Congress returns to Washington this week, with an extremely limited amount of time left to get anything done before the year-end holidays. As I wrote last week, the lame-duck Congress has many very important things to get done, some of which may be incredibly time-consuming in the Senate (such as having to proactively raise the debt ceiling using budget reconciliation rules, which will permit the bill to pass with only Democratic votes). However, at least the time pressures in the Senate will not include filling as many federal judgeships as possible, since Democrats will still be in control after January 3rd. What would have been critical if the political power was about to shift in the chamber can now wait until next year -- and it might even be easier and faster then, if Senator Raphael Warnock wins re-election in next Tuesday's Georgia runoff election. If Democrats have 51 senators in the new Congress, they won't have to have any power-sharing arrangements with Republicans, which will speed up the committee process in a big way. But even with the judicial confirmations off the table for now, there's still quite a lot for the Senate to do, to attempt to (as one article memorably put it) "crazyproof" as much as possible before the Republicans take over the House of Representatives. But one thing that should not be undertaken in the lame-duck Senate is moving Senator Joe Manchin's pet "permitting reform" bill forward.

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Attorney General Merrick Garland announced at the end of last week the appointment of a special counsel to lead the various Department of Justice investigations against Donald Trump. Since then, the Monday-morning-quarterbacking has been fierce and all over the map as to whether this was a proper and necessary step, and (if so) whether the timing of it had been right or not. Meanwhile Trump (of course) denounced the whole thing as persecution by (as he put it) a "super-radical-left special counsel." Trump, of course, provided no evidence whatsoever to back up such a claim. All par for the course with Trump, who believes that anyone who doesn't see him as pure as the driven snow simply must (almost by definition, to him) be some sort of super-radical-lefty.

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It was another rather momentous week in politics, as the Republicans chalked up enough midterm wins to retake control of the House of Representatives but fell short in the Senate, where Democrats picked up one seat (which is enough to assure them control) with one race still waiting for a runoff election in early December. The GOP will have a razor-thin House majority, which is quite likely to produce nothing but chaos for the next two years. After the results were known, Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced she (and her whole team) would step away from leadership roles and allow a generational shift to happen in the Democratic House caucus. And Donald Trump formally announced his third bid for the presidency, which didn't exactly go over as well as he might have hoped. Plus there will be the first White House wedding in years, and Joe Biden will become the first octogenarian to occupy the Oval Office when he turns 80 years old on Sunday. All in all, a big week.

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Unfortunately, that phrase doesn't have the alliteration of "Democrats in disarray," but it was tough to figure out what "R" word could work (other than "Republicans Are Revolting," which always just kind of seems self-evident to me, but I digress...), so I just went with the non-alliterative substitution. "Democrats In Disarray," of course, has become a running joke, because that is the mainstream political media's go-to headline whenever they're feeling especially lazy. It's also a joke precisely because of where we find ourselves right now -- when the Republicans are engaging in internecine warfare, the media often shrugs and doesn't pay any of it nearly the attention they do to Democratic intraparty tiffs.

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Donald Trump is, in a word, performative. His entire political career has been one long installation of performance art. He lives to see good television ratings. It is his own personal measure of his self-worth. And tomorrow night, he'll be unveiling his next act.

It's far from being a secret what this act will consist of. Tomorrow night, Donald Trump will announce his third bid for the United States presidency. He has wanted to make this announcement for months now, but has so far been talked into delaying it by his advisors. Tomorrow, the delay will be over and Trump will throw his hat back into the ring.

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Well, that was a better week than we expected, we have to say.

The 2022 midterm elections are now over (although the counting still isn't) and the one big takeaway is that either Republicans dropped the ball or Democrats ran excellent campaigns all over the country. Or maybe some combination of the two. The red wave simply did not appear as predicted. A "blue breakwater" turned it back.

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Reasonable Republicans now have the best chance they have had in almost two years to reclaim their party and realign it so that it is not in perpetual orbit around the whims of one unhinged man -- a man whose track record of losing elections grew much larger this Tuesday. Donald Trump is now being called the thing he fears most -- a loser -- by members of his own party. The right-wing media is even jumping on the "Dump Trump" bandwagon. The next few weeks could be pivotal for the ultimate direction of the Republican Party, in fact. It could either recede into the swamp of fawning obsequiousness towards Trump (that it has been stuck in since 2016), or it could decide that a brand new direction is what is needed right now.

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That headline could be applicable to today's post-election situation in a number of ways, I suppose. As a movie director's cry (i.e. "We're starting take number two!"), since we are going to have a Senate race runoff election on December 6th in Georgia. It could be read literally, since at this point both parties need to take two of the three uncalled races in order to achieve a Senate majority. Or just as: "Take two and call me in the morning," the classic punchline to a doctor joke -- because it will probably take quite a while to get all the results in even before the December runoff. Or maybe even as: "I did a double-take when I heard the first results," that could work too. The funniest thing I heard during the extended post-election period in 2020 came out of the mouth of a babe -- some parent's toddler (this was passed along to me as an anecdote) said they were tired of watching television with Mommy and Daddy because "all they wanted to watch was The Map Show." And it looks like we'll all have at least a few more mornings of checking in with The Map Show before we know what Congress is really going to look like in January.

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The American system of holding elections is about to go through a stress test. I saw this term in the headline of a Washington Post piece today and had to agree it was the correct term to use. A stress test, whether for a piece of software or a new gizmo, is essentially the quality assurance/quality control people beating the living daylights out of it until it crumbles. For online software, this might mean simulating millions of people trying to access it simultaneously (see: Obamacare marketplace website rollout). For a new doodad, it might mean dropping it from increasing heights until it shatters when it hits. The whole idea is to push beyond the limits to find out the breaking point, one way or another.

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Some weeks, we pre-empt our own talking points here and just deliver a rant (because sometimes the circumstances seem to almost require it). This week, however, we're going to pre-empt the entire Friday Talking Points column. For some reason, we just don't think handing out awards to Democrats (good and bad) or providing talking points is the important thing, this week. At this point, the Democratic talking points are kind of set in stone; new ones wouldn't do much good with such little time between now and Election Day.

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