The blue jean rebellion.

• Author: Conniff, Ruth
• Position: COMMENT - Blue Jeans in High Places: The Coming Makeover of American Politics - Book review

The November elections are upon us, and much hangs in the balance.

If the Republicans succeed in taking over the Senate, they could end President Obama's ability to make appointments to federal agencies and the federal bench.

Even without Senate control, the Republicans have blocked nominations and stalled the enforcement of labor laws and financial reform by holding up nominees to head the National Labor Relations Board and the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

If Ruth Bader Ginsburg or another Supreme Court justice retires, and the Republicans are in control, the party that vowed to make Obama's Presidency a failure might just leave the seat vacant until after the Presidential election in 2016.

And wait until the next debt ceiling showdown in March.

Senator Mitch McConnell has already pledged to extract concessions from the President as the price for preventing the United States from going into default.

Then there are the investigations--Obamacare, impeachment, and, of course, Benghazi, in the run-up to the 2016 Hillary Clinton campaign. Fox News will script the next two years.

As for debating issues that actually matter to a majority of Americans, like regulating Wall Street or raising the minimum wage, with McConnell in charge of the calendar, you can bet there will be no hearings, let alone floor votes, on such matters.

We've already had a good preview of the Republican legislative agenda in the states.

"If you want to know what a wholly Republican Congress would do, the thing to do is to look at what they've done in state capitals where they can," Senator Sherrod Brown, Democrat of Ohio, told Mike Tomasky of The Daily Beast earlier this year. "In Ohio, they've gone after voters' rights, workers' rights, women's rights. They'd bring that to Washington."

The stakes are high. But voter turnout, in this non-Presidential year, is projected to be low.

That gap--between the urgency of the moment from a political and policy point of view, and the rampant alienation out in America's voting precincts--has set off a familiar cycle of hand-wringing.

On a recent public affairs show on Wisconsin Public Radio, callers all over the state registered their frustration with, and alienation from, the Democratic Party. One caller asserted that this year, he might not even vote. A series of outraged NPR listeners rushed to the phones to scold him, and express outrage at nonvoters everywhere, who allow our elections and our democracy to be taken...