This couldn’t last — and didn’t. Within 48 hours, other congressional Republicans were filling in some of the blanks left by Bachmann and Ryan, from privatizing Medicare to eliminating the government agency that regulates product safety. Perhaps the fresh crop of G.O.P. revolutionaries has been too busy revisiting 1776 to study the history of Newt Gingrich’s swaggering revolution of 1995. In January of that year, 49 percent of Americans approved and 22 percent opposed the incoming Republican Congress’s plans, according to the NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll at the time. But as soon as the plans’ details emerged, those numbers started to flip. By October 35 percent approved of G.O.P. policies and 45 percent did not. That was a month before the first of the two government shutdowns that put Clinton back on top…

The most revealing moment in either Republican response, though, came from Ryan, who, as chairman of the House Budget Committee, implicitly threatened another government shutdown, or catastrophic fiscal meltdown, if the House majority doesn’t get its way. “The president is now urging Congress to increase the debt limit,” he said with distaste, referring to the vote required possibly as soon as March to allow the Treasury to keep paying its bills. Should the House majority hold that vote hostage to its vision of the budget, it will throw the markets into turmoil and upend our still-embryonic recovery.

It tells you all you need to know about Ryan’s tilt to the right that, for all his professed disapproval of increasing the debt limit during an Obama administration, he voted to do so twice himself during the gushing deficits of the Bush years. Funny he didn’t mention that Tuesday night. It tells you all you need to know about the G.O.P.’s overall tilt to the right that not just the Tea Party is making barely veiled threats to play dangerous political games with the debt limit. Mitch McConnell and Cantor did so last weekend, as have a plethora of potential 2012 presidential candidates, from Tim Pawlenty to Gingrich. The Bachmann-Beck-Palin tail is now firmly wagging the Republican dog.