After the midterm wipeout, one that is historic in New Hampshire, two immediate tests are now before us. How do we take the news, and what can be done before January? Character, after all, is defined when we fail.
Nationally, as I noted here, the GOP still has Congress until Jan 1 and could try to ram through legislation for Trump to sign. The Senate should drop the filibuster because Dems will do that anyway. Push as much into law as you can, given how Team Blue did well but doesn’t have supermajorities to override vetoes in 27/28.
Will they?
Trump will continue to push his agenda the only way he knows: take wins you can get and negotiate everything else to the best possible outcome. He will likely veto everything even after this third impeachment, which the Senate lacks the votes to execute.
Everyone in his cabinet will be on the Hill, but it sounds like they already have a wipeout plan ready to deploy, so let’s see what they do given the new challenges and the old ones; Congress wasn’t his friend when it was red. All the Republican House and Senate investigations will be shelved, dropped, or burned in an alley and the ashes pissed on.
Locally, the NH House has a Democratic supermajority, but the Senate is still one seat away. If that holds, Republican Governor Ayotte can veto anything and everything, and it likely won’t get overridden. If the Dems pick up another seat, will they try to pass the income and sales tax already in the pipeline?
We should expect every other crazy blue thing, a return to the 2006-2008 class (they had a Dem governor back then), and an interesting budget battle. I can’t wait to see how the Blue House pivots from a depressed, unaffordable economy to revenue estimates that reach for the sky to justify all the spending they’ll want to do.
We have been here before.
Then there’s the wilderness.
Republicans will have to live in it, especially in the Granite State, for the next two years. The massive ground effort produced nothing we can point to as a success, unless you want to say it prevented Dem supermajorities in both chambers and saved the governors’ race. Not exactly reassuring.
