Senate Standoff

Although the Democrats control the Senate with Vice President Kamala Harris' tie-breaking vote as the Senate's presiding officer (and we might as well call her the 101st senator, since she's likely to cast tie-breaking vote on measures that go along party lines with numbing regularity), the 50-50 split means that Republicans control the levers of power per the rules of the Senate in the previous Congress because Senate Democratic leader Charles Schumer and because Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell (below) have yet to agree on a power-sharing deal - a deal made necessary by the even split - for the new 117th Congress.

The main sticking point is the filibuster.  McConnell wants it so Republicans can block any legislation they do not like. Schumer, knowing that ending a filibuster by a three-fifths majority would be impossible, wants to get rid of it.  No deal is imminent.  Eve if the Democrats had a clear majority, it would be difficult to end the filibuster, as some moderate Democrats, including Senator Joe Manchin (D-WV), want to keep it.  

But if the Democrats had managed to win just one more seat in the Senate - one more seat, that's all - they could have at least organized the committees, fast-tracked President Biden's legislative agenda, and put President Biden's Cabinet nominees on a faster track as well (although Lloyd Austin was confirmed as Secretary of Defense).  That what continues to flabbergast me.  The Democrats couldn't win Senate elections in any of the numerous states where the vote could have gone either way.  Maybe it was because of progressives' calls to defund the police after George Floyd's death.  Maybe it was because the pandemic made it more difficult for Senate Democratic candidates to campaign. Maybe it was the fact that almost all of the tossup Senate elections were in states where the voters stuck with the GOP and voted for Trump - except Maine, which Biden carried the state but where Senator Susan Collins managed to win a fifth term. At any rate, I curse all of the Democratic Senate candidates who had a chance to win but let the elections slip through their fingers.  And for sexter Cal Cunningham in North Carolina, that goes double.