Bill Scher is the senior writer at the Campaign for America’s Future, and co-host of the Bloggingheads.tv show “The DMZ” along with the Daily Caller’s Matt Lewis.

If the latest round of polls is accurate, Democrats will lose nearly every competitive Senate race, giving Republicans full control of Congress for the first time in 10 years.

This is excellent news for Democrats.


Instead of another two years of the same old gridlock that has turned voters off of both parties, Democrats will get to kick back with a large tub of buttery popcorn and watch the Republican soap opera hit peak suds.

In the House, the Boehner vs. Tea Party plot line will heat up, as several anti-Boehner party rebels are expected to win seats now held by more genteel Republicans. The Senate may end up more like a classic sitcom: Can two grandstanders like Rand Paul and Ted Cruz run for president at the same time without driving the majority leader crazy?

And if you thought that was enough conflict for one season, you’ll be on the edge of your seat as these two Animal Houses flail about and flagellate each other trying (or not trying) to keep the government open and avoid a debt default.

Sen. Mitch McConnell has already mapped out a confrontational budget strategy with no end game: Jam spending bills, which are necessary for funding the government, with a bunch of right-wing riders unpalatable to President Obama. What if Obama vetoes your bills, POLITICO recently asked him? “Yeah, he could,” shrugged McConnell. He skirts what would happen next: the proverbial hot potato would get tossed back to him and Boehner, and the simmering GOP civil war between the cautious and the revolutionary would be on full boil.

The inconvenient truth for the Republican Party is that it’s not ready for prime time, yet it’s on the verge of fully sharing with the president the responsibility of running the country.

An organized opposition party could use control of Congress to rally the nation behind a package of popular proposals and set the stage for a White House triumph. But Republicans will be going to war with the party they have, not the party they wish to have: All this incarnation of the GOP can win in November is the opportunity to work out its dysfunctional family issues under the white-hot spotlight of a presidential campaign.

They have no one to blame but themselves for being unprepared to capitalize on a midterm sweep. Instead of spending the last two years implementing the recommendations from the party-commissioned “autopsy” of its 2012 failure, and unifying the party around a positive agenda with appeal beyond the conservative base, Republican congressional leaders expended their energy defusing land mines from their unruly right flank.

To their credit, GOP chieftains have largely contained the worst impulses of the right in the run-up to Election Day. No shutdown redux, no Todd Akins, no witches. But in exchange for limited drama, friction between the factions is only being papered over.

You can sum up the Republican midterm strategy in one word: “Duck.” Republicans are punting on policy: Have you seen a single ad in which a Republican Senate candidate is promising to enact legislation that passed the House this year?

More damning is how Republicans are submerging their most basic principles. “Republicans are barely mentioning reducing tax rates,” observes POLITICO. “Republicans in tough races aren’t making cuts to government spending and deficit reduction a central part of their campaign messaging,” finds The Hill. To tackle any issue head-on with the slightest bit of specifics risks alienating either the pragmatists or the purists. That tells you all you need to know about how tenuous the Republican governing coalition will be.

Republicans may believe that despite these challenges, winning the Senate still will be worthwhile. They cannot win any new ability to block the president’s legislative agenda—control of the House already takes care of that. Yet Republicans will be able to block judicial nominations and complicate Democratic chances for keeping the White House in 2016 by launching a blizzard of executive branch investigations. That’s worth the price of a little infighting, right?

Not so much.

Per the Associated Press, Republicans are merely threatening to rehash all the House Republican investigations of the past two years: Benghazi, I.R.S. and Fast & Furious. Yawn. This may keep the conservative fever swamp bubbling, and a renewed Benghazi focus would be an annoyance to likely Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton. But the Obama administration has already proven itself capable of managing these inquiries without suffering political damage. And if there’s anybody that knows how to turn the tables on a politically motivated investigation, it’s a Clinton.

The opportunity to permanently stall Obama’s reshaping of the federal judiciary might sound more promising. But it’s less exciting than it sounds, for three reasons:

1. Obama has already succeeded in reshaping the federal judiciary.

After Senate Democrats stripped the minority of the power to filibuster non-Supreme Court judicial nominations, Obama took full advantage. As the New York Times explained earlier this month, “For the first time in more than a decade, judges appointed by Democratic presidents considerably outnumber judges appointed by Republican presidents … Democratic appointees who hear cases full time now hold a majority of seats on nine of the 13 United States Courts of Appeals. When Mr. Obama took office, only one of those courts had more full-time judges nominated by a Democrat.”

2. Democrats have already sabotaged Obama’s ability to run up the score.

Although Senate Democrats killed the judicial filibuster, Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy refused to kill the “blue slip” courtesy, which gives senators an effective veto over nominations for district or appellate judge vacancies in their own states.

When vacancies arise in states with Republican senators, Obama has little choice but to break bread. When he had several openings in Georgia to fill, for instance, he forged a deal that involved accepting Republican choices for some of the vacancies. Furious progressives targeted one nominee with a conservative background, Michael Boggs, for defeat, successfully pressuring committee Democrats to deny him a vote. (Leahy called for the nomination to be withdrawn last week.) As a result, while two appellate court nominations from that deal have cleared, Boggs and three other district court picks have remained in limbo.

Roll Call notes that the scuttled deal has “effectively concluded” Obama’s judicial nomination efforts. All the remaining appellate court vacancies and the majority of district court slots hail from states with a least one Republican senator. Since Democrats weren’t willing to abide by the Georgia blue-slip deal, Obama’s authority to forge future deals has been undermined.

In other words, myopic Democrats beat Republicans to the punch. Winning the Senate wouldn’t change much.

3. Republicans can’t easily filibuster a Supreme Court nomination.

While no one is expecting a Supreme Court vacancy in the next two years, stranger things have happened. Republicans might consider all the drawbacks of winning the Senate worth it if they could avenge the ghost of Robert Bork and defeat a Democratic Supreme Court nomination.

But some Republicans have long been aware that it’s dangerous politics to deny a president the constitutional prerogative to shape the Supreme Court, all the more so if there is nothing disqualifying about the nominee in the eyes of the public. Consider that Republicans did not force a cloture vote to risk blocking either of Obama’s previous Supreme Court nominees, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan.

Sure, the incoming crop of Republicans may be crazy enough to do it on the next one. But to reject a nominee with a seemingly moderate temperament would only add to their 2016 troubles. The end result could easily be more Democratic judges in 2017.

Underlying the Republican predicament is that they are on the brink of a big victory despite being deeply unpopular. Shutdown, balkanization, obstruction and investigation has earned congressional Republicans an approval rating of 19 percent, far worse than President Obama’s numbers. Winning the Senate will not be validation of a party philosophy or platform, especially when one has not been offered. It simply allows the House’s haphazard governing approach to spill over into the Senate. This is not a recipe for restoring the party’s battered brand.

Voters in November may throw out several Democratic incumbents and hand the reins to Republicans because they want less dysfunction in Washington. They will receive a rude awakening when they realize dysfunction is all that a divided Republican Party can provide. No longer accountable for any “Washington” gridlock, liberated Democrats will giddily run against “Republican dysfunction” in 2016, which not only will abet the presidential nominee but also smooth the path to retaking the Senate as several blue state Republicans will be on the ballot. For the Democrats, losing the Senate couldn’t come at a better time.