Columnist: Can U.S. survive Democratic dominance?

William Rusher, a respected conservative columnist, is resigned to the fact that Barack Obama will be elected president on Nov. 4. The real question is whether voters will approve larger majorities for the Democrats in Congress.

We've seen what Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid have done over the past two years. Do we really want to give Democrats more power?

From Rusher's column:

Assuming Obama defeats McCain, and the Democrats extend their present control of both Houses of Congress, how big are their majorities likely to be? That question is of enormous importance, since the size of those majorities will determine the degree of dominance the Democrats will actually have. In the Senate in particular, the Republicans will be able to block Democratic initiatives if they have enough votes to wage a filibuster. Since a two-thirds vote of the Senate is needed to end a filibuster, the Democrats will need 67 votes. The Republicans can keep a filibuster going if they have only 34. But will they have 34?

At the moment, they have 49. That would seem to give them a fairly comfortable margin of 15 votes by which to maintain a filibuster. But if (as just about everybody expects) the GOP loses in November, that margin is almost sure to shrink — perhaps dramatically. There have been times in American history when there were far less than 34 Republicans in the Senate. (In 1937, there were only 16 — and, for good measure, just 88 Republican representatives in the House.)

So it is by no means out of the question that the Democrats in the next Congress might have a "filibuster-proof" majority in the Senate. With a correspondingly large majority in the House, the Democratic Party would have achieved something not far short of total dominance in American politics.

Read the full column at The Mercury's Web site.