Remember this? From Politico, October 28, 2010 (emphasis added):
Right now, the tone is a lot different — with Republicans pledging to embrace an agenda for the next two years that sounds a lot like their agenda for the past two: Block Obama at all costs.
And even Obama’s pre-election appeals to cooperation are wrapped in an I’m-still-the-president tone that suggests that Americans will be looking at two opposing camps glaring at each other across the barricades — gridlock all around.
Here’s John Boehner, the likely speaker if Republicans take the House, offering his plans for Obama’s agenda: “We’re going to do everything — and I mean everything we can do — to kill it, stop it, slow it down, whatever we can.”
I remember this! I remembered it, in fact, when I read this story this morning, also from Politico:
Republicans claim Democrats, at the direction of their leadership, are determined to deny GOP incumbents any big victories heading into 2020 on a host of issues — from prescription drugs to immigration reform — and are dropping the bipartisan approach they seemed to promise during the last election.
The piece cites several grumpy Republicans upset that their Democratic colleagues haven’t allowed them input on legislation, from drug prices to bills protecting Dreamers. Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart of Florida, for example, said he’s ever-so-concerned that Democrats would be “not trying to actually work in a way to put bills on the floor to become law, but on the contrary, doing it in a way that it won’t become law, just to score political points.”
Could you imagine? Imagine the House passing bills without input from the other party and without intending them to become law, maybe even dozens of times? And it’s not like the GOP-led Senate is chomping at the bit to take up a pro-immigration bill, either, even if it’s the most tepid bipartisan compromise possible between Democrats and the 2.5 moderate House Republicans remaining in Congress.
Charges of hypocrisy are not particularly effective as politics; voters don’t care as much about Process and Norms as they do about things that affect their day- to-day lives, like healthcare and jobs. But evidence of Republican hypocrisy is still useful to point out because Democrats need reminding over and over that Republicans simply do not care about doing things the Right Way and respecting rules—and that you will get no credit with them for trying.