After last week’s elections, Maine Republicans have some good news and some bad news. The bad news is that Sen. Angus King and Rep. Chellie Pingree easily got reelected and Republicans yet again came up short in their quest to regain the majority in the Maine Legislature. The good news? Well, the good news is the same as the bad news: that they, yet again, managed to come up short in their quest to regain the majority in the Legislature.

You see, with Gov. Janet Mills safely ensconced in the Blaine House, Republicans couldn’t have gotten much done anyway. If they’d passed anything, it would have been with bipartisan support, both from Democrats in the Statehouse and Mills.

The forthcoming session probably won’t be an easy one. Thanks to the spending spree that Mills and the Democrats have been on for the past six years, the state faces an almost billion-dollar budget shortfall in the forthcoming biennium – or the difference between spending and revenue. To be more precise, that’s $637 million in the General Fund and $313 million in the Highway Fund, for a total of $950 million. Keep in mind, every time they passed a new budget, Democrats claimed that their spending was sustainable, meaning that future revenues would cover it.

They were clearly, completely, disastrously wrong.

This is also something that was completely, and entirely, predictable.

Now, the actual figure may not turn out to be quite this bad. This was an early forecast required by statute, not one based on actual revenue and expenses. It’s better than a poll before an election, but it’s hardly the final word on the subject. If the economy does better, then tax revenues might end up being higher and things won’t look quite so bad. However, the flip side could also happen: the economy could do worse, or state tax revenues might turn out to be weaker for some other reason, and the shortfall could be even larger.

Typically, the two parties negotiate over the biennial budget because, as emergency legislation, it requires two-thirds approval. During the Mills administration, however, the Democrats have used parliamentary tricks to avoid this, passing purely partisan budgets. They’ve faced no real consequences for these maneuvers, either in the court of public opinion or in the Maine Supreme Court. That was when there was money to spend, though, and things were going just fine. They certainly didn’t want Republicans to derail their spending spree – that wouldn’t have been any fun, so they just ignored them.

Now that things may be getting a little rougher, it’s easy to see Democrats suddenly rediscovering their sense of bipartisanship. No doubt they’ll talk about shared sacrifices and how important it is that everyone work together, but really it’s a political strategy to spread the blame around. You see, when Democrats were having fun with their spending, they got all the credit from the electorate – that’s why most voters didn’t mind their parliamentary shenanigans. Now that things may not be quite too easy, they’ll want to make sure Republicans own part of the solution, so that there’s bipartisan blame to go around.

Typically Republicans engage in these debates by holding firm against any tax increases, as Sen. Rick Bennett recently suggested in these pages – and that’s certainly a good start. House and Senate Republicans ought to be united in opposing a single dime of tax increases on anyone or anything. Democrats have already unnecessarily raised taxes, with Mills breaking her promise not to do so; Republicans shouldn’t take the bait and bail them out by going along with a tax increase now. So, yes, at a bare minimum Republicans should refuse to go along with any kind of tax or fee increase.

Unfortunately, along with standing tall against tax increases, Republicans have often offered their own specific, detailed budget proposals. With their numbers so low under a Democratic governor, this never made much sense. Their proposals just ended up being fodder for the other side, and when Democrats abandoned any pretense of bipartisanship, they lost the vague hope that they might slip something in.

This time, they need to do more with less. Republicans should just let Mills and majority Democrats fix the problems themselves, with votes from their side of the aisle. There’s no need for them to even negotiate over the budget; after all, Democrats weren’t willing to negotiate with them in the past. Democrats created this problem. Republicans ought to force them to come up with a solution.