In one political corner alarms are sounding, and in the other, corks are popping, because the House, as district polling strongly suggests, will go Republican.
I'm certainly no cork-popper, yet, aside from the lugubrious prospect of the GOP wielding subpoena power -- it remains almost inconceivable that this decade's harvest of such prodigiously incompetent pseudoconservatives could even fake casting judgment on others -- is the concept of a Republican House through 2012 actually a gloomy one?
As President Obama made clear again earlier today, from the White House, his problem (and ours) lies in the Senate, not the House. The Dems could hold a 434-1 House majority and it wouldn't mean a thing, since all good things swiftly come to an end in the upper minority.
His latest tax-cutting, job-promoting small-business bill "has been languishing in the Senate for months," decried the president, "held up by a partisan minority that won't even allow it to go to a vote."
"I ask Senate Republicans to drop the blockade," he continued, which of course they won't. Not this summer, not this fall, not next year or the year after.
The thing is, though, might it be politically better for Obama to have Republican senators, in their likely continuing minority, blocking legislation in cooperation with a House Republican majority rather than a House Republican minority? A new majority in the lower chamber would distribute ownership of the economy's health; the party could no longer claim powerless outsider status; it would be on the accountable hook in 2012, just as Democrats are now.
As for subpoena power, yes, gloomy indeed. It would, however, in the long run, probably work less to the GOP's benefit than Obama's. With the economy still in the dumps in January, 2011, all the voting public would need to hear, to realize their momentous electoral error, is that GOP House chairmen are gearing up an elaborate buffet of investigative committees rather than job-creation bills.
The fundamental point here is that as long as the GOP wields minority veto power in the Senate, nothing will get done for the next two years anyway. And Obama must be pondering his next chess move: Is it better to get nothing done with some Republicans in charge or to get nothing done with both chambers on his partisan side?