The GOP's Damage Done

I confess to feeling terribly conflicted about the impact of last week's debacle over funding of the Homeland Security Department. There is no question that it was yet another example of Washington appearing dysfunctional and raising questions about what Republicans will be able to do with the House and Senate majorities that they so badly wanted. Here's the dilemma: On the one hand, one would be hard-pressed to find a single objective expert on congressional elections who believes there is any realistic chance that Republicans could lose their majority in the House of Representatives in 2016. Indeed, a pretty credible case can be made that the next decent shot Democrats will have would be in 2022, after the next census and redistricting, if then. It is also true that the October 2013 shutdown of the government seemed to have little effect on the 2014 midterm elections, when Republicans picked up 13 seats and reached their highest number of seats in the House since the 1928 election. In the Senate, Republicans have 24 seats up in 2016, compared with just 10