The Obamacare hearings before the House Energy and Commerce Committee are a grudge spectacle.

They aren’t about fixing problems but affixing blame. They want to make the problems with HealthCare.gov into a problem with “government health care.”These hearings are a charade and a sham. They are devoid of equanimity and reek of vengeance. This is not the way to win an argument, only to elevate the screeching.

And Republicans did themselves no favors on Wednesday with their rough handling of Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius. At one point during the hearing, Sebelius could be heard saying: “Don’t do this to me.”Sebelius was proxy for the president and they unleashed on her all they had. The secretary’s taking responsibility for the website debacle, as she called it, could have added to public unease about the government’s ability to manage such an enormous undertaking. But the hearing quickly became a mockery of itself, with congressmen underlining the bully in bully pulpit. Committee Republicans lost a chance to rise above, and stooped to their lowest.

The White House and the Department of Health and Human Services are not without shame and blame here. The website rollout was a mess. And the president’s repeated promise that people could keep their insurance if they liked it has turned out not to be true for many people in the market for individual, not group, policies — about 5 percent of the population.

It is true that the administration has forced insurers to offer more robust plans and many of the plans being canceled don’t meet the threshold, but it would have been better to be upfront about that than to deal with the fallout from nondisclosure on the back end.

That said, even these two issues are not the whole of the health care law and don’t mean it is destined to fail. And, perhaps more important, they haven’t much affected Americans’ opinions of the law. Americans may not know all the details or keep track of all the machinations, but they know a piling on when they see it.

According to a Gallup poll released Wednesday, the share of people who say the law will have a negative impact on their family or the country has remained virtually unchanged since the website rollout. The only notable change between June and October was a decline in the percentage of people saying that the law would make things worse for their families — a drop to 34 percent from 42 percent.

Republicans, with their incessant attempts to destroy, defund or defang the law using a barrage of spurious, unsupported allegations, have lost all credibility to be critical of the actual issues with the law’s implementation.

All their gripes are too easily dismissed as sour grapes. You shut down the government to try to kill Obamacare, then open hearings to try to fix it? C’mon.

And it points to a bigger Republican problem: the party is too consumed with ax grinding and not concerned enough with idea generation.

When is the last time you heard a truly big idea coming from the right that could become law and could move this country forward? Don’t worry, I’ll wait. Exactly. Silence.

They are less interested in making laws that get things done than in making laws that prevent people from doing things. They want to halt progress and rewind it a few decades. For them, what used to be is always better than what can be, and that is a fatal logic flaw in a dynamic society.

Just look at the other two pressing issues on the agenda: the possibility of a grand bargain on the budget and immigration.

Paul Ryan, the chairman of the House Budget Committee, quickly squashed any hope of a grand bargain following the G.O.P.’s government shutdown and debt limit debacle by saying Tuesday on CNBC: “I don’t think we’ll get a grand bargain. And we’re not talking about getting a grand bargain because then one party will require that the other compromises a core principle, and we won’t get anything done.”And, according to Talking Points Memo, he said Wednesday during his opening statement at the first meeting of the budget conference: “Taking more from hard-working families just isn’t the answer. I know my Republican colleagues feel the same way.”He continued: “So I want to say this from the get-go: If this conference becomes an argument about taxes, we’re not going to get anywhere. The way to raise revenue is to grow the economy.”Ryan knows well that if the Republicans are taking revenue off the table, they are taking a grand bargain off the table.

The Republicans are making it clear from the outset that they have no interest in compromise, and no interest in taking serious steps toward solving our debt problems.

On the immigration front, too many Republicans still see comprehensive immigration reform as amnesty and a gift from Democrats to reward and lock in minority support.

The Republican pollster Fred Steeper told John Harwood of The New York Times this week: “The Republican Party needs to throw in the towel on the immigration issue.”But, of course, it won’t. Republicans are so consumed with the mistaken notion that they are speaking for the American people that they refuse to recognize the change in the people of America.

So, absent ideas, we are forced to watch the G.O.P. wallow in frustration, and hold back American progress in doing so.

This isn’t about Obamacare, this is about Obama, and the country knows it and is paying for it.