Control of the House is about to flip, and probably control of the Senate along with it, and that portends many a gripping political battle between the parties next year. Right?

Eh.

I suppose the 800 different House investigations of Joe Biden and his family that are on the way might unearth something juicy. But you know how it tends to go when a Republican Congress faces off with a Democratic president. After handing Donald Trump a blank check in 2017 (with another blank check to come if he returns in 2025), the GOP will cynically revert to pretending that it cares about federal spending. There’ll be much sturm und drang in the House about deficits, weeks or months of Fox-friendly debt-ceiling brinksmanship, then a quiet capitulation when the internal polling comes back.

We’ve seen that movie before. It’s boring. And the next time we watch it, having witnessed the small-government fervor of the Tea Party era devolve into big-government strongman populism, it’ll play less like drama than farce.