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It’s a golden opportunity — don’t waste it

If we can all hold on another 10 days or so, it will all be over, or at least almost over.  The midterm elections are behind us – save for the 16 House races and two Senate races still undecided.  The Democrats will control the House come January and the 116^th Congress, while the Senate is even more comfortably albeit tightly Republican controlled.

While some automatically decry a “divided government,” it strikes me this is a tremendous opportunity for both sides of the aisle to prove they can govern.  If everyone behaves as an adult, this is actually a golden opportunity to burnish the reputation of Congress.

While the election was touted by every pundit and media analyst as the coming of an historic “blue wave,” a tsunami of anti-Trump sentiment to be reflected in a rush to elect Democrats to Congress, what happened as the last campaign ad faded to black was an average midterm election loss for a sitting president, particularly one in his first term.

Having finished wringing every scintilla of anti-administration sentiment out of the exit polls and demographics, we’re left with a pretty ordinary power shift in the House, the kind of rebalancing we’ve seen a dozen times since the Eisenhower years.

It appears the lame duck session which begins next week will more productive than many would have bet two weeks ago.  It looks like we’ll get the 2018 Farm Bill to the president before Christmas given the commitment of Rep. Collin Peterson (D, MN) to go bipartisan when he could just as easily punt the bill to the new Congress when he retakes the ag committee chair.  Appropriations will be completed, and will, it’s hoped, carry the disaster aid folks in the southeast need badly.  If the spending bills can be completed, it’s likely long-awaited tax extenders legislation could be included.

The monkey is now on backs of the Democrats, at least for the next two years in the House.  It’s not unlike what Speaker Paul Ryan (R, WI) and his party faced in 2016 when the GOP captured both sides of the Hill and the White HOuse, namely a mandate from the voters giving Republicans two years to prove they could govern, meaning move legislation people care about, solve problems, and so on.  While tax reform was a major step forward, the compounding challenge is a Republican president who defies the system just by being himself, forcing the Republicans in many cases to  govern around and despite the White House resident.

That same govern-or-go-home message was delivered to the House Democrats this week.  However, Trump remains the same distraction for the Democrats as he has been at times for the Republicans.

When Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D, CA) accepts the Speaker’s gavel in January – barring generational support issues, she is the single most qualified person to lead the caucus – she needs to focus on the “people’s House” for the next two years, not who sits in the White House in 2021.   She said this week her agenda will be all about those forgotten planks of the 2016 Democrat platform:  Infrastructure, health care, including drug prices, and “corruption in government,” the latter goal Pelosi pledges will be “measured and deliberate checks and balances” on the sitting administration.

This election demonstrated a record of accomplishment speaks volumes more to voters than two years of subpoenas, investigations, allegations, recriminations and silly sound bites.  Where goofiness needs to be examined, go for it; if the goal is to pile up presidential campaign ammunition, such an effort ignores the job description and underestimates the patience of the voter.