(Gosh, now HOW did he actually KNOW…? )

Unlike the probably apocryphal commendation of LBJ (“he was a politician who stayed bought”), the Democrats no longer feel that they have to abide by their word
after an agreement is reached (Obama was a master of the tactic). Without fidelity to the trade-offs that make bipartisan legislation possible at all, the entire structure of representative government breaks down, as we have seen all too well.

And yet, despite repeated instances of betrayal, Democrats complain that Republicans are obstructionists and won’t negotiate!

Clearly, they do not believe that the GOP knows the optimum Game Theory scenario for repeated games, and certainly don’t think they will apply it.
https://cs.stanford.edu/people/eroberts/courses/soco/projects/1998-99/game-theory/axelrod.html

In 1980, Robert Axelrod, professor of political science at the University of Michigan, held a tournament of various strategies for the prisoner’s dilemma. He invited a number of well-known game theorists to submit strategies to be run by computers. In the tournament, programs played games against each other and themselves repeatedly. Each strategy specified whether to cooperate or defect based on the previous moves of both the strategy and its opponent.

Some of the strategies submitted were:

Always defect: This strategy defects on every turn. This is what game theory advocates. It is the safest strategy since it cannot be taken advantage of. However, it misses the chance to gain larger payoffs by cooperating with an opponent who is ready to cooperate.

Always cooperate: This strategy does very well when matched against itself.
However, if the opponent chooses to defect, then this strategy will do badly.

Random: The strategy cooperates 50% of the time.
…
The winner of Axelrod’s tournament was the TIT FOR TAT strategy. The strategy cooperates on the first move, and then does whatever its opponent has done on the previous move. Thus, when matched against the all-defect strategy, TIT FOR TAT strategy always defects after the first move. When matched against the all-cooperate strategy, TIT FOR TAT always cooperates.

This strategy has the benefit of both cooperating with a friendly opponent, getting the full benefits of cooperation, and of defecting when matched against an opponent who defects. When matched against itself, the TIT FOR TAT strategy always cooperates.

Several variations to TIT FOR TAT have been proposed. TIT FOR TWO TATS is a forgiving strategy that defects only when the opponent has defected twice in a row. TWO TITS FOR TAT, on the other hand, is a strategy that punishes every defection with two of its own.
…
It must be realized that there really is no “best” strategy for prisoner’s dilemma. Each individual strategy will work best when matched against a “worse” strategy. In order to win, a player must figure out his opponent’s strategy and then pick a strategy that is best suited for the situation.

As many have remarked, the GOP leadership, and many members of Congress, appear to have been playing TIT FOR INFINITE TATS, and caving to Democrats whenever possible, whether for personal or alleged policy reasons, a strategy that is sometimes labeled “This is never the hill to die on.”

However, the Trump years have made the game matrix a lot more clear, and at least some Republicans don’t intend to play by the Left’s rules any longer, as clearly stated by Nick Freitas, a GOP representative to the Virginia House of Delegates.

https://www.thenewneo.com/2022/01/28/the-coming-scotus-fight-those-racist-and-sexist-republicans-that-noble-biden/#comment-2604558

To see an analysis of the Axelrod Optimum in action, read this post from last year.
https://www.businessinsider.com/fight-over-infrastructure-bills-is-a-prisoners-dilemma-2021-9

I’m wondering, if amending the PA constitution is so easy, why didn’t they do it for that voting change? Was it that they didn’t want to make it permanent? Was it supposed to just be a temporary COVID measure?

I think mail-in voting is a bad idea, but even if this law is struck down, an amendment permitting mail-in voting will almost certainly pass in the next election cycle.

Gov. Wolf made that deal and then had his allies march straight to the courts, who ignored the anti-severability clause and threw out the parts of the deal that the Republican legislature bargained for while keeping the parts that the governor wanted. So the governor and state SC basically cut the legislature out of the governing process.

Wolf is doing the same thing with redistricting. The State SC held recently that the PA constitution basically requires a pro-Democrat gerrymander. So now, instead of negotiationg with the GOP legislature, Wolf is content to let the PA SC draw the new districts too because he knows the PA SC map will be more favorable to Democrats than anything he could negotiate with the legislature.

For what its worth, I think comments like those from SDN above are inflammatory and counterproductive, but they are a completely natural reaction to the perversion of the structure of our government that progressives are engaging in now. The left is playing with fire. The trick for the right is to find a way to fight the fire without burning the house down.

Which they unambiguously DID. The Constitution specifically states that election rules are set by the Legislature; the PA bureaucracy disregarded them. QED.

Taney Court 2.0 under Roberts made it quite clear that Civil War will be required, by taking the jury box out of play.