People may be wondering why Republicans are consistently dragging their feet on essential legislation, such as budgets or key border or foreign policy issues, only to cave in at that last moment to Democratic and bipartisan demands.

The answer is simple. It may seem that by forcing compromises and stopgap measures and dragging them out to the last possible moment they not only force the Democrats to accept un-optimum or even unfavorable positions, they also get to showcase their demands and derive maximum concessions.

But there is a deeper and more compelling reason for these tactics. By forcing last-minute temporary solutions to complex problems, they force the government into behavior that is shortsighted and desperate, less well thought out solutions and legislation are pushed forward, and the overall quality of government action is reduced. The result is policies implemented by the administration are less likely to work, more likely to fail, and to have to be frequently re-done, patched or revised. The GOP can then correctly claim that policies favored by their opponents are ill-considered and flawed. Meanwhile, they can claim they are not responsible for this lack of effectiveness because they approved the proposals, albeit at the last minute. If the proposal doesn’t work, they can say it was the Dem’s fault. If it DOES work, they can say they supported it all along.

The founding fathers’ system of checks and balances no longer works They failed to foresee a situation where one side would carefully and knowingly precipitate a disaster just so they could blame it on the other side. They anticipated that honest men could have severe differences of opinion, but it never occurred to them that one partisan group would fail to try for a compromise and attempt to precipitate a crisis instead.

They’ve done it with health care, immigration policy, entitlement spending, defense, tax policy, and on a host of other issues. Often, they have even flipped on issues they originally championed and bitterly resisted them lest their enemies derive any credit for them. Remember how they opposed Obamacare even though it was only a slightly modified Mitt Romney proposal? And when something works, they jump on the bandwagon and claim they supported it all along. They refused to adopt a bi-partisan plan on the border even after Democrats made enormous concessions to get it through the House. They refused to vote war-fighting powers to Obama and then blamed him for “doing nothing” about a red line in Syria. They made concessions to the Taliban and then blamed Biden when they sabotaged his withdrawal from Afghanistan. No, I’m not saying Democrats don’t get it wrong, or that they never screw up. What I’m saying is that Republicans are doing it on purpose, for purely political reasons.
Remember how after a great start on the Covid pandemic they suddenly declared war on vaccines, face masks, and routine public health procedures.

The founders never foresaw that a minority faction would be deliberately malicious.