And: Congress went thataway. Election results aren't devastating for the Republican Party but they are unassailable: half a dozen Senate and over two dozen House seats taken by the erstwhile minority, no opposition incumbents exacted in kind, a similar picture in the capitals of most of the fifty states. In Washington, control of the legislature changes as it usually has — cleanly.
For some on the right and in the party, this is just the opportunity for reformation, to efface certain sections of the Republican palimpsest.
However, just what of party canon needs to be scratched out and what overlaid will be subject to the same differences that, it is easy to argue, impaired the defense of a majority this November. At present Republicans stand for Republicanism, tautology intended, but Republicans ended up there gradually rather than egregiously. The 1994 revolution's eponym fell in 1998; and the last serious mention of the federal budget deficit was five years ago, the day before the start of a world war, after which Republicans on Capitol Hill were complaisant over soft-statist propositions of a theretofore presumptive commander-in-chief.
Widely telecast, Republicans plan to take the party back to — somewhere not here. In the Senate, calls for moving left. In the House, a return to tabula rasa, and several extant congressmen have announced candidacy for minority leader, whip, conference chairman. Public statements generally regret drift, complacency, banality; and resolve to, in the words of Representative John Boehner, reconstruct what in 1994 "translated," for Congress, "the coalition that put Ronald Reagan in office." The 2006 loss occurred when the "coalition came apart."
Boehner and others want to put the coalition back together, and it won't be as simple as another unifying platform. The axiom of power and corruption stands, but pressure to moderate came over the last decade from a leftist party, media and clerisy, all of which spent the last five years, particularly, striking in places where the rightist majority was vulnerable. Before the midterm we heard that Republicans deserved to lose, and now hear that they are better off.
Are they? Advantages of minority status are tiny at best. There isn't much to do except refit and try again. In 2008, the party is likely to encounter an environment less hospitable to small-government ideals, and fortified to keep them out. If Democrats find it hard to legislate, the consequences of that difficulty will be easier to bear by the efforts of a sympathetic press corps. On the major networks and in the major newspapers, Washington proceedings will still be narrated as Republican misfeasance and failure, only now with the corollary that Congress a) is not responsible, and b) had its good deeds stopped up.
Some positions will be painful to adopt and maintain. Take an issue as signal this year as pork-barrel spending. Blogger Glenn Reynolds, one of the principal members of Porkbusters, a group petitioning Congress to stop measuring the legislator's worth to his constituency by the earmarked dollar, observed in October — a month after Washington's passage of the Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act — that "It's insiders versus outsiders, not Democrats versus Republicans, and however the elections go things aren't likely to change much because of party shifts."
As written here a year ago, unlimited incumbency lends itself to ingratiation. That is a rule, and only a little interpretation is needed to assume that it will be followed by the Democrats — Senator Chuck Schumer last week, heralding "majority for a generation," warned his party, "Our joy today will vanish if we can't produce for the American people." Schumer could have chosen a lot of words, like "speak," work," "perform" or "reform," but no, he said "produce." Unless Republicans politic against diverting federal monies thither, even to their own states and districts, a discretionary register will be used less for civil scrutiny than for public munificence.
That is a domestic conundrum. On foreign affairs, revivalists ought look to whether intervention and nation-building — held here to be essential for national security, however expensive — are as pungently consistent with other principles as reformers and critics alike might demand. Less entitlements here, plenary entitlement abroad? It can be done. Can it be argued?
Republicans have some time. There are ten days to go before Thanksgiving, and Democratic leaders are still posing to smile in photographs with President Bush. Nevertheless, big policy debates are coming up.