In New York Magazine, Jonathan Chait runs down the list of demands from the GOP in order to prevent a government shutdown—including Paul Ryan tax reform, offshore oil drilling, keystone pipeline, tort reform, blah blah blah, and a yearlong moratorium on Obamacare—and points out its similarity to the Mitt Romney platform that U.S. voters rejected last November. Then he writes this:

The fact that a major party could even propose anything like this is a display of astonishing contempt for democratic norms. Republicans ran on this plan and lost by 5 million votes. They also lost the Senate and received a million fewer votes in the House but held control owing to favorable district lines. Is there an example in American history of a losing party issuing threats to force the majority party to implement its rejected agenda?

One of Andrew Sullivan's readers then provides an answer:

There is an obvious example: the election and subsequent secession crisis of 1860. The southern Democrats were quite clear with their threats to secede from the Union should Lincoln be elected.

Another reader details the hypocrisy of the demagogic right:

More to the point, there didn’t appear to be all too much Republican anti-government resentment during the George W. Bush Bush presidency, as the GOP pushed for Medicare Part D, No Child Left Behind, the executive’s asserted power to wiretap and to detain & torture US citizens without charges or a warrant, surpluses turned into deficits, the right in Raich v Gonzales to imprison folks for activity legal under state law, and the invasion for bogus reasons & failed occupation of an arbitrarily selected Middle Eastern country.

But President Bush was One of Us. The Kenyan anti-colonial secret Muslim? Less so. Hence, insane demands, in the service of taking Our country back from Them.

That's been the cry, hasn't it, since January 20, 2009: taking the country back. It's the wrong cry. The right cry (both ways) is this: When is the GOP going to take back the GOP from the Ted Cruzes of the world?

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) reads “Green Eggs and Ham,” nonsensically, during 21-hour bloviation-fest.