Well, some of them did fight, but what can you do when faced with someone who will not negotiate at all and has all the power (particularly since if he doesn’t get his way with at the least the fiction of procedural legitimacy, he goes ahead by executive fiat anyway: look at the government employees’ pay increase). And Harry Reid is equally inflexible, so the GOPers in the Senate clearly couldn’t do anything - except appear in the press everyday calling attention to the situation, which is something they did not do.
It may be that losing was the only possibility, but they shouldn’t go quietly, and the thing that makes me madder than anything else is that they are not even calling attention to Obama’s outrageous and very often unconstitutional behavior in all this. I haven’t heard a peep out of them about the government employee pay-raises, for example. Actually, it’s even worse; it was an exemption from a pay freeze, so even though there’s no inflation, they’re getting what is essentially a COLA increase while Social Security recipients aren’t getting any. And it was Obama’s personal decision. Why not kick and scream about that; I don’t think they’d find many Americans who would support Obama on it.
Why doesn’t the GOP make political hay out of these things? Two sides can play the publicity game, but the GOP is so afraid of what Obama and the press might say about them (how can they get much worse?) that they just sit there and meekly take it without even giving us a rallying cry.