Remember the Golden Age of Bipartisanship? The one that lasted from approximately 11 a.m. on Thursday — when Senators Max Baucus, Democrat of Montana, and Charles Grassley, Republican of Iowa, released their ‘‘Hiring Incentives to Restore Employment Act’’ — to 4:00 that afternoon, when Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid crumpled it into a small ball, lit it on fire and tossed it in a garbage can?

O.K., to be strictly accurate, Reid simply announced that he would “move … to a smaller package than talked about in the press,” but such semantics won’t stop the tears in the Baucus and Grassley households. For you wonky sorts, here’s The Times’s Carl Hulse and David M. Herszenhorn with the details:

Senator Harry Reid, the Nevada Democrat and majority leader, said he would take four core job-creating initiatives from the bipartisan proposal — including tax breaks for businesses that hire unemployed workers and increased public works spending — and seek to move those rapidly through the Senate….

On the jobs bill, comity gave way to politics. Should we be upset?

While Mr. Reid stripped out of the bipartisan bill some tax breaks and other provisions intended to win Republican support, as well as special-interest provisions to win the backing of specific senators, the scaled-back package retained a combination of tax cuts and spending with the potential to win support from both parties … Mr. Baucus, chairman of the Finance Committee, and Mr. Grassley, the senior Republican on the panel, had … included extended unemployment benefits and health care for the unemployed as well as the renewal of an array of tax breaks that are due to expire.

The question, naturally, is who’s still on board. Initially, it was tough to tell, as even the White House was seemingly blindsided: “The President is gratified to see the Senate moving forward in a bipartisan manner on steps to help put Americans back to work,” said White House spokesman Robert Gibbs in a press release issued about a nanosecond before Reid decided to try moving a different direction in a partisan manner. “The President looks forward to working with members from both parties on this bill and on the additional job creation measures he has identified, including incentives for energy efficiency investments and increased access to credit for small businesses.”

So, will any Republicans heed that call? “Don’t expect the G.O.P. to climb back on board after this,” writes Ed Morrissey at Hot Air. “In the current political environment, Grassley took a not-inconsiderable political risk by working on the bipartisan effort with Max Baucus to craft a stimulus bill and give Democrats a little bit of bipartisan cover. What Republican will take that kind of risk on a stimulus bill this year now? The $15 billion Reid plan won’t be worth filibustering — it’s better to hang that on the Democrats when it inevitably fails to stimulate jobs — but the G.O.P. will leave the Democrats to shoulder it themselves.”

Morrissey doesn’t think Republicans will be the only ones fretting:

Reid’s decision takes the second stimulus package cost down from $85 billion to $15 billion. That may please fiscal conservatives, but it sets up an embarrassing problem for Barack Obama. No one believes that his $787 billion Porkulus package, now repriced to $862 billion, worked to create jobs, but the Left wing of Democrats thinks it didn’t work because the Democrats didn’t spend enough money. Obama himself has promised a “hard pivot” to job creation and built expectations for a large-scale effort. A $15 billion program that only contains the silly payroll-tax exemption that gives businesses a maximum $6000 for every person they hire and keep all year, more highway project money, a business tax deduction that amounts to a whopping $35 million over 10 years, and a program allowing states to borrow money at a lower interest rate will not only not create jobs, but it will make a laughingstock of the notion that Congress or Obama is taking the problem seriously.

The Left Coast Rebel is on board: “Essentially I am taking from it the sheer capitulation that the Democratic party now is engaging in, the final end result of months of tea party activism and the culmination of Scott Brown’s election (not to mention Patrick Kennedy not running for reelection). I am not saying that you need to let your guard down, you just need to note… We are winning, come hell or high-water.”

“Now senate Democrats are worried about legislative bloat?” asks an incredulous Mark Hemingway of The Washington Examiner. “It’s hard to know how sincere Reid is about fiscal responsibility now, on the heels of TARP, the stimulus bill and health care reform. In any event, Reid is kind of an impulsive guy and it’s not clear this move will improve relations with colleagues across the aisle …”

“Ironies abound,” adds Morrissey’s boss, Michelle Malkin. “Reid appears more fiscally responsible than his cohorts on either side of the aisle and the White House, which had endorsed Baucus-Grassley. But in trampling all over the deliberative process to get his bill done by any means necessary, Reid exposes the ultimate folly of the entire exercise. The point isn’t job creation and stimulation — remember the key features remain a $20 billion bailout of the Highway Trust Fund and anti-job tax gimmicks. The point of Harry Reid’s plan is to save Harry Reid’s hide. And that, praise be, looks more hopeless than ever.”

The Democracy in America blogger at The Economist thinks Reid’s error was less one of politics than of policy, in that he removed some new benefits for the unemployed. “Cutting unemployment benefits seems like a bizarre priority for a Democrat, particularly since Marc Ambinder reports that the only thing the CBO believes would do more to create new jobs than a tax credit aimed at hiring would be raising unemployment benefits. The unemployed spend new funds so quickly, raising demand in the economy so much, that increasing unemployment benefits is, counterintuitively, the single best way to create jobs.”

Nor were liberals universal in praise of Reid’s move. Here’s Alan Colmes: “the opportunity for a stronger, more-inclusive bipartisan bill that would have done more to create jobs and offer tax incentives is being squandered.”

Boy genius Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight also thinks Reid managed to miss all the fish in the barrel:

This should be a trap … for Republicans. If you support the bill, you necessarily make it “bipartisan”, at least by the Beltway’s definition of the term, since bipartisanship in the most narrow sense has nothing to do with the philosophical orientation of a bill but instead simply who votes for it. You also help the Democrats to shave a few decimal points off the unemployment rate by November. And you may be tacitly acknowledging that the stimulus bill wasn’t so bad after all, since whatever label the Democrats want to put on it, a well-constructed jobs bill is indeed more stimulus. Or … you can oppose a bill that 72 percent of the public supports (not that bloviating pundits have noticed), and risk looking like hypocrites after telling the Democrats for months that they should be more focused on the jobs picture.

Instead, Democrats seem hellbent on setting a trap for themselves, breaking up their full house to draw to two pair. Although there’s a chance that Democrats could still win a few news cycles out of the debate, for the time being they’ve let it devolve into yet another process story while at the same time limiting their options to a menu of choices all of which seem inadequate to the scope of the program.

David Dayen at FireDogLake takes issue with Reid’s statement that “We feel that the American people need a message … The message that they need is that we’re doing something about jobs.” Dayen responds: “Actually, they don’t need a message, they need jobs. And this won’t get it done.”

How does Dayen know? He talked to Larry Mishel of the Economic Policy Institute:

He said that the Schumer-Hatch job creation tax credit, which would eliminate the 6.2% payroll tax for the employer for any hire of someone unemployed at least 60 days, and offer cash incentives to keep that person on the jobs past 2009 2010, is fatally flawed. “Schumer-Hatch provides a credit for any hire. So, someone quits and is replaced, they get a credit. There’s tremendous turnover each year, with hires nearly 40% of employment. So this rewards activity almost all of which would occur anyway and means the credit is stretched very thin,” Mishel said. EPI actually supported a job creation tax credit, but theirs provided eight times as much money and would have had a much greater impact. The 6.2% of payroll may be too small to induce any hiring. Mishel concluded, “So, a small incentive, thinly spread with a complicated design. Yuch.”

Still, most on the left are backing the majority leader they so often love to mock, albeit with the sort of backhanded compliments Reid should be used to. “It is enough to make one ask — why didn’t he just do this with health care?” writes Chris Bowers at OpenLeft. “The 74 days the Senate lost while waiting for Baucus and Grassley on health care was enough to push the process past the Massachusetts special election. If Reid had just overridden Baucus back then, the health care bill would currently be law. I guess even if Reid did not override Baucus then, at least overriding Baucus now shows that he [is] valuing bipartisanship at lot less these days. Progress!”

“The Majority Leader didn’t exactly make the jobs bill better, so much as he made it less bad,” adds Steve Benen of Washington Monthly. “Work will continue next week, with a vote expected early the following week. And if you’re wondering why Dems didn’t try to pass this through reconciliation, you and I are wondering the same thing.”

“No one wants to take the blame for a tax hike in an election year, and they certainly don’t want to be seen sitting idle while doctors suffer a 21 percent cut in Medicare payments,” writes Mike Lillis of the Washington Independent, praising Reid’s courage. “But those things will get done anyway. The question remains: why stick them in a bill that’s supposed to create jobs? What effect could they have on the nation’s grave unemployment situation except to crowd out real job-creating measures?” But Lillis frets over what will happen if Congress “doesn’t step in with more targeted, bang-for-your buck spending” and worries that “there’s not nearly enough money directed to help states survive their worst budget troubles in recent history.”

Michael Tomasky, writing at The Guardian, thinks Reid did the right thing in the wrong way:

First of all, the bipartisan bill wasn’t really going to do much of anything about jobs, which was perhaps putting it kindly. It was an $85 billion measure, of which $31 billion was an R & D tax credit that had little to do with jobs … And then, Republicans started insisting on a new estate tax deal … which would deeply slash estate taxes owed by about the richest 1 percent of Americans.

Stepping back, then, we have this. A bipartisan bill, but a bad one that wasn’t ever going to do much about job creation. Republicans trying to tack one of their pet projects, solely and transparently for the richest Americans, onto the bill, knowing it was a poison pill for liberals. Finally, the Democratic leader of the Senate changing course at the last second in a way that now damages the prospects of passing anything, maybe. Honestly. Abolish the Senate. I’m almost serious. This is insane.

So, anybody happy with the way things turned out? Anybody? Wait, who’s that in the back of the room with his hand up? It’s The Atlantic’s Derek Thompson:

Is anybody else tired of the idea that partisan differences are something we expect anybody to “put aside” when they start debating important legislation? To be sure, debates over important legislation sound like precisely the time it’s in everybody’s interest to speak their mind. “Partisan differences” are what makes parties different … You can criticize the filibuster for putting a TRIMAX wheel lock on legislation, or the absurd proliferation of Republican holds, which are obstructionist beyond any reasonable definition of partisan. But this obsessive focus on bipartisanship for the purpose of bipartisanship only fetishizes something that Americans begin to value, and expect, and demand and neither party expects to work.

Good point. For example, does anybody think this intriguing “bipartisan” proposal on terrorism trials from Max Boot (writing at Commentary) will get much of a hearing?

Now that Obama is getting engaged, I hope this former law professor looks beyond the options currently on offer — civil trial vs. military commissions — and puts his influence behind a third possibility: National Security Courts to be run by federal judges but with special rules of procedure to make it easier to convict terrorists. There would, for example, be no demand for Miranda rights and no absolute bar on hearsay evidence. This is a proposal that has been knocking around for a while and has picked up bipartisan support — including that of liberal law professor Neal Katyal, conservative law professor Jack Goldsmith, conservative former prosecutor Andrew C. McCarthy, and centrist journalist Stuart Taylor Jr. Yet it has gone nowhere in Congress. This is an issue where the liberal-conservative divide appears bridgeable, if only Obama would put his personal prestige behind the proposal.

Or that this idea from Robert Robb of RealClearPolitics will get hashed over at President Obama’s upcoming bipartisan bull session on health care: “There is a true bipartisan compromise on health care that would really serve the country. It would involve Democrats accepting a transition to a robust individual health insurance market for most Americans and Republicans accepting government as the insurer of last resort for those acutely or chronically ill. There are two fundamental insecurities people feel about health care that merit political attention: (1) people are dependent on employment for coverage; and (2) there is too large of a risk of going broke if people get seriously sick.”

How would it work?

If there was a robust individual insurance market, products would change. It is very likely that term health insurance, much like term life insurance, would develop – enabling people to insure themselves against illness at a fixed premium over a long period of time. If, however, there is to be universal coverage, the health care of the acutely and chronically ill will have to be subsidized. How it is subsidized determines who the burden for the subsidy falls on.

The current Democratic bills provide the subsidy through the insurance premium mechanism, by requiring insurance companies to accept people irrespective of pre-existing conditions, forbidding medical underwriting and sharply limiting the ability of insurance companies to price according to risk. This puts the burden for the subsidy disproportionately on the young and healthy, who will pay much more for health insurance than otherwise would be the case. A much fairer way would be to provide the subsidy through the tax mechanism, by allowing anyone whose medical expenses exceed a certain percentage of income to be eligible for Medicaid. Then the burden for the subsidy would fall on those in their prime income-producing years.

Of course, it’s not like anybody really thinks the Feb. 25 get-together has anything to do with bipartisanship. So, is Derek Thompson being cynical, savvy or just recognizing the obvious — i.e., that deep down, we all love and need partisanship?

In the 1990s there was a magazine — remember George? — whose founder envisioned a “post-partisan” nation. Alas, John F. Kennedy Jr. is no longer with us, and post-partisanship never was. Sure, for this President’s Weekend we can bring out all the quotes from our finest: “Let me … warn you in the most solemn manner against the baneful effects of the spirit of party generally” (G. Washington); “We are all Republicans, we are all Federalists” (T. Jefferson). But this nugget seems to ring more true: “At the core, we are dealing with two parties that have fundamentally different views …” Karl Rove was talking about national security, specifically, but he’d likely think the point holds more broadly. At least it did at 4 p.m. on Thursday …