Once you understand that, the actions of Congressional Repubs make perfect sense. And it’s not as if they haven’t told us about this goal. Indeed, starting with Reagan and continuing through Gingrich and Norquist to the present day, the message has been clear and consistent: the government is the problem, and indeed your enemy. That is how modern Teapublicans think. Google it if you don’t believe it.
This is why Repubs were willing to: let the government go bankrupt; go over the fiscal cliff; allow the sequestration to go forward; eliminate insurance programs that citizens have paid for over the decades, and so on. Each of these catastrophes would weaken the nation as a whole and the government in particular, making it easy to “drown it in a bathtub”.
Remember when sequestration was first passed into law by Congress? The underlying premise was that the cuts to government were so severe that no politician would allow them to occur; thus action would be taken to avert the cuts. That made sense when we thought Teapublicans cared about the strength and stability of our government.
Now that we know they DON’T want the government to be strong and stable, the reasoning behind their actions of the past few years is clear. By taking the actions they have, they are weakening the government that they are sworn to serve. And doing so with malice aforethought.
To this writer, that strongly resembles treason. Of course, the Cranky One could be wrong; if he is, we’ll know it when the Elephants start acting as if they care about the government and its citizens. Until that unlikely event occurs, we’d best be treating “Republicans” as what they are: enemies bent on destroying our freedoms.
Mr. B & C
bluntandcranky 
Yup! They run for office telling us that government doesn’t work and when they are (somehow) elected, they prove it time and time again. I wish I understood better why people want other people running our government whom openly (and quite emphatically) profess hatred of “the government” and agree, in spirit if not in principle, with Grover Norquist’s long-stated goal to “drown government in the bathtub”. I can’t think of a single employer out there other than government where said employer would actually hire somebody whom told them upfront that they want the job but don’t like the employer and intend to be paid a generous salary with generous benefits whether or not they do their job let alone show up for work everyday and then proceed to try to sabotage/shut down their employer (while managing to insure that they continue to draw a paycheck til the very end). It is amazing how that sort of attitude/behavior is *o.k.* for large swaths of the American (voting) population. I’m surprised that more opposing candidates haven’t pointed this out more about their (mostly) Republican opponents whom openly profess to wanting government to fail, at least when a Democrat is in the top office of the land. It’s a message that I would think would resonate with a lot of people and, well, just makes sense!