All of these legislative battles, which pit one part of the Democratic coalition against another, give the GOP openings to win at the tactical level, to stall, modify or defeat particularly bad pieces of legislation.
The bean counters like the fact that you can write an application once and then, with little expense and effort, modify it to run on a whole universe of Microsoft systems from the corporate network level (Windows NT) down to a single set-top box (Windows CE).
In the end, Germany can still modify its energy plan to reasonably address its ideological concerns and bring up renewables to a sustainable level without doing away with their only clean and cheap energy source.