As if Republicans weren’t concerned enough about the future of their majority in the House of Representatives after the upcoming midterm elections, it appears that they have to share some of that anxiety with the Senate as well.

Stories over at the Washington Post and at Roll Call highlight new GOP concerns that the Senate might actually flip blue this November.

“I hope when the smoke clears, we’ll still have a majority,” Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., told reporters.

These reports may come as a surprise to those who thought that a favorable election map would allow the Senate GOP to sail into a more comfortable majority next year. But it’s not that big a surprise. The real question is what Senate Republicans will actually do with the information.

The name of the game for this midterm election is enthusiasm. The deciding factor is whether the Republican Party will be able to outmatch the tangible anti-Trump energy from the Democratic base. On the right side of the aisle, a lot of that enthusiasm has been dampened by repeated congressional failures to deliver on issues like Obamacare repeal, Planned Parenthood funding, overall government spending, and, well, almost everything the party campaigned on, except for tax cuts.

And where did the vast majority of those legislative efforts die? Mitch McConnell’s Senate, where observers have long complained about the lack of open process and a laughably short average work week, and where liberal conference members who often act as roadblocks to these sorts of efforts never seem to face any real consequences.

If McConnell is replaced in the event of a Senate “blue wave,” it would likely be by one of his current lieutenants, like Majority Whip John Cornyn, R-Texas, or GOP Conference Chair John Thune, R-N.D. This confluence of dysfunction and unfulfilled promises already helped McConnell earn the position of most hated senator in the United States.

So if the Senate goes blue, will anything change, or will leadership just blame Trump?

If you were busy tracking primary election results Tuesday night, you might have missed the huge set of confirmations that went through the Senate in the late afternoon and evening. The Senate packed up and left town after confirming a large, fast-tracked bundle of Trump nominees including 27 executive branch appointees and seven lower court judges.

This has turned into the latest cause for celebration for senators now heading back to their constituents at the end of a long, mostly canceled recess, the main objective of which was to address the gigantic backlog of Trump appointees.

Fun fact: Even with these confirmations, it’s still a very long list. But, bottom line: The senators basically managed to knock out what would normally take them a month in a single day.

Keep in mind that up until Tuesday, the Senate’s accomplishments for the canceled recess so far included a trickle of confirmations and a massive “minibus” spending bill that still funds Planned Parenthood.

The circumstances are extraordinary, of course. With the death of Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., there was a greater push to wrap up for memorial events spanning from Arizona to Annapolis, Maryland, over the next few days. Before that, the chamber had to contend with the consequences of Jeff Flake’s big personal recess African election adventure, which gummed up the works considerably. And the Senate Judiciary hearings for Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh start next week.

Ergo, Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., and Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., were able to strike a deal to fast-track some of the nominees. But is that what it really takes to get results?

The Senate takes a lot of flak for its notoriously short work weeks. And truly, the length wouldn’t bother folks nearly as much if they were able to use those two or three days per week as productively as they used just one in this case. The imagination buzzes at just where the GOP agenda might be right now if the upper chamber put in this same kind of hustle on a regular basis.

Instead, business as usual shows that, instead of functioning as “the world’s greatest deliberative body,” the Senate spends way too much of its time calling the roll and not nearly as much deliberating, as some of its members will attest.

Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., wants a vote to defund America's largest abortion provider, but he says he isn't getting one because of Republican leadership.

Paul aired out the issue in a scathing vent session on the Senate floor on Thursday.

"My amendment would end funding to Planned Parenthood. My amendment is already included in the House version," Paul said in a video he later posted to his Twitter account. "And yet, my amendment is now being blocked by Republicans."

Paul went on to suggest that the reason for the current situation is that Republican leadership cares more about passing a bloated spending bill than about standing up and fighting for the pro-life issues they like to "pay lip service to."

As my colleague Chris Pandolfo reported earlier, establishment Republicans are worried that holding a vote on the amendment would derail the massive "minibus" appropriations bill currently before the Senate. That basically means that hundreds of millions of dollars going to an organization that kills over 300,000 unborn children every year is simply the price that many elected Republicans are willing to pay to avoid a government shutdown.

“The question is," Paul said later in his speech, "what is more important to these Republicans: Saving lives or spending money?”

Update:

If President Trump and his former attorney violated campaign finance laws, as many on the Left allege, then several members of Congress have likely done so as well, LevinTV host Mark Levin said on the radio Wednesday.

Levin made the point in a segment that addressed gaping holes in the Left’s narrative around the recent news of former Trump attorney Michael Cohen striking a plea deal with federal prosecutors.

If spending a lot of money to make oneself look better in an upcoming election violates campaign finance laws, Levin explained, then there are a lot of members of Congress in jeopardy. He reminded listeners of the so-called “hush fund” which was money set aside for lawmakers to settle sexual harassment and similar lawsuits. He added that lawmakers who used those funds did something far worse than Cohen because they used taxpayer money, as opposed to private funds.

Levin had a simple solution for these congressmen. "Let’s drag these little bastards out of Congress and let’s prosecute them, then," Levin thundered.

Listen:

Last week’s grand jury report about sex abuse in the ranks of the Catholic clergy filled me with both disgust and anger that I can’t adequately describe here.

One thing it has made clear, however, is that there is an ecclesial “swamp” or a “deep state” within the hierarchy of the Catholic Church, one that needs to be drained without hesitation. The similarities between this clerical swamp and the D.C. political swamp are uncanny.

Both raise the question of who is actually being served. In Washington D.C., the Swamp’s status quo serves many things, primarily the wealth and influence of America’s entrenched political class and the constant growth and leftward drift of government power. The ecclesial swamp serves the interests and reputations of predators and their enablers, which far outweigh the needs of their flocks or the Church as a whole. Both swamps are concentrated on goals widely different from what their jobs actually are.

When a scandal hits, the political and ecclesial swamp creatures can always be expected to circle their wagons, run to public relations firms, and hide behind non-apologies rather than confront their own wrongdoers or offer legitimate penitence. And few will ever vacate their posts unless forced to either by public pressure or orders from higher up. Job one is preserving their own positions and authority. Just look at the calls for Cardinal Donald Wuerl — who is mentioned some 200 times in the grand jury report — to resign. For an example of a slick PR response, just check out TheWuerlRecord.com ... and note that it redirects to the website of the archdiocese.

Both have their own languages. Where D.C. swamp creatures speak politician-ese, those in the clerical swamp speak bishop-ese. Anyone who has seen a scandal unfold or seen the rollout of some do-nothing, headline-grabbing bill knows what it sounds like. Likewise, if you’ve seen a bishop’s letter or press release that talks of things like “deep sadness” without any mention of the deep-rooted problems in the church hierarchy or the desperate need for structural reforms, then you’ve read some grade-A bishop-ese.

Naturally, there are those who seek to drain both swamps. They are typically younger folks, true believers in first principles. They talk the talk and walk a firm walk on what they believe and what needs to change at the leadership levels in order to get back to those principles. For this, they’re typically despised by those who seek to preserve the status quo and are dismissed as “rigid” or “extreme.”

I don’t wish to oversimplify a complex problem. The two are not totally analogous. The Catholic Church is not a Democratic body, nor should it be, but its members are not unaccountable, especially those trusted with the care of souls. But this comparison offers non-Catholics some perspective on the problem and, I hope, encourages my brothers and sisters in the Catholic laity to step up in this moment.

We’ve heard a lot about a coming “age of the laity” in recent years. At a time like this, it might be helpful to remember the words of Archbishop Ven. Fulton Sheen when he addressed the Supreme Convention of the Knights of Columbus back in 1972:

Who is going to save our Church? Not our bishops, not our priests and religious. It is up to you, the people. You have the minds, the eyes, and the ears to save the Church. Your mission is to see that your priests act like priests, your bishops act like bishops, and your religious act like religious.

This will not be a quick or easy task by any stretch of the imagination. If swamps drained themselves, there would be no swamps. It falls to the ranks of the faithful to demand and effect the changes necessary. The monsters of this festering swamp have claimed far too many victims already.