American Democracy: Off Life Support

The midterm election of 2022 was truly a miracle.  American Democracy is still very ill, but intense efforts by small-d democrats to organize and get out the vote pulled our democracy off the ventilator, leaving it breathing on its own.  It is possible to see a way forward to some health.

The election was not a fluke nor, depending on which polls you read, was it a huge surprise.  While the pundits were speculating about a red wave, in fact, the best polls’ predictions were close to a toss-up.  In the end, it appears that large parts of America want to come back to a functioning democracy.   Not a single election denier won election to a position in a swing state that would have given them control over election procedure as governor, attorney general, or secretary of state.  Even the telegenic star of the Trump show, Arizona candidate for governor Kari Lake, went down in flames.

The Republicans will have a razor-thin majority in the House of Representatives.  The likelihood is that this will make Kevin McCarthy speaker of an ungovernable hodgepodge.  Probably, we face two years of obstructionism and government chaos led by Republicans in the House.  But I have a fantasy that a small group of traditional Republicans might be willing to cross the lines and sometimes vote with the Democrats to keep the worst impulses of the Republicans at bay.  Ultimately the way back to a healthy democracy will come from true conservatives regrouping in a new configuration.  Could that new configuration begin with a coalition of Democrats and true Republican conservatives in the House coming together to make governance possible?

The Democrats will at least retain control of the Senate with the Vice-Presidential tie-breaking vote.  But if Georgia re-elects Senator Raphael Warnock over Trumpist Hershel Walker in the December 6 run-off election to give the Democrats a true 51-49 Senate majority, the Democrats will not have to share power with the Republicans.   This will have impact in three ways:

• The current 50-50 split of the Senate has given extraordinary power to two single Democratic senators (in practice, that has been either West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin or Arizona Senator Kirsten Sinema) to block the Democratic agenda.  In a 51-49 Senate a single senator will no longer have the same veto power, a major practical shift.
• Issuing subpoenas requires a majority vote of a Senate committee, which has meant that, in the evenly divided senate, Republicans could block an embarrassing subpoena (of, say, Donald Trump).  With the Republican controlled House of Representatives likely to spend an inordinate amount of time investigating the Democrats (for instance, Hunter Biden’s laptop), the ability of Senate Democrats to pursue their own investigations could be significant.
• The power-sharing agreement between Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and Minority Leader Mitch McConnell has called for an equal number of Democrats and Republicans on each of the Senate committees and sub-committees.  This has slowed down committee functioning although the practical consequences of this haven’t been obvious.

While the Georgia senatorial contest does not have the same existential importance as it did when it determined Senate control in 2020, it is, nevertheless, a consequential election.

Former President Donald Trump is playing his part in the drama (see my post from September Has Trump Destroyed the Republican Party?) by announcing his candidacy for the Republican presidential nomination, thus guaranteeing a brawl which will most likely end with either Trump as a nominee who cannot win re-election in 2024 or the ever-loyal Trump base deserting the party.

American democracy is still very ill.  Ultimately, democracy cannot function with the extreme partisanship of America’s two-party system.  As I will explore in the next post, eventually the United States will have to make the changes in the electoral process to allow a multi-party system as proposed, for instance, by Fair Vote.  There is still a long way to go to recovery.  But, for now, Americans who believe in democracy have fought hard to get it off life support.  Because of them, American democracy is breathing on its own.