Michael Cohen maintains that Republicans will regret gaining control of the Senate after the midterms:

If recent polling is any indication, it seems increasingly likely that Republicans will take control of the US Senate in November.

But hold off on popping those champagne corks — winning the Senate and controlling both houses of Capitol Hill is a poisoned chalice for the GOP, one that will expose the party’s wide divisions and increasingly extremist views.

Cohen is right that the GOP currently has no agenda, or at least not one with any relevance to most voters, but as far as the party’s leaders are concerned that is mostly to their advantage. The party leadership hasn’t wanted to advance any specific policies before the election, and that deprives the other party of ready-made targets for criticism. Because the non-presidential party usually benefits in midterm elections, this approach seems likely to work in most competitive races. Having won a Senate majority simply by running against the administration, Republicans leaders in Congress would have very few incentives to promote their own agenda and will satisfy themselves with derailing and undermining whatever is left of the president’s. Especially as this relates to diplomacy with Iran, that could have very unfortunate effects, but that will hardly seem unattractive to the party’s members of Congress. Most of the intra-party quarrels that Cohen identifies in the rest of his argument are more likely to be postponed or suppressed ahead of the primary season. If Republican leaders are anxious not to give their opponents ammunition ahead of the midterms, when Republican candidates face a much more supportive electorate, they are likely to do the same thing ahead of a presidential election. That doesn’t rule out the possibility that one or two senators might try a political stunt now and then, but that is always a possibility whether the party is in the majority or not.

A Republican majority does seem slightly more likely at this point, but then again control of the chamber could end up hinging on whichever party independent Greg Orman decides to support. That may not end up favoring the GOP. However, that is not the GOP’s biggest concern. Even if it secures a majority in the Senate in this cycle, it is almost certainly going to lose that majority in the next one. That seems even more likely when we consider how consistently Republicans have underperformed in Senate elections in the last several cycles, including 2010. The senators elected in the Republican wave election of 2010 will be up for re-election in 2016. The party will be defending a large number of seats, and some of those seats are in states that will have much larger, less Republican-leaning electorates in a presidential year. Supposing that the GOP comes out of 2014 with as much as a three or four-seat majority, it won’t take many defeats in 2016 to return the party to the minority once again, and the Republican majority–if there is one–is probably going to be smaller than that in the end. Winning control of the Senate for the next two years isn’t going to be a “poisoned chalice” for the party because they will likely have control for such a short time that it won’t matter. It will be something for them to enjoy briefly before handing it back to the other side.