Jim Geraghty takes a look at the Senate Races, now that the stupid party has just handed McCaskill’s seat back to her on a silver platter. There’s two things I’m looking for in the Senate. One is to avoid confirmation fights, so that we can increase the number of votes for the Second Amendment. Two is to have enough margin to repeal Obamacare. The former is easier than the latter, though some Democratic senators might be able to have their arms twisted to vote for cloture in the latter case if they lose big again in 2012.
7 thoughts on “How the Senate Looks”
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The GOP needs to stop sending nutters into the spotlight. If Obama is re-elected with a Congress rife with Democrats, the Second Amendment is dead after Obama stacks the Supreme Court. At that stage the GOP will be as much to blame.
I agree. But, our problem is that much (I hesitate to say “most”) of the GOP doesn’t give a damn about the Second Amendment, apart from its perennial usefulness for getting RKBA advocates to hold their noses and vote for their nutters — who are all about the issues they do care about.
Isn’t it strange that with all the nutters the GOP seems capable of producing, with all of the radical things they’ll stand fore-square for in public, we never hear any radical RKBA proposals, say, repealing the GCAs of 1968 and 1935?
That may be true, but it still got us to 5 votes in Heller and McDonald. Unfortunately, I’m not too keen on how far that majority can be driven, and it would be nice to have another vote, so we can afford to lose a justice in future cases. I think the Heller majority probably holds for the carry cases, which are probably next up, but beyond that I don’t like the odds.
For that matter, the GOP at the national level doesn’t give a damn about abortion either, that set of social conservatives certainly haven’t gotten much joy from the Republicans, have they?
As for Missouri, I’m going with Geraghty’s analysis which says Akin has “exponentially complicated the effort to defeat Sen. Claire McCaskill”, because she’s really than bad and not well liked, plus has some huge liabilities like not paying around a quarter million in state taxes on her private airplane.
A lot of it depends on how well Akin runs from here on out, especially in getting money with national level players like the NRSC and Roves? SuperPAC withdrawing. Can’t say I’m encouraged from what I’m hearing about him (e.g. Obama sized ego), but the race is far from lost.
At least, here, we view it as potentially existential, making it a lot easier to vote for the yellow dog (well, really, against McCaskill).
The funny thing about “sending nutters to the spotlight” is two-fold: every sufficiently large group is bound to have a nutter; and every person is bound to be a “nutter” in some obscure way or another, that can possibly pop out when least expected.
The other funny thing is this: when nuttiness pops out of a Republican, the spotlight immediately turns to them. When a Democrat expresses nuttiness (can we say “Biden”? Our Vice President has expressed nutty comments nearly as bad as Aiken has, and certainly flubs far worse than anything Dan Quayle has said, yet the only reason Biden’s flubs get any airtime at all, is because of blogs and occasional ads on the radio. (The “We need Biden” ad was a classic!)
I didn’t think they didn’t pass Obamacare with 60 votes, they shoehorned it in there with that reconciliation rule. They could repeal it the same way.
The “stupid party” pulled back from helping Akin; as a tactical measure, this probably makes sense, but don’t blame the Republican Party for Akin’s foot-in-mouth problem.
And I agree that Akin will have an uphill fight to defeat McCaskill, but it is by no means certain that he will lose it. Remember that in much of the Midwest, Akin’s major problem was how he phrased it, not so much what he said.