Back in 1993, the same thing happened. The Democrats thought they finally had a mandate to reconstruct the country into their liberal nirvana, and lost all restraint. In 1994, the electorate handed them their heads.

In the best possible world, Republicans would take back the Congress in 2010. I don't know what it takes to keep government in the kind of hammerlock that prevents it from doing damage and screwing up the economy, but the one example I have where we did fairly well in this regard was Gingrich running the Congress and Clinton as president.

Maybe a conservative Congress (not just a Republican one) and a Democratic president is the ideal combination of legislative checks and balances, but I only have the one data point on this in recent times. I do know that we didn't accomplish it when Republicans or Democrats were running the whole show.