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Let's talk midterms. I haven't been keeping up with the races too much, but some quick research shows that Polymarket has odds for Democrats to take the House at ninety four percent and Democrats to take the Senate at seventy two percent (House market, Senate market). Apparently, the odds of a Republican sweep are down to five to seven percent (Balance of Power market).
Obviously, we can't really trust polls entirely. But I do trust the markets to be at least somewhat accurate, and so things are looking pretty horribly bad for Republicans. What are the actual implications if this happens? Because like I don't know, the second Trump term after Doge flopped, or rather, after Trump pulled back on Doge and was afraid to actually back them when it mattered. This whole term feels like kind of a mess.
What actual goals are going to be blocked by the Trump administration if the Democrats win a sweep? And I guess how much can they get done if they don't control the presidency? Or is it mainly, like, if they win the presidency in 2028 that things are gonna be bad? Walk me through the real ramifications of midterms flipping for the Democrats.
If the Democrats win the Senate, which I am hopeful they will not, then they will likely refuse to confirm all of Trump's judicial nominees, which will start a constitutional crisis whereby judges will only be confirmed when the same party controls both the Presidency and Senate.
Democratic control of the House, which is likely, will just become a circus of hearings and impeachments. Very little legislation is passed these days with executive action being much more important. Where was the law that allowed Biden to let in 15 million illegals?
Honestly, that's their prerogative. If he can't/won't send someone acceptable to them, even if they'd find nobody acceptable if he sent them up to and including someone on their own side, so be it. Them's the breaks. Losing an election has consequences.
I’d encourage you to look up the term mos maiorum.
In so far as the mos maiorum required the Senate to confirm qualified SCOTUS appointments even if the President's party was in the minority, it was thrown out some time ago. Democrats think it was thrown out by Senate Republicans when they refused to hold a vote on Garland and then rush-confirmed Barrett, Republicans try to both-sides it going back to Bork. The Garland precedent is that the Senate can reject nominees based on pure partisanship in order to hold the seat open for their own party President. Since the Republicans paid no political price for it, it is the new mos maiorum.
I think the real issue is that Presidents of both parties have working increasingly hard to nominate partisan justices, that Bush v Gore made this a lot more salient, and that party discipline in the Senate has been getting stronger over time. The last nominee who was sufficiently less-partisan that an opposite-party Senate should have confirmed them was Roberts.
The other point is that strategic retirements mean that a vacancy coming up other than when the retiring justice's party controls the White House and Senate is a rare event. There were no vacancies with opposite-party control of the White House and Senate between 1991 (Souter and Thomas were confirmed by a Dem-majority Senate, but one with a conservative majority if you count Dixiecrats as conservatives) and Scalia's death in 2016.
Assuming regular alternation of the parties in office, and that incoming Presidents have strong enough coat-tails to control the Senate in the first half of their term, the default is that the partisan composition of SCOTUS is fixed. The Democrats obviously have an incentive to disrupt this.
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