It can now officially be replaced as a party mascot with by the image of a lemming.

As these House Republicans have now amply demonstrated, they hold no interest in actually governing, as opposed to their perceived emphasis on the importance of lockstep, Stepford-like recalcitrant partisanship.

Immediately reminded ye old scribe of this scene:

Except that the House lacks anyone willing to actually study the menu and subsequently make an informed choice. At least in the Senate, some R’s have already signaled that they will not willingly enter into this self-constructed pull-the-wagons-into-a-circle (and pray) mode.

Update (8:00 p.m.): Shorter version of what the House Republicans scrawled on the virtual wall of the town square today: Billions for Wall Street, bupkis for Main Street.

…There’s a fine line between being willing to compromise and being willing to surrender, and I think Obama generally stayed on the right side of it, while being open enough to compromise that he will get real credit for trying.

The House Republicans, by contrast, looked silly. They were carping about tiny bits of the stimulus (the capitol mall?!). They changed the bits they objected to from one day to the next, and looked for all the world like what I take them to be: people who were determined to oppose the stimulus bill from the outset.

The function of trying to win bipartisan support, it seems to me, is to clarify things to the American people. If the House Republicans could be induced to support the bill, that becomes clear, and everyone would have been better off. If, on the other hand, they were bound and determined to oppose it, no matter what, that also becomes clear. Neither would have been clear had Obama not bothered to try. Source

Or might the upshot be that it is a part of a longer-range legislative fallback strategy by the administraion (Rahm Emanuel?). To wit, operating under the sure knowledge that there will be a House-Senate reconciliation bill coming down the pike shortly, and that that is the one in which the Democratic majority assertively can reconfigure monies, cuts, programs and stimuli.

Based on the vote on just the separate House bill today, the worst that can happen with the real bill when it comes up (insofar as Republican voting is concerned) is exactly the same thing. That is, there is no on-the-record support in that camp to lose, so the administration and the House Democratic leadership need only to not lose more than 26 votes (probably a 24-karat given that not that many will switch to voting nay in any case).

The Senate vote on any final reconciliation bill is a tiny bit more dicey, but there is also much, much less wiggle room for those on the record in support on that chamber’s own first version of such a bill (that is, the natural constituency of any one senator is intrinsically more heterogenous while also – mostly – closer to the spectrum spread of the electorate than that of any one representative).