DAVID BROOKS, The New York Times:

I have decided to take the most willfully confident or least optimistic point of view just maybe post-flood, that the dove comes bearing the olive branch.

And I do think there's potential for things to get better. The Republicans were headed toward dysfunction this fall with the budget showdowns, with this fight over the wall, possible government shutdown.

And now they at least have a pretext, all the while knowing they look dysfunctional and they have to get something done. Now they have a pretext to change the subject, to put some budget relief in there for the flood, without doing offsets, without trying to rip the money out from other programs.

And they could say, hey, we can't do the wall right now. We got to rebuild Texas. And, by the way, on the background, a lot of people are going to need a lot of construction workers in Texas. And this is a construction with a construction worker flourish.

So, maybe this isn't the time to crack down on immigration. And so I think there's a possibility, if they want to look functional, to seize this moment, whether they will or not. But I'm going for maximal optimistic unrealism.