This election isn't just about losing the Senate

You know it’s getting close to an election when every political junkie gets obsessed with polling, and men like Nate Silver and Sam Wang are spoken of in hushed tones usually reserved for sports stars and religious figures. As of today it’s not looking good for team D to hold the Senate and there are a lot of reasons why that’s a bad thing for America. Not the least of those is that the Republican party has lost its mind and they are likely going to elect some more fringe characters along the lines of Ted Cruz to the allegedly “greatest deliberative body in the world.”

I had been of the opinion that this wasn’t going to be such a travesty since it’s probably going to last only last two years, but the advent of this new ISIS war and the hysteria around immigration and Ebola means that the congress has quite a bit of leverage over the administration and could demand some very ugly concessions just to keep the government working in a time of crisis. (Yes, they will do that, don’t kid yourself.) So it’s probably a mistake to be sanguine about this election not being important. When the world is blowing up you really need the government to work properly.

As I said, the field is much more favorable to Democrats in 2016 so there’s something to hang on to if the worst happens. But this story from Mother Jones about the continuing rightward turn in the state legislatures is enough to give you nightmares. Republicans already hold total power in 23 states and are about to take control of 2 more. And let’s just say they aren’t exactly Eisenhower Republicans. Across the country where they’ve won full control, they’ve tried to enact as extreme an agenda as they can get away with. And when you have all three branches, as many of them do, the agenda is very extreme indeed.