Reply #31: No, this isn't (quite) as bad as 1994 [View All]

[Proud Liberal Dem]

It still sucks, though. and I'm more than a little nauseated about the thought of seeing Boehner's ugly mug on a more frequent basis and him sitting in the Speaker's Chair come January and thinking about all of the things that won't get done (that need to get done) over the next two years because there is no way in hell (that I can think of) that Boehner and his Republican cabal will be pushing anything even mildly acceptable to President Obama and the remainder of the Democratic caucus in the House and I have no idea how anything decent is going to make it out of the Senate. Thinking about what might happen with Bush's Tax Cuts makes me a little bit nervous now too, especially given Senator Menendez's comments earlier today. :banghead:

The silver lining is that the Dems will be keeping the Senate, thereby being able to block anything particularly nasty coming up from the House and we will still have Obama in the WH to veto anything that somehow manages to make its way through the Senate. I just hope we don't get a huge shift to the right from President Obama, though, based on his past record, I'm not even sure what moving further right would look like for him. Even though the Republican Tea Party Machine regularly accuses him of being "Socialist", he's clearly (at least to me) been governing more center/center-left. I'm probably a little more hopeful than most that he won't tack as far to the right as Clinton did following the 1994 midterms because, as much as he's tried working with the Republicans, he hasn't hesitated to call them on their BS and has advanced his agenda largely in spite of their obstructionism but we won't really know what kind of situation we're dealing with until next January. Republicans will be under tremendous pressure to do SOMETHING during the next two years or they're going to be out on their asses like so many Democrats (unjustifiably) are tonight, so maybe that awareness (if it even exists in their minds at all) will help "bring them to the table". The "non-teabagger" Republicans (such as Boehner) are probably going to have a really rough time corralling Bachmann's "Tea Party Caucus", which will probably be much more busy clamoring for impeachment hearings and investigations into things like President Obama's birth certificates and trying to figure out ways to literally shut down the government than on actually doing anything meaningful for the public.

I'm definitely NOT counting President Obama and/or a Democratic (re-)victory in the House out for 2012 and, in fact, believe that it is rather likely.

Still wish we could've held on to the house............%$*%()$*%&. No more Speaker Pelosi (for at least the next two years) *sniff*