Eric Zuesse<\/p>\n
For several months now, I have predicted that if no U.S. House Democrat would introduce a bill of impeachment against President Barack Obama (for whom I voted, incidentally), then Republicans on November 4th would elect not just one but both houses of Congress, and the closeted conservative Obama would be having a field day during his final two years signing into law lots of pro-big-business, anti-worker, anti-consumer, anti-environmental, legislation, which Democrats in both the House but especially the Senate have thus far been blocking. And, now, on Election Eve, this nightmare seems finally to be coming true.<\/p>\n
Gallup headlined on November 3rd, \u201cObama Effect Likely Negative in Key Senate Races,\u201d<\/a> and Nate Silver\u2019s election-eve prediction was that there\u2019s a 75.5% likelihood that Republicans will control the Senate<\/a>, and not only the House, in the next Congress. This means that there\u2019s only a 25.5% chance that Democrat Harry Reid will control the next Senate; and it also means that Republicans will retain the House; so that both of the two governmental bodies that write our new laws will be Republican-controlled. If Obama doesn\u2019t veto every bill that comes to his desk, and if none of his vetoes gets overridden by two-thirds majorities in both the House and the Senate, then the next two years will see no new laws. But, otherwise, there will be some new laws, and all of these will be laws that were written by Republicans and then passed by the Republican majority in each of the two houses of Congress. In other words: they will all be very conservative laws, very pro-big-business, anti-worker, anti-environment, anti-FDA, anti-EPA, pro-privatization of Social Security, pro-dismantling the consumer-protection features in Obamacare, pro-big-bank, and they will all be pro-military and anti-diplomacy in foreign policy. All of the news laws during the next two years will be extremely conservative.<\/p>\n Gallup says: \u201cObama’s enervated approval rating has undoubtedly benefited Republican candidates across the country, particularly in terms of motivating turnout, but in a few key states, Democrats’ association with the unpopular president has the potential to be particularly troublesome. \u2026 Obama’s lackluster approval rating will probably be a deterrent in motivating less-attached Democratic adults to vote, while in turn providing a turnout motivator for Republicans who are eager to deliver a blow to the president by making him deal with a unified Republican Congress in his last two years.\u201d<\/p>\n On 11 September 2014, I headlined \u201cGallup Poll Shows Doom for Dems in November, But One Hope Remains,\u201d<\/a> and I reported that, \u201cThe 11 September 2014 Gallup Poll report<\/a> shows that Americans are turning against the Democratic Party just months before the upcoming November elections. The answers to the survey question that has always correlated the most with which Party gained or lost how many House seats, in mid-term congressional elections, now overwhelmingly favor the Republicans. This question is: \u2018Looking ahead for the next few years, which political party do you think will do a better job of keeping the country prosperous?\u2019 In 2010, when Republicans gained a record 63 House seats, they enjoyed an 8% edge on this question. Their edge now is one point higher than that, 9%.\u201d Furthermore, back on 24 June 2014, I bannered \u201cGallup: The Lowest-Rated Living President or Ex-President Is Barack Obama,\u201d<\/a> and I summarized that:<\/p>\n \u201cA Gallup poll published on June 20th<\/a> shows that the only living current or former occupant of the White House who has a negative rating from the U.S. public is its current occupant, President Obama, with 52% unfavorable, 47% favorable. All others of them are favorably rated. The least favorably rated of those (the one closest to Obama in unfavorability) is George W. Bush, with 53% favorable, 44% unfavorable. His having invaded Iraq for non-existent WMD, and produced the 2008 crash, have apparently been forgiven, which is remarkable and which is due to his having increased his favorability rating from only 32% at the crash in 2008.\u201d<\/p>\n So: I was predicting that only one thing could possibly turn things around for Democrats and save the U.S. Senate for them: a Democratic bill of impeachment being introduced by a Democratic member of the U.S. House, and supported by at least some Democrats and then passed as a bipartisan measure, which display of principled non-partisanship on the part of Democrats would remove the Obama-deadweight from the backs of every Democratic candidate but especially from the backs of every Democratic U.S. Senate candidate.<\/p>\n It didn\u2019t happen; and so we\u2019ll get an all-conservative Government: Obama\u2019s final two years in office will be spent signing conservative bills into laws that the majority of Democrats in both the House and Senate have, heretofore, blocked: laws reducing the cost-of-living adjustment in the Social Security formula, and approving the TTIP and TPP international trade deals that grant international corporations the power to control the regulations regarding the environment, consumer protection, drug safety, food safety, and virtually all regulatory matters. Republicans and Obama have wanted to transfer those national regulatory powers over to international corporations, but House and Senate Democrats did not; and, now, because there wasn\u2019t a single House Democrat who had the courage to introduce a bill of impeachment against Obama, we will have a Government that is Republican in the House, Republican in the Senate, and Republican in the White House except on women\u2019s issues, where Obama actually has been a Democrat. He hasn\u2019t been lying about that one.<\/p>\n ———-<\/p>\n Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of They\u2019re Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010<\/em><\/a>,<\/em> and of \u00a0CHRIST\u2019S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Eric Zuesse For several months now, I have predicted that if no U.S. House Democrat would introduce a bill of impeachment against President Barack Obama (for whom I voted, incidentally), then Republicans on November 4th would elect not just one but both houses of Congress, and the closeted conservative Obama would be having a field […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1254,"featured_media":202992,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[461],"tags":[115,29,59,77,524,523,49,40],"class_list":{"0":"post-141398","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-editorials","8":"tag-barack-obama","9":"tag-democrats","10":"tag-military","11":"tag-oil","12":"tag-russia","13":"tag-ukraine","14":"tag-usa-news","15":"tag-white-house"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/141398","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1254"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=141398"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/141398\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/202992"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=141398"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=141398"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=141398"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}