The New Yorker has a great map of the districts where the GOP’s “Suicide Caucus” lives. Ryan Lizza writes,

In short, these eighty members represent an America where the population is getting whiter, where there are few major cities, where Obama lost the last election in a landslide, and where the Republican Party is becoming more dominant and more popular. Meanwhile, in national politics, each of these trends is actually reversed.

In the past, Lizza says, party leadership could control these factions. I’m not sure if that is true. American political parties never have had the leadership controls that other countries have, because of our voting procedures.

But mainstream Republicans are getting upset. Check out John Podhoretz’s column in the New York Post.

Meanwhile, Americans are getting a great lesson on all the things that government does. It provides supervision of food production. It cares for the families of dead soldiers. And, hopefully, we won’t have to learn hard lessons about how the government deals with debt.