On Tuesday, November 2, the American electorate engaged in its ritual cleansing. They chased more than 60 Democrats from the House and another six from the Senate. Power changed hands yet again in this country's government. And once again, the incoming party is promising to set up a utopia and the outgoing party is cackling at what will be the inevitable failure of its adversaries.
Do you feel clean?
Maybe you do. Perhaps you're a staunchly conservative Republican convinced that this time around, congressional Republicans will remain beholden to their professed fiscal conservatism. Perhaps this new Congress will successfully hinder the enactment of health care reform, cut taxes and slash spending.
Maybe even you feel clean as a progressive Democrat. Perhaps you're happily anticipating the failure of Republican economic policy, that the next two years are just a breather for you until the Democrats storm back and take the House.
If you don't fall into either of these categories, you're probably just another disgusted and/or disillusioned American in desperate need of a bubble bath and a long respite from electoral politics.
So where do we go from here?
Now that they've been elected, Republicans are burdened with the capacity to actually legislate. If you reach back into recent memory, you might remember that nothing has crushed the political fortunes of Republicans like the onus of actual governance.
The American people have seen it fit to give them another chance. The success of the resurrected Republican majority in Congress will be judged by one thing and one thing alone: the performance of the economy.
The importance of the economy to this election was common wisdom. Republicans campaigned by saying that the Democratic fixes have not helped, and that they only inflated the deficit. These Republicans won.
Meanwhile, most Democrats campaigned by repeating the progressively staler slogan that Bush and the Republicans were the ones responsible for the recession. These Democrats lost.
The Republicans got what they asked for—now what on earth are they going to do? It is the answer to this question that really worries me.
The question of a full economic recovery is not a matter of reclaiming America's values. It is not a theoretical problem, nor will it be resolved by anything other than policy prescriptions tailored specifically to what ails America's current economy.
Unfortunately, it seems as though the new House leadership is far more enamored of broad ideological platforms than it is of the process of problem solving. They have pledged to cut both the deficit and the unemployment rate—wonderful!
But how do they want to do this?
The top two legislative priorities for soon-to-be Speaker of the House John Boehner are the full extension of the Bush tax cuts and the repeal of health care reform. On the one hand, I can understand that conservative economic philosophy is predicated on low taxes and a reduction in the size of government. I may not agree with this philosophy, but Congressional Republicans are certainly planning ventures very much in line with their ideological persuasions, which is fine. That's democracy—Americans were decidedly in favor of right wing politics in this last election and now Republicans control the House.
On the other hand, one would think that governance should be a response to the problems of the times and not just an extrapolation on theoretical values. As a result, it seems that the new Republican Congress completely misses the point of governance.
The question must be asked: Will Republican legislative priorities ease the problems of unemployment and debt in this country?
According to the New York Times, the full extension of the Bush tax cuts will increase the deficit by $4 trillion over the next 10 years—so much for fiscal responsibility. Moreover, those tax cuts will contribute only meagerly to job creation, since most of the money that will be saved by Americans will be saved by those making over $250,000 annually. This money won't be spent to boost the economy because rich people are already spending as much as they want to.
The health care reform bill passed last year is understandably anathema to the conservative understanding of government. However, reform is predicted to cut the deficit over the next 10 years. So why spend your political capital trying to repeal a bill when you really need to be improving the economy?
As a progressive, I'm certainly not happy about the Republican victories in this year's midterm elections. However, I would hope to expect real governance—even if it's from the right—rather than an imposition of an ideological platform that ignores the contemporary problems facing the country. This country's greatness undoubtedly stems from the expressions of democracy that took place on November 2. Yet it pains me that Republican politicians seem more concerned with reveling in being temporarily right—in the eyes of the American electorate at least—than in taking the burden of governance seriously.