hands and my congressional representation is where I want it to be.
2.) It was not surprising that the Republicans had a good night. One party regaining congressional control during a midterm election happened during Clinton’s tenure in the White House as well as during Bush’s time. Given how completely divided our country is and the fact that the Republicans completely outspent the Democrats in a lot of the campaigns, it was a forgone conclusion.
3.) The Republicans have a majority in both houses of Congress but it’s not one that will make a huge difference. The majority in the House is +16 seats and the majority in the Senate is +2 seats. It’s a simple enough majority to pass bits and pieces of legislation but not nearly enough to do damage. On legislation that doesn’t require a 2/3 majority, it will pass even if everyone votes along party lines. However, the Republicans don’t have enough of a majority to override presidential vetoes. To do that they would need 290 seats in the House and 66 seats in the Senate. They also don’t have enough people to invoke cloture in the Senate (they would need 60 seats) which means that filibusters can and likely will happen. Likely, the only thing they’ll be able to do is hold up nominations of judges and just be a thorn in the President’s side.
4.) This means that the system of checks and balances works out well. Does anyone else remember learning about our government having “checks and balances” in school or is that one of those weird things we learned about back in the Dark Ages (also known as 17 years ago in my Government class in high school)? The basic idea is that no one branch of the government has too much power. Given that the executive branch is run by a Democrat, it’s actually not that weird to me that the legislative branch is controlled by the Republicans. The judicial branch has appointees from both Republican and Democratic presidents. This means that the legislative and judicial branches are not going to function as rubber stamps for the executive branch and that’s actually the way it should be.
For the sake of full disclosure, I double-checked all my facts at Project Vote Smart.
Every time there’s a shift, the winning party goes on and on about how it constitutes a “mandate” from the people. That always makes me want to hit someone, because usually it means people held their noses and chose what seemed the lesser of two evils. In my state they do that with taxes that fail, when most of us are like, “No, actually we were NOT saying ‘no new taxes,’ we were saying ‘That’s not the right way to fund this particular cause.'” Agh. I wash my hands of politics.