>if fact their political power (such as it was)will likely be diminished.
Dude, you have that 100% wrong.
Think again.
And the reason the democrats are likely to win big in November is that they are proposing at least partial solutions to problems (such as the specter of Medical Bankruptcy" if you lose your job) that the voters want solved but which most of the Republican Party does not even recognize as a problem.
You can see this in Newt's proposals for a new action plan: not one word about heath care, but instead a proposal to improve the Air Traffic Control system... as if a 50 year old unemployed middle class woman with cancer cares about airport delays while trying to decide if she should pull her daughter out of college, lose the house, on take a chance on forgoing the last half of her radiation treatments.
In this situation sane conservative politicians would be taking about how to insure her while doing the least damage to the economy and the motivation to work, instead the voters hear only why we can't solve the problem, or diversionary discussions of HCSAs and other programs that don't solve it.
And conservatives will get clobbered in November, having forgotton that in a minortiy political position "The best is the enemy of the good".