When Harry Reid invoked the "nuclear option" last week to permanently prohibit filibustering judicial and executive branch nominees (SCOTUS excepted) he invited a brief surge of ritualistic navel gazing by a class of political pundits who also tend to spend a lot of time worrying about the national debt, and healthcare costs, and the amount of money the country spends on elderly people generally.
These might seem like unrelated issues -- the filibustering of nominees and the trajectory of public healthcare spending -- but they're actually very tightly linked. These fiscal scolds actually owe Reid an enormous debt of gratitude, but their religious devotion to the idea that solutions to big problems aren't worth undertaking if they're not bipartisan has proven to be stronger than their commitment to budgetary restraint.
In a single interview with NewsmaxTV on Monday, Time magazine's Mark Halperin unintentionally exposed the tension between these two precepts, when he allowed his axiomatic hostility to partisan power grabs to overwhelm his concern for the country's fiscal health.