Last week I started writing about the results of the election, and this post is going to continue that. I discussed the basic issue of fascism, and in this post, I’m going to talk about the basic situation we’re looking at as a result of the election.
As it currently stands, the GOP won the Presidency, won the Senate by 2 seats (so 52 to 48) and won the House although the margin of votes is still unclear because three races are tight enough that the GOP margin is between 222 (if all three races go for the GOP) and 219 (if all three races go to the Democrats). My guess is it will wind up at 221 to 214. Another confounding issue in the House is that Trump has tapped two current House members, Matt Gaetz and Elise Stefanik for posts in his administration (Gaetz, as you may know, immediately resigned his seat in a bid to stop the Ethics investigation against him from being released, and then quickly withdrew his nomination for Attorney General, also to stop the Ethics investigation being released). In theory those two loses could undo the GOP gains if the Democrats managed to pick up those seats, although that’s improbable.
Additionally, and not related to the election, the GOP also controls the Supreme Court by a 6 to 3 margin. Thus, as things stands, the Republicans hold a trifecta in the Federal government, although their margins in both houses of Congress as very slim.
So this means that a lot of Republican legislation will be passing the House. But because of the filibuster, much of that legislation will stall out in the Senate, since the Democrats will be able to block it if they remain relatively unified. Additionally, the narrow House majority means that even a small handful of GOP Representatives can thwart legislation in the House, since Mike Johnson has generally shown himself to be a fairly weak Speaker and Hakeem Jeffries appears to be maintaining control of his caucus in the House. In the past few years, we’ve seen the Freedom Caucus be highly disruptive to the GOP in the House by making unreasonable demands (although Gaetz, the instigator of Kevin Johnson’s ouster as Speaker, is now out of the picture), so it’s possible that Johnson will have a great deal of trouble on his right flank.
All of that, however, assumes that Senate filibuster rules remain unchanged. When the new Senate first meets, it has an opportunity to pass new rules that change how the chamber operates, so a worst-case scenario involves the Senate abolishing or sharply restricting the filibuster, thereby enabling all legislation that passes the House to pass the Senate. I think that is unlikely, but not impossible, for reasons I’ll touch on in a few moments.
So it’s likely that we’ll see some really shitty legislation passing Congress and getting signed by Trump, but the worst of the worst will be thwarted by the Senate Democrats. How awful the budget will be depends enormously on how much of a fight the Senate Democrats put up. And so the legislative gridlock we’ve seen for the past few years is likely to continue to a considerable effect.
But even with that, Trump will be in a position to do enormous damage simply through his control of the Executive Branch. We have heard a lot of wild talk from conservatives about things like firing half of all Federal branch employees, replacing career civil servants with GOP true believers, purging the military leadership of generals who won’t go along with conservative plans, and so on.
Certainly Trump’s cabinet picks have been a remarkably shitty bunch. The chief qualification to be chosen for Trump’s cabinet is loyalty to Trump, not competence for a particular post. That’s how we got an accused sex-trafficker nominated as Attorney General (Gaetz), an accused rapist and Christian Nationalists nominated for Secretary of Defense (Pete Hegseth), a woman widely considered to be a Russian intelligence asset nominated to head the CIA (Tulsi Gabbard), and a guy who rejects the use of vaccines nominated to head Health and Human Services (RFK). These people can and will do serious damage if they are confirmed.
However, there are some encouraging signs that some Senate Republicans are reluctant to play along with Trump’s agenda. After the Nov 5th election, the Senate GOP met to choose their new Majority leader (since Mitch “Gravedigger of Democracy” McConnell is on his way out). Trump tried to pressure them to choose Rick Scott, but instead they chose Ryan Thune. It was done on a secret ballot, which allowed GOP senators to vote their conscience, and it appears that a majority favored Thune because he wasn’t fully on the Trump train the way Scott is. (That’s why I suspect Thune won’t try to drastically change Senate rules; he is likely to want the excuse of Democratic filibusters for not co-operating with Trump legislatively.)
Consequently, the furor over Trump’s shitty cabinet picks is likely to weed out at least a few of the worst choices. Gaetz already proved unacceptable, although whether his nomination was sunk by the pretty credible accusations that he was sex-trafficking high school-aged girls and paying them for sex or by the fact that the GOP hates him because he’s such a wild cannon is unclear; it was probably a combination of both. I think that Gabbard is likely to fail to earn confirmation; she’s technically a Democrat, although she’s generally acted like a hard right Republican, and a lot of intelligence professionals view her as a serious national security risk. Trump has indicated that he wants his nominees to forego security clearance vetting by the FBI, which will probably not play well with more serious-minded Republicans.
Hegseth, unfortunately, might be more capable of passing confirmation. The fact that he’s an accused rapist doesn’t seem likely to faze the GOP; they confirmed Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court, after all. As awful as that fact is, the more worrisome issue is that he’s a Christian Nationalist who has pretty clearly said he doesn’t think American should be a democracy. He’s also pointed out that he feels some sort of literal civil war is extremely likely between the Right and the Left. He opposes diversity in the military, opposed efforts to combat extremism in the military, and is likely to support Trump’s call to purge the Armed Forces of trans people. He’s hostile to NATO. He’s announced his support for rebuilding the Jewish Temple in Jerusalem (which would require the destruction of the Al-Aqsa Mosque and the Dome of the Rock, which would probably trigger a major war in the Middle East; he’s an Islamophobe. Under Hegseth, it is entirely possible that we could see US troops used against US civilians who oppose Trump’s policies. In short, Hegseth is a Fascist and he’s going to have a lot of control over the US military.
Fortunately, Biden has done a remarkable job of installing federal judges. He’s successfully appointed nearly as many judges as Trump did in his first term, and if the Senate manages to finish up confirming those appointments, Biden will have surpassed Trump’s total (although Senate Democrats have shown some willingness to cave after the election). That means that a lot of what Trump is trying to do is likely to get bogged down in lawsuits for a year or two. The biggest cases will eventually reach the Supreme Court, but it will take a while. And while Thomas, Alito, Kavanaugh, and Gorsuch have generally seemed very much on-board with Trump’s plans, Roberts and, surprisingly, Barrett have been a bit more skeptical, which means that the most radical plans may well be defeated.
But overall, the picture here is pretty grim. A majority of current GOP members are, if not active Fascists, sufficiently afraid of their base to be unwilling to openly oppose Trump and his Fascist movement. Whether there is enough of a group of non-Fascists left in the GOP to thwart them remains to be seen.
Now that we’ve looked at the scope of the problem, in my next post, I’ll talk about what LGBT people and kinksters can expect in the next couple of years.
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