Maine Had A Wave

Republicans in Maine did a lot of losing yesterday. Eric Brakey tried taking out Angus King and got 35.2% of the vote for his effort. Chellie Pingree was reelected to the House with 58.9% of the vote. Republican Mark Holbrook took just under a third of the vote-- 106,750 (32.3%). And in the second district, the race is too close to call, although it looks like Democrat Jared Golden may well replace Republican incumbent Bruce Poliquin. The Democrats also took control of the state Senate, winning at least 21 seats in the 35-seat chamber, and increased their majority in the state House, with at least 81 of the 151 seats. And... the day after termed out Governor Paul LePage announced he's had enough of Maine and is moving to Florida, the voters chose Democrat Janet Mills to replace him. She took 310,493 votes (51.1%) with Republican Shawn Moody, the Republican in the race, taking 261,353 votes (43.0%) In all, a very bad day for the GOP.

So no one should have been surprised today when she took one look at Trump's immediate steps to end the Mueller investigation and tweeted her disapproval:

Too late; the damage is down. She voted to confirm Kavanaugh and she cuddled up with Trump enough to make normal Mainers sick (literally and figuratively.

But now she's concerned? Was she not paying attention for the last coupla years? Who, oh, who could have guessed Trump would interfere with the investigation? Or that there is a single normal Trump would hesitate to break? Susan Collins is concerned. She's going to be a lot more concerned when she's on the ballot with him in 2020.

And what about Trump's threats today to "have" the Senate "investigate" Democratic members of Congress if any committees start investigating him, probably the top reason why millions of voters decided to replace Republicans with Democrats in the House. The New York Times reported that Trump said he would adopt a "warlike posture" towards the House Democrats if they did. "They can play that game, but we can play better because we have a thing called the United States Senate and a lot of questionable things were done between leaks of classified information and many other elements that should not have taken place... I could see it being extremely good for me politically because I think I’m better at that game than they are, actually, but we’ll find out."

It doesn't seem like any other Republicans are concerned about that or that Trump fired Sessions half a day after the midterms and replaced Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein with a stooge, Matthew Whitaker, to "oversee" Mueller and his team. Don't recall Whitaker? He was the one who wrote an OpEd last year claiming that if Mueller looked into the Trump crime family finances he would be "dangerously close to crossing" a red line.

Into the Swamp by Nancy Ohanian