Original Coverage & Source Attribution: ca.news.yahoo.com
To give you an idea of how thoroughly Donald Trump and his Republicans were thumped in Tuesday’s U.S. midterm elections, consider that as of the writing of this column the Democrats hold 253 of 435 seats in the House of Representatives, the Republics hold just 161.
That leaves 21 seats still up for grabs, and all but a couple of those are leaning to the Democrats.
It’s reasonable to expect the Democrats to finish with a total of 265 or more.
That doesn’t come close to the record Democrats win of 333 to 89 in 1938 when Franklin Roosevelt was president. But it is the biggest spread in favour of the Democrats since 1988 when George H.W. Bush was elected.
It is the heaviest rebuke of a president and his policies in nearly 40 years.
It’s delightful to see. Trump has been the biggest bully, the crudest human and the worst chief executive in modern American history. He deserves a dramatic repudiation.
Canadians, particularly those who live in regions heavily impacted by Trump’s tariffs, should ring the bells that the tyrant is dead (at least politically).
The Democrats didn’t win the supermajority they would have needed to override any Trump vetoes without Republican help. If they want to repeal Trump’s punitive tariffs against Canadian goods and if Trump decides to veto their attempts, they will need 20-25 Republicans votes in the House and 12 to 14 in the U.S. Senate where the Democrats currently lead 54 to 44.
Incidentally, the Democrats will require the same number of Republic voters to remove Trump from office should the House vote to impeach him – for a third time.
Impeachment seems unlikely, however, it was clear in Tuesday’s results that Trump’s tariffs were a big reason for the Republican’s shellacking.
Most American voters displeased with the unaffordability of many goods understood tariffs better than Trump did. Trump has always believed tariffs were paid by the foreign country shipping goods to the U.S. To the average American voter, it was clear enough that tariffs were a tax they paid to keep imported goods out.
Given the key role of tariffs in Trump’s whoopin’, it should be possible to find a dozen or more GOP senators, especially from border states with a lot of manufacturing that is dependent on Canadian parts and material, who are prepared to vote against a presidential veto.
But the Republican’s renunciation by voters may not be as much good news for energy-producing provinces. A powerful wing of the Democratic caucus is anti-oil and anti-pipeline. Remember it was Democrat Barack Obama who paused construction of the Keystone XL pipeline and Joe Biden who killed it at the behest of their party’s environmental wing.
It may be even more difficult today that is was under those two presidents to increase Canadian oil exports to the United States because so many winning candidates on Tuesday are from the far-left Democratic Socialists of America rather than the mainstream Democratic party.
Those Democratic congressmen beholding to the United Auto Workers for instance (which opposed Trump’s tariffs) may find it easy to dismantle Trump’s ludicrous trade war while lefty Dems will use their power and influence to reduce oil consumption and pipeline construction.
The Democrats’ landslide may turn out to be better for central Canada than for the West.
This is more incentive for expanding pipeline capacity to the West and to the East to capture greater shares of Asian and European markets so Canad’a energy industry is not dictated to by radicals on the American left. (If we didn’t want our policies dictated by Donald Trump we should be no more eager to have it dictated by Michigan senator-elect Abdul El-Sayed or Congressional leader Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.)
Canadian sovereignty is Canadian sovereignty no matter who is in power in Washington, D.C.
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