While 2014’s early voting patterns show Democrats are showing up in higher-than-predicted numbers in states where U.S. Senate races will help determine if Republicans will control Congress—the oddsmakers are still betting that the GOP will soon win a narrow Senate majority.

“So what might Republicans actually do if they have majorities in both houses of Congress,” asks Reason.com’s Nick Gillespie, the longtime libertarian. “If past behavior is any indication of future performance, the short and likely answer is: screw it all up.”

There’s been plenty of pieces written in the progressive media about what a Republican-majority Senate is likely to mean. But sometimes the better source comes from the ‘takes-one-to-know one’ universe of ideological Republicans who are well acquainted with their current and possibly incoming senators.

“What Republicans can’t do is spend their time trying to chop chunks of government, obsess on the spending side, cut holes in the safety net, perpetuate cronyism or let paranoia gut anti-terror measures (e.g. drones, NSA),” wrote the Washington Post’s “Right Turn” blogger Jennifer Rubin, in a recent advice-filled column. “Senate gadflies are about to learn that being in the majority is different than throwing spitballs from the minority. They will need to show they can problem-solve (or they will confirm concerns that they cannot).

What Gillespie and Ruben both are confirming, actually, is that the Republicans are not likely to do much of anything other than be the fight-picking, time-wasting, obstructionist legislators that they have pledged to be on the 2014 campaign trail.

In other words, it is all too likely that there will be efforts to: dismantle Obamacare; ignore climate change and block all kinds of pro-environmental activities; repeal pro-consumer laws; block increases in the minimum wage; ignore immigration reform; block federal judicial nominees, and maybe even pursue impeachment. Georgia’s Republican senatorial candidate David Perdue has pledged to “prosecute the failed record” of the Obama administration. Iowa’s Joni Ernst wants to ban abortions and same-sex marriage.

These examples, gleaned from recent pieces in The New York Times, Washington Post, The Nation, and other reputable outlets, suggest that the race to the bottom in American politics is about to sink even deeper into the muck. The New Yorker’s sharp political writer, John Cassady, just wrote a piece entitled, “The Empty Elections of 2014,” where he is spot-on in noting that there’s been little substance—but a deluge of idiotic stereotypes and character assassinations—behind the “enervating output of political admen, spin doctors, and negative research shops for whom this is, first and foremost, a profit-making industry.”

Cassady’s point is that Americans are deluding themselves if they are thinking that party is somehow secretly campaigning on substance. The political ads “aren’t just an annoying sideline to, or distraction from, the real issues in the campaign. To a large extent, they are the campaign,” he wrote. “They represent the main source of information about candidates and issues. Which, if you think about it, is pretty alarming.”

That analysis certainly pushes the advice-to-fellow-Republican columns by Reason’s Gillespie and the Post’s Ruben into the wishful thinking department. There is almost no evidence that a Republican-controlled Congress is about to change its radical mindset. You don’t have to look any further than their own words to confirm that. Take April’s proposed federal budget by Rep. Paul Ryan, the House’s budget architect. It contained tax cuts for major corporations, cuts in middle-class tax deductions—for pensions and IRAs, cuts in Medicaid (a way to attack Obamacare), cuts in food stamps, increases in student loan interest rates, increases in military spending, and more. Those and other draconian proposals would no longer be dead on arrival in the Senate.

The financial press is also making predictions about what a Republican-controlled Congress would look like. You can expect the tax on medical devices that now helps pay for Obamacare to possibly be repealed. On energy, Forbes magazine predicts not only that there will be a push to build the Keystone XL pipeline, but they recommend selling stock in alternative energy sources. And while many pundits have said that Obamacare isn’t going to be repealed, Republicans campaigning for Senate are saying that they would attach defunding amendments to major government spending bills.

Nobody can truly predict what will unfold if the Republicans control both chambers of Congress for the next two years. But one thing is certain. Americans may think that their political system could not get any more dysfunctional, but that would be wrong. History is filled with examples of demagogues and mob rule that trample on previously accepted boundaries of political consensus and governing.