Daniel McCarthy

What does it say about President Trump if Republicans lose control of the House of Representatives after the November 6 midterms? If your answer is that Trump is failure or Trump is a disaster for his party, then you have to say the same thing about President Clinton and President Obama, both of whom also lost the House in their first midterms. Here’s my prediction: the GOP will indeed lose control, but the swing to the Democrats will be smaller than the swing to Republicans was in 1994 (54 seats) or 2010 (63 seats). Trump will have outperformed Clinton and Obama, and on strictly empirical grounds — setting aside anti-Trump bias, including among NeverTrump media conservatives — any honest analyst will have to admit as much.

This article was originally published on Spectator USA. With the confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh, the Supreme Court has a solidly conservative majority for the first time since the New Deal. Just how conservative this new majority is remains to be seen: Chief Justice John Roberts disappointed the Republican right when he voted to uphold the legality of Obamacare in 2012. But if Roberts is no Antonin Scalia (the paragon of what most conservatives look for in a justice), he is no Anthony Kennedy, either. And with two of the four liberal justices on the court in their 80s, the prospect of a 6-3 or even 7-2 conservative majority is not a remote possibility. A second Trump term would almost certainly make it a reality.

Watch out, Twitter — Donald Trump doesn’t need you anymore. He now has his own Presidential Alert system that can send messages right to every cell phone in the country. Twitter allowed Trump to bypass the traditional media when he wanted to; the service is a sterling example of ‘disintermediation’ and the direct connection that can now be established between celebrities and the public. But with his new text alerts, Trump can well and truly speak directly to people without any fear of censorship by a tech zillionaire. Or at least he could if the Presidential Alert system actually were such a thing, and not just a 21st-century analogue to the dowdy old Emergency Broadcast System that used to transmit a beep to TVs and radios once a month.

‘There’ll be another woman.’ A friend of mine who has been in political journalism much longer than I have told me this weekend to expect another accuser against Brett Kavanaugh to come forward — and sure enough, the New Yorker on Sunday revealed one. Deborah Ramirez alleges that when they were students at Yale, a drunken Kavanaugh exposed himself to her at a party and touched her with his penis. As yet, however, Ronan Farrow and Jane Mayer write, ‘The New Yorker has not confirmed with other eyewitnesses that Kavanaugh was present at the party.

Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court nomination has suddenly turned into a political disaster that threatens to submerge the GOP’s hopes of long-term judicial realignment. The Washington Post this weekend published details about a previously anonymous allegation of sexual assault committed by Kavanaugh in his youth. The political implications are clear, even if everything else about the claim is hotly disputed: Kavanaugh’s nomination is punctured below the water line. A woman who knew Kavanaugh in his high school days, Christine Blasey Ford, has accused him of drunkenly assaulting her at a party, holding her down, tearing at her clothes, covering her mouth when she attempted to scream — in short, attempted rape.

Four years ago a seemingly invincible US senator came within a percentage point of losing his seat in an unexpectedly close election. Mark Warner was pretty moderate as far as Democrats go, a good fit for a state, Virginia, that had drifted out of the Republican column in the last two presidential elections and just elected a full slate of Democratic statewide officials a year before. But midterms are when presidents and their parties get rebuked, and Warner, a telecom millionaire who had once been tipped as presidential contender, took his support for granted. The Republican, lobbyist Ed Gillespie, was supposed to be hopeless, but he nearly claimed what was supposed to be a safe Democratic seat for the GOP.

There is a monumental hypocrisy at the heart of NeverTrump Republicanism. The president’s critics in his own party say that Trump is a danger to American institutions and the rule of law. Yet time and again, these opponents bend and break the rules of institutions stretching from the Republican Party to the federal government in an effort to sabotage the regular political process — a process whereby Republicans, and Americans in generals, have consistently repudiated the NeverTrumpers. They can’t win elections, so they can’t govern constitutionally. But they do everything in their power to seize the machinery of party and state nevertheless.

The most surprising political development of the day yesterday did not come in one of the three states that held primaries. Instead, while voting was still ongoing in Florida, Arizona, and Oklahoma, news broke that Sen. Rand Paul, a Republican from Kentucky, had endorsed former New Mexico governor Gary Johnson in Johnson’s bid for a Senate seat of his own. Senator Paul has libertarian affinities, but Johnson is running as a big-L Libertarian. After two stints as the Libertarian Party’s presidential nominee, Johnson is now its Senate nominee in the state he once governed. Is Paul delivering a vote of no confidence in his own party, the GOP?

In every revolution there are revolutionaries who love the old regime even as they tear it down. John McCain was a symbol of that. He stood for masculinity, anger, honor, and pain to a generation of Americans — roughly speaking, the Baby Boomers — who have spent their lives treating such things as a pathology. John McCain was an unmedicated American. He was a totem of military strength to a post-Vietnam media and political elite that accepts war (of the humanitarian variety) but not warriors. ​McCain the man is impossible to separate from his place in politics, and that’s a shame. As a man, he was brave. He was self-directed and defiant, traits that stood out in a gray Washington during his thirty years in the Senate.

Against all odds, Rand Paul is once again the most interesting man in politics. When TIME first called him that in 2014, the Kentucky senator looked to be a serious presidential contender. Now he’s become President Trump’s unlikeliest alter ego — a Republican who can say and do many of the same things the president likes to say and do, but with greater ideological focus and discipline. Nowhere is this more apparent than in foreign policy, where the senator has both the institutional independence and the philosophical self-assurance to fight battles that the president’s advisers don’t want Trump himself to fight. Russia is a case in point.

If Tuesday’s elections needed a slogan, it would be “make politics boring again.” In the hottest race of the night, the special election for Ohio’s 12th congressional district, Democrats failed to pull off an upset victory. Republican Troy Balderson, running to replace incumbent Republican Patrick Tiberi, squeaked out a one-point win over Democrat Danny O’Connor in a district that has reliably elected GOP congressmen since 1982. (It’s John Kasich’s old district.) Democrats take heart from the narrow margin—if Ohio 12 is this close, doesn’t that mean the Democrats will pick up less heavily Republican districts in November and cruise to control in the House of Representatives?Quite likely.

John Brennan had a tough time when he took his first CIA lie-detector test in 1980. He was asked a standard question as to whether he had ever belonged to an organisation dedicated to the overthrow of the United States government. Not quite, but almost: just four years earlier Brennan, then a student at Fordham University, had cast his first vote for president for the candidate of the Communist Party USA. Brennan had never been a party member—just a Communist voter. The CIA let him in. A little more than thirty years later, he was appointed by Barack Obama to lead the agency. But now, ex-CIA director Brennan is questioning the patriotism of Obama’s successor, accusing the president of being an agent of Moscow.

America is a free country in which the law criminalises almost everyone. The web of nanny-state regulations and bureaucratic technicalities is so dense that anyone can be snared. The law criminalises far more people and far more activities than prosecutors can possibly tackle. So they act on their discretion, and that discretion is often informed by political considerations. Prosecute a high-profile figure, and you can present yourself as David slaying Goliath.Donald Trump’s frankly political pardon of Dinesh D’Souza—admirably frank, even—should be less cause for outrage than the use of prosecutorial power to score partisan points. Not that D’Souza was a hapless innocent caught in the complexities of U.S. campaign law.

The 2018 midterm elections, like the 2016 presidential contest, are proving to be far more interesting than conventional wisdom ever suspected. Two years ago, pundits were sure that Trump would lose, right up to the early evening of election day. This year, the conventional wisdom has it that Democrats will take back control of at least the House of Representatives, probably by a landslide, if not the Senate as well. But two critical polling indicators suggest the GOP’s hand is getting stronger. President Trump’s approval ratings are solidly into the 40s in recent polls, and even hit 50 percent in the most in the Rasmussen survey last week (which, to be sure, has consistently shown better numbers for Trump).

John McCain is a victim of hypocrisy. His allies in Washington and admirers in the national media praise him as the conscience of the nation, even as they betray him in his last desperate battle against the normalisation of torture. After a White House communications staffer, Kelly Sadler, joked that McCain’s views don’t matter because “he’s dying anyway,” the senator’s pretend friends called for her firing. Her tasteless joke, badly received even among colleagues, provoked a degree of outrage from wonks and commentators unmatched by any such umbrage at the nomination of a woman implicated in torture and the destruction of evidence to head the CIA. For elite Washington, disrespectful words are worse than waterboarding.