We all forget that "bipartisan" cooperation got us into the mess we're in. Lawmakers across the country just kept passing spending bills because they thought the money pot would never run out. Well, here in Alaska, it's running low, in large part because Sean Parnell and the Legislature inflated the budget by 30% during his years in office, chasing the high price of oil. Now that the price of oil has dropped, we can't sustain that budget without onerous, economy-damaging taxes on the people, but you'd think we wanted to cut the budget to draconian levels rather than roll it back to 2010 levels, which is where it should have remained all along. Oh, the schools are going to collapse! People will starve in the streets! No, none of that will happen. 

So now we're in partisan "gridlock" as we try to fix what's been broken by too much across-the-aisle backslapping. The solution is the spenders recognize their ideal is not sustainable and it's time to return to reality.