Bipartisanship is No Virtue

So says Kevin D. Williamson.  In response to the now famous (or infamous) Norman Ornstein and Thomas Mann piece in the Washington Post over the weekend (my take on it is here), Williamson argues that the implicit argument of Ornstein and Mann--that bipartisanship would no doubt be better than the current Republican blockade--is actually what got us into this mess in the first place.  Here is Williamson:

But while the authors focus on the allegedly extreme partisanship in Washington, anybody who has been watching our national descent into insolvency must conclude that the problem has been too much bipartisanship, not too little. For more than a decade now, the operating model in Congress has been that Democrats more or less support Republicans’ tax cuts (though sometimes howling about it for the benefit of their base) while in return Republicans support Democrats’ spending (also howling about it). That is the substance of the national suicide pact that Congress has signed us up for.

Concerning the budget, Republicans during the Bush years surely did not help things whatsoever:

Republicans had a lot of things they wanted to get done from 2001–09, and the easiest way to keep things moving was by talking a great deal about spending without actually doing much of anything about it. Likewise, if we judge them by their actions rather than by the speeches they make, Democrats are broadly content to go along with a great deal of the Republican agenda on taxes. I’m sure that if they thought they could get away with it Democrats would raise the top rate to 90 percent, but they know they can’t, and the ones who take the time to look at the numbers know that it is the bottom two-thirds of U.S. taxpayers who are unusually lightly taxed, not the top third.

Far from bipartisanship helping, it actually sped us further down the path to fiscal ruin far quicker than would a divided government. 

And just as an aside in thinking about the most used cliches in politics today (Jonah Goldberg's book on the subject just came out today), one of the most overused ones has to be the standard line about "getting things done in Washington."  (Of course in order to get things done, bipartisanship is required, right?)  But what if the things getting done are erecting poll taxes or reenacting prohibition?  But that's the problem with the value-free language of today:  it only references the means and not the ends those means are directed towards.  As Hadley Arkes has shown, it is surely useful to know whether a person speeding down the highway is taking a family member to the hospital or a wheelman driving a getaway car.