Midterms 2010

Unlike the majority of Americans, I’ve been glued to the midterm election coverage over the past couple days. I keep checking the New York Times website to see if any other races have been decided. While it’s been reported for months that the Republicans were going to gain in the House, I guess I just had to see it for myself. I just spent the last few moments comparing the map from elections of Representatives from 2008 to 2010. The amount of blue that is changed to red is very surprising to me. Even California went 7/8 red this time around.
While this isn’t something to celebrate by any stretch of the imagination for sitting Democrats in Congress, it could be worse. Sharron Angle and Christine O’Donnell did not win (Angle lost by 6%, and O’Donnell by 16%). O’Donnell’s concession can be seen here and Angle's here. Angle was well known for her commercials profiling illegal immigrants and O’Donnell for her controversial Christian stances on pre-marital sex and other clips from the 1990's on Real Time with Bill Maher.

But it is important to note that while these radical Republicans did not win, Rand Paul did. Paul is a Libertarian who has been known for controversial opinions on the Civil Rights Act. It was almost humorous to watch the panel on MSNBC (including Kieth Olbermann, Rachel Maddow, Chris Mathews, and Lawrence O’Donnell) freak out about his success.

Congress now stands with each house being controlled by a different party. Republicans won 60 seats in the House of Representatives, putting the final total at 239 Republicans and 186 Democrats, while winning 6 seats on the Senate, putting the final total at 52 Democrats and 46 Republicans. How this will effect Congress is uncertain. When the House had a majority of Democrats and a supposed filibuster-proof majority in the Senate, still over 400 pieces of legislation were passed through the House and were not passed or reconciled by the Senate. Now, with differing ideologies in Congress, it seems to make sense that the House will pass even more legislation than before over the Democratic minority, only to hit a road block at the Democratic Senate. Another discussed point was the power of the filibuster. It was just recently threatened by John McCain over the repeal of Don’t Ask Don’t tell. Now that the Democrats have no power to block a filibuster, will it happen more and more often?
These are all extremely hypothetical questions. All of the candidates that have been recently elected have been running on ideological statements and now must attempt to put those into practice. Republicans in this election ran on the ideal of small government and cutting government spending, and it is known that the United States will reach the designated debt ceiling sometime this spring. If the ceiling is not increased, then the United States will risk default. Read about it here. If the newly elected Republicans vote to increase the debt, than they will not appear to be the small government advocates that they appeared to be during their campaign. But if they don’t’ raise the ceiling then there will be repercussions for the United States financial system.

One thing that is always predicatable about elections is their unpredictability, that's for sure.