President Obama has a new slogan. It used to be “It’s Bush’s fault.” That, however, has become a bit shopworn, six years into a presidency that hasn’t managed to get the economy producing jobs at anything like, say, the Reagan rate. So now he’s blaming — wait for it — Roger Sherman. He is the only signer of all four of America’s great state papers, the Continental Association (that set up the trade boycott with Britain), the Declaration of Independence, the Articles of Confederation, and the Constitution. Sherman’s greatest contribution was as architect of the so-called Connecticut Compromise. That was the breakthrough that gave popular representation to the House of Representatives and equal suffrage of the states to the Senate. It is a core principle of our government.

All the more breathtaking, 225 years later, to hear the President of America carping about it in respect of his political predicament. Yet, according to a dispatch in the Washington Times, Mr. Obama is “blaming his inability to move his agenda on the ‘disadvantage’ of having each state represented equally in the Senate.” He parceled out that blame at a party fundraiser Thursday at Chicago, where he told big donors that one of the hurdles facing the Democrats is the apportionment of two senators to each state. The Times says he also blamed “demographics,” meaning the tendency of the Democrats to congregate in cities. Yet his main assertion was that it is “some structural reasons” that explain “why, despite the fact that Republican ideas are largely rejected by the public, it’s still hard for us to break through.”

It happens that we watch an indicator here at the Sun called the H.Q., which stands for “hypocrisy quotient.” We test this with a Carter brand, electrically-operated Hypocr-o-Graph (patent pending). It turns out that this particular statement by Mr. Obama registers — at 1,11.9 — one of the highest hypocrisy quotients ever recorded in a presidential statement. We think this stems from the discord between his assertion that GOP ideas have been rejected by the public and the particulars of the current Congress. It is, after all, the upper chamber, the one in which the small states have an equal vote with the more populous states, that is controlled by the Democrats. It is the lower chamber, the one that is apportioned according to population, that is controlled by the Republicans.

In other words, things are just 180 degrees opposite of what the president is trying to palm off on his demoralized donors. If left to the popularly elected House, Obamacare would have been lifted from the economy long ago. We would have tax cuts. We’d have audited the Federal Reserve a year or two ago. We’d know how much gold it has, who owns it, and where it is. We’d know what the Fed has been doing with foreign banks. We’d have reciprocity among the states for concealed carry of pistols. Oooh, don’t get us started. We wouldn’t say that nothing dies in the House. We would say that if it’s legislative apportionment according to population that the President wants, he’s talking about gutting his signature programs by acclamation of the people.

Now we get that our politics are more deeply divided than we’ve seen in years. We’ve been saying for years that this exposes America’s constitutional bedrock. We’re in touch with the left-of-center scholars, such as, to name but one, the University of Texas law school sage Sanford Levinson, who has been hunting for ways to get around the fact that the equal suffrage of the states in the Senate is the one remaining part of the Constitution that is essentially impossible to amend (absent unanimous consent of the states). We embrace this debate, even when we don’t agree. What we don’t embrace is the tendency to blame the rules — or the Founders. Smarmy is the word for the suggestion that the GOP lacks for standing with the people. The party of Lincoln controls the people’s House because of the substance.