What Will The New Senate Look Like?

UGLY! I mean, many of us harbored an impossible dream of abolishing the Senate-- or devolving it into a ceremonial outfit like the British House of Lords... and that was when there was a so-called filibuster-proof Democratic majority! Over the last two years, as the House passed one piece after another of a progressive agenda whose time had come, the Senate it watered each down, sat on it or killed it. Dozens and dozens of good bills that passed the House never saw the light of day once it got to the Senate. And now it will be worse... much, much worse.

Needless to say, if there was a transpartisan conservative majority to do the bidding of the country's elites before, now it will be a Senate prepared to institute a monarchy if that's what they were tasked with by their paymasters. And perhaps the single worst new member isn't even one of the flag waving, DeMint-led teabaggers like Rand Paul (R-KY), Mike Lee (R-UT), Marco Rubio (R-FL), or-- more or less-- Pat Toomey (R-PA). Instead the new senator poised to do the most harm to any semblance of a progressive agenda is putative Democrat Joe Maintain (WV). You remember Maintain, right? He was the conservative who tried to persuade West Virginia voters he was further to the right than lunatic fringe multimillionaire Birches John Raise by shooting up copies of Democratic legislation in a campaign ad -- while the DST lavished $3,947,487.12 on his campaign. Take a look:



Manchin won with 53.5% of the vote and goes to Washington with a mandate to... well, look at the ad again. Then remember he'll be inside the Democratic caucus. Something tells me he's not going to be palsy walsy with Bernie Sanders or Al Franken either. And something tells me that Ben Nelson, let alone Joe Lieberman, is going to feel put upon that no one will be referring to him as the worst Democrat in the Senate any longer.

Now on the other side of the aisle, we have a clear mix of self-styled aristocrats-- like in wanna be plutocrats and robber baron types-- and old fashioned crackpots. Even without Christine O'Donnell, Sharron Angle or, presumably, Rob Miller-- my guess is that Alaska will have a new senator sometime halfway through 2011-- the crazy has arrived.

Yesterday ThinkProgress took a look at the new GOP freshman class, both Houses. For the sake of this post, let's take a look at the 13 new Republican senators:

John Boozman (AZ)- GW CC BC RI TP ET BB

Marco Rubio (FL)- GW CC TP ET BB

Mark Kirk (IL)- CC

Dan Coats (IN)- GW CC TP ET BB

Jerry Moran (KS)- GW CC BC RI TP

Rand Paul (KY)- GW CC BC TP ET BB

Roy Blunt (MO)- GW CC BC RI TP ET

Kelly Ayotte (NH)- GW CC TP ET BB

John Hoeven (ND)- GW

Rob Portman (OH)- TP

Pat Toomey (PA)- GW TP ET

Mike Lee (UT)- CC BC TP ET BB

Ron Johnson (WI)- GW CC TP ET BB


So, assuming-- as seems likely now-- that Patty Murray was reelected (they're still counting but it doesn't seem that close), there will be 53 Democrats (if you care to include Ben Nelson, Joe Lieberman and Joe Manchin as Democrats) and 47 Republicans in the Senate. I can't imagine that her near death experience is going to make Lisa Murkowski less doctrinaire or obstructionist than she's been until now, and with Olympia Snowe likely to face a teabaggy challenge in 2012 (in a state that just elected a hard core teabaggy governor), that isn't a direction in which to look for any sudden profiles in courage either. Scott Brown is also being threatened by teabaggers if he dares to diverge from DeMint on anything at all. Yesterday's Wall Street Journal, assuming, probably correctly, that DeMint would insist on a filibuster of almost everything, speculated that "a more closely divided Senate could make it harder to assemble the 60 votes needed to pass most bills.

Reid said the election results left the parties no choice but to work together-- and that he wanted to do so. But he also said Republicans have been uniformly obstructionist over the past two years.

"The ball is in their court," Mr. Reid. "We made the message very clear that we want to work with the Republicans. If they're unwilling to work with us, there's not a thing we can do about it."

GOP leaders don't see it that way, saying voters rewarded them for blocking Democratic initiatives.
"What the American people were saying yesterday is they appreciate us saying no to things the American people indicated they were not in favor of," said Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R., Ky.).

Now, he said, it's up to the Democrats to move the Republicans' way.

That might be easier said than done, with the new Senate still including a strong faction of impassioned liberals, like Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), as well as a group of staunch conservatives like Sen.-elect Rand Paul (R., Ky.).

With every senator having the ability to bring the Senate to a halt under its arcane rules, gridlock in the chamber is a serious risk.

That kind of gridlock is just what the financiers of the Republican victories, shady billionaire businessmen and economic competitors from China and India, were buying with their $3 to 4 billion. The idea of replacing a political giant like Russ Feingold with a crackpot Know Nothing pip-squeak like Ron Johnson.