What's next?

In this post I will attempt to answer the question "What's next?" in terms of policy priorities for each party.  Let's suppose for each party that the each have an opportunity to pass their current respective legislative priorities without any barrier from any legislative branch.  For Democrats that would probably include the following:
1.  Immigration reform.
2.  Cap and Trade.
3.  Dream Act.
4.  Gun Control-Assault weapons ban, universal background check.
5.  Stimulus spending.
6.  Student loan reform.
7.  Repeal Citizens United or passage of Disclose Act.
8.  Return to Clinton era tax rates.

For Republicans it would probably include:
1. Repeal of Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.
2. Cut individual income and corporate taxes.
3. Increase Border Security.
4. Limit availability of abortions.
5.  Reform Social Security and Medicare.
6.  Approval of Keystone XL Pipeline.

The interesting questions is "What's next?"

Democrats
1.  Interest free loans for all college students.
2.  Fairness Doctrine.
3.  Living wage.
4.  Single Payer Health Care.
5.  Universal High Speed Internet.
6.  More Tax Fairness.

Republicans
1.  Privatize social security.
2.  Tort Reform
3. Flat Tax
4.  School Choice

The Better Question for Climate Change Legislation.

"What test should we apply to your idea to prove it was either good or bad?"  This is the question that is essential to any scientific hypothesis.  It must be possible to be proved wrong.  It must be testable.  This is the corner stone to the philosophy of science.  We should apply this rationale to public policy.  Take climate change for example.  President Obama said that our climate is changing, and that we are contributing to it.  You can't really argue with that, he didn't specify how the climate is changing or by how much, or by how much we are contributing to it.  You can't disprove that statement.  Something you can measure is how much Obama's policies will change that.  So here is the question, if we passed legislation designed to mitigate climate change, and 10 years later we don't see any effect on the climate, that would either prove that our specific climate mitigation efforts were the wrong ones, or that any realistic mitigation effort is not capable of undoing the damage we have already done.  Neither conclusion holds that the climate is not changing or that we did not contribute to it, but it would prove that the U.S. can't not change the climate with legislation.  Now you may ask, well maybe we just picked the wrong mitigation efforts or we need to strengthen the original efforts to produce a measurable effect on climate.  Well that may be true, it admits that we are not good at predicting how our actions impact climate, which would cast doubt on the premise itself that we are contributing to climate change.  Either way at the end of the day, if 10 years of climate legislation fail to show scientific results, we abandon said legislation as ineffective, or we abandon the premise.