Congress must pay the damn bills which it alone can authorize constitutionally, and which it has itself run up, and Congress must not drive the full faith and credit of the United States down into the slough of despond and of discredit in which it is now institutionally bobbing in utter disgrace. The Four Freshmen of the Apocalypse in the United States Senate and three-or-four dozen less-readily-identifiable firebrands serving nominally in the oxymoronically misdesignated House of Representatives have temporarily succeeded in shutting down much of the federal government of the United States of America from September 30, 2013, at midnight, following over 21 hours of faux filibustering in the Senate shortly theretofore by Frosh Ted Cruz (R-Texas), as aided and as abetted by Frosh Mike Lee (R-Utah), Frosh Rand Paul (R-Kentucky) and Frosh Marco Rubio (R-Florida), and following months and months of sophomoric extremist tantrums and of other self-indulgence that have too-long dominated what has historically been styled as the People’s House. Reasonable citizens can differ about just how much genuine harm has been and will be done by a badly bumbled shuttering of major components of our government by the United States Congress even though Americans must continue to pay our federal taxes in order to fund all those programs – ranging from inconveniences caused by National Park closures to entirely needless deaths from suspensions of National Institutes of Health medical research – but no thinking person can defend the Four Freshman of the Apocalypse and their 35-or-40 House confederates being permitted by elected leaders of the Senate and of the House to drive a still fragile American economy over the cliff later this month by preventing payment of our nation’s bills, every dime of which the current 113th Congress and prior congresses have voted to approve, so as thereby to turn our country into the literal deadbeat, financially, that their nonfeasance, misfeasance and malfeasance in positions of public trust have already proven them, figuratively, and are increasingly proving them, morally.