One of the best ideas in the run up to the government shutdown was a petition on the White House website to designate the Republican Party as a terrorist organization. Think about it. The Republicans want to force President Obama to give up his signature achievement of changing the healthcare system. That didn’t work. The healthcare exchanges opened for business yesterday because it’s not affected by the shutdown, which is costing the American taxpayers $300 million USD per day. In short, the Republicans are economic terrorists.

Ironically, the petition page got disabled from the Republican shutdown:

Due to Congress’s failure to pass legislation to fund the government, We the People has been temporarily disabled.

As a result, you will be unable to create or sign We the People petitions. Once government funding has been restored, We the People will be reenabled. Petitions that were open as of October 1, 2013 will have their deadlines extended.

Updates regarding government operating status and resumption of normal operations can be found at USA.GOV.

Now would be perfect time for Americans to sign the petition en masse to break the 100,000 signature minimum requirement for the White House to consider the petition. Most petitions don’t get enough signatures to warrant a response, and the few that do often get boilerplate response on why the government can’t do this or that. (The most unique response was for a petition to build the Death Star.) Sometimes a petition with a very good idea gets implemented.

Would the White House designate the Republican Party as a terrorist organization? No.

If the Obama Administration branded the Republican Party as a terrorist organization, it would probably be the opening salvo for a second civil war as extreme conservatives from the southern states will assert their Second Amendment right to bear arms and go to war with the government. To paraphrase the old miner (Mel Brooks) in Blazing Saddles who shouted from the rooftop: “The president is a [church bells pealing]!” That a black man can become president despite their repeated attempts to sabotage the economy galls these angry old white guys like nothing else.

What the country need is a new political party for moderate conservatives to rally around and isolate the extreme conservatives in the Republican Party. (Some liberals will argue that a progressive party needs to split away from Democratic Party, but that’s taking political extremism in the opposite direction.) I recently changed my political affiliation because I don’t feel welcome as a moderate conservative in a party hijacked by the extreme conservatives. Until another political party can replace the Republican Party, we the people must continue to suffer the economic consequences of our duly elected terrorists.