Voters are understandably unhappy about inflation and gas prices, but electing a GOP House majority won’t solve those problems, and would unleash chaos.
The Democrats probably would fare better in pre-election polling if Biden were popular, and I would argue he deserves to be more popular than he is, if for no other reason than he’s doing a great job handling the Ukraine crisis. But he’s also getting a bum rap on inflation and gas prices, because he didn’t cause that, and it’s largely beyond his (or any president’s) control.
The best reason for Democrats to keep the House, though, is to maintain a functioning government during the next two years. Make no mistake, if they get control of even one branch of Congress, Republicans will try to shut down as much government as they can.
Writing in The Hill, former Clinton campaign strategist Donna Brazile says (here) this year’s GOP candidates for Congress are hiding their party’s real agenda behind bleating about inflation and gas prices. She points out that “complain[ing] about a problem and offer[ing] a ‘solution’ that won’t really solve anything” is an old GOP tactic dating back to Nixon and the Vietnam War. (As she says, his “secret plan to end the war” turned out to be “no plan.”)
“Republicans today,” Brazile writes, likewise are “trying to pull the wool over the eyes of Americans again, just as Nixon did, only this time by falsely claiming they have a plan to slow inflation.” What plan? The GOP agenda is always the same: Cutting taxes for the rich, and cutting programs that help the rest of us. In particular, they’re targeting Social Security and Medicare again. But these moves have no chance of surviving both the Senate and Biden’s veto pen.
There’s also another reason to keep House control out of GOP hands: They would use it to impeach Biden and a long list of administration officials, and conduct retaliatory investigations aimed at impeding ongoing efforts to prosecute those who committed criminal acts in furtherance of Republican attempts to overthrow our democratically-elected government after the 2020 election.
And they could — and likely will — cause real damage by instigating a debt ceiling crisis (read story here); even if that didn’t shut down the government, it would impede a good deal of government functioning. There’s also a palpable risk a GOP majority would curtail or cut off the U.S. military aid that’s keeping Ukraine in the fight.
On the inflation front, housing prices are coming down a little, but because of soaring mortgage rates, monthly payments are bigger than ever. America’s housing shortage was years in the making, and it will take years for new construction to catch up with population growth. That’s an economic, not political, process.
The Federal Reserve’s policies, and Congress’ pandemic relief checks, helped create this inflation. Want to give those checks back? Raising interest rates will bring down inflation, but at the expense of jobs; you usually can’t have full employment and low inflation at the same time. That’s the economics equivalent of a perpetual motion machine.
Pandemic-related supply impairments also have contributed to this inflation. Supply chains are improving, but there’s a worker shortage, which could be made better with more immigrant workers, but Republicans oppose that.
Republicans say they want U.S. energy independence, but they’re against alternative energy that reduces dependence on fossil fuels. They want more fracking, but that’s an expensive way to get oil from the ground, and if you want more fracked oil you have to pay for it at the pump. Cheap gas is incompatible with increasing oil supplies; cheap gas is how we got a tight oil supply in the first place. Oil companies couldn’t make money and disinvested in production.
I mention these things to point out that electing Republicans to Congress won’t make things better for ordinary voters focused on kitchen-table issues. Their agenda is helping rich people, not the middle and working classes. They don’t have a magic wand to wave over housing, grocery prices, or gas pumps.
All that electing a GOP congressional majority in 2022 will get us is angrier politics and more government dysfunction. It might, however, help the Democrats in 2024 if by then voters have had a bellyful of the chaos Republicans love to create.