Is there a big voting bloc who particularly appreciates this sort of time-wasting?
This is just to show off for the people at home. Nothing more, nothing less.
So typical for conservatives to see things like this. No, the job of politics is not to hurt the other team.
Contrast that with the topic of the article at hand, which is a solution for a non-problem and serves no purpose.
See, the Republicans can say the exact same thing about this as above: “the work from home ban is not meant to spite anyone: it is a legitimate attempt to increase the low productivity of federal employees, regardless of whether you, as an opponent, don’t believe it will be effective”.
You exhibit a typical liberal blind spot of “everything we do is for the noble purpose, and if it doesn’t achieve the stated goal, well, too bad, it was a good will attempt, whereas all our opponents do is to oppress and spite their opponents, and their reasons are purely pretextual”. This is wrong and false.
I can give you more example of liberals doing pointless, spiteful policies, but I suspect you’ll just maintain that these are just good will attempts, despite the available evidence. If you cannot recognize that knowingly instituting and maintaining laws that clearly and obviously do not do anything for the expressly stated goal, but instead attack constitutional rights of the opponents, I have zero hope of achieving any sort of shared compromise and understanding.
I wonder is this a specifically American thing, or a general feature of two-party systems. Many (most?) democratic countries don't have a well-defined concept of two sides. Here, for instance, that framing would make no sense; the current ruling coalition is two centre-right parties who historically dislike each other and have somewhat different constituencies, plus a centre-left party. In a few years, there'll be another government, which is quite likely to contain some, but not all of the current component parties. Try two-sides-ing that...
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/11/newt-gi...
1.8 million voters over the age of 55 die every year (one every 20 seconds), ~3.6 million every two year election cycle (per the CDC), voters who tilt conservative (per Pew Research). States turning blue will get there eventually, and aggregate political leanings will tilt as millennials and younger have less kids or no kids and drop religion. Would I like change to happen faster? Certainly; being held hostage politically at the national level by a minority party with no real policy to speak of is unpleasant (especially the policy weaponized to purposefully harm), but as a scholar, I have learned sometimes time is your adversary, sometimes your ally. Change happens slowly, and then all of a sudden.
If this enumeration seems crude, I’m unsure how else an engineer or systems analyst would approach such a problem. It’s a system, so you must think in terms of systems.
https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2020/06/02/the-changing...
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/05/29/gen-z-mille...
https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2022/09/13/how-u-s-reli...
https://www.sociologicalscience.com/download/volume%201/octo...
https://www.ft.com/content/c361e372-769e-45cd-a063-f5c0a7767...
Old people die as time marches on, but young people become old people. The 18-29 demographic voted for Obama by 34 points in 2008. 14 years later, almost that same cohort (now 30-44) voted democrat by just 7 points. Declining religiosity could change things, but not necessarily in predictable ways. For example decreasing religiosity gave rise to Trump and “barstool conservatives.”
Increasing childlessness in theory helps democrats—unmarried women are their strongest base after black people: https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2023/01/17/.... But it also makes for an unwieldy coalition, because the other pillars of the party are minorities, who typically are parents and have kids. As childless people move the party culturally to the left, that strains the relationship with the rest of the base. Like, the best marketing you could give me for persuading my immigrant parents to vote Republican would be to explain to them how important childless people are to the Democratic Party.
Indeed, democrats are in a fundamentally precarious situation. Their coalition is a minority of the dominant group, plus a majority of minorities. They can only win elections if those minorities view politics through the lens of disenfranchised outsiders. The problem is that the biggest share of those minorities, Asians and Latinos, are rapidly assimilating into the mainstream, socially and economically. The last time that happened, with Irish and Italian voters, you got the Reagan wave and three straight Republican landslides, followed by a massive retooling of the Democratic Party. And yes, that change happened “slowly, then all of the sudden.”
Might not have been a one-time boost: I've wondered whether the Dems didn't intentionally not try to pass a national abortion-rights bill during the recent lame-duck session of Congress, precisely to keep Dobbs alive as a voter-turnout motivator for 2024. The added benefit: Fixing the Electoral Count Act was by far the highest priority.
It's also why we have hyper-partisan politics, partisan versions of "news" and so on.
Washington warned us against political parties and charlatans. We've ignored him.
(Also I assume this would meet at least some _internal_ resistance; I can't see hardcore libertarians being particularly onboard with the idea of the legislature micromanaging the federal government...)