It is so painful to see these idiots behave like fools. No leader among them, and the conservatives are either leaderless as well or are kept quiet. The hell with decorum, actively resist the current leadership, which will after all side with the rats anyway.
Ed Morrissey of Hotair observes:
There are three potential inflection points in the next two months on spending. The first is the debt ceiling, which is poor ground for the GOP, as the spending Congress has already authorized requires Treasury to borrow funds to comply.
Denying a raise in the ceiling to at least the amount necessary for authorized spending amounts to a bad-faith effort to reopen the previous agreement, and it will be perceived that way especially as the media hyperventilates about default.
That leaves the sequester in late February and the expiration of the continuing resolution on March 27th, the government-shutdown option. Republicans stand on the best ground on that point for demanding real spending cuts in the final half of the FY2013 budget and the new FY2014 budget. However, if Republicans attempt to evade the sequester — which splits $1.2 trillion in cuts over ten years evenly between defense and domestic spending — they will undermine their case for a government-shutdown threat in March. Those cuts are painful on both sides, butany significant cuts are going to be painful; if they weren’t, they would have already taken place.
This is why the Republicans will have better ground after the tax and debt-ceiling deadlines pass by.
Inaction in both of those cases favored Democrats (big tax hikes and a default scenario they could blame on Republican intransigence). In contrast, inaction on the last two “cliffs” of the sequester favor the GOP — real spending cuts and a standoff on the real issue of spending. And in fact, House Republicans can pass a final FY2013 budget using normal order well before March 27th and simply state that they will not negotiate with the Senate except through a conference committee, demanding a normal-order budget from Harry Reid. If he refuses, then it’s Democratic inaction that will produce the government shutdown.