Republicans may have won the Senate and kept the House, but Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is no inspiration, allowing President Obama to keep all of the leverage of shutting down government spending while the President wags the threatening finger of executive orders in McConnell’s face.

If Ted Cruz stays the course of conservative leadership and McConnell is replaced as Senate Leader, the Republican Party has the chance to achieve great success in pushing through policies that will actually create an environment in which businesses can grow and individuals can succeed.

If Republicans fail to achieve improvements in just two years, Democrats can certainly propagandize the electorate towards a reversal of this success.

“Hope and change” is a successful campaign theme only when there seems to be no hope and any change at all feels like forward momentum. We Americans learned all too well that campaign themes don’t guarantee positive results. Too many Americans still vote on the uneducated impulse of such themes.

Some good news is that Republicans in charge means tighter control over an IRS that has been illegally turned into a partisan weapon.

There might be more scrutiny of the Federal Reserve’s activity.

“If the Republicans take control of the Senate and thus have control of both the House and the Senate—two words for the Federal Reserve: Watch out,” said Camden Fine, president of the Independent Community Bankers of America.

As the Wall Street Journal reports, “Leading the GOP wish list in dealing with the Fed would be legislation to open the central bank to more scrutiny of its interest-rate decisions, using congressional audits of monetary-policy matters that Fed officials strongly oppose. Many Republican lawmakers also want to require the Fed to use a mathematical rule to guide interest-rate decisions or shift its focus more directly to inflation rather than inflation together with unemployment.”

Republicans may actually be able to defy billionaire Tom Steyer who bought President Obama’s anti- XL Pipeline stance despite pleas from Obama’s union constituencies who just didn’t have as much money as Steyer.

Ted Cruz has promised to repeal and replace Obamacare with a plan that restores affordable major medical health insurance to the millions of Americans who now suffer from extraordinary premium increases as much as 300 percent.

Cruz wrote in USA Today that he will “pursue all means possible to repeal Obamacare. There is a reason Obamacare has miserable 37 percent approval ratings: it has caused millions to lose their jobs, be forced into part-time work, lose their health insurance, lose their doctors, and pay skyrocketing premiums. It simply isn’t working. We should pass repeal legislation (forcing an Obama veto), and then pass bill after bill to mitigate the harms of Obamacare. Prevent people from having their healthcare plans cancelled, prohibit insurance company bailouts, eliminate the provisions forcing people into part-time work, and repeal the individual mandate.”

Now is the time for Republicans to replace the failed Obamacare with a substantial improvement or be doomed in 2016.

Will Republicans do something as simple as passing legislation that strips American citizens who join ISIL of their U.S. passports so they cannot return home and wage jihad against innocent men and women? Democrats refuse and Republicans can hardly afford to fail.

A couple of agenda items Republicans will fail to achieve include instituting a flat tax and passing a balanced budget amendment.

What they need to do is pass legislation reducing the corporate tax rate to be competitive with other countries so as to reduce inversion, in which U.S. companies incorporate in foreign countries to reduce their tax burden.

Inversions include maneuvers such as Burger King buying Tim Hortons, the Canadian coffee-and-doughnut chain, in which Burger King’s operations would stay in Miami and the taxable corporate headquarters of the new company would be in Canada thus avoiding U.S. corporate taxes. Lowering the U.S. corporate tax rate would de-incentivize this legal behavior.

Now that Republicans have won the Senate and the House, they need to earn their keep just as the Democrats failed to earn theirs.

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© Copyright 2014 Rick Jensen, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.