GOP tells Wall St. Journal landslide Republican election meant voters want GOP to pass Democrat agenda quickly and quietly, to 'get things done' with Democrats like quickly passing massive spending bills, quietly increasing debt ceiling-Seib

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12/9/14, "Gauging Whether Predictions of Change in Congress Match Reality," Wall St. Journal, Gerald F. Seib

"For some time now, you couldn’t go wrong by betting on dysfunction, failure and paralysis in Washington. So it takes some courage, and perhaps some suspension of disbelief, to suggest that maybe things will start working better.

Yet conversations in the last week with senior lawmakers from both parties indicate that some of them are actually starting to think there is a chance Washington might start working better in the wake of the midterm election.

These predictions aren’t based so much on the fact that Republicans won control of the Senate in that election—though, of course, some in the GOP would argue that—but more that 

the election is being seen as 

a moment when voters declared that they have had enough of Washington’s fractured status quo  

and their elected representatives 

found they had to agree.

As a result, one Republican lawmaker says Congress now has what he calls an “outsized opportunity” to start getting things done. One Democratic lawmaker declares: “I do think there is a real opportunity in the next Congress to tackle some big economic issues.”

Skepticism is called for, of course, but one big factor at work can be summed up in this word: 

embarrassment. In the Senate, in particular, lawmakers are simply embarrassed at how dysfunctional their institution has become. Republicans found that an effective attack line in Senate campaigns was one charging that so few actual debates and votes have occurred that even some senators seeking a second six-year term had yet to propose even a single amendment that actually had ever been voted. 

Whatever one thinks of any individual senator, it’s indisputable that none of them worked to win election to what once was called the world’s greatest deliberative body only to become inconsequential.

But words and sentiment are one thing, and action is something else. So if you want to see whether these sentiments become reality, here are three mileposts along the legislative road that will help determine whether expectation of change matches up with reality:

–The federal budget for the rest of fiscal 2015. The tale on this one will be told this week, as the House and Senate try to agree on the simple act of passing legislation to fund the government—or most of it at least—through next September. Republican conservatives outraged at President Barack Obama’s attempt to change immigration and deportation procedures by executive order and without congressional consent, don’t want to go along. The likely compromise is to fund everything except the Department of Homeland Security to allow a chance to revisit the debate next year. If both parties agree to that by week’s end, it will represent the kind of compromise that often was elusive in recent years.

–Raising the federal debt ceiling. Sometime next spring—the exact time is hard to predict—the federal government again will reach its legally authorized debt ceiling, meaning it needs to be raised before the government can keep paying its bills. In the last two years, that has been the occasion for a market-rattling showdown between the two parties. If a less cataclysmic path is agreed upon this time, that also will be a sign of new attitudes on both sides.

–A transportation bill. Last August, Congress couldn’t manage to agree on anything except a 10-month measure to fund highway and bridge repairs, a half-measure that showed it was no longer capable of doing even the things that used to be done relatively routinely. That also means that, by the middle of 2015, Congress will have to tackle the subject again, or risk entering the summer without providing the money states rely on to do basic roadwork, among other things, during the summer months. A transportation bill used to be the kind of regular business that the two parties worked through to an uneventful conclusion. That is the goal some lawmakers are setting for themselves now."