A Democrat Senate?
Will the democrats win the Senate? To take control, they need to flip four seats without losing any of their own. The polls say they will. So do the prediction markets, which show republicans losing North Carolina, Ohio, Maine, Alaska and Texas while democrats hold Michigan. And if they do take the Senate, what will they do with it? For starters, Sherrod Brown, who is trying to win back a Senate seat in Ohio, says no more Trump-nominated judges will be confirmed: “We’re not obviously confirming Trump judges.” Roughly 60 to 70 federal judges are nominated each year. Since Trump won’t leave the Oval Office until January 2029, that could mean about 140 vacancies waiting for the democrats to fill if they capture the White House in 2028.
The federal judiciary has three main tiers: the Supreme Court, with nine justices; the courts of appeals, with 179 judgeships; and the district courts, with 677 judgeships. A backlog of 140 vacancies can hardly make for a healthy administration of justice. But the democrats would see it as an opportunity – a chance to flood the federal bench with liberal judges.
And what about the other positions that require Senate confirmation – cabinet secretaries, ambassadors, the heads of major agencies? Would those go unfilled too? In all, roughly 1,200 positions must be confirmed by the Senate. What happens to them? Then, of course, there is the rest of the wish list: killing the filibuster (Trump should love that one), granting statehood to Puerto Rico and DC, loosening voting laws, bringing back DEI and the Green New Deal, reopening the border, rolling back oil and gas production, and adding seats to the Supreme Court. I wonder whether they will also try to cut funding for Trump’s military dalliances.
Trump’s hand is going to get tired signing all those vetoes.
And of course, a democrat House will be sending articles of impeachment over to the Senate, where they will have no chance of passing. No math gets the democrats to the 67 votes needed to convict.
But if the democrats are focused on Trump, they will not be focused on what Americans actually care about: affordability. As I have noted before, democrat “solutions” will only make things worse. Do you really think a Senate that includes Sherrod Brown, Abdul El-Sayed, James Talarico and Mary Peltola will make things better? Name one democrat position that would actually improve the economy. Raising the minimum wage? Shutting down data centers? A billionaires’ tax? Medicare for All? Lowering the cost of housing – how, exactly? Spurring manufacturing by keeping Trump’s tariffs, which have done the opposite? Bringing down utility costs? Going after Big Pharma to lower drug prices – didn’t Trump already try that?
What we will get, essentially, is more tax and spend. No proposals to cut federal spending or the national debt – when have democrats ever proposed that? Nothing on energy independence. Nothing that smacks of growth. The real question is whether the democrats will seize the opening and expand the socialist programs Trump started, namely the government’s push into the private sector. If they did, perhaps Trump wouldn’t veto them.
With both the House and the Senate in democrat hands, Trump will rule by executive order even more than he does now. I came across an undocumented claim that during the 2016 campaign Trump made this curious remark, an obvious jab at Obama: “A presidency that lives by the pen and the phone dies by the pen and the phone.” Yet Trump has issued 509 executive orders across his two terms, and he will have to issue even more if the democrats are in power. No president has expanded executive power the way he has. Will a democrat House and Senate try to rein that power in, or will they wait, hoping a democrat wins in 2028 so they can use the same power to advance their own agenda?
When Biden took office, his first executive orders undid whatever Trump had done. Trump then did the same to Biden. So what does 2028 hold? Jamie Raskin of Maryland, one of Trump’s most vocal opponents in the House, says Trump’s use of presidential power can and should be reversed. In Raskin’s words: “We have a massive reconstruction task ahead of us. Fortunately, reconstruction has a great history in our country, and when it’s allowed to work, it has been a lot more successful than either authoritarianism or revolution. We will have to go department by department, subject by subject, and public purpose by public purpose to determine what we salvage and what we re-create.”
So what bills have Raskin and his colleagues introduced to restrain Trump? One would bar presidents from entering into financial settlements with their own government, prompted by Trump’s “settlement” with the IRS. Others would limit the president’s power to declare emergencies or impose tariffs. Another would enforce the ban on presidents accepting payments or gifts from foreign governments without congressional approval. Still another would require public review of any renovations to the White House. And there are more.
Again, my bet is that none of these will become law even if the democrats take the House, the Senate and the presidency. If anything, look for presidential power to grow. And some of what the democrats say they want, they already have – tariffs, for instance. The problem is that Congress does not enforce its own laws.
But contrary to most observers, I think that if the democrats take the Senate as well as the House, they won’t be able to help themselves: they will overreach. Washington is already a circus and a clown show (again, with apologies to clowns). With a democrat Senate and House, I predict they will alienate voters so thoroughly that, ironically, they will help put a republican back in the White House in 2028. Let’s all hope, for the country’s sake, that it isn’t JD Vance.
