“No matter how often pundits praise bipartisanship, it’s not weird or unusual in politics for parties to disagree, and for the out-party to oppose what the in-party proposes. The question, however, isn’t whether an oppose-everything strategy is unethical, but whether it gets the best outcomes. Surely, the top Republican preference was for the relief bill to collapse as it went through Congress. As it turned out, they were unable to make that happen. It seems likely after that, however, that their next-best preference was to have it pass without their votes because agreeing to a deal that would produce a smaller bill would still leave GOP legislators open to accusations that they were unwilling to fight. There’s not much scarier to them than being slapped with the dreaded RINO label.”

“The second problem for Republicans, however, is that they’ve finally lost their credibility when they claim to oppose deficits. For decades they had managed to persuade many pundits to erroneously believe that they favored small deficits when Democrats are president, when in fact the party, for all its ‘deficit’ talking points when Democrats are in the White House, was actually uninterested in actual federal budget deficits. At any rate, after Republican tax cuts widened the deficit under President Donald Trump, no one believes GOP deficit talk. That fact, along with some changes in Democratic policy preferences, helped produce the huge relief bill. At this point, only a very aggressive Republican effort to reach a deal might have had a chance to work, and everything Republicans believe and have done for the last 30 years pushed against making a serious effort. Which is one of the reasons that Biden will be signing a bill on Friday that deals Republicans a whole bunch of policy defeats” – Bloomberg.