Big-Government Republicans

Andrew McCarthy gets it right:

The problem is the GOP. Republicans are simply not interested in limiting government or addressing our death spiral of spending.

Even more pointedly here:

As if to prove that Obama has not cornered the market on cynicism, the GOP apparently feels the need to insult your intelligence while it helps our latter-day Robin Hood take from the unborn to give to the insatiable...

...Now in control of the House and with near parity in the Senate, Republicans were in a position to stop the madness: to decline to authorize more borrowing and thus force spending cuts.

Instead, they did what they always do: They caved...

..There was no credible threat of default because revenues remain vastly higher than what it costs to service the government’s bonds. The real threat — the threat too terrible to contemplate — was that our elected representatives might be forced to make hard, accountable decisions about what spending would need to be cut in order to live within their $14.3 trillion limit...

McCarthy ends with the big, ugly, question no Republican wants heard:

The debt is America’s existential crisis. For a dozen years, Republicans have been more its cause than its solution. In 2010, they were given a new lease on life based on their assurances that they had changed. But nothing has changed. So remind me what we need them for?

My answer: So we have the third ingredient for the constitutionally protected performance art involving tar and feathers.