"...The fetish for bipartisanship has dominated Washington for at least 80 years. In that time, bipartisanship acquired a rosy glow: to label a policy bipartisan was to deem it both representative and virtuous, the byproduct of opposing sides compromising their way to the best possible solution. But on its own, bipartisanship has never been a virtue. It has been, at best, virtue-signaling -- a legislative both-sidesism that has infected US politics for far too long. [snip]
"The continued efforts by the GOP to prevent investigations into the insurrection only confirm that bipartisanship is a useless metric. Senate Republicans blocked an independent commission, and McCarthy has now made clear that the price of Republicans playing ball on the select committee was accepting some of the insurrectionists' biggest supporters as members. Pelosi, who has grokked the new rules of politics far better than most Democrats, did the right thing by saying no." -- CNN's Nicole Hemmer, in a brief history of why "bipartisanship" has never been a metric for good politics, and why Speaker Pelosi's defenestration of two Republican seditionists from the January 6 select committee was the right move.
