I understand why they don't trust themselves. Given the GOP's track record, why would they? But surely they can see that major shifts in a country's direction cannot be accomplished by a party that has an advantage in just one house of Congress. Negotiation, compromise, and incrementalism is the best any party can do from that position, but the GOP (tracking the broad confusion in the conservative movement, behaves as if compromising from a position of weakness in a way that gets you something you want but concedes something else is a betrayal, even if it leads to an outcome that's substantively better for small government.

Like the GOP presidential candidates last cycle who stood on a stage and said they'd reject a deficit reduction deal that cut $10 in spending for every $1 in tax increases, House Republicans have given every indication that they're unwilling to make even those deals that advance their ends more than they could reasonably hope, as if doing so would be a failure of principle rather than a victory. If you're a small-government conservative, the sad result is there's no coalition you can back that's likely to succeed in advancing the agenda in which you believe. There are Republicans ostensibly working for a smaller federal government, but it isn't clear how the fights they choose would lead to that outcome, even if they manage to stop neoconservatives from plunging the country into more trillion-dollar military conflicts of choice.

The GOP amassed such a poor record while governing that voters ousted it. Finding itself in a much weakened position, the party tried to substitute intransigence for the long, hard work of clawing its way back into power. The strategy has brought them to a moment where its negotiating ploy may well end up hurting the country far more than it would be helped even if Republicans won. They haven't chosen the wrong hill from which to fight, but the wrong valley.