The 2012 presidential campaign has been premised on the notion that voters faced the greatest choice in a generation. Vastly different candidates, enormous consequences.
The premise took hold in large part because Republicans spent 2011 and 2012 building party- and movement-wide support for a policy platform — Paul Ryan’s budget — that called for a radical restructuring of Medicare, and deep cuts to nearly all of the government’s domestic functions, to finance much lower taxes on wealthy Americans.
But that agenda seemed politically viable because for most of the race (and for good reason) because the conventional wisdom held that if Romney won, it would be on a Republican wave sizable enough to sweep the party into control of the Senate.
That conventional wisdom has recently fallen apart. Today, all major polling aggregators forecast that Democrats will keep a majority of the Senate no matter who wins the presidency. And that’s badly damaged the GOP’s hope of making sweeping policy changes.
best-laid plans of mice and men oft go astray.
or as pictured Pinky and the Brain you pick who's who.
kinda like their promise to stall programs so he won't look good, did any of them think by doing that they sink "we the people" as well, or was it just collateral damage in their heads?
Without a Senate majority, Republicans can’t control the budget process. Which means they can’t cram their entire agenda into a reconciliation bill that’s immune from the filibuster.
It means that even if they force votes on repealing the Affordable Care Act, they’ll need 60 votes — or about a dozen Democratic defectors. Not likely. President Romney would have to stymie implementation of the law from within the executive branch — a difficult tas task — and his tax agenda would be a non-starter.
So would his plans for Medicare and Medicaid. He’d still be able to appoint Supreme Court justices and lower court judges, but Democrats would be able to block conservatives they deemed too objectionable.
checks and balance's at work.
