I hope Chuck Schumer is enjoying his time as senate majority leader. It won’t last long. After next year’s elections, Republicans will regain control of the senate and not surrender that control for the rest of our lives.
The fact that Democrats control the senate today, and that Chuck Schumer is the majority leader instead the minority leader, is a fluke. It’s the result of Johnny Isakson retiring due to illness, Stacey Abrams working hard to get Georgia Democrats to the polls, and Donald Trump telling Republicans in Georgia not to vote in the two senate runoff elections.
As it is, even though Chuck Schumer is the majority leader, Democrats are a minority in the senate. There are only 46 Democratic senators. Angus King and Bernie Sanders are independents who usually side with the Democrats. But Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema are in every respect, except party affiliation, Republicans. Hence, the failure – so far – of the Democrats to advance an agenda in this congress.
This historical anomaly, which has Democrats in the “majority” in the senate will end with the midterm elections in November 2022. The Democrats face an enormous uphill struggle in those senate elections and have no plan for what to do about it. Under the best case scenario, the Democrats will lose between two and four seats in 2022. Then comes the real bloodbath – 2024. The same senators who were elected in 2018 will be up for re-election in 2024. You’ll recall that in 2018 anti-Trump fury drove Democrats to the polls in record numbers. Nationally, Democrats won 18 million more senate votes than did Republicans – and they still lost 2 senate seats. Get the picture?
If 2024 is just a normal year in which Democrats win 51 percent of the two-party vote, they will lose 6 to 8 more senate seats.
This is the reality: Because of the way the senate is structured — geography over population — Democrats are likely to win more than 50 percent of the vote in the next two senate elections and end up with only 41 or 42 seats in the senate. And that minority status will last forever.
Faced with this calamity, the Democrats are doing nothing. As Ezra Klein has written, “The Democrats are sleepwalking into catastrophe.”
Today, the Democrats control the White House, the senate, and the house. This is their last chance to head off their own political extinction. They need to use this full control of the government to pass a package of democracy reforms to make voting fairer and easier, to make Puerto Rico and Washington, D.C. states, and to consolidate North and South Dakota into one state. But they’re doing none of these things, or anything else, to remain relevant going forward.
I’ve written previously in these pages about the flaws in our constitution which Republicans have ruthlessly exploited to end democracy in this country, and, in spite of their minority status, seize political power. I’ve also written about the end of our democracy when Donald Trump is re-elected in 2024. Our anti-democratic constitution has driven us into this dead-end alley. The choices facing the country are to do nothing and allow the Republican/Trump Party to end democracy on their terms, or to head off that calamity by restructuring our constitution and system of government on democratic terms.
