After Barack Obama’s victory over Mitt Romney in yesterday’s Presidential election, approximately half of America is jubilant, and half is depressed. As a faithful reader of this blog, I’m guessing that you’re more likely to be in the latter category than in the former. That being said, here are my thoughts.
After billions of dollars being spent (mostly on negative T.V. ads), after spending and debt was allowed to increase to historic and dangerous levels, after unemployment remained at crushing levels, after government growth continued at alarming levels, and after a Harry Reid-controlled Senate failed to pass a budget for four years, not much changed as a result of last night’s election.
At the Presidential level, Mitt Romney carried the states that John McCain won, plus Indiana and North Carolina. Obama won the states he’d won last time and carried all the battleground states that were supposedly in play, (including Ohio), albeit by narrower margins. In the Senate, a few faces will change, but the make-up has changed very little. (Harry Reid’s still in control.) And the last bastion of Republican influence at the federal level is the U.S. House of Representatives, where the Democrats needed to win 25 seats to give the gavel back to Nancy Pelosi. It looks like they’ll fall far short of that, with a net gain of only a handful of seats.
There will be considerable pressure from political pundits and “thoughtful” people for the House to go along with tax increases now, in return for spending restraint in the future (which would never come.) This must be avoided at all cost. As I’ve always said, the problem is NOT that we’re undertaxed, the problem is that government overspends.
The thing I find perhaps most disconcerting about an Obama second term is that he will now have four more years to appoint U.S. Supreme Court and other federal judges (who serve for life.) In his first term, Obama replaced two retiring liberal Justices with two liberals. If one of the conservatives, or the one moderate (Justice Kennedy) goes, liberals will control the Court. That would be a disaster.
On a personal basis, thank you for your support in re-electing me to the U.S. House of Representatives. With your help, we defeated my Democrat opponent by 21%: by 9% in Hamilton County and by 49% in Warren County. (Approximately two thirds of Hamilton County and all of Warren County is in my congressional district.)
As always, please let me know if you have any suggestions, or if I can be of any help. See you next week.
