If Clinton wins, the country will get even more liberal - By Paul Waldman
By Paul Waldman - November 7 at 2:03 PM
If the polls are correct, late tomorrow night Hillary Clinton is going to become president-elect of the United States. Even the conservatives who opposed Donald Trump and for whom this outcome will be something of a relief will still find themselves feeling a fair bit of distress when the call is finally made. But they should gird themselves for worse, because if Clinton does win, after Tuesday, America is going to become more liberal in a whole variety of ways.
We can start with the presidency, which is of course on everyone’s mind. Clinton’s election will represent not just a missed opportunity for the right, but an entrenchment of everything they’ve fought against for the last eight years. Their hopes of repealing the Affordable Care Act will be dead — and knowing that, some more states may finally accept the expansion of Medicaid, making the law even harder to repeal. They won’t be outlawing abortion, or cutting taxes for the wealthy, or privatizing Medicare, or building any walls on the border. Clinton may not be a clone of Obama in foreign policy, but she won’t be tearing up the Iran nuclear deal either. And she’ll continue Obama’s initiatives to address climate change and promote renewable energy.
Republicans may succeed in stopping Clinton from passing ambitious new legislation, but she’ll still be able to make incremental progress on a wide variety of issues with a combination of the president’s bully pulpit, the regulatory levers of the executive branch, and the courts. For instance, she’ll push for increasing the national minimum wage (and history shows that Republicans eventually give in to that pressure after fighting it for a few years) while her Labor Department promotes workers’ rights and increasingly liberal courts uphold them.
That’s another vital area where things will get progressively more liberal. A third of current federal judges were appointed by Barack Obama. Even more striking, when he came into office, only one of the 13 federal appeals courts had a Democratic-appointed majority, but now nine of them do. After another four or eight years of a Clinton administration, liberal judges will completely dominate the federal courts.
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https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/wp/2016/11/07/if-clinton-wins-the-country-will-get-even-more-liberal/?wpisrc=nl_popns&wpmm=1
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