Kevin Drum, over at Mother Jones magazine, made a compelling case earlier this week for the merits of true bipartisanship. He writes:

Bipartisanship is in bad odor these days because it's associated with a knee-jerk, David Broderish tendency to assume that the answer to any policy dilemma is automatically halfway between the liberal position and the conservative position. But that sells bipartisanship short. Where it shines is its ability to allow politicians to make tough decisions. If all you want to do is hand out goodies—tax cuts, prescription drugs, defense contracts—life is easy. Everyone loves goodies. You don't need help from your opposite numbers to get stuff like that through Congress. But what if you want to pass something tougher? Something that takes as well as gives? If you have bipartisan support, you can do it right: you can stand up to special interests and K Street lobbyists and enact real reform.  But you can only do this if you have political cover and plenty of votes. If, instead, you have to do it in the face of implacable partisan opposition, then you can't afford to make any more enemies. Every vote is precious, and that means instead of standing up to special interests, you have to buy them off. 

Essentially Drum argues that if a congressional edict is going to aggravate powerful interests—especially if it will cost private-sector entities buckets of cash—then it's much easier to pull that off if you have a lot of supporters. His piece then critiques Republicans for unanimously opposing measures that fit with their core principles. In health care for example, Democrats are proposing to cut millions of dollars of waste from the Medicare system. Such spending discipline is usually music to the ears of GOPers. And yet Republicans, led by Mitch McConnell, are vehemently opposing what they decry as cuts to Medicare services. Democratic attempts to make the system more efficient—something you'd assume sensible Republicans would support—are portrayed as hanging seniors out to dry. In Drum's vision of bipartisanship, Republicans would set aside that innate political desire to make a wedge out of every issue and agree to rid Medicare of wasteful spending. Both parties would get something they want and they'd have a convincing enough majority to quiet concerns. Sounds pleasantly functional, right?

Clearly that isn't how things are playing out in Washington right now. Even the flickers of cross-party activity on Capitol Hill don't really square as bipartisan. These days bipartisanship doesn't even mean some middle point between political poles. It has become shorthand for a process of fashioning a bill with sufficient quirks designed to appeal to the one or two GOP senators who might deign to support it that it can gain the elusive but electorally important stamp "Both parties support this." The dirty secret is that everyone knows having a couple of moderates on board with a policy is hardly incontrovertible proof that its garnered cross-party support. The result is legislation that, like that unveiled by Max Baucus on Wednesday, lacks internal consistency. In the process of compromising to turn a couple of opponents into supporters—give a little bit here, a little bit there—the intellectual framework for the bill gets eroded. Its overarching rationale for existence is weakened, and what's left is a brittle, gnawed-at stack of paper that, in this case, is declared DOA by the left and nonsensical by the right. Although our political culture continues to hold out bipartisanship as a signifier of legislative desirability, in its contemporary incarnation, it's a poor way of making public policy. Support from both sides of the aisle shouldn't be mistaken as a automatic marker of good policy, just a limping indicator of possibility.