Yesterday, so-called Republican leader Mike Pence declared on Fox News:

Republicans have had no input whatsoever in the development of this so-called stimulus bill.

It’s easy to laugh at that — and people have — but it is actually 100% true. It’s not like anyone from the Democratic side actually sat down with the Republicans and negotiated the content of the bill with them.

Obama sat down with them but, hey, that was a Presidential pep-talk, not a negotiation meeting.

Obama threw in all those tax cuts into the stimulus bill to appease the Republicans, but that was a unilateral pre-emptive concession, not something that was negotiated across the table with anyone from the Republican side.

Obama ordered spending provisions Republicans didn’t like dropped from the bill — first family planning services, then the National Mall renovation — but again he did that unilaterally, in response to their public criticism. It wasn’t the result of any formal input or negotiation process.

So what if Obama gave the Republicans a lot of what they wanted and were publicly asking for? So what if he practically awarded them a line-item veto over this bill? They still had no input whatsoever in the development of the bill; it was developed entirely by Obama and Democrats, with paternalistic unilateralism.

(Unless, of course, Obama sat down and conducted secret negotiations with the de facto leader of the Republican party, that giant of the conservative movement, Rush “Living Buddha” Limbaugh.)