The Party Of Always No

House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer gave a pretty depressing speech today over at the Center for American Progress about the Republicans basically refusing to vote for any legislation whatsoever and then blaming the mean ol' Democrats. Ezra has the goods:

What Hoyer doesn't offer much of are solutions. But then, solutions are hard. Harder even in the House than the Senate.

On the one hand, the House is in better shape. Unlike the Senate, it's not paralyzed. But that's not to say it's working well, either. A world in which the only votes available for legislation are Democratic votes is a world in which the possible compromises and coalitions are very narrow. The House health-care bill, for instance, could have done a lot more to control costs if some Republicans had been interested in cutting deals. Hard compromises -- like capping the employer tax exclusion -- could have been justified by the need to attract Republican votes. Without that space to gain votes from politicians representing different interests, however, there wasn't room to make deals opposed by Democratic interests. And not all Democratic interests were right about every aspect of this bill.

But fixing that is a lot harder than fixing the Senate's anti-majoritarian tendencies. Ending the filibuster is easy, at least as a technical matter: You just end it. Making it safe for politicians to compromise with one another is much more difficult. Hoyer's speech is a call for Republicans to recognize their responsibility to the country, but responsibility seems sadly outgunned in the current era.

Why be responsible when it's so much easier to simply obstruct any and all legislation, then blame the Democrats?  You have a compliant media that wants to advance the story that Republicans still run Washington and are popular and that the Democrats are losers despite the massive margins in Congress, you have a ready-made astroturf organization of former Republicans and lobbyists dispersing talking points to the media and the Teabaggers, and you have the talk-radio screamers and winger bloggers ready to howl on cue whenever they are needed.

The problem is far larger than just the Republicans ceding any and all responsibility towards improving the country.  Many, many people are deeply invested in seeing Obama fail as miserably as possible in order to get another Dubya in the White House.

That's always been the plan.  Why compromise when you can obstruct and then destroy all opposition?  The binary Bush worldview didn't end on January 20, 2009.

[UPDATE 4:44 PM] Just as a reminder, Republicans pull crap like this:

They’d all walk to the front of the House and, laughingly and jokingly, put their arms around each other’s shoulder like it was some kind of clownish fun. And they did this over and over to make sure every vote took half an hour. That’s how low things have gotten. I could give you countless examples just like that. They’re simply obstructionists and there’s nothing you can do about it.

Nice.