Chester Borrows: Dead man walks into seat

Dennis Hof, owner of the Moonlite BunnyRanch, a legal brothel in Nevada, who died last month after fashioning himself as a Trump-style Republican candidate, has won a seat in Congress, defeating Democratic educator Lesia Romanov. Photo / AP

Donald Trump thinks he was the big winner in the Midterm elections held this week in the United States.

The Midterm elections are the referendums which pick the Congress and Senate representatives from various states but have value in that they tend to reflect on the presidency and act as a barometer on the popularity of the nation's leader - currently, the inimitable Donald.

The next presidential election is still two years away.

Only in America, though, could the owner of a brothel - who died a few hours after celebrating his 72nd birthday with one of his prostitute employees - be elected and preferred over candidates who are living and breathing.

Mr Dennis Hof will not be taking up his position as Congressman for Nevada.

We have also seen Governor Brian Kemp in Georgia, who is also the state's chief election official, in charge of the same election he is standing in and deciding which votes can be voided.

He has introduced several measures to limit the votes cast for Democrats.

People with previous convictions cannot vote.

You must have photographic identification to vote and produce it for the vote to be counted.

An "exact match" of the identification and registration is required or the vote is null and void.

So, a misplaced comma, hyphen, incorrect spelling or date of birth which may well be an administrative transcribing error rather than the fault of the voter, can rule a vote out.

Law enforcement strategies, the issuing of driver licences, and a few other bits of related regulatory enforcement mean those most likely to lose their votes are African-Americans who tend to vote Democrat.

As I write, Kemp is 1.7 per cent ahead of his Democrat rival in a state where 70 per cent of the 60,000 withheld registrations are for African American voters.

It appears that the Democrats now run the House of Representatives (Congress), although the Republicans maintain control of the Senate.

This multi-cameral system means that laws must pass through these upper and lower houses before they can be enacted.

Donald Trump may have a brilliant idea, but it will be going nowhere unless he can get it through both houses.

His biggest threat, though, is that the Congress can make inquiry on its own motion and the Democrats have promised that, given a majority, they would investigate Russian collaboration in the 2016 US presidential election, investigate the business dealings of the president, extend healthcare, lift the minimum wage and pursue similar measures which could expose the skewed state of the Trump presidency.

I guess it is timely to note the state of politics in another country where, just like all others, the road is never smooth and the gradient never easy, but the US is a stark contrast to New Zealand's unicameral and comparatively transparent system of government.

The machinations of Jami-Lee Ross and Simon Bridges looks like a playground sandpit squabble compared to this shower of the proverbial.

Donald Trump's promise to move to a "war footing" if the Democrat majority in Congress seeks to over-scrutinise him leaves me wondering what a war footing would look like compared to his current standards of behaviour.

Oh well. At least all New Zealand's Members of Parliament are alive.