Maintaining Democratic control of the Senate was an uphill battle even before the debates began. With a one-seat majority, Democrats are trying to defend 23 seats to the Republicans’ 11. The Democratic races include three seats in states that Trump won in 2020 (Jon Tester in Montana, Sherrod Brown in Ohio, and the seat vacated by Joe Manchin III in West Virginia) and five seats in states that Joe Biden won by three points or less. While it’s conceivable that the Senate could stay in Democratic hands, it’s looking increasingly unlikely.
The House is a different story. There are 220 Republicans and 213 Democrats in the House, with two vacancies. Democrats need four more seats to reclaim their majority. Seventeen of the Republican-held seats are in districts won by Biden, so there’s a good chance House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (Dynamo, NY) will take the speaker’s gavel in January.
And that’s where Bennet’s point matters: A Democratic-led House would be the firewall against a second Trump term and Trumpism. The only firewall. It’s scary to imagine what it would be like without it. And it must be a factor in the party’s deliberations about the future of a Biden presidency.
The same situation existed during the first two years of President Trump’s term, but with a difference. Then, despite President Trump’s great displeasure, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) maintained the filibuster. In fact, he didn’t have the votes to stop it. Who thinks the next Republican Senate will maintain the 60-vote threshold? Neither do I. Another check on presidential power is gone.
That leaves the House of Representatives, where Democrats are the only stop on any legislative issue: immigration, tax cuts, Social Security and Medicare, climate change, withdrawal from NATO, etc. Consider the insanity of the current House majority and what they could accomplish with a filibuster-free Senate and a Trump White House.
“A Trump presidency would be a disaster, and it would be even more of a disaster if there wasn’t a legislative branch to delay what needs to be done,” one House Democratic leader told me on Wednesday.
Here the self-interest of House Democrats and the national interest coincide: Most of them occupy safe seats, but all of them are eager to regain the majority, and my reporting suggests that most believe that Biden’s nomination makes that less likely.
This is the hidden meaning behind former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s remark on Wednesday that “it’s up to the president to decide whether he wants to run.” It’s as if Biden has not made it clear he intends to hang in there until the end. Pelosi’s message to the soldiers is “it’s not over yet.”
That’s why I was so pleased to hear Bennet highlight what’s at stake in November: It’s both obvious and underestimated. He stopped short of calling on Biden to back out, but the implication was clear.
Bennet is no bomb thrower. He’s smart (a Yale Law School graduate and editor-in-chief of the Yale Law Journal) and politically savvy (a former campaign manager for the 2020 Senate Democrats’ presidential run). He’s respectful, dedicated, responsible, moderate, and someone to be taken seriously.
I recall a visit to a senator’s office early in the Trump administration: Over a pile of books on the coffee table, Bennet began reading aloud from Sinclair Lewis’ 1935 dystopian novel, “It Can’t Happen Here,” about Buzz Windrip, a dangerously firebrand senator who becomes president-elect.
Bennet was infuriated by the uncanny resemblance between Windrip and Trump, and by his Republican colleagues’ seemingly easy acceptance of it. He couldn’t believe this was happening, and on Tuesday night it was clear he couldn’t believe it was happening again.
If, as Bennett suggests, Trump is to return to the White House, it’s essential to maintain a bulwark against total Republican control. And that requires a sober assessment now of where the race is and what’s best to protect the country.
Because we now know that can It happens here, except this time it’s even worse.
