Discussion:

Talk about a sticky wicket. This is a double-dawg dare. I don’t think, even Mitchy, will do it. You know, with such a huge mandate and all.

Goodbye, everything.

I really don’t think the GOP can keep it’s majority in the Senate in 2 years time. Democrats only need to flip 3 seats to regain the majority if I’ve counted correctly. Hopefully democrats will also keep the Executive branch. To regain a majority in the House will require grass roots work in redistricting congressional districts and getting voters energized enough to get them to the polls. Republicans have spent years doing redistricting all over the country and its paid off for them to the detriment of the country. Now we have a bunch of dysfunctional cretins in office that their Speaker and House Majority Leader cannot control. That crew is exactly why there has been no immigration bill for Obama to sign. That group thinks they are in office to block whatever Obama does and nothing else. They aren’t there to govern, to compromise, to do any of the traditional things the House does in running the country. Here’s what Rush Limbaugh said a day after the election:

“It is to stop Barack Obama. It is to stop the Democrats,” Limbaugh
said on his show Wednesday about Republicans’ agenda. “There is no
other reason why Republicans were elected yesterday. Republicans were not
elected to govern.”

“How can you govern with a president that is demonstrably lawless when
he thinks he has to be?” Limbaugh continued. “The Republican Party
was not elected to fix a broken system or to make it work. The Republican Party
was not elected to compromise. The Republican Party was not elected to sit down
and work together with the Democrats.”

Rush makes it pretty damned clear.

The real problem is the undemocratic way the Senate is elected. There should be one senator for every 3 million people. Then Los Angeles gets 3 and Wyoming and Montana get 1.

Of course he will. He will see it as a opportunity to make Reid look like a fool for not doing it in the first place.
The Dems can be their own worse enemy…

Not sure he will, precisely because the map makes it likely that things will indeed swing back. (Though I still wouldn’t hold my breath on single-payer.)

My only quibble with you is that McConnell probably realizes the odds of his being back in the minority come 2017 given the map (knock wood).

Go right ahead, Yertle. You and your party aren’t likely to be controlling the Senate after 2 years anyway.

If i was Harry, who is turning into a spiteful traitor, I would revert the rules back to 60. He still has the majority. Then let Mitch play games. Or should I say more games.

The GOP thanks you for your support.

Disagree. The Senate is to put all 2nd level administrative unit of the country (the states) on equal footing. The Senate was never indented to be proportionally representative and was key to getting the 13 independent states to form a Federal government.

(scroll)

I do not know which is worse. Watching this man run the Senate, or just plain seeing more than anyone ought to see of that simply insipid looking expression of his.
Elections have consequences. Starting the first week of the New year, lots of people who have forgotten those consequences will get two years of stark reminder.’
You can ignore the individual.
You can grit your teeth and try to set aside the lame brained look on that face.
'What no one can ignore is what people like this and their lame brains are about to try to do to those who have the least in this Nation, just so men like this can take the most for themselves.
Yes, America, here are your consequences,
All summed up in one face.
Enjoy it, America. You’ve earned it.

The problem will still be the congress. Congress is what is destroying this country. They are the problem.

As a KYian who has watched McConnell’s rise to power, I will say this: I suspect he’s going to be far more reasonable than Democrats could’ve imagined. As he’s demonstrated numerous times over the years, he has absolutely no problem saying one thing and doing the complete opposite. That’s what I suspect he’ll spend the next two years doing, complaining about Obama’s “radical liberalism” while secretly making deals to advance some of the president’s agenda. As I said in another post, I have no doubt this man wants his time as Majority Leader to look a lot more like Tip O’Neil’s than John Boehner’s. He doesn’t want to be the Senate version of a Bull Connor figure.

The funding fathers will stand for no less: if you have a mechanism to thwart the opposition, by the God of insider information why wouldn’t you force your paid-for congress to use it?

“…But will he make good on his threat?..”

He didn’t make a threat. He posed for the media.

It was the photo shoot before the one with the fluffy puppies.

Pretty please Mitch?
I’d love to see the filibuster put to bed. it’s been abused lately by …ummm… Mitch McConnell. Why should Every. Last. Vote. in the Senate require 60 votes? Well… to gum up the works and Mitch is the author.

Sure, and two operable words for Mitch and his Koch smoking pals: Veto Threat

The only agenda the depraved Republican Cult has is the one set by their Batshtcrazy Wingnut Wing, and that agenda is anti-affirmative and anti-progressive in all ways.  Their odious fing party right now is nothing but a bundle of all the resentments, fears and hatreds of all the people in this country that history has passed by.  They want to repeal a whole lot of things, the last two centuries of human progress first of all.
The filibuster is purely a privilege the majority grants the minority and it’s a privilege that can be withdrawn anytime, and therefore is not a power, not something that can be used to threaten or promise anything.  The very least threat from the filibuster to anything the majority wants, and if that majority is sufficiently ruthless, the privilege is nuked in a matter of seconds.
The power of the Presidential VETO is the real firewall to McConnell. He’ll threaten to end the filibuster if pushed by his TEAliban Caucus, but it serves him little to end it openly and quickly to pass bills that will only fall under a presidential veto. And the landscape looks bleak for the GOP in 2016, as things now stand, even worse in some respects than it did for the Democrats in Nov. And payback would be a bitch indeed if the fall of the GOP is as bad as many predict in 2016.
So now he will try to peel off a few DINOs for some “bipartisan” measures to send to the President for any number of bullsh*t measures and laughable “reasonable” changes in taxes, trade agreements…etc. and hope to get the President to accept them. Barring that, McConnell will do just about anything he can to cause damage to an Administration he hates blindly and a President that he certainly hates more than he loves this republic.

Read Elizabeth Warren’s op-ed from Nov. 7 in the Wash Post.  She notes that lobbyists were already lining up wholesale to “get something done.”
 I’d rather have fu*king gridlock than see any part of the Tea Party agenda become law.  It will be fascinating to see how McConnell (who has blasted the Tea Party when it suited him and his bid for reelection) deals with the lunatics when he’s given the gavel to “govern.”