This seems to be one of those pieces of counter-intuitive, chattering class conventional wisdom that bubble up every so often. I’m hearing it a lot from both directions. Heck, I’ve made the case myself.  A lot of people seem to think that the Democrats would be better off losing the House. And a growing number of people think the GOP would be better off not gaining control of the House. (Note that I’m not talking about Mickey Kaus’s theory that the GOP leadership would prefer a small majority to a large one. That is a different debate on a different dimension of issues).

It’s an interesting proposition, and usually goes something like this: if the Democrats lose Congress, the GOP will probably have a very small majority. They’ll be able to investigate the executive branch, but the prospects for them passing their program are almost nil – they will have a small majority and, beside, Obama will veto anything truly odorous that they pass. They will be unable to do anything, and the President will finally have a decent opponent to attack. Consequence: we win a big Democratic victory in 2012, which is more important anyway.

Or the GOP version: the economy is in the tank.  If we win control of the House, or the House and Senate, we’ll be saddled with owning the economy. And even if our policies could guarantee recovery, there’s an excellent chance we won’t be able to pass them over an Obama veto. So we’d be better off just cutting into Pelosi and Reid’s majority, but leaving them in total theoretical control but, in practice, without much ability to pass things. They can own the economy for the next two years, and in 2013 we’ll have all three branches, and probably a natural economic recovery to ride.

Here are four thoughts on all of this:

(1) This is a cynics — or at least a realists — argument. I remember working on a campaign once in New Haven, for a Democrat running for mayor of a small town outside the city.  Sitting around campaign headquarters after our candidate took a brutal beating in which the mayorship and entire town board went Republican, one of my colleagues said, “well, hopefully the Republicans will run the town into the ground over the next two years.” It takes quite a level of detachment to say something like that about the town you live in (the kind of detachment you can only readily acquire as a graduate student at a place like Yale), but even more than that, it takes a venomous measure of partisanship.  On the other hand, if you think America is 100% going downhill over the next two years regardless of who mans the ship and what laws pass, maybe it’s the right way for someone with definite ideological beleifs (and policy preferences ) to think.

(2) This is a strikingly long-term  argument. If you buy the argument — whether you are a cynic or a realist — you are implicitly giving up hope on public policy making a positive effect on the next two years in America. That’s a lifetime in politics, and the discount-factor we should apply to designs on the 113th Congress and the Presidential election should be rather large. To say that you’d rather give away the 112th Congress implies a serious pessimism. And a time horizon that virtually no House Member employs.

(3) This is an argument from the point of view of leadership, or the White House. People who want to run for President on the GOP side, or people who want to lead grand public policy drives going forward, or people who want Obama to get re-elected, etc. Backbencher Members of the House are loathe to think in these grand terms. Why? Because being in the majority is a massive boon to the average Member of the House. The number of seats available on the committees goes up, the opportunity for earmarks increases, it’s easier to raise campaign cash, challenger quality goes down (because quality candidates don’t want to sit around in the minority), passing pet legislation goes up. And — lest we forget — you can make a quality contribution to public policy.

(4) People sometime forget a key implication of controlling the House. And I’m not talking about the Speaker being third in line to the Presidency. As mentioned above, one of the big perks of having the House is that you sit on the levers of control regarding oversight and investigation and the executive branch, via the committee system. And while I’m sure there are staffers at the White House who are rooting for a GOP win of the House, it probably doesn’t sit will with them to think the committees will be aiming their artillery down Pennsylvania Avenue.