{UAH} REASONS TO BE CHEERFUL AFTER SUCH A FOUL ELECTION

Reasons to be cheerful after such a foul election

by Hugo Gurdon, Editor-in-Chief | 

 

November 04, 2020 03:02 PM

 

Conservatives have a reputation for gloom, for bleakly concluding that the world is going to hell in a handbasket, handcart, or (Wikipedia tells me), even in a handbag. But, to the contrary, I think there's a lot in the election results to prompt optimism.

This does not depend on the result of the presidential contest, which, at the time of writing, is far from settled. Much clearer is good news on Capitol Hill, where Republicans have almost certainly held the Senate. This is huge. Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, reelected with more than a 20-point margin over a candidate who spent $100 million of mostly out-of-state money to defeat him, will lead a caucus willing and able to defend America against the Democrats' constitutional vandalism.

With Republicans running the upper chamber, there will be no packing of the Supreme Court with left-liberal justices who make up the law rather than interpreting it. A textualist majority will reject legislative overreach and stymie congressional or executive arrogation of powers not granted to them by the Constitution. It will, moreover, refuse to do Congress's job for it, decline to make the difficult policy decisions that are the proper purview of elected officials, and will thus oblige the people's representatives to abandon extreme positions and compromise to pass legislation.

This is what the public demands. It is how voters want America to be.

A GOP grip on the Senate means the filibuster will be preserved. McConnell could have scrapped it during the last Congress but didn't. And he will decline to do so again. So we'll be spared from a tyranny of the majority; legislation will pass only if the parties each give ground and try actually to govern rather than treating legislative disagreement primarily as an occasion for electoral chest-thumping.

Nor, sans Democratic control, will the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico be made states simply because the party of the Left cynically calculates that this would give them four permanent seats and a majority unassailable except in once-in-a-generation cycles when there is a red wave. The Electoral College, elegantly designed by the founders to make sure all states and regions are represented in the choice of president, will also survive.

That's quite a checklist of desirables, to adapt a phrase. Democrats won't be able to pack the Senate or the Supreme Court, nor sack the Constitution that has served the nation so well for so long. All the Left's proposed power-grabbing in Washington will be thwarted.

What else? Remember how recently even the more cautious mainstream pollsters gave President Trump just a 10% chance of winning? A Biden landslide was joyously predicted. Democrats and pundits hoped that voters, detesting Trump as much as they themselves did, would wash his party out with him on a blue wave that radicals surfed to power. They'd then throttle businesses, restore union control over workers who've been set free, end America's energy dominance by imposing a ruinous Green New Deal, and raise taxes on the middle class while gifting a state and local tax deduction to the wealthy in states that vote blue.

Now, that's not going to happen. Oh, and California, where bad ideas usually begin, did itself and the nation a favor by stomping on regressive "progressive" proposals to hobble the gig economy and allow racial discrimination through "affirmative action."

Given how unappealing Trump is to so many people, it's perhaps a wonder that the election was close. Faced with such a flawed incumbent, Democrats could now be celebrating total control of the levers of power. Instead, they lost ground (and seats) and must look at their failure in such favorable circumstances and recognize that it's because they flirted with or promised extreme policies and connived at violent mobs whom decent people wanted stopped, not enabled. The street thugs were vandals of a traditional sort, smashing property and attacking innocent people, but voters could see they were the flip side of Democrats who wanted to be a constitutional wrecking crew.

Finally, the election sets things up nicely for Republicans in 2022 and 2024. It has prevented Democratic excesses for at least the next two years, which is the immediate benefit. But if Joe Biden squeaks into the Oval Office, historical precedent suggests Republicans would win seats in the next midterm elections. Then, two years later, the GOP presidential nominee will probably be a vigorous, age-appropriate conservative, challenging either the oldest incumbent in the history of the country, or a venomous radical who was once his vice president.

EM         -> { Trump for 2020 }

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