After the most expensive and negative midterm elections in American history, Republicans have gained control of the Senate. That’s going to make it possible for a GOP-dominated Congress to follow Mitch McConnell’s lead by advancing the agenda of the right-wing billionaires and corporate interests that pay for elections while neglecting the issues that matter to the great majority of Americans.So what will they be doing? McConnell told the Koch brothers and their allies that Republicans will seek to undermine President Obama’s ability to implement programs by writing spending bills that “go after them on healthcare, on financial services, on the Environmental Protection Agency, across the board.” But Obama is not without options. He has a bully pulpit, the authority to issue executive orders and a veto pen—and he must use them all.Obama also has history on his side. Plenty of presidents have suffered severe setbacks in the middle of second terms, including Ronald Reagan, Dwight Eisenhower and Franklin Roosevelt. Those presidents got Supreme Court and federal court nominees confirmed, they enacted budgets, they prepared the country for great challenges and they prepared their parties for comebacks—often in the very next presidential election. In his response to this year’s setback, Obama should borrow from those of his most successful predecessors: don’t give McConnell an inch. Keep campaigning, get the people on your side and write the narrative of the next two years. The risk is that, seeking to “get things done” and appease his Wall Street backers, Obama will work out compromises with Republicans that alienate his base among struggling families, students, immigrants, women and communities of color. This is the “rising electorate” that sent him into office in 2008 and 2012, and any “grand bargains” he strikes that undermine the precarious economic security of these groups will carry a significant political cost for him and for the Democratic Party: just imagine the damage if the lackluster turnout among these groups that spelled defeat for so many Democrats this cycle is repeated in 2016.Read More.Source: The Nation/The Editors