Midterm Elections 2010: American voters have rejected Barack Obama

A thumping. That’s George W. Bush’s word, but it describes what happened to his successor Barack Obama’s Democratic party in the congressional and state elections on Tuesday. Republicans ousted Democrats from six Senate seats - ordinarily a good haul for an out of office party in an offyear election. But that is being depicted as something of a failure, since they failed to win seats in West Virginia, California, Nevada and Colorado which seemed within reach. That left them four seats short of a majority in the Senate.

But they didn’t fall short in the House of Representatives. There they gained about 65 seats - the exact number will be determined by final canvasses and perhaps recounts - the biggest turnover of House seats since 1948. There will be more Republicans in the next House, about 244 Republicans to 196 Democrats, than at any time during their 12 years in the majority after their 1994 breakthrough; more than in any House since the one elected in 1946.Washington insiders of all political stripes agree that if your party could control only one house of Congress, you would prefer to have a majority in the House rather than the Senate, just as any Brit understands that you would rather have a majority in the Commons than in the Lords. The House has rules which enable the leaders of the majority party to determine which bills come to the floor and what amendments, if any, members will be allowed to vote on. Time for debate is strictly limited. Seldom was outgoing Speaker Nancy Pelosi, and seldom were any of her five predecessors, defeated on any significant vote (speakers are party leaders, not neutral arbiters as in the House of Commons).

The Senate is different. Debate proceeds only when the majority leader obtains unanimous consent; non-germane amendments can be offered and must be voted on pretty much any time; a supermajority of 60 out of 100 votes is needed for approval of most significant legislation. So the contrast is clear. A strong speaker can control the House. No one can control the Senate.

The driving force in the new House Republican majority will be upstart Republicans elected with the support of Tea Party movement backers, determined to roll back the Obama Democrats’ vast increase in the size and scope of government and eager to repeal the Obama health care legislation even though a presidential veto is assured. The new Speaker, John Boehner (pronounced BAYner), one of 12 children in a working class family who was a conservative rebel himself when he was first elected to the House 20 years ago, has been busy running to try to get ahead of the herd which he is supposed to lead.

Boehner can do bipartisan legislation - he was the lead House Republican putting together the 2001 education bill supported by George W. Bush and Edward Kennedy—but he will spend most of his time staking out partisan ground. Extending all the Bush tax cuts, even those on miscreants making more than $250,000 a year, is a first order of business; they expire January 1. Rolling back government spending to 2008 levels, a promise in the House Republican leaders’ Pledge to America issued last September, will take more work. The election results establish conclusively that the Obama Democrats’ big increases in government spending are highly unpopular. They don’t necessarily establish that spending cuts of Osborneian magnitude will be popular.

Even so, Republicans would be foolish not to act on the assumption that voters want policies sharply different from those of the Obama Democrats. No other administration in recent memory has suffered such a repudiation in its first offyear elections. Franklin Roosevelt’s Democrats actually gained House seats in 1934, as did George W. Bush’s Republicans in 2002; John Kennedy’s Democrats came very close to doing so in 1962. Dwight Eisenhower’s, Richard Nixon’s and George H. W. Bush’s Republicans in 1954, 1970 and 1990 suffered small losses, as did Jimmy Carter’s Democrats in 1978.

(source:telegraph.co.uk)