Moe Lane

Fair warning: I’m awful at these.  So there’s that.

1. John Boehner will remain Speaker of the House.
2. Nancy Pelosi will announce her retirement after this term.
3. The economy will go back into recession.
4. Our national credit rating will be downrated.
5. A lot of politicians, on both sides, are going to be shocked to discover that the country will be quite happy to blame a lot of politicians, on both sides, for the previous two things.
6. There will be interminable calls for a third party, which will not materialize.
7. Then again, neither will the various reforms, proposed rules changes, new operating methodologies, and whatnot.
8. The Senate will still not pass a budget.
9. President Obama will discover that blaming everybody but him for everything is boring, and that everything is boring, and he’ll be displaying that boredom more and more.
10. On the bright side: Pacific Rim is going to be insanely good.

Yeah, I have a mediocre record at best at these, so ignore as you please. Anyway:

1). I am not going to predict the Republican nominee and how he or she is going to get the nomination; but he or she will beat Barack Obama in November.

2). Not at all unrelatedly, neither the economy nor the unemployment rate will improve all that much between now and November.

3). The Republicans will retain the House, but will lose seats.

4). The Republicans will retake the Senate.

5). The US Supreme Court will declare the individual mandate to be unconstitutional, but not throw out Obamacare entirely.

6). The Syrian regime will collapse. Messily.

7). There will be a ‘shakeup’ in the Iranian regime. And a lot of ‘car accidents.’

8). A liberal Supreme Court Justice will retire. Hijinks ensue.

9). Mass Effect 3 will come out, and Not Suck. Despite the fact that there will be bitter recriminations that the Thing That Had To Have Been In There For It Not To Suck Wasn’t Actually In There.

10). The same will be true of The Hobbit, Part I. Both sentences.

Mind you, the track record for my predictions for 2010 were…”eh” is probably the best word for it.  Then again, I’m glad I was wrong on a couple of them.

So, here goes:

• Congress will engage in full-scale war on the second day of the 112th Congress, and continue on for the rest of the winter and spring sessions.
• The President will disappoint his base with his State of the Union speech.
• There will be a maximum of three Supreme Court justices at the SotU.  Two of them will be Obama appointees.
• Republicans will win all three of the Louisiana, Kentucky, and Mississippi gubernatorial elections.  Of these, the Kentucky one will be the most surprising result and the Louisiana will feature the most vicious rhetoric by the opposition candidate.
• Michael Steele will not be re-elected RNC chair.
• DoMA will not be repealed.
• The individual mandate in Obamacare will be declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court, but the larger law will be deemed severable from it.
• Obamacare will be given the legislative equivalent of a curbstomping.  At least one repeal will make it all the way to the President’s desk for a veto.  Less publicly, Obamacare will swiftly get a name in the Beltway as being a place where government careers go to die.
• The 112th Congress will otherwise spend its first year concentrating on correcting the fiscal mistakes of the 110th and 111th.
• The Governor of Hawaii will release the President’s long-form birth certificate, which will show that the President was just [expletive deleted] born in Hawaii already… and which will still not convince some people.
• The President will finally have somebody that he cares about tell him to stop spending Christmas in Hawaii; Camp David exists for a reason, and the Obamas will spend all remaining Presidential Christmases there.
• The President will get another vacancy on the Supreme Court to fill.  He will pick a liberal, who will eventually withdraw – and get replaced with another, less obnoxious liberal, who will be confirmed.
• A Cabinet member who is not Secretary of State will resign.  His successor will have the obligatory tax problems, and be forced to withdraw her name from consideration.
• We will still be in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Gitmo on 12/31/2011.
• Two Republican Senators and five Democratic ones will announce their retirement; the media will obsess over the former and ignore the latter utterly, despite the fact that this will be later be seen as a direct cause of the Republican takeover of the Senate in 2012.
• Between six and fifteen Democratic Congressmen – including at least one Ranking Member – will likewise announce their retirements.  In most cases this will not eventually result in a shift of the seat.
• Mitt Romney, Mike Huckabee, and Sarah Palin will not be running for President by the end of 2011.
• And, finally: there’s going to be a dramatic breakthrough in physics, on the level of the Michaelson-Morley experiment.  Mostly because we’re about due for one.

He really goes out on a limb, here:

Domestically, there will be historic midterm contests that will reshape the entire political landscape, at least until the next election. I can see clearly that there will be far more losing than winning candidates, counting primary contenders. A fair number of the winners will eventually be found to be corrupt, having extramarital affairs, or involved in other categories of scandal. One more prediction is coming into focus: The November 2, 2010 results will be over-interpreted.

I wrote that while smiling, by the way. Larry Sabato was just having fun.

Moe Lane

(A version of this is up at RedState)

Because it’s going to be a heckuva year, to be sure. Predictions after the fold: (more…)