Granderson: ‘They go low, we go high’? Great plan. But have you seen how low Republicans will go?
Great plan. But have you seen how low Republicans will go?
By now, it’s pretty clear that the GOP Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, is doing everything he can to protect the Republican majority in the House. Mitch is putting up a wall, shutting down the investigation into the IRS targeting of conservative groups and the FBI’s spying scandal. He is trying to hold on to his majority.
But it looks like the Republican House majority is going to be very vulnerable to defeat for at least another couple of months. And even if they don’t lose it in 2018, they may be in a position to lose it in the 2020 election and have to work very hard to regain it.
I have no illusions as to whether that’s going to happen. But it’s an easy matter to point out, in hindsight, to others, such as myself, that the Democrats didn’t have too much to lose in this situation. Democrats aren’t going to lose any seats in 2018 and if they win in 2020, they’re going to have a very long climb to regain their majority.
Now this is not to say the Republicans will lose, as I was just pointing out in a recent column. But they’re taking a real risk, and we’re going to be very interested to see whether the Dems, like the Trump White House, are willing to take it.
The question is whether the Dems are willing to take it by making a major mistake in their calculations about what the consequences of their actions can be.
The Trump White House is making major mistakes, and I don’t think most of them have anything to do with the tax cuts or the economy. And I think it’s a mistake of the highest order for Democrats to make a similar mistake of overconfidence in their own performance. I would make a very generous and reasonable judgment of them, based on the errors they’ve made, that they’re going to make errors and will make mistakes in a similar way.
But I’m not that optimistic. I think it will take more than that to