Remember how Gov. Martin O’Malley kept talking about the “Bush recession” well into President Obama’s second term? Well, he’s about to give Gov.-elect Larry Hogan a structural deficit that could take years to dig out of thanks to state spending that outpaced revenue for every year of his term -- quite the gift for Gov.-elect Larry Hogan, who ran on creating jobs and cutting taxes Gov. O’Malley raised 40 different ways during his term.

To find a way to align spending with revenue will require the state legislature and governor’s administration to work together in a state not used to divided government. So far, State Senate President Thomas V. Mike Miller has only extended a poker to the incoming Republican, telling him to speak to current and former legislators who know “how government works” and lamenting that “we don’t have the time for training new members of the General Assembly and [to] help this new administration in learning the fundamentals of government.”

Given that his version of “how government works” is why Marylanders are $900 million in the hole for this year and the next, he should instead review the policies that got us here. A lack of self-reflection about the priorities of Marylanders is what lost Democrats the governor’s office. With the check and balance of a soon-to-be split government, both parties will have to seek more support from the public to achieve their goals, a huge step forward for a state where one-party government allowed Democrats to evade budget accountability. Here’s to Mr. Miller relinquishing the poker and embracing reality, even if it is not what he envisioned November 3.