While we celebrate here in Delaware, nationally, Democrats of all stripes (blue dogs, progressives, moderates, liberals, conservatives, decades-long incumbents, freshmen) lost. And lost big. To quote Melanie over at Progressive Delmarva:
[T]he election was a Republican tidal wave nationally. Maybe it was a tsunami! Maybe it was a . . . what’s worse than a tsunami? Uh . . . it was a Republican snakes on a plane!?
Yeah, there is no sugarcoating a loss of 60 seats in the House. We can explain it: the economy has been slow to recover, and what recovery there has been is not being felt by the voter, just like in 1994. And while Democrats have down a ton of great things in the Congress over the last two years, in cleaning up the Republican mess, they were incompetently bad in delivering the message of what they had done and why it is good to the voters. Couple that with an Republican Party that has no problem, and actually prefers, to fearmonger and play on our bigotries to win, and it was the perfect recipe for a defeat of this size.
Now, what the GOP will claim is a mandate. They will soon discover that that mandate is paper thin. Speaker-elect…. God help us…. Boehner has already said that if President Obama wants to compromise he will do everything the Republicans want. Someone get the orange man with eyeliner a dictionary to help him learn what “compromise” means.
So, you can see where this is going. The House GOP will overreach in fantastic terms. They will gut Social Security and Medicare in their budget, and they will altogether eliminate the Departments of Energy, Education and Veteran’s Affairs. They will open impeachment investigations of President Obama and god knows who else. They will repeal the Affordable Care Act, the Lilly Ledbetter Act, CHIP, Financial Reform, and Credit Card Reform. They will gut Veteran’s services. All the while providing more giveaways to billionaires and corporations, and leaving the middle class out in the rain.
Let them. They are only tying an anvil to their ankles. Each piece of legislation will die in the Senate or be vetoed by the President. Yet each piece of legislation reveals their agenda. And don’t fool yourself. Boehner and the GOP have to do all of the above. They cannot just sit back and do nothing for the next two years, because the Teabaggers that just elected them will not show up in 2012 to reelect them if they do nothing. And the Independents who voted GOP this time will not be pleased with no action (and yet conversely will be horrified by the actions they see the GOP will take to please the Teabaggers).
The GOP is in a no-win situation now. They have to pass a radical agenda in the House to keep the teabaggers happy, and that radical agenda will only lose them the Independents while helping the Democrats and Obama and will This script has been written before. I just really did not want to see this movie again.