At their first official leadership retreat in January 2009, the model that the House Republicans chose to emulate was the Taliban. The Texas congressman Pete Sessions, the new leader of the Republican House campaign committee, held up Afghanistan’s infamous Islamic extremists as providing an example of how they could wage “asymmetric warfare.” The country might be in an economic crisis, but governing, he told his colleagues, was not the reason they had been elected. As he flashed through a slide presentation at the Annapolis Inn, he asked his colleagues, “If the Purpose of the Majority is to
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