GOP Now At Its Most Powerful Since Great Depression

(Graphic image is by Ben Wiseman in The New York Times.)

The Republicans already controlled the White House and both houses of Congress. With the confirmation of Kavanaugh, they now also control the Supreme Court. They have not had this much power over what happens in this country for the last 8 decades.

Here's how Aaron Blake describes it in The Washington Post:

Republicans face a difficult 2018 midterm election in about one month’s time. But on its eve, the GOP just secured its greatest amount of political power and leverage since at least the Great Depression.

The new, clear-cut 5-4 conservative majority on the Supreme Court replaces a more nominal 5-4 court, in which Republican appointee Anthony M. Kennedy served as a swing vote and sometimes sided with the court’s more liberal justices. Things can always change, but Kavanaugh is expected to be a much more reliable vote for conservative issues.

Assuming the court is more tilted toward the GOP going forward, that delivers the GOP the last vestige of power in Washington that had thus far eluded it. While justices are technically nonpartisan, experts say this is shaping up to be the first reliably conservative Supreme Court since at least the New Deal era more than 75 years ago. By some measures, the court was already more conservative than it was then — at least before high-profile decisions legalizing same-sex marriage nationwide and upholding Obamacare — and it’s likely to be even more so now.

In a lot of ways, though, the Supreme Court is just catching up to the legislative and executive branches, both in Washington and at the state level.

Republicans currently control 33 out of 50 governor’s seats, which is just one shy of the record set briefly last year. That happened after West Virginia’s Jim Justice switched to the GOP but before Republicans lost in neighboring Virginia. Before the last few years, the GOP had never held more than 32 seats.

The GOP also holds complete control of the governor’s seat and the state legislature in 25 states (compared to eight for Democrats). That’s also just one off the record, set briefly last year for the same reasons as above. Before this decade, the GOP had never held more than two dozen.

The GOP controlled 4,104 out of 7,383 state legislative seats as of July, which was just a few dozen seats off its record, also set in recent years.