2020: America's Brexit 2.0

I apologize for my absence over the past two weeks. To paraphrase Professor Hinkle from the children’s Christmas cartoon classic “Frosty the Snowman,” I have been “busy, busy, busy.” While my plate largely remains full, I wanted to take a second to weigh in on the United Kingdom general election that took place last week and its implications for the 2020 presidential election. 

Three years ago, the United Kingdom voted to leave the sovereignty-crushing supranational nanny state organization known as the European Union.  The final vote tally found 51.9 percent voting in favor of exiting the EU while the remaining 48.1 percent voted in favor of remaining.  Many predicted that a victory for the so-called “Brexit” movement would preview success for then-candidate Donald Trump, whose campaign focused on many of the same issues at the heart of the debate about membership in the European Union.

Sure enough, just four and a half months after the “Brexit” vote, the United States of America elected Donald Trump its 45^th President of the United States.  Just like 48 percent of the British people voted in favor of the “establishment” position of remaining in the European Union, roughly 48 percent of American voters supported the “establishment” candidate, Hillary Clinton while the rest indicated a desire to support an anti-establishment candidate. 

In both the United States and the United Kingdom, the establishment has done everything in its power to make sure that the elections that took place in 2016 did not have consequences.  In both cases, the establishment’s efforts to resist the will of the voters have paid off; at least when it comes to immigration and national sovereignty.  Immediately following the “Brexit” vote, British Prime Minister David Cameron, who supported remaining in the European Union, stepped down.  It would have made perfect sense for a supporter of “Brexit” to take his place.  However, Brexit skeptic Theresa May ended up succeeding Cameron. Needless to say, the United Kingdom remains in the European Union more than three years after the “Brexit” vote.

Unlike in the United States, where the Constitution mandates that elections take place at a fixed time every two years (every four years in the case of presidential elections), Prime Ministers in Britain can call for elections whenever they feel like it; contingent upon approval from parliament.  In an effort to achieve a stronger majority heading into the Brexit negotiations, May called for a “snap election” in 2017.  The attempt to strengthen the conservative majority blew up in her face. The Conservative Party ended up losing seats in Parliament, forcing them into a coalition government.

Similarly, the establishment struck back in a series of elections that took place in 2017 and 2018.  Democrats ended up taking control of the United States House of Representatives in the 2018 election but Republicans still maintained control of the Senate.  Even with complete control of all three branches of government, Republicans failed to pass any meaningful “America First” immigration reform championed by President Trump on the campaign trail into law.  Unlike the United Kingdom, the United States has separation of powers. In Great Britain and all other parliamentary systems, the head of state and the leader of the majority party are always one and the same.  Liberals in the United States seem to prefer a parliamentary system where they can demand whatever they want from the Executive Branch and the leader serves at the pleasure of Parliament, as their behavior throughout the impeachment debacle has demonstrated. In liberals’ fantasy world of a parliamentary United States came true, Nancy Pelosi would enjoy the position of Prime Minister. 

While President Trump had a strong passion for enacting “America First” immigration laws, the leader of the House of Representatives, Speaker Paul Ryan, did not.  Ryan had always found the concept of implementing an “America First” immigration policy perplexing; dating all the way back to his time as a legislative aide on Capitol Hill back in the mid-1990s.  In 1994, California voters supported Proposition 187, a ballot initiative designed to prevent illegal immigrants from obtaining welfare benefits.  As Tucker Carlson explained in his book Ship of Fools, “Ryan was appalled. He and (then-Republican Congressman Jack) Kemp led Republican opposition to the law.” In addition to advocating against the implementation of Proposition 187, Ryan worked behind the scenes to kill similar legislation at the federal level.  According to Carlson, “In 1996, Congress debated a bipartisan proposal to significantly curb immigration. By this point, Ryan was an aide to Representative Sam Brownback of Kansas, and he worked overtime to kill the bill. Ryan authored a series of ‘Dear Colleague’ letters that successfully frightened Republicans into neutering the law.”

As for the Senate, Republicans only held 52 seats for the first two years of President Trump’s term.  This number obviously amounts to a majority but a majority does not guarantee passage of legislation in the upper chamber thanks to the filibuster rule.  Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell had successfully abolished the filibuster for Supreme Court nominees but did not share the same enthusiasm for abolishing the legislative filibuster that requires 60 votes for most legislation to pass. Therefore, the Senate became the “graveyard of conservatism” during President Trump’s first two years in office; with a number of conservative bills passed by the House dying in the Senate because they could not secure the support of 60 Senators.  Then again, the filibuster rule did not prevent the passage of the Obamacare repeal. In the 116^th Congress, the Senate serves a different role as the “graveyard of liberalism,” where garbage legislation by passed by the liberal-led House of Representatives such as the Equality Act goes to die. 

Across the pond, May tried and failed to get Parliament to agree to her “Brexit” proposals.  May eventually resigned and Brexit supporter Boris Johnson took her place as Prime Minister.  As his attempts to deliver on the mandate of the voters in 2016 continued to fail, Johnson called for another election.  The Conservative Party won 365 out of 630 seats in the House of Commons, with the Labour Party winning just 203 seats. The Conservative Party’s share of seats in Parliament comes out to 56.15 percent.  Should the results of this 2019 United Kingdom general election, which effectively amounted to a “Brexit 2.0,” end up matching the results of the 2020 Presidential Election the same way the 2016 Presidential Election closely mirrored the Brexit vote, Republicans would end up with 244 seats in the House of Representatives; equivalent to 56.15 percent. In terms of net gain in seats, the Conservative Party picked up 47 seats.  If Republicans ended up picking up 47 seats, that would give them a total of 247 seats; matching the number of seats they held after the 2014 election.  Republicans can exceed this goal simply by sweeping all 49 seats that President Trump either won or where Hillary Clinton won with just a plurality of the vote in 2016 and maybe even a few where she received a majority of the vote.  Republicans will definitely end up losing two seats in North Carolina thanks to court-ordered mid-decade redistricting. 

While a narrow Republican majority in the House of Representatives would dethrone Nancy Pelosi as House Speaker and put an end to the never-ending presidential harassment that has come to define the 116^th Congress, it would probably do little to advance an “America First” immigration policy.  Just last week, 34 House Republicans voted in favor of an amnesty bill titled “The Farm Workforce Modernization Act.” Of these 34 amnesty enthusiasts in the GOP, only seven have decided not to run for re-election.  That means that most of them will end up serving in the 117^th Congress, Republicans will need a similar mandate, equal in magnitude to the mandate the Conservative Party received in the general election that just took place last week, in order to pass “America First” immigration legislation into law. 

This mandate would likely enable President Trump to enjoy an even stronger Electoral College margin in 2016.  In addition to the Senate seat in Alabama, a “Brexit” style could enable Republicans to pick up Senate seats in Michigan, Minnesota, and New Hampshire.  Assuming Republicans lose the Senate seat in Colorado, picking up those seats in the Senate would increase the Republican majority to 56. The GOP has not held that many seats in decades. 

With a stronger majority in Parliament, Johnson will hopefully have the ability to lead his nation out of the European Union by January 31.  For his part, Johnson seems quite optimistic about the prospects.  Hopefully, President Trump can do the same thing with a larger Republican majority in both Houses of Congress by leading his nation out of the immigration status quo by January 31, 2021.  While President Trump’s second term would not start until January 20, 2021; the 117^th Congress will convene on January 3.  That should give congressional Republicans to pass into law the RAISE Act, which would alter the legal immigration system, as well as the portions of the Goodlatte Bill that call for ending chain migration and the diversity visas, mandating the use of E-Verify, building the wall, and passing Kate’s Law.  Congressman Warren Davidson’s Fair Representation Act, which would make sure that the census only counts American citizens also deserves a look. As a new report from the Center for Immigration Studies outlines, counting non-citizens in the census inflates the voting power of states with large illegal immigrant and non-citizen populations, almost all of which vote Democratic in presidential elections, at the expense of other states that would otherwise have more representation in Congress and the Electoral College. While January 31, 2021, exactly one year after the United Kingdom’s deadline for leaving the European Union, seems like a nice deadline to pass all this legislation, keep in mind that the “Contract With America” that swept Republicans into power in the 1994 elections promised to hold votes on the key pieces of legislation within the first 100 days of the 104^th Congress.  It surely seems reasonable to expect the 117^th Congress to do the same. 

In addition to passing into law “America First” immigration legislation, a 117^th Congress with a strong Republican majority should work to hold votes on other long-sought conservative legislative proposals in the first 100 days; including defunding Planned Parenthood and repealing and replacing Obamacare.  It would probably behoove Republicans to start “trimming the fat” by working to make the cuts that I suggested in my previous blog post. It definitely would not hurt to revisit some of the proposed Constitutional Amendments that became synonymous with the “Contract With America” including the Balanced Budget Amendment and the Citizen Legislature Act, better known as term limits. 

In 2016, voters in the United Kingdom said “no thanks” to globalism but the establishment didn’t listen.  Three years later, British voters gave globalism another no vote of confidence. Hopefully, this time, their leaders will listen. A similar phenomenon took place in the United States with the election of President Trump and the vast efforts of the establishment to thwart the will of the people.  Only by making 2020 the United States’s “Brexit 2.0” will the establishment in Washington get the message loud and clear.