The sequestration impasse is so obviously the Republicans' fault that the punditocracy, which can't abide an obvious and unchanging story line, is trying hard to invent a new one that blames President Obama. Bob Woodward says it was Obama's fault for inventing the sequester, which misses some crucial context. Dean Baker says it's Obama's fault for positioning himself as a budget hawk. Bill Keller says it's Obama's fault for not positioning himself as a budget hawk. And so on.

Rather than spin ever-more-rococo theories about who's to blame, these domes would do better to think about how the current alignment of the two parties makes the sequestration problem so very difficult to solve. I submit that the obstacle is that the Democrats haven't moved far enough to the left. My argument here isn't ideological (though I certainly wouldn't mind seeing a more liberal Democratic Party). It's tactical.

To understand why Democrats must move further left, let's consider why Republicans are so intransigent. Richard W. Stevenson had a good piece in the New York Times mapping the problem from the Republican point of view. The GOP is struggling to figure out what it stands for. Being the anti-immigration party isn't working. Being the anti-gay-marriage party isn't working. Being the party that says you can't get pregnant from being raped isn't working. And, as Sam Tanenhaus noted recently in The New Republic, being the party of white people isn't working.

All the GOP has left, Stevenson argued, is to be the party that shrinks government. That's not quite right. Very little in the GOP's behavior during the past three decades (as opposed to its rhetoric) indicates that cutting government spending is a high priority for Republicans. Real government spending per capita at all levels of government increased much faster under George W. Bush than it did under Bill Clinton or President Obama. Ronald Reagan increased federal spending by 22 percent in constant dollars; Obama has thus far increased federal spending by 19 percent, and virtually all that increase occurred during Obama's first year, when the financial crisis necessitated a large spending increase (much of it at the prompting not of Obama but of Bush).

The GOP isn't the party of smaller government. It's the party of lower taxes. Opposing tax increases and legislating tax cuts is its numbskull heart and soul.