And so history repeats itself. During Barack Obama's first term as president, Mitch McConnell said bluntly that, as leader of the Senate's Republicans, his primary responsibility was to ensure Obama would be "a one-term president." Now the Senate minority leader says that "100% of my focus" is on blocking President Joe Biden's agenda. Funny how public service and bipartisan cooperation never seem to come into the equation.

Obama negotiated in good faith on health care but ultimately got no Republican support. Biden is now attempting to negotiate in good faith on infrastructure with a man who has made clear his primary loyalty is to party, not country, as underscored by McConnell's leadership Friday in blocking approval of a Jan. 6 commission.

Biden's earnest detente is starting to look like Charlie Brown and Lucy with the football. It's a game that makes the case more strongly by the day for eliminating the Senate filibuster.

There should be little dispute about the mandate voters have given Biden. He ran on pandemic relief, health care expansion, an infrastructure overhaul and rolling back the GOP's irresponsible tax cuts for the rich — and he garnered 7 million more ballots than the incumbent Republican. That doesn't mean McConnell has an obligation to roll over and let Democrats have whatever they want, but the national will should be part of the conversation, along with the national interest. America's infrastructure lapse is a national scandal.

There was some progress last week in bipartisan infrastructure negotiations, but the GOP's insistence that its 2017 tax cuts for the rich remain untouched should be a nonstarter. Those cuts larded the budget with almost $2 trillion in deficit spending, and now they can't be even partially rolled back to provide America with reliable 21st-century infrastructure?

The McConnell conundrum, though, is bigger than infrastructure or any other single issue. His focus, as always, is on the good of his party rather than the good of the nation. It's why he led Republicans in shooting down the proposed commission to investigate the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol. He knows that, as crucial as such a review is to the nation, it would likely put his party in a bad light, and that's ultimately all that matters.

McConnell's nickname of "Doctor No" is only relevant because of the Senate filibuster. That historic anachronism, which isn't in the Constitution, means the minority party today can effectively thwart most legislation it doesn't like — which, in the case of McConnell, is virtually any Democratic legislation. He has said it himself, repeatedly, that he views his responsibility not to serve America but to wrench the Senate gavel back from the Democrats. The longer they leave the filibuster in place, the more they enable this partisan nihilism.

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