Republicans Take Senate, Supreme Court F*cked For Rest Of Our Lives. And Good Morning To YOU!
This is not one of them 'buck up' posts!
Well before Donald Trump won the goddamned election early this morning, control of the US Senate flipped to the goddamned Republicans. Republicans picked up at least three seats, giving them at least 52 votes and guaranteeing Donald Trump a rubber stamp on Cabinet and judicial appointments. Several key races remain too close to call, so that total could still go higher.
First, the West Virginia seat formerly held by Joe Manchin (Manchin Party) was won by Gov. Jim Justice, and then in Ohio, Sherrod Brown lost his bid for a fourth term to car dealer and crypto asshole Bernie Moreno, who was helped out by $40 million in funding from the crypto industry. Brown chairs the Senate Banking Committee, so he was a prime target for crypto scammers who’d rather remain largely unregulated, including the president-elect.
Moreno doesn’t seem to have suffered at all for his September remarks about how women over 50 were crazy for voting to preserve abortion rights, because “I’m thinking to myself, I don’t think that’s an issue for you.” Moreno’s certain to support a national abortion ban, but maybe Trump will veto that so the issue can be left to the states (HOLLOW MORDANT LAUGHTER).
In Montana, Democrat Jon Tester lost to lying carpetbagger millionaire Tim Sheehy, who lied about a self-inflicted gunshot wound and portrayed that as a kind of heroism, and got away with offensive insults about Native Americans that once would have tanked any campaign, but Republicans can now say and do whatever they want without consequences, another lesson we’ll keep learning for the next few years.
As of blogtime, several Senate races remain too close to call. In Arizona, Democrat Ruben Gallego leads election denier Kari Lake in the fight for Kyrsten Sinema’s former seat; in Wisconsin, incumbent Dem Tammy Baldwin has claimed victory against creepy Republican Eric Hovde, although with 99 percent of the vote counted, the AP has not yet called the race.
Other nail-biting races include Pennsylvania, where incumbent Dem Bob Casey (48.3 percent) narrowly trails Republican Dave McCormick (49.1 percent); Michigan, where Elissa Slotkin (D) and Mike Rogers (R) are only three-tenths of a percentage point apart (Slotkin 48.6 percent, Rogers 48.3 percent), and Nevada, where in another squeaker, Democratic incumbent Jacky Rosen (47.2 percent) is right behind Republican Joe Brown (47.3 percent, with 88 percent of the vote counted.
The House has yet to be decided but could well stay in Republican control; with a trifecta, Trump and Republicans could force through damn near anything they want, since all the Rs who joined Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema’s principled fight to keep the filibuster — you know, for bipartisanship — will throw it out the first time they want to pass anything, with no John McCain to give a thumb’s down to repealing the Affordable Care Act, whether there’s anything to replace it or not. But that’s a worry for later, when all the votes are counted. For now, we can be sure of an endless stream of rightwing judicial appointments that will fuck up the federal courts and the Supreme Court for decades, and the most we can do is resist the madness at every step.
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I'm grumpy and sleep-deprived enough to outright delete gloating trolls today in the chat thread. This bitch ain't playin'.
It occurred to me in the middle of the night, when I couldn't sleep, that the bastards might even decide that everyone who had student loans forgiven should be forced to pay them back.