1. The morning after the party

The party is over; the confetti is load-bearing now. Democrats spent Tuesday winning the House, the Senate, the Texas governor’s mansion, and a Senate seat in a state that has grown more Republican than the concept of Tuesday itself. By Wednesday, the country had produced a verdict, and both sides had declared it delicious, which leaves the last two years of this presidency arranged like a corridor with a door at each end and neither door opening.

The Senate leader in question, Chuck Schumer, described the Democratic mood before the returns even finished as “nauseously optimistic,” a phrase that deserves its own statue, and promised to fight the President “tooth and nail” while simultaneously focusing on issues. Fighting tooth and nail while focusing on the issues is what parents call chewing and walking. The new majority intends, apparently, to do both, and the country should be grateful for the acrobatics.

"I characterize our mood as nauseously optimistic. The American people want us to do things that make lives better. We're going to fight Trump tooth and nail and focus on the issues." — Senate leader Chuck Schumer, election morning, in what historians will likely call the honest fever of the newly elected

2. The President is willing

The White House, for its part, has always been generous to winners. The President said Wednesday he is “absolutely willing” to accept the results and work with the new Congress — “We’ll, you know, look forward to working with them. We’ll probably work something out.” Probably. That single adverb is the most honest word in American politics, the word that comes after the handshake and before the committee assignments, and it should be printed on the building. Nothing gets fully built in Washington, and nothing stays fully demolished; everything is a “probably” in a good suit.

3. The part with the paperwork

Here is the part nobody campaigns on: a majority is not an answer. A majority is a group chat of roughly two hundred and twenty people who have just been promised, by their own voters, that winning was the hard part. One of them, on a clear path to the speakership, now has the job of driving a bus whose passengers have each, personally, been promised the steering wheel. The new Speaker’s first task will be to discover what a supermajority of enthusiasm does when it meets an ordinary Tuesday.

4. What this desk expects

Investments: the two parties will discover, within ninety days, that they agree on roughly everything that matters except the four hundred things they disagree on, and will spend two years testing whether gridlock can be called a policy if everyone repeats it loudly enough.

The new Congress convenes in January. The old one leaves in January. The paperwork is the same as always: everything.