Edward Shineman complains that President Obama got the Affordable Care Act passed without bipartisan support, where “100 percent of the other party . . . objected’’ (“Obama has not been a good model for winning bipartisan accord,’’ Letters, Nov. 18). He follows that tautology with the observation that such a major piece of legislation as the ACA had never before been passed “without some bipartisan support.’’

Shineman appears to be oblivious of the fact, as Laurence H. Tribe notes in his op-ed in the same edition, that the 100 percent GOP objection to the ACA was based on more sheer partisan “recalcitrance and obstruction’’ than any president had faced in recent times.

That partisan obstruction was not based on any principled concern for the public welfare. The ACA is modeled, after all, on a Heritage Foundation proposal designed to keep private insurers in the health care market. The obstruction was based instead on Republicans’ stated objective to make Obama’s presidency a failure by opposing anything and everything he proposed.

By contrast, Senators Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders and Obama himself have shown who the real grown-ups are in Washington, by saying that they are willing to cooperate with President Trump as much as they can on the progressive issues on which he campaigned, helping him to succeed in fulfilling those promises to the people who voted for him.

Richard Latimer

Falmouth