12 Years Older and Deeper in Debt

With the House's adjournment at 5am Saturday the GOP's 12 year run in Congress ended. A "movement" that rode in on the back of the Contract with America seemed to be the start of a Republican stranglehold to match the decades of Democratic control reaching from Roosevelt to Clinton (with brief interruptions.) The threat of the Republican Revolution to undue the social programs that served as the primary safety net for millions of Americans never occurred, if anything the period will be remembered for wild spending that has occurred during the Bush administration.

But setting the chaos of Iraq aside for a moment, will the last 12 years be remembered? One historian says not so much:

Compared with the liberal ascendancy, which ran from Franklin D.
Roosevelt's New Deal to Lyndon B. Johnson's Great Society and arguably Ronald
Reagan's election, the conservative era has been brief and relatively
inconsequential, said Julian Zelizer, a Boston University congressional
historian. Nothing in the past 12 years compares with the creation of Social
Security or Medicare, the voting rights and civil rights acts, the Marshall Plan
or Dwight D. Eisenhower's interstate highway system. Nor were any of those
big-government achievements fundamentally altered.