The barbarians were at the gates, but not last time when they stormed the capital so as to foment insurrection and so violate the U. S. Constitution, but this time perhaps legitimately were electing Republican majorities in both houses of Congress because of the indifference of the voting public to Jan. 6th, treating the Insurrection as just one of the issues to be considered, such as crime or inflation, rather than of the utmost and primary importance because the procedures of democracy were at stake. The other issues were cooked up by those Republican funders who spend a lot of money to make up issues to contest. The economy is in fact doing pretty well, what with unemployment low and jobs high. We need more workers. GDP is going up and so is the Stock Market. Yes, there is inflation, but it is steady rather than runaway and probably the result of the aftereffects of the pandemic. Three of its nine percent are attributed to the cost of oil, which is the result of the war between Russia and Ukraine. That makes it a war tax,something to endure for the duration. TV commentators will not say so, because they never will allow the voters to be mistaken, but the American people should stop bellyaching. They should persevere through the war, which is not so bad for us in that the United States is shipping weapons but only the Ukrainians are dying for it, quite a coup by Biden given that in a different proxy war, the United States had 55,000 casualties in Korea. That other phony issue is crime, by which Republicans mean that black looting in the cities is crime, which means burglary, while the white insurgents at the Capitol attacked people so as to overthrow the peaceful succession of power and so could be considered traitors to the country, but that doesn’t seem to matter because the Republicans, like Ron Johnson thinks white rebels who kill only a few people are not really criminals, perhaps because they had the highest (or to my mind, the lowest) of intentions, while the looting of property, as deplorable as it might be, is non violent and spasmodic, the result of people not won over to the idea that acting accordingly seems worthy even if what they are doing is in fact unworthy and stains their entire ethnicity.
The issues on the side of the Democrats did not seem that they would get the traction expected. Abortion was supposed to be a big deal but suburban women might allow the Republican issues to intrude. If they don’t care about what they consider the decisive basis for voting, the litmus test of which party to support, why should others care? Maybe a Republican Congress will pass an anti-abortion ban that Biden vetoes while that possibility gives women pause because such a law would result in an underground railway moving from southern women to northern places where aborion would be available only in hidden clinics. Is that what the women wanted? And very low on the list was voting rights which Brian Kemp insists did not restrict voting because so many people in Georgia did vote when in fact maybe even more might have voted without restrictions, such as ridding the roles of people who did not vote in a few elections so as to curtail voter fraud when there was no evidence that in fact voter fraud had indeed been significant and needed a remedy. No problem means no need for a solution. Voter security was just another excuse to decrease Black voting. What about in Texas, where the legislature allowed only one lockbox per county, which meant Harris County, that includes Houston, gets one lock box and so does all the smaller rural counties in Texas.
Another heartbreak of the midterm election was to be the flaunting of misinformation. Oklahoma candidates insisted that Eastern cities were rife with crime and persisted without checking that in fact the number of murders were higher than the rat in New York. But they believe to their core that it must be higher in the East because they have contempt for the East and because the undercurrent remains that crime is black issue, where inner cities are indeed suffering. Republicans claim Democrats wanted to defund the police though Biden tried to fund police. Lori Lightfoot, the Black Democratic mayor of Chicago, was opposed to defunding the police not in favor of it. When Paul Palosi was attached, people made fun of him and suggested that the intruder was a male prostitute. For shame. Have the Republicans no decency? Nixon, like McCarthy and Ken Starr, take the low road while Democrats castigate Trump for high crimes and misdemeanors, not because he had a lot of girl friends.
The Republican point of view was that this would be a usual midterm election. The opposition party is likely to gain a number of seats in Congress especially if the first term president is unpopular. Just sit tight. Don’t make proposals, just denounce the democrats for soft on crime and mismanaging the economy even if those claims are untrue. In this case, the Republicans just elude the issue of the Insurrection as if it didn’t happen. McConnell and MacCarthy had denounced it on Jan. 7th, but quickly backtracked, MacCarthy going to Mar A Lago to recement relations with Trump perhaps because constituents and donors suggested it was wise. There was no compact whereby Republican congresspeople denounced the insurrection or even offered a white paper to support the idea that there was a rigged election and Biden was illegitimate. The last stand was the vote of the people: what they thought of the insurrection would be decided by whether the voters supported the election deniers and the candidates supported by the ex-President. In fact, it would seem that except for those fundraisers and the point of view of the election deniers, that there would have been little cost if the Republican leadership had rejected Trump. Remember that Republicans rejected Nixon in 1974 even if they had been longtime supporters, like Robert Baker, and they nearly won the Presidency in 1976 with Gerald Ford. He did not lose to Jimmy Carter because of Watergate or even because of having pardoned Nixon. The usual explanation was that Ford in his debate with Carter had said what was p[robably correct, which was that the Poles were not intimidated or converted by the communists from Russia, just oppressed, as became clear when a free years later the Pope came to Poland and mobilized anti Soviet feeling. Maybe the current Republicans can’t oppose those moneyed interests or that they are too spineless to counter Trump. And so that is the way things stood on election night.
What happened was that the incumbents in Congress, both Senators and Congress people, were reelected. Steve Kandracki, the MSNBC poll analyst, said for weeks to look at where, if any, there were flips from one party to the other, and that proved correct. So far, there was a certain flip from a Republican Senate seat to a Democratic one, in which is Fetterman defeating Oz, and no other flip, so far, in Nevada (though Kandracki thought otherwise) and a runoff in Georgia that might flip but would not change which party controlled the Senate, though Walker beating Warnock in Georgia, is as preposterous an idea as Ronald Reagan getting elected President in 1980.
The Times says, during the past few days, that Democratic leaders were right to push the theme about Trump and his followers being too extreme rather than shift to defending the Biden economy and their views have prevailed. People don’t want extremists, and people are tired of Trump. But I am not so sure. The fact that so many elections were so close suggests that there are lots of people who would vote for the extremist leadership, whatever other issues were also motivating.and so that Trumpism is hardly dead, just that democracy dodged the bullet. No surrender declaration even if Mitch McConnell is grousing about bad quality candidates. No, the problem was not the candidates but what they believed in and they had a run for their money.
Commentators and columnists are prone to speculate what will happen next rather than describe in detail what already happened, maybe because it is easier or because producers and editors think readers and viewers prefer using their precious time and space on those other matters. They now comment on the mess that will happen if the Republicans take the majority in the House but not with a sufficient margin that prevents the extremists from forcing McCarthy to go along with their wishes to demand legislation of their own sort such as yearly reauthorization of Social Security in exchange for funding the government. I think it a bluff because refusing to vote for Maccarthy would make Nancy speaker again and they don’t want that.
I will offer a different prediction. The fracas on controlling the House will pale if in January Merrit Garland indicts the ex-President for fomenting an insurrection. That would become center stage, much more than the House January 6th committee managed to do. There might indeed be rioting in the streets by Trump supporters and the Republican leadership might have to squirm about it. An indictment would be close to unprecedented to indict rather than impeach a President or ex-President, the closest thing being the trial for Aaron Burr in the early nineteenth century for having conspired to separate the west pf the Alleghenies into a separate country. Wou;d Trump have the temerity to continue to campaign: the White House or the Big House? I think so and further discredit the electoral [process The republicans as a party didn’t disown him, and the electorate seems to be inclined to discard him, maybe, but it may be necessary for the judiciary to finish off the job.