There are no good outcomes for the GOP in Alabama.
The Washington Post’s Paul Kane notes that the GOP stands to lose no matter who wins today’s Alabama Senate race:
Kane’s argument, of course, only touches on part of the dilemma that Republicans face in the wake of tonight’s results. As I noted yesterday, a Moore victory would likely mean that he would end up becoming as much of a focus of the Democratic strategy in 2018 as Donald Trump is destined to be. Republican candidates for Senate, particularly those in the handful of states where Republican seats are potentially at risk such as Nevada and Arizona and those running to unseat Democrats in traditionally red states such as Montana and North Dakota will be put on the hot seat and forced to either associate themselves with Moore or distance themselves from him. Candidates for potentially vulnerable House seat are likely to face the same question even though Moore sits in a different chamber of Congress. This will happen not just due to the sexual improprieties that will continue to hang around Moore’s neck but also with the host of controversial statements that Moore and his supporters have made about Muslims, gays and lesbians, and others that Democrats would no doubt seek to attach to the Republican Party as a whole.
In addition to the consequences for candidates in 2018, a Moore victory will place Mitch McConnell and the Senate Republican Caucus in a bind. In the month since the allegations of sexual impropriety leveled against Moore, several Republicans have said that if he is elected then the Senate should send the allegations against him to the Ethics Committee while others have said that the Senate should essentially bypass the Ethics Committee process, which would take an extended period of time to complete, and move to expel Moore from the Senate. That move would require an affirmative vote from two-thirds of the membership of the Senate, meaning that at least nineteen Republicans would need to join with the Democrats in voting for expulsion. In that regard, it’s worth noting that a poll released this morning from Politico and Morning Consult shows that 61% of respondents say that Moore should be expelled from the Senate if he wins the election. This includes 77 percent of Democrats, 59 percent of independents and even 45 percent of Republicans. If Republicans fail to move against Moore should he win, then they will be painted as hypocrites. If they do try to expel him from the Senate, then they are likely to raise the ire of their own base and, most especially that segment of the base that is most loyal to the President. How they choose to act is likely to have real implications for the 2018 midterms.
While it would allow them to avoid the twin problems of having Moore hung like an albatross around their necks in 2018 and facing pressure to push him out of the Senate even while contemplating a rebellion from the base if they do, a Doug Jones victory would pose more practical problems for the GOP. As it stands, Republicans control the Senate by the slim margin of 52 seats to 48 seats for the Democrats. Losing Alabama would drop that majority to 51 seats. We’ve already seen in connection with both the debate over health care reform and the debate over tax reform, Republicans are at a point where they can ill afford to lose a single Republican Senator even in those situations where they don’t have to worry about a sixty-vote threshold. As things stand now, McConnell can still afford to lose two Senators and still get legislation passed with the Vice-President’s tie-breaking vote. If Jones wins, that margin would drop to a single vote. This would give individual Republican Senators who may be on the fence about particular pieces of legislation tremendous bargaining power and would make accomplishing anything in the Senate even harder than it already is at the moment.
Of course, Republicans have nobody to blame but themselves. The phenomenon that led to Roy Moore’s candidacy and his victory in the Senate primary are the same ones that resulted from the Republican Party’s ill-fated decision to make common cause with the Tea Party and other populist movements on the right, which in turn led to the rise of Donald Trump and the fact that the Republican Party has much less power than it seems to even though it controls both chambers of Congress and the White House. They fed the monster, mostly because it helped them win elections and fill their campaign coffers, and now they’re paying the price. I can’t say I feel sorry for them at all.
Sorry but from what I have been seeing in regards to GOP actually concerned about ethics issues. There has been no rally cry on anything ethical. The GOP has turned their heads and looked away as Their chosen members do anything that they want to win, the GOP is practicing a strategy of the “Ends justify the means.” They will continue until they lose power. Anyone that is expecting them to ethically cleanse themselves is sadly mistaken or living in a long ago past GOP era.
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