Barack Obama takes office in 2009 to find Republican leadership already committed to blocking him, and this report tracks how that strategy hardened into the shutdown fight over Obamacare and the debt ceiling. Interviews carry the argument: Mike Lofgren, a longtime Republican congressional staffer, describes his unease watching the Tea Party refuse the routine debt-ceiling increase, and Arlen Specter, once a moderate Republican senator from Pennsylvania, explains why he left the party rather than face resistance during the financial crisis, a defection that gave Democrats the votes to break a filibuster on economic reform. Archival clips of Ronald Reagan working with Democratic majorities sit alongside footage of Republicans signing no-tax pledges, drawing a direct line between the two eras. The film lands on the 112th Congress of 2010, which it presents as the least productive and most partisan in American history, and asks what happens to governance when compromise itself becomes a liability inside one party.