Even before yesterday’s elections, the Dems’ theme is already clear.  Whether it’s Jon Stewart’s “Rally for Sanity” or the liberal talking heads on the Sunday morning talk shows, all the liberal whining is about whether Republicans will be willing to “cooperate", to “work together to get things done.”

Even Barack Obama has been making noises about how the GOP, with a majority in at least one house of Congress, will have “a responsibility” to govern and to work with him.rasm

This is, of course, after two years of congressional Democrats actually saying out loud – and living up to their words – that they won (in 2008) so they get to write the bills.

This is after Barack Obama saying that a GOP majority should expect “hand to hand combat” with his administration.

This is after two years of Republicans not even being consulted on most aspects of most significant legislation.

This is after using bribes and deceit to pass Obamacare, the only bipartisan aspect of which was opposition to it.

This is after calling the Republicans all sorts of names, in public and in private.

There’s a good, short answer to these Democrats:  Screw you!

One of my most frequent themes is that the charge of hypocrisy does not work against Democrats because they do not campaign on principle.  If you campaign based only on outcome (or on race or just hating the other guy), you never have to be held accountable to living up to a principle.  For conservatives, however, if you run on a platform of “family values” and then are caught dipping the wick in Argentina while your wife remains back in the US, you are – and should be – pilloried as a hypocrite.

BUT, at some point, even the left can be seen as hypocritical by the public, and this could be one of those points.  Because this is about process, not policy or principle.  The hypocrisy of Democrats asking for Republican cooperation after how they’ve behaved since the election of The One is, if not surprising, at least obvious enough to be galling even to independent voters.

Keep in mind that you’re going to have fully 25% of the Republican Party as a freshman class in 2011 after the GOP wins an enormous number of seats tomorrow.  These are people who are not particularly loyal to GOP leadership, to Boehner, Cantor, etc.  They are in large part people of the Tea Party who, when a bad idea comes along, won’t just want to be the “Party of No", but the “Party of Hell No!”

Incumbent Republicans will have to fear Tea Party-organized primary challenges if they don’t also focus on cutting government spending, taxes, regulation, and overall intrusiveness.  While the left regularly mischaracterizes as the Tea Party as a bunch of far-right radicals who want to ban abortion and close the borders, we know that the movement is, for all practical purposes, only about liberty and opportunity, with a primary focus on out of control government spending – the impact of which is the decimation of both liberty and opportunity.  While there are Tea Party members who are “extreme” on social issues or immigration or some other occasionally in-focus issue, there are plenty of others who hold different or opposite views.  Again, we know this even if the left doesn’t know or doesn’t tell the truth, which is why the Tea Party should remain a real force if it stays focused.  If it stays focused, it can mount primary challenges to RINOs, the liberal Republicans who give the GOP a bad name by acting far too much like Democrats.  And it is only in the ability to beat incumbents that the Tea Party or any other political movement has any power.

As long as politicians fear the Tea Party, and I think they will for at least the next couple of years, the Republican Party will, at long last, care (at least in public) as much about our Founding Principles as they do about appearing to be “getting something done."  The public does not, contrary to the Dems’ assertions, hate gridlock.  They would have loved more gridlock over the past couple of years to prevent most of Obama’s signature legislation.

Therefore, I think that over the excessively cautious instincts of GOP leadership (and I say this both in the House and with new Republicans in the Senate), the GOP will push to repeal Obamacare.  Of course, they won’t be able to because they won’t have the votes in the Senate nor the votes to override an Obama veto.  But they should keep this their front-and-center issue going all the way through 2012 and keep explaining how the legislation is and will continue to cause the cost of health insurance to skyrocket.

The left will complain about hyperpartisanship, about being shut out, and they’ll complain a lot about the many hearings that GOP gadfly Darrell Issa will call to go after Obama’s horrendous czars and the massive overstep of the administration’s regulatory authority by leftists.  In fact, the opportunity for those hearings is the single biggest reason I want a GOP takeover of the House.

What I am suggesting is that the next two years will be more about  positioning for 2012 than about “getting things done."  The GOP should be slightly careful not to be purely oppositional, but in general they should remember that blocking Obama and making him and all other Democrats look bad – which is to say look like what they are – is more important than getting along.

Bipartisanship for its own sake is and should be dead.  The new crop of Republicans,  hopefully including Colorado’s own Ken Buck, will, if we’re lucky, stay true to their stated principles and goals and not get the Potomac Fever which destroyed the soul of the Republican Party over most of the past decade.

As Scott Rasmussen noted in a WSJ op-ed on Monday, this election was a vote against Democrats, not a vote for Republicans.  That is not a winning strategy for the GOP in the long term.  More importantly, it is not a winning strategy for the Constitution and our liberty.  Republicans need to give people a reason to vote for them.  The next two years will be just such an opportunity.  I remain slightly optimistic, perhaps in a triumph of hope over experience, that they may do so after so many years of failure. (Interestingly, financial reporter Charlie Gasparino had a WSJ op-ed the same day saying that bankers may vote for Republicans this time…but just barely:  “Wall Street doesn’t so much love the Republican Party as it is hedging its bets on divided government."  Gasparino’s closing sentence also strikes me as important for the next couple of years: “For all the money that banks are steering to the GOP this midterm election, once tomorrow’s vote is over we can expect them to kiss and make up with the president who’s brought them billions in profits while the rest of the country has continued to struggle.")

So, can’t we all just get along?  In Congress, for the sake of our children’s futures, we must hope the answer is not just “No", but “Hell, No!”

And, what must start TODAY is pressure from lovers of liberty on all Republicans to read and remember the words of the Declaration of Independence and Constitution when thinking about every aspect of their jobs.  We must let Republicans, even more than Democrats, know to expect electoral punishment if they forget that the country they are serving is the United States of America, and not Germany or France or Russia or Kenya.  We are not interested in following the failed socialist paths of others; our nation’s role is to abide by its founding principles – including particularly federalism – and to let other countries then follow us when they see that our system works better than theirs.  For two years, we Tea Partiers, 9/12 group members, or just plain ol’ Americans must continually remind members of Congress that they work for us and that if they do not behave with fidelity to American principles, they will be replaced.