In the year of our Lord 2010, the voters of the United States elected the worst Congress in the history of the Republic. There have been Congresses more dilatory. There have been Congresses more irresponsible, though not many of them. There have been lazier Congresses, more vicious Congresses, and Congresses less capable of seeing forests for trees. But there has never been in a single Congress -- or, more precisely, in a single House of the Congress -- a more lethal combination of political ambition, political stupidity, and political vainglory than exists in this one, which has arranged to shut down the federal government because it disapproves of a law passed by a previous Congress, signed by the president, and upheld by the Supreme Court, a law that does nothing more than extend the possibility of health insurance to the millions of Americans who do not presently have it, a law based on a proposal from a conservative think-tank and taken out on the test track in Massachusetts by a Republican governor who also happens to have been the party's 2012 nominee for president of the United States. That is why the government of the United States is, in large measure, closed this morning.

We have elected the people sitting on hold, waiting for their moment on an evening drive-time radio talk show. We have elected an ungovernable collection of snake-handlers, Bible-bangers, ignorami, bagmen and outright frauds, a collection so ungovernable that it insists the nation be ungovernable, too. We have elected people to govern us who do not believe in government.

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We have elected a national legislature in which Louie Gohmert and Michele Bachmann have more power than does the Speaker of the House of Representatives, who has been made a piteous spectacle in the eyes of the country and doesn't seem to mind that at all. We have elected a national legislature in which the true power resides in a cabal of vandals, a nihilistic brigade that believes that its opposition to a bill directing millions of new customers to the nation's insurance companies is the equivalent of standing up the the Nazis in 1938, to the bravery of the passengers on Flight 93 on September 11, 2001, and to Mel Gibson's account of the Scottish Wars of Independence in the 13th Century. We have elected a national legislature that looks into the mirror and sees itself already cast in marble.

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This is what they came to Washington to do -- to break the government of the United States. It doesn't matter any more whether they're doing it out of pure crackpot ideology, or at the behest of the various sugar daddies that back their campaigns, or at the instigation of their party's mouthbreathing base. It may be any one of those reasons. It may be all of them. The government of the United States, in the first three words of its founding charter, belongs to all of us, and these people have broken it deliberately. The true hell of it, though, is that you could see this coming down through the years, all the way from Ronald Reagan's First Inaugural Address in which government "was" the problem, through Bill Clinton's ameliorative nonsense about the era of big government being "over," through the attempts to make a charlatan like Newt Gingrich into a scholar and an ambitious hack like Paul Ryan into a budget genius, and through all the endless attempts to find "common ground" and a "Third Way." Ultimately, as we all wrapped ourselves in good intentions, a prion disease was eating away at the country's higher functions. One of the ways you can acquire a prion disease is to eat right out of its skull the brains of an infected monkey. We are now seeing the country reeling and jabbering from the effects of the prion disease, but it was during the time of Reagan that the country ate the monkey brains.

We are in an age of global oversupply: an oversupply of global labor (hence high underemployment); an oversupply of global productive capacity (hence ultra-low inflation); and an oversupply of global capital (hence low interest rates). This explains why, around the middle of each of the past three years, activity petered out after predictions earlier in the year that the economy would finally achieve escape velocity.

The jobs created have been mainly low wage and part time. Growth in domestic manufacturing is still slow, and business spending has fallen, though corporations are flush with profits. Debt-saddled households continue to see real incomes deteriorate (even with very low inflation). Sales of new homes have suddenly reversed course. Rents are falling in several markets where home prices have recently increased. Even the seemingly unflappable stock market has been seesawing because of the uncertain economic signals.

Why do we seem unable to get out of this rut? In short, our policy makers are still fighting the last war. We are no longer faced with a world in which supply-side economic remedies — easy money, reduced taxation, fiscal belt-tightening and deregulation — can spur new capacity and the creation of well-paying private sector jobs.

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Can we get out of this mess? We can, but we need a fresh playbook. Developed nations need to put the huge surplus of underemployed workers back to work by any means, including big public sector investments to improve infrastructure and competitiveness. We need a new economic multilateralism with the developing world, to encourage them to rebalance their economics away from savings and toward consumption, while we in the West must curb our addiction to credit and consumption (and in doing so reverse the trends of income and wealth polarization).

There is no question about it -- a government shutdown would be a debacle for American families. But, Congressional Republicans are refusing to do even the most basic and routine aspect of their jobs -- namely, keeping the government operational -- without extreme political grandstanding that has brought us to the eve of the first government shutdown since 1996. This past weekend, all eyes were on Speaker John Boehner, with questions lingering as to whether he could carve out a deal with his own Republican colleagues to pass routine funding legislation without toxic political riders added on.

But, with the clock ticking and every minute a precious opportunity to negotiate, John Boehner wasn't in Washington working on a deal to prevent a shutdown -- instead, he was at the Greenbrier, a fancy hotel in West Virginia, dining with coal executives. How's that for priorities?

Let's be clear about what the shutdown means. Hundreds of thousands of Americans, not just in Washington, D.C. but across the country, will be temporarily out of work. Our national parks will close -- to everyone but oil and gas drillers. The Environmental Protection Agency will effectively be shuttered, with 9 out of 10 employees furloughed, taking our clean air cops off the beat and leaving vulnerable Americans with almost no one to monitor pollution that could make them sick.

Maybe that’s why the coal industry was happy to host Boehner at a time when he could have been working to cut a deal: a government shutdown could mean that the floodgates will open for air pollution with few on the job to enforce critical public health and environmental safeguards. On the eve of a government shutdown that would rattle the lives of millions of Americans, John Boehner wasn't working to corral his reckless caucus -- he was dining with coal executives. If you needed any more evidence that House Republicans put polluters before people, this is conclusive.