For the past month or more, Senator David Vitter, a Louisiana Republican, has blocked every significant action in the Senate, whether important for national security, homeland security, or the ability of Senate committees to function, in return for his demand to knock those subsidies out. Now House Republicans have jumped on this faux-populist bandwagon, knowing that anything that smacks of special privilege for Congress — even if falsely so — will be popular back home.

I have talked to enough Senate staffers and senators to know that the fear of a brain drain is real. Many of the most seasoned committee employees, who have enough seniority to retire but who stay in their jobs because they love public service, will bail out if their pay is suddenly cut by several thousand dollars due to the loss of the employer contribution for health insurance. So will plenty of staffers making $40,000 or $50,000, for whom the hit would be proportionately more severe. The Senate as an institution will suffer significantly from a loss of institutional memory and savvy that contributes to a functioning chamber and better laws being written — which ought to be a goal of liberals and conservatives alike.

But many senators who privately complain about Vitter’s obstructionism and demagoguery have been unwilling to stand up and vote to stop him; Republicans in the Senate voted in lockstep to support the House plan.

All that is part of a larger problem that exists, one that has had me referring to the drivers in the GOP not as conservatives but as radicals. Rod Dreher, writing in The American Conservative in a piece called "Republicans, Over the Cliff," eloquently makes the same point. Conservatives believe in limited government — but also that the government we need to have — the services from national security to homeland security to interstate transportation — should be efficiently and competently provided, and that when government intervenes, it should do so with as much deference to the marketplace as possible.

The current drivers of the GOP are much more hostile to government. Thus, the assault on all federal employees via cuts in pay and benefits; the all-out attack to delegitimize the Internal Revenue Service and its employees by Darrell Issa and his cronies, designed to make it harder for them to carry out their basic functions; the enthusiasm for the sequester; and the lack of concern about the societal impact of mindless cuts to basic research, food safety, and homeland security.

Some of this impulse is libertarian in nature, as evidenced by Senator Rand Paul’s preferred budget, which makes Rep. Paul Ryan’s look New Dealish by comparison. Some of it reflects ignorance or willful suspension of disbelief — not understanding, for example, the impact of indiscriminate cuts on our health research infrastructure and on our nation’s seed corn in terms of our technological edge; or supporting the sequester but then decrying its cuts in medical research (without noting that these cuts would not occur without the sequester).