Bob Franken

Surely you didn’t believe these guys, with their promises of bipartisanship and compromise? That’s what we got from President Barack Obama, but particularly from the Republican congressional leaders after an election where Capitol Hill — all the real estate under the dome and the outbuildings — became a GOP fiefdom, facing off against the Democrats’ shrinking territory down the Pennsylvania Avenue no-man’s-land that ends at the White House.

New Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell even offered a rationale for cooperation, telling The Washington Post that his party has something to prove, whi...