Republicans had hoped that 79-year-old Senator Thad Cochran of Mississippi would return to work today, but he had a recurrence of his urinary tract infection over the weekend. It’s unclear when he will return to the Senate, or how reliably he be available to vote over the next several months. Given the seriousness of John McCain’s brain cancer diagnosis, it’s also unclear how long he can counted upon to be in Washington, D.C. Just based on these two senators’ ailing health alone, the GOP will be unable to know if, and for how long, they’ll have a working majority in a political chamber they control by a 52-48 margin.
The Democrats have their own problem with Senator Bob Menendez of New Jersey who just suffered a setback in his legal struggles.
The bribery case against U.S. Senator Bob Menendez survived a key test on Monday, as the federal judge overseeing his trial rejected a defense motion to throw out the most serious charges.
U.S. District Judge William Walls in Newark, New Jersey, allowed the trial to proceed on all charges, five days after suggesting he was inclined to dismiss the heart of the case based on a U.S. Supreme Court decision last year that narrowed the legal definition of public corruption.
Prosecutors have accused Menendez, a 63-year-old Democrat, of taking bribes from Florida ophthalmologist Salomon Melgen in exchange for using his office to help the doctor in a variety of ways.
The New Jersey senator has been mostly absent from Congress during his trial, and it’s possible that he’ll resign if convicted, especially of the more serious charges against him. As of now, his replacement would be appointed by Governor Chris Christie, a Republican, but the Democrats are heavily favored to win the race to succeed Christie this November. If that election goes according to plan, Menendez only needs to survive until January to assure that his resignation won’t cost the Democratic Party a seat in the Senate.
So, there’s considerable uncertainty at the moment about how the Senate will be divided for the rest of this term, and it’s generally bad news for the Republicans. If they want to pass a budget, if they want to enact anything partisan under the reconciliation rules (e.g. tax cuts) or other rules than allow them to get around a filibuster (e.g., appointments and nominations), there’s some degree of chance, timing, and luck that will be involved.
And this doesn’t even take into consideration the potential for individual Republican senators to simply vote against the majority in their own party.
Under these circumstances, it seems like a bad bet to build a legislative strategy based on ramming home 50-50 votes in the Senate with the vice president as the tie-breaker. Apparently, though, failure of the type is preferable to admitting to voters and donors and the president that bipartisan solutions are a better bet.
During Trump’s diatribe today he told us that the Democrats and Republicans have “just started” to work together on health care, today, this week, prompted by his own actions (cutting off the CSR payments).
So he, unsurprisingly, has no idea at all that bipartisan health care discussions have been going on specifically for months — Pelosi, Schumer etc. didn’t get it through to him — and in general for years.
I honestly wonder if he’d have endorsed the Alexander/Murray process if they’d called it the ‘Trumpcare meetings’.
Of course, I also think the only way out of this mess is for every Democrat, from Obama down to, well, me, to change party registration and become Republicans.
Very creative my friend. Repulsive. But creative just the same.
There have been quite a few stories the last few weeks on how Trump is becoming more and more unbalanced and how the people around him are trying to mitigate it.
Watching that video of his health care rant should remove all doubt he is unhinged. For Trump it was relatively low key, but watching it scared the shit out of me. Just something about his face, and the way he talked. This is a very very disturbed man.
He’s dead inside.
.
The string of obvious failure appears to have deepened his seriously delusional personality. Of course, that Trumper had a very shaky grasp of reality was quite apparent before the election. Now, he listens to briefings, and this garbage is what his mind creates for him from the info. It’s frankly too stupid and deranged even for Trump kool-aid drinkers like Miller to have concocted.
Obviously there is no one in the American Fascist entourage who rubs Der Trumper’s nose in reality. Our Trumper has no Albert Speer, haha. I’d expect more and more public rants, since he loves doing them—it’s his idea of being “presidential”!
Donald Trump is having a difficult period…
Yes, and it’s just reached its 72nd year.
There’s a good reason that the recent headlines these days refer to the White House as Adult Daycare. Obviously I have no credentials to make diagnoses, nor will I here. But wow, just wow – tRump’s recent behavior suggests he is so far out of his depth.
Both Cochran and McCain come from very red states with Republican governors so, if both depart the scene (death and/or resignation) not much will actually change. The real problem is bad legislation failing to achieve a GOP only majority. Obviously, that’s what happened to repeal and replace and the so-called “tax reform” is even worse, if that’s even possible.
AZ is decidedly NOT a “very red state”. In fact it’s trending purple pretty much and obviously if McCain dies or resigns Democrats would have a very good pickup opportunity. Jeff Flake is a dead man walking. He has zero chance of winning re-election because he dared to criticize Trump. So, die hard Trumpites hate him, and Democrats hate him.
Democrats could wind up with both AZ Senators in 2019.
If McCain dies in office would the replacement finish his term, or would there need to be an election, with two seats up in Arizona.
If so, and the Dems win both AZ seats and the NV seat they would have an outside short at retaking the Senate (I still don’t think we are holding all of the Dem seats that are up).
Does anybody know the answer – would the appointment finish McCain’s term?
And here is the answer from NBC:
McCain’s prognosis is not good – he is unlikely to live for another year. This suggests there will be two seats in play in Arizona, a seat where Democrats are clearly closing the historic gap with Republicans.
Why couldn’t Menendez be normal and get rich by insider trading like a normal senator…
If that election goes according to plan, Menendez only needs to survive until January to assure that his resignation won’t cost the Democratic Party a seat in the Senate.
Is the trial supposed to end soon? Menendez isn’t going to resign until Murphy takes office in January, if he’s convicted. I’d guess the Democrats haven’t pushed him out sooner only because The Big Chicken would appoint his temporary replacement.
Was this a legit strategy? It’s a game of musical chairs for the GOP. Who gets the blame for failure?
What choice did McConnell and Ryan have? They had NO “replace” option, because there is none. They were backed into this insanity by their own 8 years of demagoguing Obamacare. Only they HAD to repeal or else face a donor revolt. And Trump didn’t help by threatening everybody in sight.
So, what choice did they have? Should they have told Trump that he needed to find the votes? That they couldn’t guarantee their own caucus would vote for it? Trump refuses to understand anything he doesn’t want to understand. He would have done exactly what he did do: blame “weak” GOP leaders.
So, they did the best they could. They hoped against hope that they could sneak it across the line by hook or by crook. They might still do it in January in which case Trump will take a victory lap.
As it turned out they COULD have passed a normal bill using reconciliation, but they had NOTHING to put in place of Obamacare.
What was really astonishing is how many Senators actually voted for what is essentially a GOP suicide pact. If they pass it everybody will blame them when their health care premiums go up. Even if they don’t pass it. They are operating under the delusion that they never have to answer to the left, only the right-est of the right wing.
Given that kind of mass delusion among Republicans it should have been possible to pass anything no matter how horrible. But, naturally several Senators took a look at what would happen to THEM if the bill passed and quailed under the threat. Only a couple, but they could only lose 2 and they probably missed by about 6 votes. We’ll never know because a lot of Senators were secretly hoping they didn’t have to make that call.
Given all that, Trump’s delusion was probably the least of it. McConnell looks stupid to think it would work, but he was probably quite aware of the risk, but what else could they do? Admit the truth? That they didn’t have the votes? That would never work.
With hindsight I’m sure it appears obvious, even to McConnell and Ryan, repulsive turtle and the boy wonder, that their best bet was to encourage Trump to take off in a new direction and hide beneath his skirt. They should have secretly encouraged him to cut deals with Democrats. All the deals they themselves cannot make. Then let those few moderate Republicans vote with Democrats to pass his agenda. The fact that Trump is so popular with the rubes, the very people they need to win elections, would have given them cover to go along to a large extent. Those holding the bags of gold are sophisticated enough to understand there was no other option. It was a mistake to lull them into a sense that they could pass incredibly unpopular legislation. I hope to the heights of heaven that they’re forced to pay a huge price in the midterms.
The generic Democratic lead in Congressional elections is well into double digits. This is obviously way too early to get overly excited by polls like this (and individual Congressional district performance will vary on election day), but taken together with generally consistent Democratic overperformance in special elections (those state legislative wins in deep red state house and state senate races seem to get overlooked) and there is cause for some cautious optimism.
Can you imagine Trump keeping a secret like that, though? At the first, worst, opportunity he’d ran on Twitter that they encouraged him to betray the party.
Menendez would be a fool and show Democrats they’ve learned nothing if he resigned before January. He should resign no matter what the outcome of the trial once the Democrat is sworn in as governor — guilty or not guilty — because everyone around the world knows he’s guilty and a corrupt piece of trash. But thanks to Roberts and Co, corruption is essentially legal unless I tell you in words that this money is for that favor. Even if convicted, it wouldn’t stand in light of this horrendous precedent.
Yep – let’s hope that is Menendez’ game plan: hang on just long enough to let the door hit Christie’s ass on his way out, and once his (very probable) Democratic replacement is sworn in, throw in the towel and let the new Governor replace him.
Now, now, I’m sure the Roberts court could find a way to keep a stinky Democrat from benefiting by that decision.
100% true.
Frankly, I would not be terribly surprised to learn that the DoJ drops the case against Menendez once it becomes clear that a Democratic governor has been elected in NJ’s 2017 elections in three weeks. The DoJ has only been conducting this trial despite the SCOTUS’s rulings in the hope the Christie would be able to appoint another Republican Senator. Power is all they understand. Justice for them needs to squat in the back of the bus.
Nah, they want their scalp.
I want a few scalps myself.
.
If the race becomes about who has the right to appoint Menendez’s replacement, I would expect that the GOP would fare better than expected in the race. The reason we got Chris Christie to begin with was in part that Democratic voters got fed up with Democratic scandal after Democratic scandal. That and because apparently we hate teachers and somehow think we shouldn’t have to pay their salaries each and every year, year in and year out.