Skip to main content

Kansas Voters and Post-ROE Politics





Yes, I know midterm elections as supposed to go against the party with the White House. Sometimes by a large margin, at other times not. 

But I do believe that we are looking at an exception this year, especially in the Senate. There won't be any "red wave" in the House, either. Perhaps a marginal improvement in the GOP's position in the House, but the size of its will be a disappointment. My guess? If Pelosi is no longer Speaker a year from now it will be because she has decided to step aside in favor of a younger-generation Democrat, not because any Republican holds the post.

As to the U.S. Senate -- I'm guessing the Democrats win a minimum of two seats, enough to make Manchin and Sinema figures of lessened importance.

The voters of deep-red Kansas, God bless them, have revealed the depth of popular revulsion at the overreach of the U.S. Supreme Court as now constituted, and by association revulsion at Mitch McConnell and the shenanigans by which SCOTUS has reached this point. 

More guesses? The Republican Party is on its way out the door as an effective political force. We are facing a new "era of good feelings." 

After the decline of the Federalist Party, the Democrats were the only effective political party in the country for a short period, until the rise of the Whigs. Nobody's feelings about this were very good, but the Federalists were seen as allies of the Brits, who had burnt Washington. 

The Democratic Party (which was in the process of shortening its name from the awkward "Democratic-Republican") was then composed of a range of figures from John Calhoun on one end to Daniel Webster on the other.  It could not hold together for long as such. In time, Webster and others with analogous views formed the Whig Party, which absorbed into itself the vestiges of the old Federalists. 

Where the new Whigs will come from, I don't know. Maybe from Kansas.  

Labels:

Comments

  1. HenryAugust 11, 2022 at 6:58 AM

    There may be reason for optimism about congressional elections this November, but I am less optimistic that the Republican Party is on its way out the door as an effective political force. This is because the Supreme Court, by endorsing partisan gerrymandering, has ensured that it will retain power even as a minority party. Ruth Marcus writes in the Washington Post that, in Indiana, which just enacted a near-total ban on abortion, "Republicans generally receive 56 percent of the statewide vote," yet, in the state legislature, the GOP holds "39 of 50 Senate seats and 71 of 100 seats in the House." https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/08/08/post-roe-abortion-indiana-kansas/

    I see little hope for this country unless the Democrats in Congress add four justices to the Court, but the Democrats are too timid even to seriously consider that. And, if we are to become a democracy, those four justices, along with the Jackson, Kagan, and Sotomayor, must be willing to strike down partisan gerrymandering and to overturn Citizens United as well as this past term's rogue decisions of the Court's six Republican politicians -- "politicians" because they have abandoned their role as judges.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. HenryAugust 11, 2022 at 7:01 AM

      Marcus makes the point that the right to abortion is usually determined by state legislatures, as it was in Indiana, and not by the voters directly, as it was in Kansas.

      Delete
    2. ChristopherAugust 11, 2022 at 9:20 AM

      How many states have initiative/referendum procedures that would allow activists to press for an analogous determination?

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A Story About Coleridge

This is a quote from a memoir by Dorothy Wordsworth, reflecting on a trip she took with two famous poets, her brother, William Wordsworth, and their similarly gifted companion, Samuel Taylor Coleridge.   We sat upon a bench, placed for the sake of one of these views, whence we looked down upon the waterfall, and over the open country ... A lady and gentleman, more expeditious tourists than ourselves, came to the spot; they left us at the seat, and we found them again at another station above the Falls. Coleridge, who is always good-natured enough to enter into conversation with anybody whom he meets in his way, began to talk with the gentleman, who observed that it was a majestic waterfall. Coleridge was delighted with the accuracy of the epithet, particularly as he had been settling in his own mind the precise meaning of the words grand, majestic, sublime, etc., and had discussed the subject with William at some length the day before. “Yes, sir,” says Coleridge, “it is a maj...
9 comments
Read more

Searle: The Chinese Room

John Searle has become the object of accusations of improper conduct. These accusations even have some people in the world of academic philosophy saying that instructors in that world should try to avoid teaching Searle's views. That is an odd contention, and has given rise to heated exchanges in certain corners of the blogosphere.  At Leiter Reports, I encountered a comment from someone describing himself as "grad student drop out." GSDO said: " This is a side question (and not at all an attempt to answer the question BL posed): How important is John Searle's work? Are people still working on speech act theory or is that just another dead end in the history of 20th century philosophy? My impression is that his reputation is somewhat inflated from all of his speaking engagements and NYRoB reviews. The Chinese room argument is a classic, but is there much more to his work than that?" I took it upon myself to answer that on LR. But here I'll tak...
17 comments
Read more

Recent Controversies Involving Nassim Taleb, Part I

I've written about Nassim Taleb on earlier occasions in this blog. I'll let you do the search yourself, dear reader, for the full background. The short answer to the question "who is Taleb?" is this: he is a 57 year old man born in Lebanon, educated in France, who has been both a hedge fund manager and a derivatives trader. He retired from active participation from the financial world sometime between 2004 and 2006, and has been a full-time writer and provocateur ever since. Taleb's writings for the general public began where one might expect -- in the field where he had made his money -- and he explained certain financial issues to a broad audiences in a very dramatic non-technical way. Since then, he has widened has fields of study, writing about just about everything, applying the intellectual tools he honed in that earlier work. As you might have gather from the above, I respect Taleb, though I have sometimes been critical of him when my own writing ab...
4 comments
Read more