It’s unclear whether Republicans were actually not paying attention to what was in the bill they were voting through, or were too afraid of being seen as voting against the 9/11 families during an election year, or some other reason. But probably the most important underlying factor is the sheer unwieldiness of the Republican base. The GOP’s guiding electoral principle during the Obama years has been the fanatical posture that the country is on the verge of total disaster, and therefore that procedural extremism to force the president to heel — for example, shutting down the government to try to coerce him into defunding ObamaCare — is an urgent necessity. Anyone who tried to explain the constitutional limits of congressional power, or worse, tried to come to some accommodation with Latinos so as to win the presidency, was denounced as a RINO heretic and sometimes even scourged out of the party. It’s like having messianic cultists in the government — and paved the way for a lying demagogue like Donald Trump to win the party’s presidential nomination.

A party fueled by that level of diseased thinking just can’t make the sort of tactical compromises necessary to govern sensibly in concert with a president from the opposing party. A functioning party, presented with a popular but potentially problematic bill like the 9/11 one, would simply bury it in committee and play dumb. But Republicans are too terrified of being seen as Obama apologists to manage that strategy, so through it goes.