Hopes of a Republican victory on the presidential level are already distant this year, but further down the ticket, hopes are simply nonexistent.
To be sure, there has been some good news. Rep. Jack Murtha (D., Pa.) could lose after calling his constituents "racist." His opponent, retired Lieutenant Colonel Bill Russell, will have at least $500,000 to spend in the campaign’s final weeks. Rep. Tim Mahoney (D., Fla.) could well fall after revelations that he engaged in numerous extra-marital affairs, paying hush-money to one mistress before obtaining a federal earmark for the other.
But these represent just two of 435 races in the U.S. House of Representatives. The cold, hard fact remains that Democrats are in position to win perhaps 30 House seats from Republicans, perhaps more. Members once believed to be safe now find themselves struggling to survive. According to sources in Florida, Rep. Tom Feeney (R., Fla.) may be the latest to enter this category.
In the Senate, Republicans finally gave up this week on their only serious pickup opportunity — the chance to defeat Sen. Mary Landrieu (D., La.). The pressure to spend money on defense had simply become too great. GOP Senate seats in New Mexico and Virginia were written off months ago. Seats in Alaska, New Hampshire, Minnesota, North Carolina, Colorado, and Oregon are all looking shaky. Republicans in Kentucky and Mississippi face uncomfortably close races. A filibuster-proof Democratic majority has become a real possibility.
In the absence of a Senate firewall or a significant coalition of opposition to his policies in the House, a President Barack Obama could make many permanent and sweeping changes to America’s economic policies. It is worth examining this conservative nightmare — the possible consequences of an unchecked Obama presidency.
Although a significant bloc of House Democrats has in the past provided a working majority against the most offensive pro-abortion legislation, this may no longer be possible after the election of 2008. Obama promised on July 17, 2007 that he would sign the Freedom of Choice Act, which would strike down all of the incremental gains that pro-lifers have made in state and federal law on the issue of abortion. The bill would re-legalize partial-birth abortion, strike all state restrictions on government funding of abortions, and overturn state laws requiring parents to be notified when their minor daughters seek abortions. The bill has 19 Senate co-sponsors (including Obama) and 109 co-sponsors in the House. It will likely receive a vote in the 111th Congress, and it could well pass. Obama, who has opposed all restrictions even on late-term abortions, called this bill a top priority.
Obama’s economic policies will also move quickly and make a deep impression in law. His tax policy has been hard to pin down, as it keeps changing with the election season. But he appears to be serious about raising capital gains taxes from 15 to 20 percent (or higher, as his previous statements suggested) for the sake of “fairness,” as he has put it. That change could be made — and made permanent — if there are 60 votes in the Senate. Employers — both corporations and small businesses that pay personal income taxes on profits — could pay permanently higher taxes under Obama that make them less competitive, facilitating the further shipping of American jobs abroad. President Obama will be able to explain away any damage this does to the economy by blaming his predecessor, who is an easy enough target.
The failed cloture votes of the current Congress provide further indications of what an unchecked Obama presidency could look like. Exhibit A is the Employee Free Choice Act, an effort to expand union membership by removing the guarantee of secret-ballot elections in the workplace. It received 51 votes toward the 60 needed for cloture in June, with one Democrat absent, and it could easily achieve cloture in the coming Congress.
When Democrats decided to make “speculators” the bogey-men for a rise in world oil prices, their plans to limit trade on commodities markets hit a snag in the Senate. In June, they could only deliver 51 votes toward cloture, in the absence of Ted Kennedy and Barack Obama. With Obama in the White House and larger majorities in the House and Senate, Democrats have good odds of keeping their promise to reinstate the ban on offshore energy production that lapsed at the beginning of October. Caps on carbon emissions received 48 of the 60 Senate votes needed for cloture in June, and that was in the absence of Obama, Hillary Clinton (D., N.Y.), Joe Biden (D., Del.), Ted Kennedy (D., Mass.) and two other Democrats. With their enlarged Senate majority and a willing president, this scheme of limiting carbon emissions by raising consumer energy prices could become reality as soon as next year.
As depressing as the future under total Democratic rule may appear for conservatives, far worse is the role Republicans have played to bring the United States in the direction of a centrally planned economy. Democrats cannot claim credit for nationalizing the mortgage market or directing nearly a trillion dollars to sustain a credit bubble on Wall Street. They cannot claim credit for recent years’ growth in government spending. They cannot claim credit even for the new entitlement that is paying for even the wealthiest senior citizens' prescription drugs at the expense of younger wage-earners, at a ten-year cost of $395 billion, according to new estimates from August.
Americans are already depending on government today as much as they ever have since the Great Depression, and Barack Obama cannot be blamed for it. If he wins and his unchecked presidency can make America drink of socialism, it will only be after President Bush and Congressional Republicans brought her to its waters.
— David Freddoso is a staff reporter for National Review Online and author of The Case Against Barack Obama.
