What Happens After the Mid-Terms?

Prognostication, predicting the future.  Oh, what a foolish thing to do.  But let’s talk about after the mid-terms.  But what happens afterward depends on how they end up to some extent.  Let’s look at the possibilities and then the follow-up for each case.

Suppose the Democrats somehow get through the elections and maintain their majorities in both Houses.   Based on the current projections this is the most unlikely outcome but let’s say for the sake of argument that SCOTUS overturns Roe and the Media manages to enflame the female half of America to go on the warpath and vote out every Republican they can.  So, let’s say the Democrats gain seats in the Senate and House.  This would have the effect of emboldening Biden and would mean there would be even more radicalization of the actions being taken by the feds and that would also translate at the state and local levels in Democrat locales.  That would make things increasingly worse for us and would also indicate that the Dems would hold the White House in 2024.

But as I said this is an almost absurdly unlikely election outcome.  Voter sentiment is lopsidedly negative on Biden’s performance in office.  And this has translated effectively against the Democrats in Congress and in state and local governments.  So, let’s look at a more likely outcome.

Currently the polls indicate that the Republicans are likely to take back the House of Representatives with a shift of somewhere between thirty and sixty seats.  The Senate is predicted to return to Republican control with a shift of two to five seats.  What happens then?

The Republicans capturing Congress will put an end to Biden appointing anymore Supreme Court justices or any other judges if the Senate is in that mood.  It will also limit the kinds of cabinet changes that Biden will be able to make during his last two years in office. And finally, it will put an end to any laws he is hoping to pass.  And those are all good things.  In addition, the House and Senate can go about investigating and probably impeaching Biden for the multitude of shady deeds that have been leaking out of the Hunter Biden laptop scandal.  There won’t be enough votes to convict him in the Senate but plenty to get the impeachment going in the House.  And the investigations will uncover enough dirt to make the 2024 election a mud-slinging extravaganza.

But all these good things won’t change the fact that Biden will still have two years to continue his destruction of the working and middle classes in this country.  We will have to endure his open borders nightmare and the punishing inflation that his terrible policies have inflicted on us.

Now let’s look at the other unlikely possibility.  Suppose by November that the country crashes spectacularly.  A bad recession strikes but inflation goes on raging.  If this were bad enough the country might get truly desperate and even Democrats might throw out their own senators and representatives.  This would give the Republicans enough votes in the Senate to convict Biden and Harris.  And that would force the Speaker of the House into the presidency.  Now this would have the added benefits over the last options of ending all of Biden’s awful programs.  And it would give the incoming president a clear powerful majority in Congress and a clear mandate for change.

But the chaos inherent in this kind of violent change would require extremely smart handling to prevent it from devolving into chaos.  Think about it.  Kevin McCarthy would be President of the United States.  How exactly is that supposed to work?  Sure, there might be ways of making someone else president but the mind boggles trying to figure out how it doesn’t all go wrong.  And as I said it’s a very unlikely scenario.

So, the short answer to this whole question is that after the mid-terms we will be looking at a weakened but not neutralized Joe Biden.  It’s possible that if he’s serious about running 2024 he may try to triangulate to less unpopular actions and policies but that’s unlikely.  Other people are pulling his strings and they’ll use his last two years to keep the damage coming.  I think they know at this point that 2024 will most likely go to a Republican.

So, that’s my read.  Don’t assume that because Joe Biden has loused up the country that the mid-terms will fix everything.  What it tells me is I need to figure out a way to survive the damage of the next two and a half years and hope and pray that we find someone who can break us out of the death trap we find ourselves in.