Mitch McConnell now faces John Boehner's Tea Party problem

As far as problems go, it's a good one to have. When you control Congress, people expect you to get things done — with great power comes great responsibility, and all that. And Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), the presumptive majority leader when the 114th Congress convenes next year, seems to appreciate it.

McConnell "will definitely work with Speaker Boehner to show Republicans can govern," former Sen. Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.) told The Hill before the election. "I think they really have in mind, if you listen to what McConnell has been talking about, finding things the president could sign." To get anything President Obama will sign, Republicans need to compromise. It's not clear McConnell's caucus will want to compromise.

House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) has faced a similar problem since his party won the House in the last wave election, 2010. Against Boehner's instincts, House Republicans spent a lot of time passing doomed, theatrical repeals of ObamaCare, up to and including a politically disastrous government shutdown that only seems less damaging because it was eclipsed by the horrible rollout of the ObamaCare website.

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It has always been unclear if Boehner is in charge of his caucus or hostage to the restive Tea Party wing he needs to pass legislation with a majority of Republicans. There are plenty of relatively moderate House Republicans, just as there are relatively moderate Republicans in the Senate. The GOP moderates haven't driven the political conversation in the House, and there's no reason to believe the new class of 2014 will have any interest in being less assertive.

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), the most vocal of the Senate's Tea Party–aligned Republicans, has refused to say if he'll support McConnell's bid to be majority leader. And the Republican freshman class of 2014 appears to be closer to Cruz's vision of the GOP's mission than McConnell's get-stuff-done aspirations. There's no way Obama will sign a repeal of his health care law, but that's Cruz's stated first priority. Here's how Cruz welcomed former hog-castrator Joni Ernst of Iowa to the Senate:

There's a school of thought that suggests Republicans won this election by beating the Tea Party as well as the Democrats — there were no major gaffes from Republican candidates, as in 2010 and 2012, and the successful ones went out of their way to downplay or repudiate previous stances that seemed too far to the right of the political mainstream. But that's good public relations; it doesn't signal a change of heart or mind.

Ernst, North Carolina's Thom Tillis, Colorado's Cory Gardner, Tom Cotton of Arkansas — will they follow McConnell's lead, or dance with the fired-up Republican base that brung them? After five years of saying no to Obama — a strategy McConnell championed — can Republicans suddenly start saying yes? Political parties don't have the same levers of power and persuasion they did even 10 years ago. Mitch McConnell's party won the Senate, but his biggest battle may well be with his own caucus.

McConnell has two years to prove himself. Tuesday was a heady day for the GOP, but 2016 could end his reign as majority leader — assuming his conservative colleagues don't first. Not only will the electorate be broader and younger, if recent presidential election years are any guide, but Republicans will have to defend 24 Senate seats — seven of them in states won by Obama — versus 10 seats for the Democrats.

The clock's running.