EDITORIAL: What if Democrats win it all?

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If Barack Obama is elected into office as the 44th president of the United States on Nov. 4 and voters, in tandem, give the Democrats 60 seats in the Senate and give them a solid majority in the House. What happens after Inauguration Day?

Single-party rule is inherently totalitarian whether the people consent to it or not. In most cases, one-party states rise out of authoritarian regimes, including former monarchies, or socialist revolutions. There are currently seven - China, Cuba, Eritrea, Laos, Vietnam, Syria, Korea. The United States would become the eighth.

Single-party rule is something to fear in and of itself - particularly from a spending standpoint, regardless of which party has absolute power. From 2003 to 2005, George W. Bush and the Republican Congress created the largest expansion of Medicare in history the prescription-drug bill and started two wars. They also succeeded in creating the largest tax cut in history.

From 1932 to 1980, virtually every Democratic president with the exception of Harry Truman had a period of single-party rule. The difference is that Lyndon Johnson, Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton didn't have cohesive majorities of the same mind.

"In 1976 under Carter, you still had Southern Democrats," said David Boaz, executive vice president of the Cato Institute. "The question is, does the president have a working majority in Congress? Arguably Democratic presidents from 1932 to 1980 didn't have a working majority. Even in the Clinton administration, it is not clear that Clinton had a working majority, because he couldn't get gays in the military and he couldn't get health care."

In the case of Mr. Carter, liberal Democrats like Ted Kennedy, who ran against Mr. Carter in the 1980 Democratic primary, the president could have been considered a Blue Dog, a fiscal conservative Southern Democrat. Mr. Carter was a former businessman who deregulated the trucking, airline, rail, finance, communications and oil industries. He also happened to be a Teddy Roosevelt environmentalist, expanding the National Park Service and increasing Federal park land and had a very authoritarian energy policy, including gas rationing. Then again, Mr. Carter and the Democratic Congress also created the Department of Education.

LBJ's majority increased spending by about $5.4 trillion on programs like socialized medicine (Medicaid and Medicare), the Department of Transportation infinitely increased the size and scope of government. However, ending the government-sanctioned racial oligarchy in America clearly overshadowed the inevitable fiscal destruction those policies would someday wrought. Still, there was some level of resistance in all of those administrations, even Mr. Johnson's.

An Obama administration would have none. The Democratic Congress has moved further left since 1992 and is now solidly liberal under the leadership of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. There is no Southern centrist in the Northern liberal Mr. Obama.

In the first two years of Mr. Obama's term, there will be significant tax-and-spend policies and legislation, and then, in 2010, taxes will increase automatically when the Bush tax cuts expire. After that, assuming the liberal anti-war crowd has pulled us out of Iraq, spending will explode.

Here is some of what to expect from the new majority Mr. Obama has spoken of so eloquently on the stump: At least 20 new urban one-stop, job-training, parent counseling, education, arts and recreation centers will crop up in cities across America; Medicaid will grotesquely expand as Mr. Obama institutes his health-care reform policy; government regulation will grow, too; and the Blue Dogs, perhaps enthused to be solidly ensconced in the majority, won't be there to stop the raping of the coffers as liberals push for higher taxes. In fact, if the Democrats sweep all three institutions on Tuesday, expect Big Government to earn capitalization from Inauguration Day forward.