John Bryson is not the issue here. The stalled free trade deals are the issue. They remain an issue because the White House is insisting that the deals with Colombia, Panama and South Korea include lapsed trade adjustment assistance for displaced workers, conditions Republicans thoroughly reject. John Bryson has been taken hostage as a byproduct to this dispute, and it happened months before he was nominated. His history with the NRDC or whatever else oppo researchers can dig up is irrelevant.

It’s not just an article of faith among many in the Republican Party that the government by some rule of nature/psychology/economics can’t be a solution. This idea has morphed into a commitment to make it impossible for government to properly function, preventing it from ever being a solution. The conservative philosophy about the role of government has transitioned into an active effort to realize a self-fulfilling anti-government prophesy, as the proposal for smaller single-issue bills and the RIENS Act demonstrate.

Wyoming’s two Republican senators, Mike Enzi and John Barrasso, are pushing for a rules change that would only allow an individual bill to deal with a single issue, in order to prevent the current practice of Congress passing massive omnibus bills. From Politico:

Republicans claim to support HSAs as a way to encourage smart health care consumption, with minimum insurance coverage mandates, and automatic enrollment as a way to increase coverage. Progressives support public insurance programs, believe everyone should get basic coverage to protect them from medical bankruptcy, and support a public alternative to private insurance companies. Republicans, progressives, and a majority of Americans overwhelmingly oppose an individual mandate forcing Americans to buy a product from private insurance companies, or face getting fined by the IRS.

A bipartisan policy compromise would be to scrap the current individual mandate and replace it with automatic enrollment in a HSA combined with only a very minimal public extreme catastrophic insurance policy.

Opponents of the Employee Free Choice Act in Congress made their Big Lie into a bill Wednesday, when Republicans John DeMint (S.C.) and Mike Enzi (Wyo.) introduced the so-called Secret Ballot Protection Act.

Before we go further, let’s clear up the bill’s false implication right now:

The Employee Free Choice Act would not—repeat after me—would not, take away the secret ballot National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) election process if workers seeking to form a union wanted to use it.