Zika funding stalls due to RW riders. UBC fails due to gun-control riders... [View all]

The objective in both examples of the same tactic is to kill the "mother" legislation.

No one expects a mythical "clean bill." No one expects the "riders" to be adopted. A perusal of the histories of this tactic should confirm this. What remains? To kill the original bill is what is at stake..

Only the motivations differ.

The GOPers have a mechanistic ideology which is corrosive to any funding outside of military, incarceration, policing, and some road project bills. Zika only represents federal "over reach" in support of centralized welfare spending. So it's worth it to try to put the squeeze on the "wussy Democrat Party," even though the effectiveness of bullying the Party on that basis is less effective. But the GOP is nothing if it ain't ideologically mechanistic.

The gun-controllers, on the other hand, have a different motivation. They, too, know the GOP won't even bend on gun-control (or ANYTHING that fits its ideology). But again, the objective is to kill the "clean" legislation of UBCs. So many Democrats load up the legislation with the dead-fish-smellin' AWB and other appendages. So what is behind the tactic, here? For many Democrats, it is a signal that they want to continue full-bore with gun bans, keep it on the front burner, and cultivate a passion (for culture war) which cannot be found in the Party's other murky issues, and certainly cannot compete in the same league as the GOPer's relentless issue campaigns. By now, most here on this site -- and in the country at-large -- know gun control is a self-defeating issue. But much of the Party structure is still cemented to the issue, and much of MSM has picked at the scab so long, that both see compromise as nothing more than an effort to weaken resolve, and to diminish the future of gun control as An Issue. And the Party, for some forty years, now, has cultivated a non-ideological and technocratic stance that it is singularly to inexperienced to deal with this community of rather extreme prohibitionists.

Same tactic, same dug-in inflexibility, same result, different motivations.