Tag: senate

Harry Reid’s Ebolan Roulette.

Specifically, the Surgeon General nomination.  Why is Vivek Murthy’s nomination stalled, again?  Well, as Byron York reminds us it’s primarily because Harry Reid wants it stalled:

It would take just 51 of the Senate’s 55 Democrats to confirm Murthy. But that confirmation has not happened. “There is bipartisan opposition, so Sen. Reid hasn’t even tried to bring him to a vote,” says another senior Senate GOP aide.

Consider this the fallout from Reid’s decision to partially nuke the filibuster (oh, I slay me): Harry Reid wanted the judges, and he figured that getting them was worth the embarrassment of having to occasionally scuttle the President’s more embarrassingly awful executive branch nominees. And Murthy is, indeed, embarrassingly awful: back in 2012 he rather infamously declared guns to be a “public health issue” – which is to say, Dr. Murthy wants to use the regulatory aspects of the State to do an end-run around that pesky Constitution thingy and ban guns that way.  Which is why civil rights groups have made their opposition to Dr. Murthy crystal clear – and why Harry Reid has allowed Murthy’s nomination to languish in the bowels of the Senate*. Continue reading Harry Reid’s Ebolan Roulette.

White House to Senate Democrats: “Sauve qui peut!*”…

This is not what you tell people when you’re trying to keep a loss from being a rout:

Understanding full well Obama’s unpopularity is a drag on some Democrats in tight congressional races, White House officials are signaling to party leaders and campaign managers alike there will be no consequences should they run away from the president in order to win.

This is what you tell people when you think that there’s going to be a rout, no matter what, but you want to maybe rebuild something from the shattered fragments afterwards.  It’s also a tacit admission that you’re expecting this preemptive forgiveness to be largely if not almost completely an academic exercise anyway. If I was a more reckless man, that’d be grounds for a DOOM call right now.

Via

and

Moe Lane

*Classical Reference.

Interesting wrinkle in the Virginia-SEN race: Mark Warner caught up in offering Plunkett a deal.

This is very interesting:

…a scandal touching Virginia’s current Democratic governor, Terry McAuliffe, may also implicate Warner. Several Democratic figures in the Old Dominion are involved a federal investigation looking into the circumstances of the resignation of a former Democratic state senator. The Washington Post has the scoop that federal investigators have been told of Warner’s supposed involvement in offering that senator and his family political favors in exchange for his staying in the legislature…

For those who don’t remember: the state Senate flipped earlier this year when Democratic state senator Phillip Plunkett suddenly resigned, essentially in exchange for a judgeship for his daughter. More recently it’s come out that Governor McAuliffe’s chief of staff is on tape offering to make Plunkett an alternate deal, with kind of short-circuits any kind of righteous indignation on the Democrats’ part. It’s hard to take the high ground on an issue when your opponents can accurately note that your real problem is that you didn’t make a better offer than they did – which is what McAuliffe pretty much did.  Now it’s come out that sitting US Senator Mark Warner is caught up in this entire, tawdry story as well.

Will this help Ed Gillespie?  Hard to say, although having his opponent be possibly involved in a future federal investigation for corruption probably won’t hurt Ed.  Mark Warner is currently hovering just under 50% in the averages, but there’s the usual third-party nonsense to consider.  All in all, I’d have preferred to have had this story come out last month.  Mind you, this is still an improvement on the way that these things can go with the Washington Post: they quite often wait to break stories like this until after the election…

Moe Lane

Greg Orman (D* CAND, Kansas-SEN): Oh, yeah, sure, Obama can have whoever he wants.

This is not an unreasonable position for a Democrat to take, of course; or, rather, it is unreasonable, but it is not particularly unexpected. But since Greg Orman is still urinating on people’s legs and telling them that it’s bipartisanship, well…

Democratic Senate candidate Greg Orman said that he would allow the president to choose whomever he “feels he needs to pick” to serve in cabinet positions.

“At the end of the day, we sort of let to need chief executives, whether they are Republicans or Democrats, pick the team that they feel like they need to pick to run various cabinet agencies,” Orman said during a Kansas Senate debate with incumbent Pat Roberts (R., Kan.) on Wednesday.

Continue reading Greg Orman (D* CAND, Kansas-SEN): Oh, yeah, sure, Obama can have whoever he wants.

The Democrats had a bad night in the Iowa Senate race.

Sounds like they lost a debate that they needed to win.

Such a tragedy.

Moe Lane

PS: The GOP locking down Iowa would make life exceptionally difficult for Democratic strategists.

The Five Senate Races that will NOT decide control of the Senate.

OK, this is how you reinforce a narrative in This Town.  You start off by writing something like this:

The fight for the Senate majority is increasingly focused on five races: four controlled by Democrats and one held by Republicans. These contests — Alaska, Colorado, Iowa, North Carolina and Kansas — are acknowledged by both sides to be very competitive, and because of that are likely to see the heaviest spending by both the party committees and the outside groups over the last five-plus weeks of the midterm election.

To a Democrat, that doesn’t sound too bad.  That Democrat already ‘knows’ that Alaska is being locked down for the GOP (true), Colorado is trending the GOP’s way (true), Iowa hasn’t yet slipped into GOP territory yet (actually, it probably has), North Carolina is still in the Democratic zone (we’ll see), and Kansas is a wild card (no, not really).  So there’s still a chance, right? Continue reading The Five Senate Races that will NOT decide control of the Senate.

Quote of the Day, This is Not Quite A DOOM Moment In The Iowa-SEN Race edition.

But it’s a big, fat warning sign. Short version: the Des Moines Register poll shows Joni Ernst beating Bruce Braley 44-38. That’s not the warning sign. This is:

[Braley] isn’t winning in his home district, in northeast Iowa.

That’s… great news, actually. Which means that it’s horrible news for Bruce Braley.

Via Hot Air Headlines.

Moe Lane

PS: Joni Ernst for Senate.

Eric Holder’s resignation indicates that the White House expects the Senate to flip.

It’s the only reason to do this now.

U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder will announce his resignation on Thursday after heading the Justice Department for six years, according to the White House.

Citing two sources “familiar with the situation,” NPR first reported that Holder will exit the U.S. Department of Justice as soon as his replacement is confirmed, though the process could potentially drag out into 2015.

…actually, I expect it to be the other way around: Harry Reid will ram the nomination for Holder’s replacement through the Senate while he still can. If it drags on until 2015, it’ll probably continue to drag on even further under the new Senate.  And possibly not get resolved until after Eric Holder comes clean about all the things he’s been doing to the country for the last six years. Continue reading Eric Holder’s resignation indicates that the White House expects the Senate to flip.

Et tu, Jay Carney?

It’s not that he’s saying anything that the rest of us don’t already know…

“It’s not going to be a good year for Democrats by definition,” [former White House press secretary Jay] Carney said. “The sixth year is always particularly bad for a president’s party. You couple that with the fact so many seats are defended by Democrats in red states where Mitt Romney did very well against the president, double-digits in most cases, and there’s no outcome in November that anybody could say would be great for Democrats, except for barely holding onto the Senate.”

…it’s that the sight of Jay Carney saying something clearly and straightforwardly (and, frankly, accurately) is a kind of a new sensation for everybody. It’s like watching a moose tap-dance; theoretically it’s possible, but you still kind of have to stare.  I’d feel bad about being rude like that; but, hey, Jay Carney.

Moe Lane

PS: I understand that it’s currently fashionable to manage expectations about the Senate.  Oh, who am I kidding? It’s always fashionable.  Win or lose, every two years it’s like clockwork.

The day that The New Republic snapped like a rotten twig. #kssen

You have to laugh, because the alternative is to… well, laugh. In that way that makes people nervous.

tnr

…said method of ‘voter suppression’ being ‘forcing Kansas Democrats to confront the fact that they nominated an absolutely horrible candidate for Senate.’ Amusingly, at this moment TNR’s own comments section (link below) is throwing tomatoes at the author; this will change, but in the meantime… chortle. Just not in a fashion that will have your neighbors call the cops.

Via