Five global stories to watch as the US waits for midterm election results
The Democrats’ victory in the 2018 midterms in the United States has given their party a majority in the lower house, but what have they done with it?
That’s what voters, media and the rest of the wider community want to know. The only real way to find out, however, is for the two parties to give a reason for themselves.
As of Wednesday morning, the Democrats have a 55.2 seat majority in the House of Representatives, and they seem intent on using that majority to work on legislating into action what should have been their first-priority after the last election. For the past two years, they’ve focused on trying to repair their congressional majority, which they’ve spent most of their time in office fixing.
Instead of using the political capital that’s been accumulated during this session, they’ve turned their attention to passing legislation that’s more aimed at pleasing their constituents than at actually fixing problems for them. What’s more, it’s led them to spend more and more money rather than getting things done at a political level.
Meanwhile, the Republican party seems to have finally given a reason for itself and decided to make the most of their House majority. By not wasting the political capital on legislation for which they’ve already achieved something (i.e. the first-year of their term when they passed almost every piece of legislation that year for which they needed to get consent from their fellow-members) and instead focusing on trying to pass legislation that would benefit their constituents, they’ve decided to use this opportunity for legislative action to go back to what was their first priority in Congress: doing what’s best for the people they represent.
They went through the state houses to repeal the Affordable Care Act, roll back rules on public employee pensions, abolish the Department of Education and ban sanctuary cities. Just in case the Democrats decided not to take things further, they also gave themselves permission to do so.
In the past few days, they’ve started looking at the state houses and the state legislatures to repeal the Affordable Care Act and roll back regulations. That’s also a priority that the Democrats
