On Wednesday, Trump joked that he can circumvent the 22nd amendment to the constitution and run for a third term. I hope he does, especially if he’s in a mental institution by then. But he triggered Dan Goldman, always up for some good counter-trolling, who introduced a resolution the next day “clarifying that the Constitution’s two-term limit for presidents applies even if the terms are not consecutive. It asserts that the 22nd Amendment to the Constitution, which states that a person who has been elected president twice cannot run again, ‘applies to two terms in the aggregate’ and leaves no loophole.” If Trump wants a loophole, he could just run Trumpanzee, Jr. Besides, the two right-wing kooks from Louisiana, MAGA Mike and Scalise will never let Goldman’s resolution reach the floor.
But, as Russell Berman, pointed out Wednesday, seemingly, there’s plenty Trump already can’t do— even with robust control of the Senate and less than robust control of the House. Republicans have won the 218 seats they need for bare bones control the House. John Duarte is likely to win CA-13. Which would give them the slimmest majority in decades. They will probably win the at-large Alaska seat, but no one knows for sure because there are still plenty of votes to count and because after than ranked choice counting kicks in. That would bring them to 224 seats, still too few for the fractious Republican conference. At the moment Michelle Steel leads by 349 votes in her Orange County seat but the pattern of late votes indicates she’s going to lose. No one knows and it could go either way. I’d bet on. Democrat Derek Tran though. The other GOP incumbent struggling to stay above water is Mariannette Miller-Meeks in Iowa— and she’s ahead by 801 votes, a tiny increase this week. My guess is that she’ll come out ahead the end, although Democrat Christina Bohannan has already requested a recount.
The 4 other uncalled races are Democrats running for reelection. Californians Josh Harder and Jim Costa look fairly safe. Harder is up by 8,125 votes (a 3.6% margin)— with 86% counted. Costa’s total has risen significantly as more votes have been counted and he’s ahead 81,434 (51.6%) to 76,247 (48.4%) with most of the uncounted votes in blue-friendlier Fresno County. That leaves two districts that are headed for recounts, OH-09, where Marcy Kaptur in hanging on by 1,193 votes and ME-02, where Blue Dog co-chair Jared Golden has 726 more votes that Republican Austin Theriault and the ranked choice tabulation is into its 4th and final day. Theriault has already requested a recount, so it could be weeks before we know who won this one.
Berman’s point was that a majority this slim “means that the legislation most prized on the right and feared by the left— a national abortion ban, dramatic cuts to federal spending, the repeal of Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act and Joe Biden’s largest domestic-policy achievements— is unlikely to pass Congress. ‘I don’t think they’re even going to try on any of those things,’ Brendan Buck, who served as a top aide to former Speaker Paul Ryan during Trump’s first term, told me.”
It’s likely that conservative Democrats— ironically led by Golden if he wins (and by his Blue Dog co-chair Marie Gluesenkamp Perez)— could help Trump pass another big tax break for the wealthy and some kind of hideous anti-immigrant legislation.
An anti-abortion ban is a bridge too far, both for any Democrats (except maybe Henry Cuellar who is likely headed for prison and will want Trump’s pardon) and even a few Republicans who just barely won in blue-leaning districts, some of whom won by out-polling Trump.
Jonathan Chait posits that spineless GOP leaders are more afraid of Trump than ever. He wrote that “At every step along the way, Republican elites have assumed that they could stop Trump later. But when the decisive moment arrived, they discovered that the cost of confrontation had gotten higher, not lower. Opening a breach with a man whom the base had come to admire, and then worship, would imperil their own ambitions, not just Trump’s… Senator Tommy Tuberville not only pledged his support for Trump’s slate of nominees but threatened primaries against any Republicans who dissent. This is deadly serious business. Loyalty to Trump is the main basis on which Republican primary voters choose their nominees. Trump has proved willing time and again to handicap the GOP’s prospects of holding seats— thus undermining his own base of support in Congress— by endorsing the most slavish loyalists over slightly more independent and much more electable alternatives… Old-guard Republicans appear to be in the middle stage of a familiar Trump-era progression. It begins He’d never do it before moving on to We’ll stop him if he tries and finally settling on There was nothing we could have done anyway. As they advance through these stages, they will cede Trump more and more power, which will only vindicate their ultimate fatalism. How could they ever have stood up to somebody so strong?”
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