The Midterm elections are barely a month old … Republicans have still to take office, and yet the outcome of those elections is already evident. And that oft used phrase “elections have consequences” has turned out to once again be true.

Republicans won the House and gained seats in the Senate after a two-year legislative campaign of Just Say No to anything proposed by the Obama administration.

The fall campaign attacked what was deemed by Republicans as the Failed Stimulus of almost $800 billion by the administration, and on a pledge to cut the spending that has brought both huge deficits and debt to the nation in the past decade.

Voters responded to these issues by a broad election of Republicans, forgiving them for their past discretions. As you may recall Republicans found themselves booted from Washington in 2006 and 2008 for excessive spending and an inattention to the concerns of the voters.

And so, as the all new, now fiscally conscious Republicans prepare to take office they have promised to do the people’s work and cut the spending.

It is spring in America for them as they re-decorate offices all over the capital, wise now in how to govern.

So what is their first change after returning from exile? This week, with the cooperation of President Obama they agreed to add a trillion dollars to the deficit over the next two years with a second stimulus.

Yes, the Republicans and the administration found a way to compromise with each other, on creating another stimulus and another trillion in debt.

You may not have liked the first stimulus. It spent money on teachers jobs, police jobs, unemployment compensation, propping up state governments, infrastructure construction and granting 95 percent of taxpaying Americans a tax cut.

But if you did not like that stimulus, will you like this one? Its capstone achievement is a tax cut for the richest Americans and a reduction in the inheritance tax.

The Republican stimulus is going to the only people in America who do not need to spend the money they will save, who need not invest, but simply hoard their good fortune. Oh happy days, the Republicans are back in town.

But it did take the cooperation of a democratic president to accomplish this trillion in new stimulus.

President Obama used a tactic he apparently discovered from President Bush and refined it from preemptive attack to become preemptive surrender.

Yes, this president thought the Republicans would kill the unemployment extension for out of work Americans and would deny all Americans a tax cut if the top 2 percent were not awarded a tax cut. So to save us all he gave in to a stimulus designed to help no one but those who do not need the help.

The president did all of this without the help or comment of the Democratic Party, still a congressional majority. Had he asked, the party might have told him the Republicans have caved five times on unemployment benefits and would have a sixth time if necessary.

Democrats might have reminded the president that Speaker-to-be Boehmer had earlier this year said he would accept only extending tax cuts for the middle class if that was his only choice.

So, in the end, the president looked at the most important issue of the day, the deficit and debt, and turned away.

In a time of great fiscal crisis he and his new republican friends decided greed by the rich and more debt for all of us was a better choice than sacrifice by those who can best afford to help the nation restore its fiscal sanity.

Soon the president and the Republicans will ask Americans to reduce their Medicare protection and limit their Social Security benefits … and then will have to explain why the richest Americans got a tax cut when we went to war, were bailed out when the banks failed, and cost all of us another trillion dollars in this newest stimulus.

Elections have consequences, and this time the voters said stop the spending and end the stimulus. This week the president and the Republicans laughed in the face of the voters.

Jim Crawford is a contributing columnist for The Tribune and a former educator at Ohio University Southern.