Bipartisan booby-traps

This morning, I was talking to a friend of mine who's in the Massachusetts legislature. I complimented her on voting with the Republicans on a vote that would make town budgeting much less ... impossible. Her vote was not only good politics in a swing district, it was good on the merits.

She's committed - much more than I am - to bipartisanship, and she has found that a few of her Republican colleagues are worth working with. That's no surprise even to me.

But bipartisanship is a not a two-sided coin; it's a two-edged sword. The House Republicans filed their amendments, most of them doomed, but they didn't care to provide the text of the amendments.

What this says: They're not interested in governing. They're only interested in setting electoral traps for the Democrats, who of course won't vote for amendments blindly - even if it's theoretically possible that those amendments contain a good idea here or there.