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Little time to enjoy the GOP takeover of control of the House. It is time to try and reverse healthcare and put the country back on track. It is also time to find out about the quantitative easing by the Fed.

The billionaire brothers' influence is most visible in the makeup of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, where members have vowed to undo restrictions on greenhouse gases.

Let's be clear: It was never in the political interests of House Republicans to force a government shutdown over this -- and John Boehner, who was a member of his party's leadership when the GOP suffered a P.R. disaster during the shutdowns of late 1995 and early 1996, knew it. But the House Speaker also knew that the best way to keep his fellow Republicans from insisting on one -- and, potentially, from throwing him overboard in the process -- was to extend the negotiations as long as possible, making it look like he was as hell-bent on confrontation with President Obama as they were, and to hope that influential conservatives would eventually give him cover to cut a deal. That seems to be what finally happened late on Friday night, just over an hour before funding for the government was set to expire and mass furloughs were set to begin.

"Never has the time been so right," Louisiana State Representative Noble Ellington told conservative legislators gathered in Washington to plan the radical remaking of policies in the states. It was one month after the 2010 midterm elections. Republicans had grabbed 680 legislative seats and secured a power trifecta-control of both legislative chambers and the governorship-in twenty-one states. Ellington was speaking for hundreds of attendees at a "States and Nation Policy Summit," featuring GOP stars like Texas Governor Rick Perry, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich and House Majority Leader Eric Cantor. Convened by the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC)-"the nation's largest, non-partisan, individual public-private membership association of state legislators," as the spin-savvy group describes itself-the meeting did not intend to draw up an agenda for the upcoming legislative session. That had already been done by ALEC's elite task forces of lawmakers and corporate representatives. The new legislators were there to grab their weapons: carefully crafted model bills seeking to impose a one-size-fits-all agenda on the states.

It's a ready-made campaign commercial as Democrats plan to hail their own votes as heroic when states are facing massive budget crises. And -- you guessed it -- Republicans will say it's another big-spending government plan.