The psychologist Carl Jung once defined insanity as when a part of the personality detaches itself from the rest and attempts to act as if it were the whole personality.
This is exactly what Thomas F. Schaller means when he refers to the insanity of the "tea party-beholden GOP" ("Why did GOP pick a fight on Obamacare?" Oct. 16).
That a small fraction of one chamber of one branch of the federal government could use our democratic system to threaten its economic destruction is indeed insane.
That the system itself could permit such a catastrophe means there is something very wrong with the system itself. And if not corrected, what looms as a potential catastrophe today will sooner or later become a reality.
This is not what the Founding Fathers had it mind.
Howard Bluth, Baltimore