Let’s peer into the future and say “What if?”

What if we Democrats work out our differences, unite behind two candidates for President and Vice President, and head for victory in November? Let’s assume we increase our majority in the House of Representatives, and gain an unlikely six net seats in the Senate, giving us an effective 55-45 majority. “Your” candidate is now President. Will we all live happily ever after?

Not hardly.

First of all, the GOP isn’t dead, it’s just hurt. It will rise again, and their strategists are already planning for that day. The conservative infrastructure is strong. It is organized and well-funded. The think-tanks, the media, and the fundamentalist religious groups remain in place. While the Democrats will control two branches of government, they won’t own them.

Executive:

The new President will have to deal with a huge federal bureaucracy, much of it hostile. All those Bush appointees won’t be gone, just some of them. Some will have shifted over to civil service positions, where they will burrow in like moles. While the top positions will be vacant through-out the bureaucracy, many of those Regent University/Loyal Bushie types were hired and/or promoted during the last eight years, and they will be entrenched for years to come.

All new appointments require Senate approval. We’ll discuss that below, but until the new appointments are approved, nothing will change. Meanwhile, the new President selects appointees and the vetting and approval process begins. This will take months to complete. The new appointees will take some time to transition and get up to speed as well.

The new President can rescind or change executive orders, and issue new ones. But until that happens, the old ones remain on the books. The existing laws and regulations also remain in effect, but require new legislation in order to be changed. That’s a lot of stuff to go through.

Realistically speaking, this whole transition process will take up most of next year.

The new President can order the prison at Guantanamo closed, but what do we do with the prisoners? Things like torture and extraordinary rendition can be ended by an executive order, but what about those who have already been tortured? Do we investigate the misdeeds of the Bush Administration, including torture, corruption and malfeasance, or do we put it behind us and move on?

Legislative:

The only significant change will be that Congress can pass legislation without fear of a veto. The House of Representatives will be mostly unaffected, but the Senate will see Holy Joe Lieberman booted from his committee chairmanship and sent to minority status with the GOP.

But Mitch McConnell will be back as Minority Leader, and there is no reason to believe that the GOP discipline will change. Most Senate Republicans come from solid red states, and only 1/3 will be up for reelection in 2010.

IOW - Filibusters. That means no appointments requiring Senate approval (Cabinet, top bureaucracy, ambassadors and judicial appointments) will get past them unless the GOP gets what they want. A Democratic version of Bill Frist’s “nuclear option” could be tried, but that would be a bad precedent.

Less than 60 votes in the Senate means filibusters on legislation too. Recent history shows that the GOP is not shy about obstruction.

Even worse, many Democrats in Congress are from conservative states or districts, and can be counted on to side with the GOP on many issues. We can scream and call them DINO’s, but it won’t help.

Judicial:

The November election will change nothing. Not for a while, anyway. All appointments to the federal bench have lifetime tenure. That includes Federal District courts, appellate courts, and SCOTUS. The GOP under George W. Bush has stocked the federal bench with relatively young, extremely conservative judges. Change will be slooooow.

These judges will take great delight in ruling new legislation unconstitutional. Bet on it.

Media:

The Village idiots will remain at their posts, criticizing everything the Democrats do, lying, misrepresenting and spinning. Business as usual, but the nineties version.

No more lapdog media, hello attack dogs. They will work hand-in-glove with the GOP to raise public opposition to anything new, and to scandalmonger. The GOP moles in the bureaucracy will feed them information.

Lobbyists/Special interests:

Business as usual for the lobbyists. As for special interests, they are not created equal. There are the favored ones, like unions, minority groups, LGBT, child advocacy, and environment groups. Then there are the disfavored ones like Big Oil, telecoms, banks, and industries.

But every single one has a vested interest in the status quo.

Issues:

They are many, here are but a few:

1. Iraq - “If I stay there will be trouble, if I go it will be double.”

For good strategic reasons, a complete and unilateral withdrawal is not a good idea. Politically, the new President is going to have to order a withdrawal of some kind. Damned if we do, damned if we don’t, and the GOP will blame us either way. That’s why they call it a quagmire.

2. The economy - A big pile of shit. Where do we start?

3. Deficits - Can’t raise taxes, can’t cut spending. Can we declare bankruptcy? The Bush administration cut taxes and increased spending, effectively putting the government on a credit card. The Iraq war hasn’t been paid for yet either.

4. Health care - Everybody has a different idea, nobody will be happy with the outcome, the GOP will obstruct as much as possible. For an example, read The Hillarycare Mythology:

Yet the kind of reform that Clinton believed necessary was alien to the Washington health bureaucracy and unfamiliar to members of his own cabinet. Ironically, the same concern that would motivate so much of the opposition — distrust of the Washington bureaucracy — probably also influenced the president’s decisions to locate policy development in the White House and to put his wife and Magaziner, one of his old and trusted friends, in charge. Internal conflicts over the health plan, particularly with top officials at Health and Human Services and the Treasury, would become a consuming preoccupation inside the White House. It was partly these tensions that led to persistent and damaging leaks and the appearance of disarray in the reform effort and to the countervailing efforts to maintain confidentiality and discipline that Hillary’s critics have mistakenly attributed to her allegedly controlling and rigid personality.

5. Global Warming - The one area some stuff might get accomplished.

Conclusion

The entire system is resistant to change, partly because the founding fathers wanted it that way, and partly due to institutional inertia. Every spending program and every tax break has a beneficiary. Try to eliminate any of them, somebody will be upset. When Reagan tried it, his own party started to turn on him.

Every tax increase or new regulation affects somebody. Put the Spotted Owl on the Endangered Species list, and loggers lose their jobs. Tighten emission regulations on an industry, and they open factories in other countries and ship the jobs overseas. Piss-off enough people, lose the next election. The new President is going to have to make hard choices, and no matter what those choices are, somebody will be unhappy.

I’m not being a defeatist, just a realist. Winning the election is just the first step.

Then the hard work begins.