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 Remember that kid when you were growing up, the one who wasn’t very skilled at some game or sport? Remember that he’d invariably tell his playmates that "he didn’t really like to play that game, anyway”? It seems that a group of these kids have grown up and gotten themselves elected to the House of Representatives as Tea Party Republicans. And now that they are part of the national legislature, it seems that they don’t “really like to govern, anyway.”

Since the Federal government has mostly stopped functioning after its budgetary authority to spend money lapsed last Monday, the media has attempted to pin down exactly who the members of this minority of obstructionists are. The Atlantic website lists “32 Republicans Who Caused the Government Shutdown”. John Sides describes “The 5 Species of House Republicans” in the Washington Post’s “WonkBlog”.  What is clear is that, no matter what their number, a minority of GOP House members have abandoned the norms of American governance for no other purpose than obstruction.  Gone are deliberation and compromise, gone are joint efforts by members of the two parties to legislate, replaced by a crude form of legislative extortion. A simple metric: In the number of bills passed into law, this Congress is on pace to be the least productive in the nation’s history. (The House has still found time for forty useless votes to repeal the Affordable Care Act.)

Minority rule is antithetical to functioning democratic institutions. Yet that it what this group of self-styled “conservatives”* have achieved. Controlling one House of the legislative branch, one-half of one-third of the Government, they have managed to bring the other five-sixths of the Federal government to a halt. While this group is fond of paraphrasing the Founding Fathers, they sit in the legislature that would be unrecognizable to the men who drew up the plans for the Republic.

Begin with this: Many of the Tea Party types in the House come from Congressional districts so convolutedly-constructed by gerrymandering that they resemble Rorshach inkblots. The effect is, as Fred Hiatt wrote in a Washington Post editorial today, that “in an increasingly self-serving redistricting process, politicians choose their voters instead of the other way around and insulate themselves from challenges by all but the extremes.” These House members represent a minority of the populace, but, bolstered by the support of outside interest groups^†, they manage to thwart the will of the majority.

Think about this: In a functioning democratic society, opposing entities contest for the votes of the people.  Candidates make great efforts to persuade voters to support particular policies. The underlying principle is majority rule: Once elected, politicians work at getting policies enacted into law. In the representative form that is our republic, a majority on any particular issue may even exist across party lines.

Look ahead to this: The current situation, with the Federal government “shutdown” and a likely battle looming over raising the debt ceiling in ten days, is more than a partisan fight. It risks becoming a full-fledged constitution crisis because a determined minority didn’t get its way.

Boys and girls- our government is being hijacked.

*”Conservative” is their self-appellation. They have managed to induce wide discomfort in traditional conservatives, many of whom are threading a fine line between criticizing the Tea Partiers while not appearing to side with the Democrats. Others, notably Bruce Bartlett if you follow his Twitter stream (@BruceBartlett), have gone all-out in disparaging the “wankers”.

^†An article in yesterday’s New York Times reports on the activities of these groups