Michael Barone

Many Republican House members and the bloggers and Tea Partiers who cheered their victory in gaining a majority in November 2010 seem to be seething with discontent and eager for confrontation. They believe, reasonably, that that victory represented a repudiation of the vast expansion of government by the Obama Democrats. They want to see those policies reversed, and pronto. And if the dilatory Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and the all-campaign-no-governance President Obama want a confrontation, so much the better. Such impatience is unbecoming in those who call themselves "constitutional conservatives." It is James Madison's Constitution that prevents the winners of one election from directing the course of public policy as unilaterally as, to take one example, the British Labor Party marched Britain into a socialist welfare state on the basis of one election victory in 1945.