All of the news for the next day or two will be about Joe Biden’s pick for VP, Kamala Harris. I actually bought her book, The Truths We Hold, a while ago when she was running for president but I didn’t get around to reading it. I guess I will have to move it back towards the top of the stack. That said, I lived in California before moving back to Montana and am somewhat familiar with Senator Harris. I think she is a great choice. She’s smart, tough, and if I were Mike Pence, I’d be pretty nervous going into a debate with her.
If Biden-Harris are successful and win this election, I have two major concerns – neither of which has anything to do with either Biden or Harris, who I fully support. The first is whether or not Trump will relinquish power smoothly, which I doubt, and secondly, what will happen on all of the down ticket Senate races, i.e. will the Republicans retain control of the Senate.
As to the first concern, Trump has already been setting the stage to challenge the election if he loses. He will claim wide spread voter fraud. He will claim foreign actors helped Biden win. He and his minions are likely to file lawsuits in every state that he lost and this whole thing could drag out for weeks. Not a pretty look for the United States of America which has been held up as a ‘model of democracy’ in which one of the foundations is the peaceful transition of power. It will just be another example to show Trump cares more about Trump than about the United States of America.
I don’t remember a time in my lifetime when so many reasonable people were actually having serious discussions about whether or not there would be a smooth transition of presidential power after an election. Even in the most recent incidence in the Bush-Gore election when the whole issues of ‘hanging chads’ were a key issue in the Florida results and the Supreme Court ultimately had to get involved, there were not accusations on either side of wide spread voter fraud. There was plenty of litigation but, in the end, Bush won the electoral college vote and Gore graciously conceded. We can fully expect that scenario to be played out on steroids this election. https://www.cnn.com/2020/08/11/politics/biden-trump-2020-election-november-3/index.html
Trump challenging the election results will certainly be ugly but a bigger concern of mine is if the Republicans retain control of the Senate. If that happens and Mitch McConnell remains the Senate Majority Leader during a Biden presidency, Joe Biden, Kamala Harris and the rest of us are in for a tough four years. I just finished the book, Broken; Can the Senate Save Itself and the Country?, by Ira Shapiro which chronicles how the Senate has devolved over the last two or three decades from the ‘world’s greatest deliberative body’ to a partisan arena where floor debates on legislation are rare, things are done in partisan committees behind closed doors, arcane rules are used to obstruct progress, and ‘the art of compromise’ is rarely practiced. Mitch McConnell is directly responsible for much of today’s Senate disfunction.
Shortly after Obama won his first term, McConnell gathered his Republican flock and “sketched out a strategy of opposition. They would pick fights that they could win to show that Obama was not invulnerable. They would obstruct and oppose him on virtually everything else, undercutting his basic promise to usher in a new era of postpartisan cooperation.”
If the Republicans retain control of the Senate, it is a 100 percent certainty that McConnell will institute a similar strategy during a Biden-Harris presidency. McConnell is astute enough to know that the administration in power generally gets blamed for whatever happens so if he can prevent Biden from implementing many of the things he promised during the campaign, it will provide great political ammunition for the Republican candidate in 2024.
One of the reasons that Obama resorted to Executive Actions was due to the fact that the Mitch McConnell controlled Senate made it their mission to obstruct him at every turn. Biden could find himself in a similar situation. (And you can bet, that in spite of all of the Executive Actions that Trump has signed, the Republicans will scream bloody murder.) In the final words of Shapiro’s book, “What is most urgently needed is for senators to act like senators, not partisan operatives. They should not mirror, and even exacerbate, the nation’s divisions. They were sent to Washington to overcome them.” If only most of the Senators understood that.
It is unfortunate that more people don’t understand how powerful Mitch McConnell is. After the Democrats took control of the House in 2018, they passed hundreds of bills that were passed to the Senate. Mitch McConnell proudly sports the moniker, “The Grim Reaper,” because almost all of the bills never even have a chance to get debated in the Senate. They essentially die in Mitch McConnell’s desk drawer. It’s a pretty sad comment on American democracy when the second most power man in the country is proud of the job, he is doing at blocking any debate on issues of substance.
Unfortunately, the Senate seems to have lost its way and if the Republicans retain control of the Senate, it’s going to be an ugly road ahead – no matter who wins. If Trump wins, he will be even more emboldened knowing that he has Attorney General Barr and the US Senate in his pocket. And if Biden wins, Mitch McConnell will dig pothole after pothole to try to obstruct everything Biden tries to do. I don’t think the Founding Fathers ever envisioned a president like Trump nor a Senate Majority leader like Mitch McConnell.
“The Senate, the great anchor of the government …. Such an institution may be some times necessary as a defense to the people against their own temporary errors and delusions.” — James Madison letter to Thomas Jefferson; Federal Papers #63 (1787)