#rsrh My 2011 predictions thread.

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• DoMA will not be repealed.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.