Frankly, Broder’s fetish for bipartisanship is kind of weird

Brian Beutler has exactly the right response to David Broder’s most recent ode to “bipartisanship”:

Looked at one way, the stimulus was an extremely partisan effort that succeeded thanks to the Democrats’ near unity and the defection of three Republicans who might not continue to be Republicans if a viable third party emerged. Looked at another, though, it was the triumph of every political faction in the country over the increasingly sclerotic group of tax-averse, socially conservative, pro-corporate politicians who happen to make up the core and husk of the modern GOP. The fact that there’s only one other major party is inconvenient for the word “bipartisan” but it says little about the range of representatives (from Bernie Sanders to Roland Burris to Ben Nelson) who voted for reform.

It never actually hit me how much Broder fetishizes bipartisanship until I read this passage in his column:

It starts from a false premise: that the stimulus bill proves the failure of outreach to Republicans. In fact, had Obama not negotiated successfully with Republican Sens. Susan Collins, Olympia Snowe and Arlen Specter and met most of their terms, his bill would have died. This was a success for bipartisanship, not a failure.

No, this may have been a success for bipartisanship, but it was also a definite failure for the stimulus package.  What’s more, the fact that Obama was forced by the idiosyncrancies of the Senate to negotiate a weaker stimulus package is not a good thing.  This “success for bipartisanship” really only demonstrates the degree to which the Senate is a fundamentally countermajoritarian institution which impedes the ability of the majority to pursue its voter-approved legislative agenda.

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