If you work in the business world long enough, you will notice that an employee reveals the most about his own personal work ethic, not when he starts out, not when he’s angling for a bonus or promotion, but at the end, when he gets a new job and gives his two weeks’ notice, or when he starts training his successor as he reaches retirement.

How hard does he work those final weeks? Does he still put the company first, or does he just phone it in?  Or does he stuff his briefcase with office supplies, raid the petty cash drawer, and pilfer the prototype cabinet every evening before he goes home?

If he really gives it all he’s got, right up to the last day, then there’s a role model to remember with love.

The same goes for political leadership when it has had its walking papers served on Election Day, or even when that eventuality becomes evident, months in advance.

The polls now are in agreement: barring some earth-shaking shock this autumn, the Democrat party will be out of leadership in the United States House of Representatives and in some state legislatures as well, following the November elections.

How are they responding to this news? What can we learn about our modern politicians from this current experience?

Let’s recall two rather famous recent changes in our political leadership: 2000 and 2020.

As author Barbara Olson revealed in her shocking book, “The Final Days,” much of the Clinton team was so certain they would be carried forward in a Gore administration, many engaged in petty (and some not so petty) acts of sabotage across the executive branch, especially at the White House, between Election Day 2000 and Inauguration Day 2001. That crew spent their final months doing damage.

By contrast, think back on the end of Donald Trump’s first term, as the clock ticked off the final months in 2020-2021. 

President Trump’s medical response team had been working on fast-tracking the development and approval of vaccines and treatment arrays for Covid-19 throughout 2020; they didn’t let up, they accelerated their work, right up to the final day, turning over a complete, impressive vaccine and treatment program to the incoming Biden regime.

Remember, too, that President Trump’s foreign policy team had been shepherding the diplomatic corps of multiple Middle Eastern nations into the series of treaties known as the Abraham Accords in the summer and fall of 2020; the Trump administration continued pressing for such agreements right up to the end, adding Morocco in December and Sudan in January.

There is a difference between one administration and another. The leadership at the top can set the tone on matters like these.

In this context, we ask: how are today’s Congressional leadership adjusting their behavior in light of polls that show they are on their way out? 

Are the Pelosi and Schumer majorities trying to win back public support by reacting to recognition that the nation desperately needs a course correction in so many ways? Or are they doubling down on the destruction causing our current problems?

Sadly, there is no indication that they are interested in the concept of working for the public good until the last moment, as the Trump administration did.

As state after state orders the owners of electric vehicles (EVs) to forego charging their cars because the grid can’t handle the load, the Pelosi/Schumer teams are doubling down on their drive to halt internal combustion engine (ICE) vehicles, despite the clear inability of our system to handle EVs.

As the nation suffers record across-the-board inflation due to unaffordable spending programs and foolhardy mass “stimulus checks,” the Pelosi/Schumer teams continue to call for even more of these destructive programs, either in more direct transfer payments or in the outrageous gifts to special interests known as “Build Back Better” plans, desperately trying to find some way to force them through before losing the gavel in December.

As every shopper sees the prices of groceries, commuting, and practically all retail goods skyrocket – sparked by the impossible transportation costs of a world in which gasoline prices have more than doubled, and diesel prices have nearly tripled, in just eighteen months.  Is Congress dealing with that – as it easily could – by reversing the anti-oil policies of the Biden White House?  No, the Pelosi/Schumer leadership teams continue to work against the public, supporting Biden’s closures of federal oil fields, supporting the Biden regulatory state’s continued attacks on the petroleum industry.  They could side with the transportation industry and the consumer, but no, the congressional majority’s sympathies lie elsewhere.

And what of the general view of the public, that this leadership is more than out of touch, that they are literally joined at the hip to certain fringe and foreign interest groups, all diametrically opposed to the interests of their constituents?

There is in fact every indication – last week’s tantrums at Senator Manchin’s refusal to sign onto another boondoggle being just the latest proof – that these majorities know they will lose, and have decided to make America suffer as much as possible for failing to appreciate the beneficence of the Pelosi/Schumer era.

They have no interest in trying to put a lid on inflation, or in trying to help students and minimum wage workers commute to work or school, or in trying to save the middle class from slipping down into the lower, or in trying to save the lower from slipping into poverty.

Instead, they spend every waking hour on January 6 investigations, trying with all their might to besmirch the Trump administration, unintentionally succeeding only in reminding American voters of how good they had it before.

The Pelosi/Schumer team sees the end of their own gravy train approaching, and they’re gathering every last handful of perks, doling out every last favor to their friends, distributing the largesse that you and I fund to the non-profits and NGOs from whom they will likely seek lucrative jobs the very morning after the voters toss them out on their ungrateful ears in November.

And worst of all, even though this future is all but written in stone, we have to watch it unfold, predictably but unalterably, for another six long, painful months.

There are good reasons why, in the private sector, once you realize you have employees like this in your organization, you have them pack up their desks, and you direct Security to march them out immediately, without postponing the inevitable another day.

John F. Di Leo is a Chicagoland-based international transportation professional.  A one-time Milwaukee County Republican Party chairman, he has been writing a regular column for Illinois Review since 2009. His book on vote fraud (The Tales of Little Pavel) and his political satires on the current administration (Evening Soup with Basement Joe, Volumes I and II) are available on Amazon.

caricature by Donkey Hotey CC BY 2.0 license