What a split government could mean for the next two years

With Democrats controlling both chambers of Congress and a Republican president in office, the question is, how will the next two years play out? Okay, we're bringing back in political analyst Stephen Maynard Caliendo to kind of talk through these issues. This is the official. Exactly. Exactly. The official symbol. So what do you see happening here? Because it could go one of two ways, and we were speaking about this during the break. It's like, do we see more political theater? In the Senate in particular, or do we see the two parties actually trying to find some kind of overlap and moving forward with meaningful legislation for the American people? I don't want to give you a political answer, but you're going to see both of those things. In what proportion is going to be the question? And what we might call political theater, I think a lot of voters yesterday are saying that's what we want. We want oversight. We don't want to, you know. If it's a referendum on President Trump, it's not just about him personally. It's President Trump with both houses of Congress and the Supreme Court, right? I mean, that's what the referendum was about. And we saw in the polls, Americans started to think about corruption a lot more than they had in the past. So if you look at 2024 and you ask people what's the most important problem facing America, corruption didn't show up very high on the list. If you ask them this year. It was in the top two or three, almost every poll that you saw. And so that's wholly a function. That's not mostly, I mean, there's some Democrats certainly that have a lot of stocks and you can ask questions, but since they didn't have any power, that's not what the voters were really thinking about when they went to the polls yesterday. So they want to see that oversight. So it's going to happen. And it is because there's cameras in the House and in the Senate, there's going to be drama. And I mean, there's going to be drama. We also acknowledged a couple of minutes ago that government moves slow and we've got Two years here, if voters have voted in these people, they want to see results. So what is the first order of business? What's going to get done? Well, where's the incentive, I think, for Republicans to coordinate with them? I mean, I think it's very minimal. If you're thinking about 2028 and trying to take back power, both in the House and Senate and the presidency at that point, they don't want to give any wins. I mean, the Democrats are on the hook at this point for the next two years. And so they're going to own the economy, even though the president is still a Republican. And they're going to own whatever policies come out of it. And so I think that the Republicans are not going to be very excited, To partner with Democrats. At the same time, what does this do, this election, to President Trump's power and influence over folks in the GOP? Are we going to see? Defection. He's done. Yeah, he's done in terms of being the kingmaker. I think that's over. Any Republican who thinks that their fate is still tied to President Trump wasn't paying attention to what happened last night. That's gonna matter for 2028 in terms of the presidential nominations, the Republican nominations. And I think we're starting to see, if you think about Byron Donalds, who made history last night as the first black governor of Florida, a Republican, he started to pull away from the president during his campaign, and he was a very close ally of the president. But even on his web, excuse me, on his websites, They were he was he was taking the president's name down. He was not campaigning when he didn't ask him to come down to campaign in Florida with them. And remember, that's the president's home state now, right? He's moving away from him. And I think all the all the nominees, you know, however many we get, we're going to get many on both sides for the presidential race. Those Republicans are not going to be siding with President Trump. Interesting. So but how if you do have a Republican president? And you have both chambers controlled by Democrats. How do you end up getting anything done? Or is nothing going to get done? Nothing's going to get done. Because in the Senate, remember, you need 60 votes to overcome a filibuster. So that's sort of there. And as we talk about, you know, accountability in terms of impossible impeachment and removals, I don't even know for Pete Hegseth, who is really unpopular, even with a lot of Republicans, if you're going to end up getting 67 votes, a supermajority you would need to convict in the Senate. So Democrats are going to have to figure out, is it worth it to have it on the historical record that the impeachment happened. They felt like that in Trump's first term, that's why they impeached him twice. They knew he wasn't going to be removed, but that was important. Is that important here, or is it just a matter of issuing subpoenas, getting the hearings going? But remember, a lot of these subpoenas are gonna be ignored. The other thing you're going to see, I think we talked about, you had a great spot talking about executive orders, pardons. There's going to be a lot of pardons. President Trump's going to be issuing a lot of pardons over the next two years. Another thing we were kind of alluding to after your previous appearance here was the judicial nominees and the implications of this when it comes to that. We are just elected, okay, there's 54 at last count Democrats in the Senate. I know some of them will be up for reelection in a couple of years. This is a six-year term. That's right. Okay? Yeah. So what does this mean for the Supreme Court and potential upcoming vacancies in the next, let's just say, two to five years? Yeah, I mean, if you're Samuel Alito or Clarence Thomas, you might be waking up this morning going, should I just resign now in the middle of the term? Or can I hang on for three more years, right? If they're going to be strategic about wanting to make sure that a Republican appoints their replacements. I can tell you this, Mitch McConnell set a precedent here that it's not going to be undone In the next two years, and that is if somebody retires, if somebody retires, even in January, with two years before presidential election, there's no way that the Senate is gonna allow this. Will you refresh folks' memory of what happened with Mitch McConnell? So president, as President Obama was about to leave office, Senator, excuse me, Justice Scalia passed away. And he had Merrick Garland all set up to have congressional hearings. And Mitch McConnell said, no, no, no, we got a presidential election coming up. It would be irresponsible to do that. And then if you fast forward to 2020, when Ruth Bader Ginsburg passed away, President Trump had, it was weeks before an election, and they rushed to make sure that they got a replacement. So these games are going to continue. Yeah. Okay. All right, Stephen Caliendo, appreciate you being here. Thank you so much. Good to see you. Good to be with you. We have so many more questions, but we're out of time. We are. We're going to take a quick break.