Does anyone else feel like Christmas might be coming early tomorrow? The breathless anticipation is part of the fun, but also part of the anxiety. If you’re a conservative this time around, it’s like we’re all kids again and it’s the night before the best holiday of the year. We’ve looked over the packages under the tree for a month, shook them, examined them in every possible way trying to guess the contents without actually opening them, but our parents did a great job hiding the contents and we’re not completely sure whether we’ll be getting what we want or, well, a lame pair of socks.
Will we be getting wildly-based Blake Masters or that short astronaut guy who pretends to be something other than a Biden rubber stamp? Will Herschel Walker decorate our trophy case or will we have to listen to six more years of pretend sermons from the pretend ‘preacher’ who ran over his wife’s foot during a domestic dispute? Will Dr. Oz prevail over Lurch and his ginormous neck protrusion? Will Republicans carry the day in places Republicans haven’t won Senate seats in decades but are currently polling even or slightly ahead, like Nevada, New Hampshire, or even Washington state?
Some things, we know. Surprises are fun, but as kids, we always knew we’d get certain things, and there was peaceful predictability in that. We asked for Ron DeSantis to win a second term in Florida over beta male, mask-in-gym-wearing Charlie Crist, and DeSantis we’ll get, hopefully in a landslide that will propel him to a possible 2024 presidential run. We asked for philosopher-king JD Vance to win a Senate seat, and it looks like he will. We asked for that insufferable election denier Stacey Abrams to be defeated in Georgia, and the much-maligned and underrated Brian Kemp is going to take care of business. We begged for national treasure Kari Lake in the Arizona governor’s seat, and barring any shenanigans she’ll likely end up there and on a springboard to bigger and better things to come for possibly 2024 and beyond. We wanted a win for Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson, who gets increasingly better every year in office and was a true unsung hero during Covid, and it’s increasingly looking like he should brush off his challenger and maintain his seat.
In other words, other than Pennsylvania, Republicans should hold serve in the Senate pretty easily, which means they only have to break serve in one or two spots to win that chamber outright. Meaning that a Walker win along with Adam Laxalt carrying the day in Nevada - as he seems likely to do - is game over for Dems. There are several ways this could play out, of course, from losing some narrowly contested races and maintaining a tie in the Senate (unlikely) to an all-out red tsunami that makes the Game of Thrones Red Wedding seem tame (also probably unlikely, but certainly more possible). And that’s not even taking into account the fact that Republicans are almost certain to win the House. The only question is by how much.
But the greatest thing about these particular gifts is that they’ll keep giving, and giving, and giving, for at least two more years and, more importantly, the two remaining years of Biden’s term. What does this mean? First of all, it’s important to temper expectations. It obviously won’t mean any sort of new legislation that’s helpful or meaningful to Americans as a whole, much less conservatives. Biden isn’t going to pivot to the right in response like Bill Clinton did. The jokesters are in control and have been his entire term, and they are ideologues, not pragmatists. However, it does mean the effective end of Biden’s legislative agenda. Sure, he’ll be able to continue ‘accomplishing things’ on the regulatory and administrative state front using the significant powers of the executive branch, but thankfully those could at least theoretically be reversed by a solid GOP president starting in 2025. Assuming Democrats don’t manage to dig us into some sort of apocalyptic, Mad Max scenario, of course.
But perhaps even better than stopping Biden’s legislative agenda is the ability to control the docket in both houses of Congress. This means the likes of Rand Paul and Ron Johnson with subpoena power grilling Dr. Anthony Fauci and the rest of the Covid war criminals, hopefully asking the questions laid out in this Brownstone Institute ‘Articles of Inquiry’ piece that I had the privilege of helping to create. The revelations to come, and the ability to hopefully prevent the atrocities that happened during Covid from ever happening again, is every bit as important, if not more, than anything else the GOP could do.
So, with the strong caveat that we should never, ever trust politicians to ultimately ‘fix’ what’s gone wrong in this country, especially culturally, Merry Early Christmas, everyone! May we all enjoy tomorrow and wake up Wednesday (and/or whenever the likely runoff in Georgia is decided and the votes are finally counted in Pennsylvania) with all the gifts we’ve been asking for and more.
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