G.O.P. Extremists Defy Description

However the budget showdown ends—and, as I write this at lunchtime on Monday, a temporary government shutdown is looking like the most likely outcome—its defining moment came on Saturday, when House Republicans decided to demand a one-year delay in Obamacare as the price of funding the government beyond September 30th. At a closed-door meeting of the Republican caucus, cheers erupted when Speaker Boehner announced the plan. The whole room shouted, “Let’s vote!,” according to John Culberson, a Texan hard-liner. “And I said,” he recalled, “you know, like 9/11: ‘Let’s roll.’ ”

Really, what can you say about that? An elected representative comparing a political protest against a piece of legislation that the President twice ran upon, that Congress voted through, and that the Supreme Court upheld, with the desperate rallying cry of a passenger, Todd Beamer, trapped aboard a jetliner that had been hijacked by Al Qaeda terrorists.

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