What if he loses?

[Bruce Wayne]

Scary stuff over at Washington Monthly. Below are excepts from several articles detailing just what damage a Republican victory in 2012 would do to the country. Do yourself a favor and don't read this right before going to bed.

Preemptive NB to mods: I don't believe this violates copyright procedures because these are each four paragraphs or fewer from separate articles by separate authors found at separate URLs. I only put them together because they all fit into one (scary) theme.

[font size="5"]What if he loses?[/font]
[font font="times new roman" size="4"]Imagining the consequences of a GOP victory[/font]

on the legislative orgy that would be...

If Obama loses, Republicans will probably control, if narrowly, both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue for the second time in a decade. When that last happened, under George W. Bush—with a nine-seat House majority and a tied Senate— the party succeeded in passing major tax cuts but failed to reduce the size of government or roll back the welfare state, despite riding into town on its usual small-government rhetoric. So too during the Reagan years, when the White House and the Senate (though not the House) were in Republican hands. During both these periods of GOP dominance, entitlement and other programs grew substantially.

The question is, would this time be different? We believe the answer is yes, because of the Republican Party’s shift to the right and its demonstrated willingness to bend, break, or change legislative rules and customs that have stood in the way of radical change in the past...

Whoever is the standard-bearer, a Republican victory in 2012 would do nothing to reverse or restrain the radically rightward march of the party. The Tea Party movement has accelerated a process that has been under way for many years within the GOP, which is now firm in its identity as the insurgent party, set upon blowing up policies and public responsibilities that enjoyed bipartisan support for many decades. The Democrats are the status quo party— protective and pragmatic. The asymmetric polarization of the two camps is the most significant feature of contemporary American politics.

--Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein

on the Courts...

For anyone considering the 2012 election’s importance to the future of the American judiciary, one fact stands out: next November, Ruth Bader Ginsburg will be seventy-nine years old. If a Republican wins the presidential election, he or she may have an opportunity to seat Ginsburg’s successor, replacing the Supreme Court’s most reliably liberal jurist with a conservative. That would mean that the Court—currently balanced almost elegantly between four liberals, four conservatives, and the moderate conservative Anthony Kennedy—would finally tilt decisively to the right, thereby fulfilling Edwin Meese’s dream, laid out in his famous 1985 speech before the American Bar Association, of reshaping the Court around one coherent “jurisprudence of original intention.” Meese, who was then Ronald Reagan’s attorney general, wanted nine conservative constitutional originalists on the Court. He may soon get his wish. A 2008 study by Richard Posner, a federal appeals court judge, and William Landes, a law professor at the University of Chicago, examined the voting records of seventy years of Supreme Court justices in order to rank the forty-three justices who have served on the Court since 1937. They concluded that four of the five most conservative justices to serve on the Supreme Court since 1937 sit on the Supreme Court today. Justice Clarence Thomas ranked first...

But it’s not just the Supreme Court that would tilt further right. The high court only hears seventy-some cases each year. The vast majority of disputes are resolved by the federal appellate courts, which are the last stop for almost every federal litigant in the country. And the one legacy of which George W. Bush can be most proud is his fundamental transformation of the lower federal judiciary—a change that happened almost completely undetected by the left. At a Federalist Society meeting in 2008, Bush boasted that he had seated more than a third of the federal judges expected to be serving when he left office, most of them younger and more conservative than their colleagues, all tenured for life and in control of the majority of the federal circuit courts of appeals...

The current administration has not done much to restore the ideological balance of the federal appeals courts. For one thing, this was never Obama’s priority the way it was for Bush, his father, and Ronald Reagan. Obama, like Bill Clinton before him, has selected lower court judges more notable for their racial and gender diversity than their hard-left judicial orientation. And he also has failed to seat them in numbers comparable to the Bush record. Republicans have used Senate rules so effectively to block Obama judges that the judicial vacancy rate currently stands at eighty-four vacancies, with thirty of those designated “judicial emergencies” based on courts’ inability to manage caseloads.

--Dahlia Lithwick

on foreign policy...

All of the Republican candidates for president believe that Barack Obama’s foreign policy has failed the United States... They believe that he has cozied up to enemies like Iran and competitors like China, and walked away from allies like Israel. They view him as a humanitarian with a weak grasp of America’s core interests who has presided over a unilateral disarmament. Obama, in short, is a soft man in a hard world—which is pretty much what Republicans have been saying about Democrats since Vietnam.

At the same time, the fact that Obama’s rivals are certain that he is wrong does not mean that they have a clear idea—or in some cases any idea—of what is right. At times the candidates’ level of ignorance has been stupefying... As Romney, the most plausible nominee, said in the party’s national security debate (held a few days after the foreign policy debate), “President Obama says that we have people throughout the world with common interests. I just don’t agree with him. I think there are people in the world that want to oppress other people, that are evil.” “Engagement” only encourages those evil forces; the time has come to replace the gentle handshake with the clenched fist.

But elsewhere, a Republican president would turn up the dial of confrontation. Iran is a particularly stark example, since Obama’s rivals have described his engagement policy there as complicity with evil (Rick Santorum: “We sided with evil because our president believes our enemies are legitimately aggrieved”).

--James Traub

on the environment...

Representative Henry Waxman, ranking member of the Energy and Commerce Committee, has grown so alarmed at the number of anti-environment votes in the 112th Congress that he built a searchable online database to keep track of them. At the time of this writing, Waxman’s database cites 191 votes to block, defund, undermine, or repeal environmental protections—an average of one a day. Of those votes, sixty-one target the Clean Air Act.

Second, Republicans have maintained astonishing lockstep unanimity throughout these votes. Rather than shedding moderates, as happened in the Gingrich years, they have been picking up centrist Democrats, even Democrats from competitive districts that Obama won in 2008. The prevailing conventional wisdom in Washington today is that it’s safer to be anti-regulation than to be pro-clean air—and that there’s nothing to fear from environmentalists or the president.

And finally, Republican proposals today are unprecedented in their sheer scope and ambition. They do not simply block this or that rule (though just about every proposed EPA rule has been voted down by the House at one point or another). Instead, they reshape the basic operations and independence of executive branch agencies.

--David Roberts

on financial regulations being turned back to 2008...

Going forward, the Republicans’ intentions with respect to Dodd-Frank are already clear: in Congress, they have introduced repeal legislation, and every major Republican presidential candidate has pledged to repeal Dodd-Frank in its entirety. It’s fair to take them at their word. Even if a Republican majority set out to kill the bill in one fell swoop but was blocked by a Democratic filibuster, it wouldn’t really matter. That’s because there are a series of simple steps Republicans can take to pull apart Dodd-Frank piece by piece. The collective effect would be similar to that of an overall repeal and would leave the global financial system in serious peril.

It has long been the case that, in the conservative imagination, the best market is one with the least amount of rules. In the 1990s, Senator Phil Gramm infamously told SEC Chair Arthur Levitt that “unless the waters are crimson with the blood of investors, I don’t want you embarking on any regulatory flights of fancy.” This guiding principle led many at Alan Greenspan’s Federal Reserve to ignore signs of fraud in subprime lending early on, despite the warnings. At the same time, there was a very conscious effort to tie state regulators in knots whenever possible, mostly by overruling, or “preempting,” state laws on behalf of large national banks. And in the years since the crisis, even without controlling the White House and the Senate, Republicans have managed to block key presidential appointments, tighten budgets, and harass regulators at every turn. All of these strategies— softening federal oversight, hampering regulatory institutions, and interfering in any state-level attempts to provide tough oversight of the financial industry—would surely be reprised by a Republican White House and Congress in each of the major battlegrounds on financial reform.

--Michael Konczal

[DonCoquixote]

1. Yes but

some here will still insist that there is no difference between Obama and Romney. I wonder how lomng until some super pac throws money nader's way.

[libinnyandia]

4. One of the sad things about 2000 was tat so many of Ralph's supporters

were relatively unoncerned about potential judicial appointment if Bush won. Roe v wade- no problem - we get Roberts and Alito- it was a very big problem- Citizens United.

[Ecumenist]

2. Welcome to DU, Bruce Wayne...

Enjoy your stay P.S. Anything can happen..really don't think we have to worry about this, This is conjecture in some circles and wishful thinking on others.

[Bruce Wayne]

3. No, I'm equally bearish on GOP chances, too, but...

I think it's a useful reminder of the stakes in this election. Besides, there's been a pretty solid pattern of 8 year rotations in the White House between Republicans and Democrats. It's sobering to think that it's quite possible that in 2016 a nutjob in moderate's wool may try to slip in with an updated version of Bush's "compassionate conservative" bait-and-switch from 2000. I don't anticipate any breaks from their insanity in the next four years. We don't need to win this year; we need to clobber them like LBJ did Goldwater, just to try and knock some sense into them.

(And thanks for the welcome)

[Ecumenist]

5. You're absolutely right, Bruce Wayne, we need to whip their asses and hand them

them to them on a silver platter. I think with the Occupy uprising and the anger of the middle class we can do it.

[Paka]

6. Good read. Thanks for the post.

It is a very scary thought, and yes, we do need to "clobber them" bigger than LBJ.