{"id":1076,"date":"2020-08-12T13:04:03","date_gmt":"2020-08-12T13:04:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.bikingwithmike.com\/?p=1076"},"modified":"2020-08-12T13:04:03","modified_gmt":"2020-08-12T13:04:03","slug":"august-12-2020","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bikingwithmike.com\/?p=1076","title":{"rendered":"August 12, 2020"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

If Biden-Harris are successful and win this election, I have two major concerns \u2013 neither of which has anything to do with either Biden or Harris, who I fully support.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As to the first concern, Trump has already been setting the stage to challenge the election if he loses.\u00a0 He will claim wide spread voter fraud.\u00a0 He will claim foreign actors helped Biden win.\u00a0 He and his minions are likely to file lawsuits in every state that he lost and this whole thing could drag out for weeks.\u00a0 Not a pretty look for the United States of America which has been held up as a \u2018model of democracy\u2019 in which one of the foundations is the peaceful transition of power.\u00a0 It will just be another example to show Trump cares more about Trump than about the United States of America.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I don\u2019t 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.\u00a0 \u00a0Even in the most recent incidence in the Bush-Gore election when the whole issues of \u2018hanging chads\u2019 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.\u00a0 There was plenty of litigation but, in the end, Bush won the electoral college vote and Gore graciously conceded.\u00a0 We can fully expect that scenario to be played out on steroids this election.\u00a0 https:\/\/www.cnn.com\/2020\/08\/11\/politics\/biden-trump-2020-election-november-3\/index.html<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Trump challenging the election results will certainly be ugly but a bigger concern of mine is if the Republicans retain control of the Senate.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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 \u2018world\u2019s greatest deliberative body\u2019 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 \u2018the art of compromise\u2019 is rarely practiced.\u00a0 Mitch McConnell is directly responsible for much of today\u2019s Senate disfunction.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Shortly after Obama won his first term, McConnell gathered his Republican flock and \u201csketched out a strategy of opposition.\u00a0 They would pick fights that they could win to show that Obama was not invulnerable.\u00a0 They would obstruct and oppose him on virtually everything else, undercutting his basic promise to usher in a new era of postpartisan cooperation.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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.\u00a0 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.)\u00a0 In the final words of Shapiro\u2019s book, \u201cWhat is most urgently needed is for senators to act like senators, not partisan operatives.\u00a0 They should not mirror, and even exacerbate, the nation\u2019s divisions.\u00a0 They were sent to Washington to overcome them.\u201d \u00a0\u00a0If only most of the Senators understood that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It is unfortunate that more people don\u2019t understand how powerful Mitch McConnell is.\u00a0 After the Democrats took control of the House in 2018, they passed hundreds of bills that were passed to the Senate.\u00a0 Mitch McConnell proudly sports the moniker, \u201cThe Grim Reaper,\u201d because almost all of the bills never even have a chance to get debated in the Senate.\u00a0 They essentially die in Mitch McConnell\u2019s desk drawer.\u00a0\u00a0 It\u2019s 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Unfortunately, the Senate seems to have lost its way and if the Republicans retain control of the Senate, it\u2019s going to be an ugly road ahead \u2013 no matter who wins.\u00a0 If Trump wins, he will be even more emboldened knowing that he has Attorney General Barr and the US Senate in his pocket.\u00a0 \u00a0And if Biden wins, Mitch McConnell will dig pothole after pothole to try to obstruct everything Biden tries to do.\u00a0 I don\u2019t think the Founding Fathers ever envisioned a president like Trump nor a Senate Majority leader like Mitch McConnell.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThe Senate, the great anchor of the government \u2026. Such an institution may be some times necessary as a defense to the people against their own temporary errors and delusions.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0 \u2014 James Madison letter to Thomas Jefferson; Federal Papers #63 (1787)<\/p>\n<\/body>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"