Prepare Yourself For A Lame-Duck Session From Hell

Donald Trump has been dropping hints for weeks that he has a secret plan to escalate his illegal war after the midterms.

Now the White House has dispensed with subtlety.

“President Trump has rejected Iran’s proposal for a seven-day ceasefire and has told aides he expects to resume bombing Iran after the November midterms,” according to the Wall Street Journal.

The level of strikes Trump is contemplating couldn’t be determined. He is reluctant to resume major combat operations, the officials said, partly because the U.S. wants to reserve dwindling munitions for other contingencies. But Trump has also announced massive attacks to push through diplomatic deadlocks in U.S.-Iran negotiations, sometimes following through but always stepping back from his most audacious threats, including wiping out the entirety of Iranian civilization.

To the extent there is any public logic undergirding something that’s notionally secret, the idea is to try, once again, to bomb Iran into desperation, so that the Iranian leadership will agree to end the war on terms that aren’t completely humiliating to Trump and the United States.

But I believe there’s more to it. I believe this has as much to do with establishing the power balance in Washington for Trump’s final two years as it does with any bona fide military strategy. Indeed, it is likely just one piece of a larger plan—or at least a general inclination—to arrogate as much power as possible in this coming lame-duck period, so that Trump can remain largely unconstrained despite partisan turnover on Capitol Hill.

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This fits a pattern unique to Republicans. In the 2010 midterms, Republicans won a huge national landslide coincident with the decennial census, which allowed them to aggressively gerrymander congressional and state legislative districts across the country. Once that was accomplished they embraced state-level, one-party autocracy wherever they could. This required particularly radical action in purple states like Wisconsin and North Carolina, where Democrats were still perfectly viable statewide, but Republicans could win legislative supermajorities with half the overall vote or less. Democrats would invariably win executive offices like governor or attorney general or secretary of state, so Republicans began routinely passing lame-duck laws to strip those offices of power and reallocate the power to entities still under GOP control.

You should count on Trump and his allies to maneuver in a similar, but inverted way after these midterms, if they lose Congress as polls suggest: Change facts on the ground too substantially for a determined Democratic Congress to undo. Perhaps even arrogate power away from Congress altogether, with help from the Republican-controlled Supreme Court.

All against the backdrop of whatever efforts Trump and the GOP undertake to overturn election results.

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First, the war escalation.

The post-election bombing plan surely has as much to do with funding the war as with fighting it. The current budget expires on December 13, and there will be a Christmas government shutdown if the lame-duck Congress doesn’t pass either a stopgap spending bill, or an omnibus, to fund the government through September 2027, when the fiscal year ends. In either case, ending the Iran war would require the legislation to explicitly prohibit federal spending on unsanctioned military action against Iran. Republicans, who’ll still officially control Congress, will not include a measure like this in any must-pass bill. In other words, if Democrats choose to avoid a shutdown, they will have to vote to continue to fund the war for a period of time.

Trump surely thinks a hot war strengthens his hand, but he’d take extra joy in seeing Democrats sign on to a full fiscal-year budget. The signal would be clear: We are going to try to avoid hardball fights with you. We will assent to whatever status quo you have in place when the new Congress assembles in early January. We will allow you to deprive us of the power to check you for at least a full third of what’s left of your presidency.

The only two acceptable options: ...