Here's a truly scary...

...thought: What if, during this recent government shutdown, the Republicans had controlled both houses of Congress? Ramesh Ponnuru, writing in Bloomberg, quotes an anonymous Republican senator (my emphasis):

At a Senate Republican lunch the day of the vote, someone mentioned that the party wasn’t ready to run the Senate: If Republicans had held a majority in both the House and the Senate, they wouldn’t have been able to pass anything in either chamber. The senator thinks such a turn of events would have been “incredibly damaging.”