Things have gotten bitter, but you can’t have bipartisan politics when the majority of Republicans don’t engage with it in good faith. As recent years have shown, it’s a concept Democrats insist on sticking to for optics that prevents them from delivering on major platform issues, which the GOP only pays lip service to in years where they don’t have the votes to ram through their policies, regardless of what the opposition thinks of them. As long as the GOP continues with this attitude that lets them pack the Supreme Court and other levels of the judiciary, while passing broadly unpopular laws and blocking policies that have majority support, insisting on bipartisanship is a losing play for Democrats. Leaving aside whether or not they would prefer to perpetually campaign on issues like reproductive right versus definitively solving the matter once and for all, it just feeds into the narrative that the Democrats are a bunch of incompetents who can’t deliver on their promises, and even flub the ones they do make progress on by compromising their stances in the name of bipartisanship, sometimes before the Republicans even raise an initial objection.

Coupled with their abject failure at communicating their actual successes to the public at large, they’re kind of self-sabotaging here. All they’re accomplishing is further demoralizing their voters to maintain an image of respecting procedural norms in the face of an opposition who explicitly seeks to undermine and subvert those same norms. Who exactly is this supposed to excite?