Democrats, don’t play revenge game

“In taking revenge, a man is but even with his enemy; but in passing it over, he is superior” — Sir Francis Bacon.

Soul searching Congressional Democrats should take those centuries old words of wisdom to heart when Donald Trump is sworn in to office on Friday.

For eight years they watched their Republican counterparts obstruct anything that might benefit Obama politically. In 2010, GOP Senate leader Mitch McConnell said “the single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president.” Yes, Republicans cared more about defeating Obama than turning around a country that was deep in a recession.

When they failed to defeat Obama, they still obstructed him at every turn. They refused to act on basic gun safety measures that a majority of Americans supported. Daddy NRA didn’t approve.

They ended 40 years of precedent, refusing to even hold hearings on Obama’s proposed 2016 budget — and of course they wouldn’t hold hearings on his Supreme Court nominee. There’s not enough space in this column to list all the many ways the GOP obstructed Obama.

Now blood-thirsty Democrats have an opportunity to return the favor to Trump. And who would blame them? The country, for starters. Americans despise Congress. Congressional approval ratings in recent years have hovered in the mid-teens, dropping in the single digits and peaking around 20 percent. There’s plenty of blame to go around both sides, but Republicans took it to another level during Obama’s administration.

It would be so easy for the Democratic minority to block anything Trump, especially in cases where votes need 60 percent or can be filibustered. And if the Democrats have good reason to block Trump legislation, they should pounce at the opportunity.

But if Trump is willing to come in and make deals — and that’s a big if — the Democrats shouldn’t automatically oppose them. The country is tired of it.

Republicans will argue that years of obstruction worked. They now control our government. But had Hillary Clinton flipped the few swing states that narrowly went to Trump, the Republican era of “no” would have been viewed as an epic failure. Trump didn’t win the White House on the heels of an extremely unpopular Congress. He won despite them.

No one knows what next month will look like, let alone the 2018 midterm elections and the 2020 presidential elections. Our country is perpetually bipolar, consistently shifting from center-left to centerright. The parties need to cut deals and let the chips fall where they may.

Trump is history’s most enigmatic president-elect. We know he has the temperament of the fifthgrade bully, but little is known about his political and policy views because they’re still developing.

If Trump blindly accepts the advice of Vice President-elect Mike Pence and his cabinet, we’ll have a traditional GOP administration. Even in that scenario, the Democrats should at least consider their rivals’ proposals — a type of respect that was never granted to them by Republicans and wouldn’t have been had Clinton won the election. Republicans already spoke of opposing her every move.

Trump has signified a willingness to buck his party’s ideology, going after the pharmaceutical companies and their outrageous drug prices. He’s apparently open to major infrastructures projects — of course it would look much different, much more privatized than a Democratic plan to rebuild our crumbing roads, bridges and airports. But Americans want compromise and negotiations between the two parties. Democrats should listen because the country won’t like hearing “no” from them anymore than they wanted to hear it from Republicans.

The only advantage to another 4-8 years of Congressional dysfunction is that it might lead to a real push for a third party. That’s what would really shake up our political system. But it’s a pipe dream at this point. We’re stuck with the same two worn out parties.

Trump’s moving into the White House. The Republicans control both Houses. The Democrats might as well hear what they have to say, even though the Republicans don’t deserve it after years of petty politics.