I don’t know much about politics

but it strikes me that if you’re the minority party, and the opposition controls the executive branch and both houses of Congress, and they happen to want to pass a bill that will greatly improve the lives of a large percentage of your constituents, costing you even more votes in the next election, and while you have no moral basis on which to oppose said bill but your political base is for the most part uneducated and easily cowed, then the only viable strategy might be to invent a ton of insane shit that’s not in the bill, let the bill pass (because you have no other choice), and then afterwards—and this is the ingenious part—take credit for keeping the insane made-up shit out of the bill, so your constituents think it was you who saved them from the immigrant-loving grandma-killing Kenyan Hitler squads.

This kind of strategy fails, of course, in a society where critical thinking is a common skill, but don’t worry, we planned ahead.