The headline reads:

Why Washington Can’t Get Much Done

Not "Why Republicans Can't Govern."

From 1992 to 2000 Washington got lots of things done. Welfare was reformed. NAFTA got passed. Deficits vanished. The defense department was made a little more efficient. Government shrank. Earmarks were in the hundreds. Iraq was contained. Real advances toward a resolution to the Israeli/Palestinian conflict were made.

From 2000 to 2007, nothing constructive, and lots destructive has happened. What part of the difference between these two periods is difficult to understand? Finally, the republicans got all three elected branches. And they screwed everything--everything--up.

It turns out, though, that Rove is right. Everything that happens is good for the republican party. The republicans have an opportunity to put in the bumper stickers policy regime they have advocated for years. It fails abjectly. Conclusion? "Washington" can't get things done.

Exegesis follows.

But some big issues come to the nation’s capital and never leave, despite the politicians’ best efforts to wrap them up and send them packing. Immigration is one.

Efforts to craft a grand compromise on the perennially nettlesome issue of how to deal with the millions who want to settle in this country collapsed in the Senate in spectacular fashion Thursday night, even though President Bush and the Senate leadership desperately wanted a deal. Almost everyone in Washington believes that America’s immigration laws are an unenforceable mess. But confronted with real legislation built on real compromises, the Senate sank beneath murderous political, geographic and ideological crosscurrents. Despite vows of senators to resuscitate the bill, it may be months — or years — before Congress again comes close to passing a major overhaul of immigration law.

There is exactly one murderous crosscurrent. Moneyed republican interests who want to have continued access to a labor pool that does not require adherence to US labor law came into conflict with the nativist voting base of the republican party. The people who want to be able to pay less than the minimum wage, not pay workman's comp and operate without complying with OSHA came up against the Republican voters who want all these brown people to just go away.

This isn't complicated. This is not a "Washington" issue. This is a Republican issue.

The reform act of 1986 failed not because it was bad legislation, but because it is not enforced. If all the businesses who employ illegal aliens were fined, as required under the law, then the problem would shrink to the purely cash economy of nannies and construction workers.

But immigration is only one of several major policy matters on which virtually all Americans agree that something has to be done, even as Washington seems mired in dysfunction. What will happen when Congress turns next to energy legislation? Or global warming? Health care? Social Security?

Republicans will block any effective legislation.

This has been another edition of simple answers to simple questions.

It sometimes seems that it takes a catastrophe to create consensus. The Great Depression, Pearl Harbor and Sept. 11 all shattered partisan divisions and led, at least for a time, to enhanced presidential power and a rush of bipartisan lawmaking (some of which political leaders later came to regret).

Seems to me the first had more to do with large democratic majorities in the Congress, the second had to do with an actual threat to the US and the third....Well, in the third, the "bipartisan lawmaking" consisted of Republicans rubberstamping the administration on every initiative, citing 9/11 whether it was relevant or not.

Today, however, the partisan chasm in Washington is deeper than it has been in 100 years, according to some academic studies, as moderate blocs in both parties have all but vanished.

WTF? There are plenty of moderate Democrats. There are no moderate republicans. The ones who claim to be moderate vote with the president on every extreme measure, from the MCA to Alito.

There were a number of Democrats who voted for the Iraq supplemental. And, what, two republicans? The extreme party is the republican party. Just because David Broder wants the Democrats to march to the right to make Brent Scowcroft the new center doesn't mean that moderate blocks on the democratic side of the aisle have vanished.

“Remember,” said Thomas E. Mann, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, “these are really big problems and they’re really tough. Solving them is going to involve some major changes in the way we live, the way we tax ourselves, the way we get our health care and the way we transport ourselves.”

Huh? No, these are all easy to solve. Europe has solved them all. Moneyed republican interests are blocking all of them. Transport is the trickiest; the internal combustion engine is a central part of the economy. But the Sierra Club has noted that there are dozens of technologies on the shelf that would greatly ameliorate the carbon production problem. The issue here is that republicans block any change to the status quo.

He added: “Many of these questions are caught up in ideological differences that really are quite fundamental. On all of them right now there is no consensus in the country and therefore the political system has to try to create one where none now exists.”

Voters have certainly reached consensus on these questions. The problem is a Republican party (and some apostate democrats) wedded to a culture of corruption.

A sign of how hard it is to fashion a compromise on these big questions is the length of time between major legislative actions on them. It took almost a decade from the collapse of the Clinton administration’s health care initiative in 1994 to the passage of the new Medicare prescription-drug benefit.

This is because the insurance lobby and Big Pharma blocked any effective reform, beginning in 1994. It was only when the medicare drug bill passed with guarantees of maintaining high drug prices that there was any "reform" possible.

Even the relatively new issue of global warming has been batted around since 1988, when Al Gore began talking about its potentially dire effects. Now, despite a foot-high stack of proposed legislation on the subject, virtually nothing has been done.

Let's see. Since 1988 the republicans have been insisting that there is no such thing as global warming. Oil companies have been producing "scientific" reports claiming that there is no global warming, or if there is, it has nothing to do with burning, of the course of a few decades, carbon that has been sequestered for tens of millions of years.

Oh, and of course, for the last six years, the administration has had their political team review scientific reporting on climate change, and "correct" the reports to leave open the possibility that the reports are wrong.

This, again, is not a government failure. It's a failure of one party committed to large corporate special interests intervening, generally illegally, in processes legislatively authorized.

Mr. Gore said it was extremely difficult to move the political system when it is paralyzed by partisan passion and beset by well-financed and well-organized interests. He refers to the combination of the oil, coal and automobile industries as the “carbon lobby,” which he said is very difficult to defeat.

Ahem. Mr. Broder, these interests are not part of the "government."

After all, the Medicare drug benefit, too, was a much-heralded attempt to lower the costs of medicines for the elderly, but it created mountains of burdensome paperwork and huge unanticipated costs for the government.

The degree to which this was unanticipated depended on whether you read the official testimony of Bush officials or whether you read their actual estimates. Nobody who paid any analytical attention to this program believed it would actually lower drug costs. The program was a shuck, to get Bush reelected without costing big Pharma anything. You can't blame this on "Washington" when, in fact, this was republican legislation, passed on a party line vote that everyone knew would fail.

Government stasis was not unintended. The Founding Fathers designed the American system of government to cool public passions and created numerous impediments to rash action. They might not be surprised that two decades passed between significant action on immigration law or government old-age pensions. But they might have had trouble conceiving the complexity of the issues facing modern Washington, like global warming or the need to find a way to provide even basic medical care to one in seven Americans.

I am pretty sure they would be appalled at the degree to which the will and the needs of constituents are subordinated to other interests.

And nothing ticks me off more than this "complexity" business. What that really means is that it is really hard to find a way to reduce energy consumption that doesn't hurt the oil companies, or to make medical care delivery efficient without lowering insurance industry revenues and profits. The only complexities involve moving the pigs out of the trough.

And those pigs, by and large, are part of Delay's K street project, which, I am quite certain would have appalled the Founders.

The molasses pace of governance in America is frustrating to many in and outside Washington. But the framers recognized that the dangers of succumbing to fleeting enthusiasms are often far greater than the slow process of fashioning a consensus from the competing interests of a sectional country.

So now the reason that we can't get universal health care is because the need to cover every American may be a "fleeting enthusiasm."

There's no lack of consensus in a sectional country. There's the Beltway, and the constituents. So, I guess, in the end, this may be a problem in "Washington," but not the way that Broder means.