In several recent posts I’ve told you that most of the near-term (pre-2024) dangers of a GOP House majority are manageable. I don’t mean “no big deal.” It’s disaster after disaster. But I mean manageable in the sense of things the country can get through. With one exception: a debt-limit hostage-taking stand-off in 2023 in which House Republicans force the first U.S. debt default in U.S. history. Regardless of the outcome of Tuesday’s election it will be within Democrats’ power to prevent this crisis in advance by settling the debt limit issue during the lame duck session of Congress. Whatever the political complexities, it is straightforward as a technical matter. Pass a bill in the House raising the debt limit high enough to take the issue off the table for years to come. Then take one of the remaining “reconciliation vehicles” on the Senate side and pass the law with 50 votes. Done and done.
But here’s the thing. We had a great TPM virtual event last night with two of the most knowledgable people about the U.S. senate, Adam Jentleson and Steve Clemons. Both agreed that there’s virtually no chance Democrats are going to do this.
TPM is holding a virtual event this evening and you should sign up to join us 🙂
Josh Marshall will lead a panel discussion tonight at 6 p.m. ET digging into various theories of Democratic messaging over the last few months leading up to the midterms.
He’ll be joined by two friends of TPM: journalist Steve Clemons and political strategist Adam Jentleson. Clemons is the editor-at-large for Semafor, a one-time blogger for TPM, and an old friend of Josh’s. Jentleson is the editorial director of the Battle Born Collective, an influential voice for filibuster reform, and a former chief of staff for former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid.
To attend please RSVP. The event is free, but consider a $10 donation to the TPM journalism fund. Readers like you make TPM possible.
I heard from a reader last night who thanked us for the latest episode of the podcast because of how it focused on possible scenarios after a GOP win on Tuesday. Then I heard from TPM Reader FT who essentially said, Okay, there’s all the polls and the election in Israel. And basically it looks like the right is winning and will win everywhere. What then? What comes next?
I’ve always been unashamedly into polls. As longtimers know, we ran PollTracker for years and only really stopped it because the other aggregators had such a total focus on polls that we simply couldn’t keep up with the state of the art when it was only a side assignment. People who read TPM are political people. And we’re interested. And there’s nothing wrong with that. But I take FT’s point.
I have been giving this quite a lot of thought and there aren’t easy answers. There aren’t a lot of pleasant answers. Let me kick off the conversation with a bit of big picture and then some specific points about how I see the next couple years.
A new episode of The Josh Marshall Podcast is live! This week, Josh and Kate discuss the Paul Pelosi attack, an influx of GOP partisan polls and what to expect in various permutations of congressional control.
You can listen to the new episode of The Josh Marshall Podcast here.
