As usual, Ezra Klein...

...of the Washington Post, hits the nail right on the head when describing the rationale behind the Republican Party's strategy of obstructionism:

...you don't gain an advantage if you give the other side a major accomplishment and then tell the American people they really did a good job reaching out to you and your colleagues. That's the equivalent of saying to your employer, "Don't give me a promotion, and in fact, think hard about whether you might want to lay me off next year."

...As I've said before, it is very near to impossible to build out an ideological model explaining why Republicans who voted for the deficit-financed Medicare Prescription Drug Benefit would vote against the deficit-neutral health-care reform bill. But it's very easy to build out a model explaining why Republicans would vote for a bill that would help them if it passed and against a bill that would hurt them if it failed...Good-faith disagreement is not the explanation that best fits the data.

...If we're going to give the minority party a reason to want the majority party to fail at governing the country, we can't also give them the power to make the majority party fail at governing the country.