Both of our major political parties can count statesmen among their membership. But there are also plenty of corrupt, self-interested, short-sighted, unprincipled, uneducated, and ideologically fraudulent individuals in each of them.

Thanks to the genius of our founders, the severe potential damage these unsavory individuals have on legislation is minimized by a vital counterbalance — the party in the minority.

Legislation requires lots of wheeling and dealing, and the party in the majority usually gets most of what it wants while the minority gets at least some of what it wants. Though this compromise doesn’t guarantee that the resulting legislation will be “good” (especially in the views of the inflexible ideologues on either side), at least the “worst” aspects of the bill are usually stripped out.

But what happens when one party gets a super majority? Without the need to compromise with the minority, the majority have no one to deal with, except each other. Without the necessary counterbalance from the minority party, the Congress becomes another Duma or Reichstag, where the less savory members gain much more leverage over their more principled peers.

The only legislation that could come from a Congress dominated by a super majority is bad.