Traditionally, a bipartisan plan has meant a plan in which both parties give a little to get a little. You give me spending cuts and I’ll give you tax hikes, for instance. But one of Mitch McConnell’s great insights is that what makes a plan bipartisan is votes, not ideas. Thus, with a Democrat as president, a bipartisan plan is a plan that Republicans vote for. And because Republican Party discipline is such that Republicans don’t vote for plans that McConnell and John Boehner tell them to vote against, a bipartisan plan is, well, whatever they say it is.

That’s how McConnell can say, with a straight face, that “President Obama needs to decide between his goal of higher taxes, or a bipartisan plan to address our deficit. He can’t have both.” According to the various negotiators, the administration has already agreed to $2 trillion or so in spending cuts. So the White House began by giving a lot. But now that it’s time for them to get a little, McConnell and Boehner are officially informing them that the only path to bipartisanship in the current Congress is for them to agree to get nothing at all. A simpler restatement of his point is that you can have your ideas or you can have our votes, but you can’t have both. That’s not bipartisanship. It’s a ransom note.