What happens then? How does the ongoing conflict between the parties play out in the new Washington of 2017 and beyond?

Before we get to that, a quick note on why this is the likely scenario. You’ve no doubt seen polls showing Clinton with a healthy lead over Donald Trump. In the Senate, right now Republicans have a 54-46 majority, but they’re defending many more seats than Democrats are, including a few held by first-term senators in states like Illinois, Pennsylvania, and New Hampshire where Democrats are strong. In the House, however, Republicans hold a much larger majority (247-188), and while many projections see Democrats picking up seats, it probably won’t be enough to win back the chamber.

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So Hillary Clinton would walk into town with lots of the usual talk about how Americans don’t want to see partisan bickering and we all need to work together to build a better future. How would Republicans react?

The first possibility is that they’ll make the same calculation they did in 2009, which is that the best strategy is to obstruct the Democratic president at every turn, depriving her of any and all legislative victories. There are both tactical and substantive reasons for them to pursue this course. As they learned through the Obama years, the other party can call you obstructionist, but the public tends to blame not the opposition party but “Washington” for inaction, and that means the president’s party suffers. After all, they did have two terrific off-year elections under President Obama, taking back both houses, no matter how many editorials decried their intransigence.

The other reason for obstructing Clinton is that they just don’t like the things she wants to do. They don’t want a tax hike on the wealthy, or an increase in the minimum wage, or universal background checks for gun purchases, or paid family leave, or almost any of the other things Clinton has promised. And as long as they have control of one chamber of Congress, they can stop her.

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So for significant legislation to pass, Republicans have to want it for reasons of their own; they aren’t going to do anything out of the spirit of cooperation and comity. But there may be one or two areas where they’d join with the Clinton administration. Interestingly enough, immigration reform could be one of them.

Clinton has promised to pass immigration reform in her first 100 days in office, and the idea of Republicans joining with her might sound ludicrous, given that they have nominated someone for president who based his campaign on xenophobia and white nationalism. But if Trump loses, the voices in the party promoting comprehensive reform as a way to undo the party’s poor image among Latinos and give it a hope of ever winning the White House will have a powerful argument on their side: Look what happened when we gave in to our anti-immigrant base.

That doesn’t mean that the calculation for your average House Republican — who represents a conservative district where his constituents only want to know how harsh the crackdown is going to be — will have changed. Indeed, if the Republicans lose seats it will mean that as a whole their caucus will have grown even more conservative, since the more moderate members from swing districts will be the ones who lost. But Speaker of the House Paul Ryan, his eye on the 2020 presidential nomination, could decide that the time has come to overrule the angry Tea Partiers. If he brought a comprehensive reform bill up for a vote, it would pass with mostly Democratic votes, the hard-right members would be livid, but he could then say that he had finally broken the logjam and emerge a hero of democracy, praised throughout the land. A revolt to shove him out wouldn’t be that likely, since nobody else really wants his job.

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That’s one issue where you could see actual movement, since the person with the power to make it happen has an incentive to do so. But there aren’t going to be too many issues like that. And what about the Supreme Court? We’ve all but forgotten that there’s still an open seat, since Republicans refused to consider the nomination of Merrick Garland. Some have suggested that if Clinton wins, they’ll quickly confirm Garland during a lame duck session, since he’s a moderate who’ll turn 64 years old just after the election and would thus be better for them than whoever Clinton were to nominate in his place. But Mitch McConnell has ruled that out.

There’s another possibility to consider: Don’t be surprised if Republicans suddenly decide, once Clinton makes her nomination, that the Court is functioning perfectly well with eight members, and we should really wait until President Ryan gets elected before we fill that seat. That might sound absurd, but every time people have said, “Republicans would never go that far” in recent years, Republicans have replied, “Hey, that sounds like a good idea.”

But since in our scenario Democrats control the Senate, that would mean Republicans would need to take the almost-unprecedented step of filibustering a Supreme Court nominee. My guess is that if they were about to try, new majority leader Chuck Schumer would pull McConnell aside and say, “If you do this, we’re just going to change the rules to eliminate filibusters for Supreme Court nominations,” which is something Democrats already did in 2013 for some other executive branch appointments. McConnell would say, “You’d better not!”, Schumer would say, “I’m gonna!” and then Republicans would proceed in retaliation to be even more obstructionist than ever, perhaps even shutting down the government (again) and threatening to default on the United State’s debt (again). Sounds like fun, right? And that’s not to mention the investigations. Republicans will impanel so many special committees they won’t be able to keep track of them all. I fully expect them to begin drawing up articles of impeachment before Clinton even takes the oath of office.

It might not work out that way. But if current trends hold, the 2016 election is going to produce a severely weakened GOP. That might make Republicans more likely to compromise with Hillary Clinton, or it might make them want to fight her with more intensity than ever.