Congress: the good news is, no more gridlock ...

• Author: Mann, Thomas
• Position: WHAT IF HE LOSES?

President Obama obviously faces a difficult (though far from hopeless) battle for reelection. What is less obvious from reading campaign coverage at this point in the election cycle is that, if he fails, it is also unlikely that his party will be able to retain its Senate majority or retake the House. There are twenty-three Democratic-held Senate seats up for contest next November to only ten Republican. Record-low approval ratings for the GOP Congress may mean some Democratic pickups in the House. But GOP gains at the state level in 2010 have given them enough control in enough states to dominate redistricting in a way that has built firewalls around some of their most vulnerable House members. The rest comes down to turnout: if enough conservative voters show up at the polls to unseat Obama, chances are they will have the same advantage in doing damage to Democrats in Congress.

If Obama loses, Republicans will probably control, if narrowly, both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue for the second time in a decade. When that last happened, under George W. Bush--with a nine-seat House majority and a tied Senate--the party succeeded in passing major tax cuts but failed to reduce the size of government or roll back the welfare state, despite riding into town on its usual small-government rhetoric. So too during the Reagan years, when the White House and the Senate (though not the House) were in Republican hands. During both these periods of GOP dominance, entitlement and other programs grew substantially.

The question is, would this time be different? We believe the answer is yes, because of the Republican Party's shift to the right and its demonstrated willingness to bend, break, or change legislative rules and customs that have stood in the way of radical change in the past.

This will be the case even if the candidate who defeats Obama is Mitt Romney--in our view the only plausible contender in the Republican field who could conceivably garner the nomination and prove an acceptable alternative to the incumbent. (And it would most surely be the case if Gingrich, a proven radical, becomes the nominee and, by some fluke, beats Obama.) While Romney is sufficiently protean in his ideological positioning and stance on particular issues to introduce some uncertainty over precisely what he would attempt to accomplish in office, his recent speeches have outlined a policy agenda well outside the old mainstream and wholly in sync with the new Zeitgeist of his...