Voters delivered a Purple Puddle

Well, it wasn’t the huge Blue Wave we were promised, a change in Congress on a par with the Tea Party’s “shellacking” of President Barack Obama in 2010, or President Bill Clinton’s big midterm losses in 1994. It looks more like a Blue Slosh. Or maybe a Purple Puddle. The Democrats regained some ground, but it wasn’t the overwhelming repudiation of President Donald Trump and the Republicans they were hoping for.

Democrats will control the House of Representatives by a narrow margin, while the GOP has expanded its control of the Senate. What does that mean for Washington? Gridlock.

Is that good? It just might be. The idea that gridlock is good is based on the notion that most of what Congress does is probably bad, and that when Congress can’t do much we’re better off. As economics blogger Bill Kort wrote in 2017, “Gridlock is good because when Congress is tied up in knots they can’t do anything to hurt us. This idea has been verified by the market many times over the past 25 years.”

Kort notes that the economic boom of the 1990s took place after Clinton was forced to moderate his approach post-1994, and that times of government unity often lead to bad decisions. Under divided government, things have to appeal to both parties or they don’t pass. That will take a lot, given how divided the parties are.

But Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has said that “divided government is the perfect time to do big things.” Pointing to Social Security reform in 1983, the 1986 Tax Reform Act, and the Clinton-era welfare reform program, McConnell said, “None of those things in my view would have occurred in unified government.”

There are a lot of things that need to be done, ranging from infrastructure to trade to a health care fix that will get us past the Obamacare debacle. They won’t get addressed unless the two parties can come together. I think there’s room for them to work together — and former Democratic National Committee Chair Ed Rendell was saying the same thing on election night on Fox News. It’ll be interesting to see whether Trump can bring the “Art of the Deal” skills he talked about in Wednesday’s news conference into play.

For Trump, at least, there are some upsides to a Democratic-controlled House. If, as expected, the leadership consists of people like Nancy Pelosi, Jerrold Nadler, Adam Schiff and Maxine Waters, Trump will have a useful array of foils. He’ll have to balance his desire to use them as convenient enemies in the run-up to 2020 and his need to work with them to produce some sort of legislative achievement.

Likewise, the Democrats will have to decide whether to weaponize the House via investigations and subpoenas or to work with the president. Rendell strongly encouraged the latter, but the party’s Trump-hating base will strongly favor the former. On the other hand, the Trump-hating base failed to produce the promised Blue Wave.

Meanwhile, there’s a bigger lesson, as brought home by satire site The Babylon Bee, which wrote, “Nation torn apart by routine election starting to wonder if government may be too powerful.”

The satire site, quotes an imaginary voter saying, “Whoa. Maybe if the government weren’t so huge and bloated, we wouldn’t care about elections that much.” He then dismissed the idea as “crazy talk,” however.

Yes, it’s satire, but is this really a joke? And no, the idea isn’t “crazy talk.”

The outcome of national elections is such a big deal because the federal government possesses such far reaching power over people’s lives. When the Constitution was drafted, James Madison told us that the powers of the federal government were “few and defined.”

That was true then. It’s not true now, and people get upset over the idea of the other party in power more because they fear what the federal government might do to them than because they have hopes for what the federal government might do for them. An oversize, overreaching federal government really is tearing us apart.

If we do something to shrink the federal government, we’ll likely make things better. Crazy talk? Maybe. But it’s also true.

Glenn Harlan Reynolds, a University of Tennessee law professor, is a member of USA TODAY’s Board of Contributors.