While Democrats are confident they can take back the Senate in 2020, Democratic presidential candidates already have a plan to render Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) powerless if Republicans maintain control.
And Republicans are going to scream bloody murder about it.
During the 2018 Election, Democrats faced an uphill battle to retake the Senate because there were fewer Republican seats up for grabs. It’s a different ballgame in 2020, but it’s still possible that Republicans could hold on.
That scenario is precisely why Democrats are openly talking about what they plan to do if they control the White House while Republicans continue to have control in the Senate.
As it turns out, President Donald Trump himself has provided this plan and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) has already warned Republicans what’s going to happen.
According to a report by Politico, Democrats are going to ram their policies through via executive orders, only their orders will do good instead of harm.
“With Republicans likely to maintain control of the Senate in 2020 — and a new norm taking root after three successive administrations that aggressively wielded executive orders to make policy — Democratic candidates for president are starting to point more frequently to the ambitious things they’ll ram through on their own,” Politico wrote.
“That’s basically the only way to govern now,” Democratic strategist Andrew Feldman said. “It’s kind of a way of life. You can actually get a lot done, and as we’ve seen with the Trump administration, you can do a lot of harm.”
Again, this would likely be the Democrats’ only option to govern since McConnell has already declared that he will be the “grim reaper” of the Senate and kill every piece of Democratic legislation even if it’s wildly popular among a majority of Americans.
It’s clear that Republicans will refuse to compromise with Democrats in any meaningful way, and that means Democrats have no choice but to make a Republican Senate irrelevant until Democrats can take majority control.
But there are other ways Democrats can push major policy reform, as Pelosi warned earlier this year.
When Trump declared a national emergency to deal with immigration issues, he opened the door for future Democratic presidents to declare national emergencies themselves to deal with crises America faces. While Trump’s border crisis is a crisis he manufactured, Democrats can declare real national emergencies to deal with healthcare, climate change and gun violence. Republicans will cry foul, but they only have themselves to blame because they refused to stand up in opposition to Trump’s national emergency declaration.
Trump and Republicans created a blueprint for Democrats. And even if Republicans take them to court, Democrats could just do what Trump does and ignore conservative judges, rending them irrelevant as well.
One way or another, whether it’s via executive orders or national emergency declarations, Republicans will come to regret letting Trump bypass Congress and the courts to enact conservative policies. Because not only will Democrats reverse all of Trump’s orders, they’ll sign new ones and declare national emergencies to deal with issues in ways Republicans won’t like at all. And a Democratic president could remain in office for eight years as Americans increasingly realize the positive impact of the Democratic plan, which could result in Democrats taking back the Senate to turn some, if not all, of these executive actions into law.
And Mitch McConnell won’t be able to do a damn thing about it.
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