After forty years of living under the fascist bootheel, the people of Portugal arose to overthrow their
Estado Novo. Optimism for a peaceful democratic transition quickly turned to horror as the country violently swung to the other end of the political spectrum. A Marxist regime had been instituted by coup d'etat. [1] President Connally moved swiftly to secure the Azores and Cape Verde Islands, but was otherwise was unable to eject the so-called People's Socialist Republic of Portugal from Lisbon during his lame duck period. General Secretary Álvaro Cunhal would ultimately fall into the orbit of Madame Mao's Red China. Cunhal, an anti-revisionist Marxist–Leninist, joined the likes of Albania's Enver Hoxha in spurning Khrushchevist Moscow. Portugal thus signed its name to the growing list of "widowed countries", the hodgepodge of dictatorships that rejected, or were rejected by, the two major superpowers and turned to Beijing for guidance. Albania, Somalia, Kampuchea, North Korea, Tawwilite Arabia, Pakistan and the aforementioned Portugal had all been bitten by the Red Widow thusfar. [2] Worse yet, Angola, Mozambique, and Zimbabwe already featured Chinese "volunteers" in their ongoing insurgencies. [3] Even Soviet Premier Alexei Kosygin expressed concern about this growing trend through backchannels with Washington, the situation was... unpredictable.
But incoming President Brooke hoped to spend his term on domestic issues. The Azores had been stabilized with Connally's last minute insult to Señor Cunhal and the new president had no intention of taking that adventure any further. Better to strengthen the home country than to follow a handful of squalling Democrats who wanted to pick up the pieces of the Portuguese Colonial Empire, stick their noses in the Lebanese Civil War, or start poking Suharto with a stick over his annexation of East Timor. There was little time on Brooke's plate to solve the rest of the world's problems. Despite his victory in November, the president's coattails were significantly shorter than expected and the party only gained a handful of seats in the House and Senate. Many Southern congressional seats flipped back to the Democrats, overriding the Black Belt's shift to a deep Republican red. Fortuitously though these losses were largely offset by a near total sweep of New England by the Republicans. The home state of both Presidents Kennedy and Brooke, Massachusetts, saw a stunning shift to the latter's party despite being a stronghold of the former's for decades.
The 1976 downballot congressional campaigns also saw a new generation sweep into power. Those who volunteered for Clean Gene's 68' campaign were now trading barbs within the congressional chamber rather than chucking rocks at its portico. And with Romney and Brooke's recent veer toward an active civil rights policy, nearly half of these youngsters found themselves in the Republican Party. Fractious, headstrong, and dismissive of how the legislative machinery functioned, the sausage making of government ground to a halt at the opening of this new congress. The flabbergasted leadership of both parties were ultimately forced to strip filibuster capabilities from the chamber to accomplish anything worth noting, this included reducing the required number of votes required to confirm a Supreme Court Justices to a mere fifty plus one. This later pronouncement came shortly after freshman Senator Harrison Schmitt spent sixteen consecutive hours filibustering the nomination of future Associate Justice Robert Bork. Among other things Schmitt declared that the Anti-Goldsboro lobby was a stalking horse for Nazism, that increasing carbon dioxide levels would be beneficial to human health, and that President Brooke and his party were Roscosmos-funded traitors for their savage cuts to the space budget. Not only was the speech bizarre, it had nothing to do with the nomination in question. Bork was later confirmed 56-43 following the rule change.
The court had become a serious political flash point in recent years. Conservative Democrats, unhappy with the rulings of the "Romney Court", began a concerted effort to exercise discretion over each new appointee. President Brooke found the polarization in Congress, the decline in civility over his court nominees, and the rise of attack-ad politics to be a blot on our "national character" and set about building a bipartisan consensus around "uncontroversial" and "common sense" legislation. Having run on a platform of "Renewed Meritocracy", Brooke began with trimming entitlement programs in favor of work programs, implementing a spending freeze to thin out the plump deficit, and easing the post-Goldsboro "regulatory hysteria" to reduce dependency on foreign oil. This later to the chagrin of Libyan, Iranian, and Indonesian petroleum exporters.
Noting the popularity of ConnallyCare but weary of the hole it continually punched in the budget, Brooke directed his efforts toward putting Americans to work full-time. Not only would this be a boon to those currently without stable employment, it was a means of shifting the healthcare burden from the Assisted Health Insurance Program to the Employee Health Insurance Program. The budget office thus directed additional funding to the Job Corps, the Office of Economic Opportunity, and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Though a reasonable short term solution, grumbling from small business owners about increased overhead would eventually lead to a reassessment of ConnallyCare after Brooke's departure from office...
A concerted effort to scrap the Assisted Health Insurance Program over its funding of elective medical procedures for low-income women led to Brooke taking a public stand in support of wide-scale legalized abortion. This stand solidified the long term trajectory of the Republican Party on personal choice issues and led to several religious leaders speaking in opposition to the party in the midterm elections. With the momentum against them.the Republicans lost control of the House and fell further into the minority in the Senate. Since the extension and expansion of the Voting Rights Act were up for renewal, Brooke faced Senator Albert William Watson in "extended debate" to win the Senate's support for the extension. With George McGovern's ascension as Senate Majority Leader, this episode proved to be the nadir of the post sixties anti-integration backlash. While men like Strom Thurmond would continue serving well into the 21th Century, seldom did his ilk occupy leadership roles hereafter. Though, of course, modern Democrats have been much slower to accept the rights of racial and sexual minorities when compared to the Romney/Brooke Republicans...
Footnotes
[1] IOTL on 25 November 1975 a pro-communist coup overthrew the Government of Portugal. IOTL the Communists were later overthrown themselves, ITTL they remain in control while the moderates establish a government-in-exile.
[2] IOTL the "Sinosphere" included at various times Albania, Somalia, Kampuchea, and North Korea. ITTL that list expands to the Republic of the Arabian Peninsula and post-1975 Portugal with room for more.
[3] IOTL the Soviets and Chinese routinely backed opposing sides in foreign civil wars. IOTL and ITTL this occurs following the fall of the Portuguese Empire in Africa.
