GOP Majority, RIP

From the Washington Post, GOP Laments Mixed Results As Control of Congress Ends:

Compared with the liberal ascendancy, which ran from Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal to Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society and arguably Ronald Reagan’s election, the conservative era has been brief and relatively inconsequential, said Julian Zelizer, a Boston University congressional historian. Nothing in the past 12 years compares with the creation of Social Security or Medicare, the voting rights and civil rights acts, the Marshall Plan or Dwight D. Eisenhower’s interstate highway system. Nor were any of those big-government achievements fundamentally altered.

Far from ending an imperial Congress, Republicans centralized power in their leadership to an unprecedented level.

Even some successes — such as a balanced budget and the diminution of farm subsidies — proved short-lived, GOP lawmakers and former leaders conceded.

*sigh*

In other news, I got through part of Bruce Reed and Rahm Emanuel’s book, The Plan, and I actually like their part about civil service. Know thy enemy is my excuse for reading it. It’s also good to steal your political enemies’ best ideas.