On November 8th, the US will hold
475 separate federal elections.
If you vote in the US, you can vote in at least one of them.
The results will determine who controls these:
the two houses of Congress.
After the 2020 election, Democrats controlled the House of Representatives
and the Senate, as well as the Presidency.
The three bodies that have to align
if you want to make new laws.
And they did.
But even when government is split between the parties.
Each one of these bodies still holds
tremendous power on its own.
So the importance of what this picture looks like
can't be overstated.
And each one of these three outcomes
contains a very different story
about the next 2 years in the US.
Scenario 1: Democrats keep both houses.
This is not considered the most likely outcome.
The Democrats have gotten a ton passed in the last two years.
My name's Li Zhou.
I am a politics reporter at Vox.
I've been covering the hill for over 6 years now.
So if Democrats get to stick with this arrangement... then what?
One of the big things that they've said they'll do
is codify Roe V. Wade into federal law,
and that would mean
a national protection for access to abortion.
Paid family leave, subsidies for child care,
universal pre-K, the PRO act which protects people's ability
to organize and unionize.
But there's a catch to all this.
And it's connected to the reason Democrats haven't done any of it yet.
These laws are subject to a rule the Senate has
(It's called the filibuster)
that requires not 51 out of 100 votes to pass a law...
but 60 out of 100.
And Democrats want to change that rule.
Just... not all Democrats.
They have this 50/50 very narrow majority
but they only have 48 who are actually down to change the rules.
And so they need at least 52,
is kind of the magic number
that Democrats have been hoping for, in order to both
change the rules, and then pass a lot of the bills
that we've talked about.
Scenario 2: Republicans win the House of Representatives.
When the House is controlled by a different party
than the presidency or the Senate.
That gives them a lot of leverage.
My name's Dylan Matthews.
I'm a reporter at Vox.
They also have a lot of control over investigations.
They can run committees.
They can subpoena people.
They can make people testify. They can dredge up documents.
We can see that by going back
to the last time the government looked like this.
One thing that the GOP majority
in 2011 and onward did was investigate
the Obama administration extensively.
The "fast and furious" gun smuggling scandal,
on the Benghazi scandal after those attacks happened in 2012.
"-Easily obtained...." "Well, but Senator, again—"
"Within hours, if not days."
After Democrats won in 2018...
They also launched a bunch of investigations
into the Trump administration, one of which
culminated in the first impeachment.
Investigations can matter a lot.
More often than not, they're kind of a sideshow.
My sense ahead of time
is that that lever of power will be less important
than the ability to block must-pass legislation
on spending and the debt ceiling.
The debt ceiling fight in 2011
was one of the first stories I covered at The Washington Post.
The debt ceiling is this limit
on how much the federal government can borrow.
Almost the entirety of the international financial system
is built on the idea that US Treasury bonds are a safe asset.
Once you hit the debt ceiling, they are no longer a low risk asset.
That would lead to investments,
and borrowing, and homes and everything
being way more expensive throughout the world
which would be a pretty major financial crisis.
You need the House and Senate and the President
to agree for the debt ceiling to be raised.
The most dramatic example of that
happened in the summer of 2011.
The debt ceiling was coming due in early August.
That gave House Speaker John Boehner and members of his caucus
incredible leverage. Unless the Obama administration
was willing to let the debt ceiling be breached,
they kind of had to come to a deal.
Ultimately, $2.1 trillion in cuts
to the National Parks, Head Start programs, the FBI
National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation.
One area of the budget is pandemic prevention.
The choice that was made to invest a lot less
in preventing pandemics as a part of this deal..
It certainly couldn't have helped.
I mostly expect this Congress to be more hard-line,
in terms of their demands and unwillingness to compromise.
Scenario 3: Republicans win the House and the Senate.
The Senate has to confirm any federal judge.
I'm Ian Millhiser, I'm a lawyer
and I cover the Supreme Court for Vox.
The president nominates
anyone who's going to be appointed to the federal bench
but they don't get the job
unless a majority of the Senate votes
to confirm that individual.
There's a little more than 800
active judges in the federal system.
There are district judges who try cases,
Court of Appeals or circuit judges.
And then there's the Supreme Court.
The last time we had a Democratic president and a Republican Senate
was in 2015 and 2016.
Under Barack Obama, the Republican Senate
basically hit stop on Supreme Court confirmations
and on nearly all Court of Appeals confirmations.
And then, of course, what happened was
Republicans held all those seats open
until Donald Trump got into office
and then filled them with Republicans.
Trump's judges have overruled Roe v. Wade,
which is the reason why abortion is now illegal in many US states.
A sweeping reinterpretation
of the Second Amendment, our firearms amendment.
And now judges are striking down gun laws left and right.
A wholesale attack on voting rights,
particularly on the Voting Rights Act, which is the law that prevents
race discrimination.
At the lower court level,
we just had three Trump judges declare the entire
Consumer Financial Protection Bureau unconstitutional.
If Republicans take the Senate
then they can block the confirmation of any judge.
If you hold those seats open,
they're still vacant when a Republican comes to office,
and then the Republican can fill them.
The Republican Party
which is an institution that wants power...
has figured out that if it controls the judiciary,
it can gain, potentially, a permanent veto power
over any law that's enacted
over any regulatory policy that's enacted
regardless of who controls the White House
and regardless of who controls the Congress.
They're going after voting rights hard.
And if you don't have the right to vote
then you don't have any rights.
Eventually, the voters who've been disenfranchized
don't have any recourse
because they have no way to change who controls the government.
And the government is controlled by people who don't share their interests.
So that's the worst case scenario.
Right now, we're still at the point where
you know, elections are the best method that can be used
in order to reverse America's democratic decline.
Out of the 475 individual
House and Senate elections that will decide control of Congress...
most of them are not close races.
The election will really be decided by these races...
only about 1 out of 7 House elections
and just a handful of Senate races.
And so if you live in one of those places...
it means you have a lot of power over which one of these we choose.