Some years ago, when I was working in the office of a House of Representatives Democratic committee chairman, a young African American intern walked into the office of the chief of staff, holding a flier that announced a seminar for “minority interns.” Why hadn’t she been sent to the seminar, the intern wanted to know. “Well Adrian,” the chief of staff said, “on Capitol Hill, ‘minority’ doesn’t mean blacks and Latinos.” “Well then what does it mean?” she asked. Meaning no humor at all, the chief of staff replied, “`Minority’ means the Republicans.”

It wasn’t just that at that point the Republicans had been in the House minority for going on three decades. It was that being in the minority seemed to fit them so well, almost as well as the expensive suits they wore. Maybe that’s why they stayed in the minority so long.

Now they’re back in the minority. This time they’ll be better at it—and therefore more dangerous.

It took the Republicans just a dozen years in the majority in Congress to do what the Democrats took forty years to accomplish: work their way back into the minority, to allow absolute power to corrupt them, not quite absolutely, but enough to undermine the judgment they needed to retain their majority.

A secure majority in Congress can do that to a party in power. Congress is a little bit like Biosphere 2. You remember Biosphere 2, the closed ecosystem in a greenhouse-like structure outside Tucson, designed to test the feasibility of space colonization. The experiment failed after two years due in part to falling oxygen levels.

Congressional majorities represent, in their own closed, thin-air political ecosystem, their own kind of near-absolute power. Members of the House and Senate exercise almost complete dominion over their employees, who are not covered by the protections that apply to other government employees. Those who chair committees or subcommittees exercise the same near-absolute control over the bills that are referred to them. Members can vote any way they want on bills that reach the floor, but the majority leaders control what bills will be permitted to be debated and voted on and even, in the House, what amendments may be proposed and how long they can be debated.

The tendency to corruption (Lord Acton didn’t say that power corrupts but that power tends to corrupt) is reinforced by the lengths to which those who have a stake in what Congress does will go to obtain a favorable vote. Having a strong case helps, but everyone has a strong case, at least in their own eyes. Campaign contributions help too. But contribution limits tend to even that playing field, not to mention the fact that House districts are so gerrymandered that most members are at little risk of losing their seat, and therefore less likely to be swayed by campaign donations. So lobbyists get personal, plying members of Congress with favors—travel, meals, tickets—and basting them in sycophancy that rivals that lavished on Louis XIV, the Sun King, by the courtiers at Versailles. Twelve years of power did to the Republicans what absolute power did to the French monarchy—made it corrupt and sloppy and ripe for overthrow.

But why did it happen so fast? The Bourbon dynasty lasted 200 years in France. The Democrats ruled the House for forty years until the Republicans took over in 1994. What truncated the dynasty that Newt Gingrich and Tom DeLay thought they had founded?

To a large extent it was inevitable. The Republicans were never comfortable in the majority. They adapted quickly to the power to reward their friends and punish their adversaries, but they never really got used to governing.

Republicans historically have disdained government, seeing it as something whose function is to provide a space in which business can operate—charter corporations, limit legal liability, enable investment—and then stay out of the way. Given the power to run the government, with little experience and less respect for what government can do, they flailed and overreached, regulating not corporate power but private behavior, and throwing the delicate balance, between those who control government action and those who want to influence it, into robber-baron-like disequilibrium.

It’s said that people who lose large amounts of weight never stop thinking of themselves, no matter how svelte and even gaunt they become, as overweight. So it was with the Republicans. Despite controlling Congress, the White House the judiciary and many media outlets, Republicans continued to see themselves as a threatened minority, constantly under attack, likely to be illegitimately displaced at any moment.

Which, of course, is what has now happened.

And now that it has happened, Democrats should not pity the Republicans, but fear them. After twelve years, Republicans in Congress finally have a job they know how to do: oppose. No longer obliged to consider legislation they secretly think the country would be better off without, to go through the motions of oversight, or to propitiate moderate members of their own party, they will have time and attention to devote to looking for the inconsistencies between Democratic philosophy and practice that will inevitably arise. What influence they still command can be expended in stopping at nothing to thwart whatever the Democrats think government should do.

“I feel liberated,” Rush Limbaugh exulted the day after the election. “I no longer am going to have to carry the water for people who I don’t think deserve having their water carried”—i.e., the people he installed and maintained in power. “[I]t’s much easier to reform things that are going wrong on my side from a position of strength”—that is, from the minority. While Democrats “are going to have to defend the platform they ran on,” one Republican congressman told the Washington Post, “We can do whatever we want.” “We will be out of the legislation business starting January 1,” said another.

They’re happy, and many of their ideological allies will be too, back in their natural habitat, the briar patch.