Donald Trump is feeling his 78-year-old oats and MAGA activists are ready to rumble in the wake of his solid presidential win and the very likely GOP trifecta in Washington. (The Senate is already safely in the bag and a House majority is very near.) But they should all exercise a bit of caution. The first Trump administration demonstrated that narrow congressional majorities can be fragile when it comes to enacting controversial legislation. And the leverage that tiny majorities confer on potential dissenters can become a real problem for would-be legislative steamrollers.

Right now, barring recounts, Republicans will have a 53-to-47 margin in the upper chamber. In the House, there remain enough unresolved races (particularly in California, which has eight of them) to create a sliver of doubt about party control, or more realistically, doubt about the Republican margin. But there’s no doubt at all the number of GOP House seats in the next Congress will be far short of the 241 they held in 2017 (somewhere south of 2020 remains a strong possibility). It’s very clear Republicans will want to put together a mammoth budget-reconciliation measure that can include most of Trump’s legislative priorities in a single bill; such bills cannot be filibustered in the........

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