No permanent victories

The morning after Tuesday’s midterm elections, the buzz on my Long Island commute was about how the Republicans had mopped up. The GOP likely will end up with a nine-seat gain in the U.S. Senate for a 54-seat majority. Its comfortable majority in the U.S. House of Representatives increased by about a dozen seats, and it picked up a net gain of three governorships, increasing its state-level executive-branch control to 31 states.

But like my colleague Janie B. Cheaney, I have seen too many of these ups and downs. Newt Gingrich brought a small-government, Republican majority storming into Washington in 1994 with a transformative agenda. But just two years later, President Bill Clinton won reelection and the revolution was over. In 2000, America elected a born-again man to the White House to restore dignity to Oval Office—which he did—and transform the role of government through compassionate conservatism—but that didn’t work out so well.

The Democrats had superhuman hopes for Barack Obama when he first won the White House with majorities in both houses in 2008. He passed a $787 billion economic stimulus package, putting gobs of cash into trade union hands, and passed Obamacare, extending government control to a large sector of the economy. But even Democratic dominance at both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue was not enough to give him the health insurance regime he wanted—a single-payer, government-run system.

Our Constitution provides brakes against revolutionary agendas coming from slight legislative majorities. Legislators facing tough reelection bids under the cloud of a persistently unpopular bill severely limited what even Obama could do. Then he lost the House to an ideologically hostile party with which he himself was personally incapable of negotiating compromises. It was over almost as soon as it started.

Now the Republicans are up. But as Ed Feulner was apt to remind people when he was president of The Heritage Foundation, in politics there are no permanent victories and no permanent defeats. Republicans are not up much and they’re only up for now. The GOP’s expanded majority in the House frees Speaker John Boehner from obligation to the demands of his tea party wing, but the party’s bare majority in the Senate is not enough to prevent a Democratic filibuster or to override a presidential veto.

And veto he will. President Obama is convinced he still has a stronger mandate than his Republican opponents do, and so he is determined to go around Congress with the use of executive orders. Congress has the legal means to rein him in on this and at the same time can offer him ways they can succeed together in his final two years. Governing in a modern republic requires compromise.

Our republican system is designed to fracture power, to balance those who have long-term ideological goals against those with short-term reelection concerns, to pull parties together in compromise and the country along with them. When power changes hands in D.C., the new party in control thinks, “Now the universe is right and it will stay this way.” It never does. Wise leaders govern with that in mind.