{"id":324704,"date":"2022-11-11T19:20:20","date_gmt":"2022-11-12T00:20:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.sgtreport.com\/?p=324704"},"modified":"2022-11-11T11:32:53","modified_gmt":"2022-11-11T16:32:53","slug":"chris-macintosh","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.sgtreport.com\/2022\/11\/chris-macintosh\/","title":{"rendered":"The Election Won’t Change Much in DC. The Real Battle Is Now in the States."},"content":{"rendered":"

by Ryan McMaken, Mises Institute<\/a>:<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

The votes are still being counted, but one thing is already clear: very little will change in Washington after this election.<\/p>\n

The House of Representatives will likely be controlled by Republicans, but the majority enjoyed by the GOP in the House will be small. This will provide a veto over some of the worst legislation being pushed by the Biden administration, but history has made it abundantly clear that the GOP is more than willing to compromise and \u201cwork with\u201d Democratic administrations rather than simply kill bills.<\/p>\n

TRUTH LIVES on at\u00a0https:\/\/sgtreport.tv\/<\/a><\/p>\n

As for the US Senate, we\u2019re still waiting on the results in Nevada and Arizona. Georgia is headed to a runoff election. But it\u2019s clear that the Senate will again be close to a 50\u201350 split. If the GOP manages to eke out a majority, that will help sink some of the worst legislation and some of the worst presidential appointees. But the direction of policy will not fundamentally change.<\/p>\n

After all, so much of federal policy is now determined by the executive branch that moderate changes in party leadership in Congress will do very little to change the course of the nation\u2019s administrative agencies such as the EPA, the IRS, and the FBI. These agencies have immense power over the daily lives of countless Americans, yet even sizable majorities of so-called conservatives have shown little stomach to rein in this power. Certainly, the small GOP majority now headed for the House will do little.<\/p>\n

From Global Warming to Money Printing to Foreign Policy, Expect Little Change<\/h4>\n

This all combines to mean we should expect very little change on policies at the federal level. For example, we can expect to keep hearing plenty about the evil of fossil fuels. The administration will continue to press for less drilling for oil and gas, and the war on coal will continue. The administration will continue to issue new edicts for \u201cfighting global warming.\u201d This, of course, will continue to drive up the cost of living.<\/p>\n

On foreign policy, it was clear nothing much would change short of an overwhelming victory by \u201cAmerica First\u201d types in Congress. That hasn\u2019t happened, so we can expect more of the same foreign interventionism we\u2019re seeing now. The US regime will add to the $65 billion it has already sent to Ukraine and will continually ratchet up its involvement in the region as it recently did with a deployment of US troops near the Ukraine border. Even worse, the US will likely continue to flirt with nuclear war, as the regime\u2019s new National Defense Strategy document has given the Pentagon\u00a0more leeway<\/a>\u00a0in using nuclear arms. The US will not any time soon remove the approximately nine hundred American troops that are currently conducting a regional occupation in Syria.<\/p>\n

Naturally, as far as social spending goes, we can expect zero change. Under Donald Trump, Republicans signed off on massive new spending increases and were headed toward approving trillion-dollar deficits even before 2020. With covid, of course, spending exploded even more, and only a small handful of Republicans expressed doubts. (Trump naturally\u00a0threw a tantrum<\/a>\u00a0about even this small bit of opposition.) The only disagreements we\u2019ll see in Washington in the next two years will be over\u00a0how\u00a0<\/em>exactly to run up the next massive annual deficit.<\/p>\n

Indeed, if the economy continues to slide as we\u2019re now seeing it do\u2014with\u00a0thousands of new layoffs<\/a>\u00a0in the\u00a0tech sector<\/a>\u00a0just this week and with real estate falling\u2014we can expect a new bipartisan consensus in Washington calling for a wide variety of new \u201cstimulus\u201d programs. Neither party will want to be seen as the party of austerity.<\/p>\n

The Biggest Changes Will Be at the State Level<\/h4>\n

While Washington will keep up with the same disastrous policies, the real change we\u2019ll see will be at the state level. The GOP\u00a0did not do especially well with state level offices<\/a>\u00a0in this election, and the Republicans lost control of legislative chambers in at least Michigan, New Hampshire, and Pennsylvania. On the other hand, the GOP gained supermajorities in both the house and senate in Florida, plus supermajorities in the state senates of North Carolina, Wisconsin, and Iowa. Moreover, Nevada\u2019s state house is trending toward the GOP. Republicans still control a majority of statehouses and also added to the tally of GOP-controlled states in recent cycles prior to 2022.<\/p>\n

What all this likely means is a continued divergence between places like Washington State, New York State, and California, on the one hand, and Florida, Texas, and Ohio, on the other. On matters like abortion, schools, immigration, guns, and energy policy, the differences between the two blocs will only continue to grow. Covid helped illustrate the importance of state-level policy and the very different legal environments that actually exist between so-called red states and blue states. This has not been forgotten, and many state policy makers will increasingly see themselves as the last defense against federal power. As one GOP\u00a0operative put it<\/a>\u00a0in Politico: \u201cWith minimal gains at the federal level, the Republican power we held and gained last night in the states will be all the more important for stopping Joe Biden\u2019s disastrous agenda.\u201d<\/p>\n

Ronald Brownstein at CNN, who clearly disapproves of red states\u2019 efforts to separate themselves from federal political trends, noted this in a column titled \u201cRed States Are Building a Nation within a Nation<\/a>.\u201d He writes:<\/p>\n

Red states, supported by Republican-appointed judges, are engaging in a multi-front offensive to seize control of national policy even while Democrats hold the White House and nominally control both the House and Senate. The red states are moving social policy sharply to the right within their borders on issues from abortion to LGBTQ rights and classroom censorship, while simultaneously working to hobble the ability of either the federal government or their own largest metro areas to set a different course.<\/p>\n

To a degree unimaginable even a decade ago, this broad offensive increasingly looks like an effort to define a nation within a nation\u2014one operating with a set of rules and policies that diverge from the rest of America more than in almost any previous era.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Brownstein frames it all as a sinister plot against the Left\u2019s favorite interest groups, and he no doubt exaggerates the magnitude of it all. But he is right that red states\u2019 governments do have the ability to set up obstacles to federal policy. Gone are the days when state governments simply fell in line every time the federal government demanded some new capitulation. One example of this is the recent conflict between the Biden administration and the Arizona government on the matter of border security. The state government had placed shipping containers along the border to form a makeshift wall. The administration demanded their removal. The state\u00a0refused to move them<\/a>.<\/p>\n

National Divorce Is Inevitable<\/h4>\n

We should expect more state governments to simply refuse to play along with federal policy. Democrat-controlled state governments have done this for years, of course, with policies like creating \u201csanctuary cities\u201d for immigrants or legalizing recreational marijuana (the latter has not become virtually mainstream thanks to\u00a0state<\/em>\u00a0level resistance).<\/p>\n

But the fact is that state governments do have the ability to push back against federal policy makers. States can interfere with federal education policy. States can refuse to enforce federal gun laws. States can make their own abortion policies. States can refuse to do what they\u2019re told.<\/p>\n

Over time, this will build further cultural and legal differences between states, just as the covid lockdowns and mask mandates made it clear that there were real differences between states. As the differences become more evident, this will even encourage residents to relocate to places that better suit their political preferences. For example, we\u2019re even now hearing that American leftists are\u00a0leaving<\/a>\u00a0the lefty enclave of Austin, Texas. It turns out Austin is in the middle of Texas, and Texas has become too \u201cred\u201d for some people. It\u2019s hard to guess how numerous these cases really are, of course, but relocating for political reasons does appear to be far more meaningful than it used to be.<\/p>\n

Read More @ Mises.org<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

by Ryan McMaken, Mises Institute: The votes are still being counted, but one thing is already clear: very little will change in Washington after this election. The House of Representatives will likely be controlled by Republicans, but the majority enjoyed by the GOP in the House will be small. This will provide a veto over […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[142032],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sgtreport.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/324704"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sgtreport.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sgtreport.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sgtreport.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sgtreport.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=324704"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.sgtreport.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/324704\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sgtreport.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=324704"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sgtreport.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=324704"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sgtreport.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=324704"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}