EDITORIAL - It had to happen sooner or later. The Left has fought for twelve years to get back into power. With a slim majority in the Senate, a larger majority in the House and an unpopular lame duck Republican president, they have accomplished that goal.

Now comes the hard part. They lack the numbers to override a presidential veto. A significant number of incoming freshman Democrats are politically centrist rather than liberal. And with the exception of a small handful of RINOs, they can expect the Republicans to fight them at every turn. They have gained the responsibility for running the nation, but they lack the mandate voters gave the GOP back in 1994.

With the exception of the Deaniacs, American voters didn’t cast a vote against Conservatism on November Seventh. Americans voted against a Republican party that has grown fat and lazy. The temptation to engage in sleazy behavior overwhelmed many Republicans while others squandered political capital by growing the government after countless promises to shrink it. The GOP turned its Armani-suited back upon the Conservative / Libertarian majority in this country and they have paid the price for their shortsightedness.

Now comes the time for the GOP to learn from its mistakes while America watches the Democrats commit the same miscues that drove them from power twelve years ago. If the GOP rediscovers its collective spine and displays a willingness to govern from the right instead of the middle, America will gleefully vote them back into power in 2008. If they show signs of being the same noodle-spined group of special-interest slaves that they’ve become, or if the Democrats miraculously wake up and discover that America works better when governed from the right, then the Repubs will be out of power for the foreseeable future.

What did the GOP do wrong?

Our government has grown at an alarming rate. I’m not talking about necessary expenditures for Homeland Security or the War on Terror. George W. Bush and the Republican Congress have placed a gigantic fiscal burden on our future with out-of-control social spending and pork barrel projects. As I recall, that was not a part of the Contract With America.

Also damaging to Republicans is Bush’s ill-advised mega-network of highways to connect Mexico, Canada and the US. The “NAFTA Superhighway” will badly compromise national security and create a glut of cheap labor from south of the border. That’s on top of it being the largest federal land grab in American history. Millions of people would be displaced to create a right-of-way for this needless and costly project. A groundswell of opposition is mobilizing against it, and it’s a good bet that many members of that group voted against the GOP across the board.

The GOP has done very little to please conservatives and libertarians regarding border security and illegal immigration. With illegals continuing to stream across the border, the best the GOP has done is to pass suspect legislation for a wall that’ll cover roughly one third of our porous border with Mexico. It doesn’t help that authorities in South Texas have uncovered irrefutable evidence that Muslim terrorists have also been crossing into the US from Mexico.

In spite of an economy that has done well overall, our manufacturing sector has taken a hit with many jobs going to Mexico or overseas. The GOP could have alleviated this situation by passing tax and regulatory reforms that would have made the USA more business-friendly. Instead, they bowed to the pressure of the Democrats’ propaganda that portrayed the Republicans as being too friendly to business. Amazing, when one stops to think that a business-friendly America would result in a job market that favors the employee. I work in one of the few industries in which exists a shortage of qualified employees and I can pretty much write my own paycheck. You’d think the Left would realize that such a situation would benefit all those “downtrodden” Americans they claim to care about.

Conservatives have become angry over the GOP’s inability to avoid scandalous behavior. Mark Foley is only the most recent of a long list of Republicans who have tarnished the reputation of a party that supposedly stands for family values. Foley voted for and spoke loudly in favor of legislation to protect minors from sexual predators. All the while, he was engaged in improper communication with teenage pages in the Capitol. If conservatives were tolerant of hypocrites, we’d have left the Democrats in power back in 1994.

Need I even mention how badly Bush and Company has bungled Iraq? In truth, the Iraq situation is nowhere nearly as bad as Bush’s dishonest critics have claimed. But it’s still a mess, and questions will always remain regarding those infamous Weapons of Mass Destruction. Bush’s biggest mistake in this matter was his failure to take into account the stream of foreign terrorists that has continued to delay the completion of operations in that country. Mission Accomplished? Yeah, right George.

Lastly, the GOP must present a 2008 presidential candidate with unsurpassed conservative credentials. Bush’s “big tent” mentality has led to a host of problems resulting from his tendency to compromise conservative principles. Nothing less than a true Reaganite can be considered acceptable for a presidential candidate. Bush, at least on the surface, appears to be a moral conservative but he’s anything but conservative on fiscal issues. Under Bush, the federal government has grown like a kudzu vine and spending has grown along with it. The process must be reversed. The federal government must grow physically (and fiscally) smaller.

These are the problems the GOP must solve, and they have about a year and a half to get it done. By the time the 2008 election campaigns kick off, Americans who supported Democrats in 2006 will be slapping themselves on the forehead and asking the question: “Why did I vote for these idiots?”

If the same old bunch of wishy-washy “big tent” compromisers inhabit the GOP in 2008, we’ll get two more years of Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid being in power. That fact alone should be sufficient to scare the RNC back to its senses.

On the other hand, if the GOP returns to its roots and presents viable and believable conservative candidates, the Democrats will be kicked back to the curb where they belong.

Time will tell.