“I do not come here to pin a rose on this legislation,” Nancy Pelosi said, just before 10 P.M. Washington time, as a bill to end the debt-ceiling crisis came to the floor of the House. “It does not have that respect.” She delivered the votes for it, though. Two hundred and eighty-five representatives said yes, eighty-seven of them Republicans—and, with that, after sixteen days of shutdown, Congress will let federal workers do their jobs and the Treasury pay our bills and not disgrace the country. There has been enough of that from G.O.P. extremists, who, after spending Wednesday staggering around Washington, wondering where it had all gone wrong, won nothing in the final bill.

Obama held out, and got a stubborn victory. The Republican Party was exposed as a mottled wreck. That’s good to know, but not good to have: a broken party can do a lot of damage. The crisis did not end in a way that will contain its dysfunction. On Tuesday, it looked like John Boehner, the Speaker of the House, couldn’t control his caucus at all, alarming anyone who assumed that the G.O.P.’s leaders would know when and how to manage an orderly surrender. Fitch, the rating agency, had to put the U.S. under a negative credit watch, and we got within hours of hitting the debt ceiling before the G.O.P. dragged itself together. The Democrats won without betraying millions of uninsured Americans; the bill doesn’t substantively change Obamacare, let alone defund it—the Republican goal—and they didn’t give up anything else. They pushed, and that was useful. But it is not as though some country-bettering initiative made it through, after a lot of wasted time. The bill only keeps the government open until January 15th, with budget talks in December, and the debt ceiling at a sufficient height until February 7th. The whole package gets at most two cheers.

Congress, two days before a national default rolls in, appears to be occupied with multiple parallel daydreams, the unrealistic ones each unrealistic in their own way. Since Monday afternoon, there has been word every hour that a Senate deal to reopen the government (until January 15th) and not renege on the debts of the United States (or not until February 7th) would be closed any minute. The deal involved more “income verification” for people getting help buying insurance under Obamacare—the health-care version of a voter-I.D. law—and delaying a fee on insurers meant to protect those with less healthy subscribers (helpful for union plans), plus talks, in December, to keep alive the vision of bipartisan budget compromise. But there were two concerns to wish away: that Ted Cruz, or another unhinged Senator, would use parliamentary moves to delay a vote until it was too late to avoid all-out default, and that House Republicans would just scream and say never.

They’ve already begun to yell. “We’ve got a name for it in the House: it’s called the Senate surrender caucus,” Congressman Tim Huelskamp, of Kansas, said, according to the Times. On Tuesday morning, the Republicans briefly seemed to have their own bill, which looked a lot like one that has already been rejected by the Senate, but with the threat of worldwide economic ruin mixed in. Darrell Issa, the California Republican, referred to it as “enhanced.” (He also told the Times that the Republicans began their Tuesday meeting by singing “Amazing Grace.”) But by the time the Republican leadership came out to introduce it, the bill already appeared to be dead—not Tea Party enough. Eric Cantor was left to talk sourly about “fairness.”

A military lawyer had identified forty-one highly classified state secrets revealed in a single article. Senior officials were telling everyone who would listen that the journalists’ revelations had made the country less safe and put lives at risk—the reporters were simply traitors. The Russians might be behind it, and who knew what secrets the journalists would hand over if they weren’t immediately apprehended. Their publisher was already in Cuba, or maybe just headed there on a plane—anyway, he was a fugitive. A call was put in to a military attaché in Spain, to ask him to arrange to have another journalist stopped at the border; a soldier thought to be his source was arrested. The country’s leader mocked the media outlet involved: “You’ve got a publication that prints a half a million copies and systematically engages in treason—to make itself some money.” And not just a little treachery: “an abyss of treason.” The whole thing was “just plain ugly.”

When the announcement came, this morning, that the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons had won the Nobel Peace Prize, not all of the group’s members were home in their beds, or near their homes at all. Some inspectors are in Syria, trying to translate the recent diplomatic openings regarding that country’s chemical weapons into some sort of reality. “We are conscious of the enormous trust that the international community has bestowed on us,” Ahmet Üzümcü, the group’s director general, said. The award, for which he said he was grateful, “will spur us to undying effort.”

“We’ve got a lot of things going for us,” President Obama said at a press conference Tuesday. The economy was looking up; people were working, oil was flowing, life would be not so bad but for the “uncertainty caused by just one week of this nonsense.” Nonsense was one of the kinder words he had for the government shutdown—“We can’t make extortion routine”—and the possibility that Congress would let the United States default on its debts, about nine days from now. He called that an “economic shutdown.”

Obama kept asking people “just to boil this down to personal examples.” In their own lives, if they weren’t happy, they “don’t get to demand ransom in exchange for doing their jobs,” or decide not to pay bills out of grumpiness. They “wouldn’t deal with co-workers or business associates in this manner.” Just as “you’re not saving money by not paying your mortgage; you’re just a deadbeat,” refusing to raise the debt ceiling, the statutory limit on the amount Congress can borrow to pay its bills, would not make those bills go away. “What’s true for individuals is also true for nations, even the most powerful nation on earth.”

Did the two raids that the United States carried out Saturday, in Libya and Somalia, succeed? At Baraawe, on the Somalian coast, what was reportedly a team of Navy SEALs approached a house, looking for a leader of the Shabab, the group responsible for killing dozens of people at Nariobi’s Westgate mall just weeks ago. (On Sunday night, the Times reported that the target was a Kenyan with a Somali family background who went by the name Ikrimah.) They didn’t get him; an unnamed official told the Washington Post that they “disengaged after inflicting some al-Shabab casualties”—how many isn’t clear. Nothing disastrous happened; it just wasn’t quite finished.

Sometime after 2 P.M. on Thursday, a car in Washington, D.C., went where it shouldn’t—through or at a barricade near the White House, near other official buildings in a city that was already disgruntled, at once tense and at loose ends, thanks to the shutdown. A woman was driving and a child was with her, according to press accounts. What happened next is still being sorted out. (The child is reportedly fine.) The car may have tried to break through the barricade and hit someone; there was shooting, and a chase, and, for a while, reports of an active shooter on the loose in the Capitol. Now it looks as though the only shooting was done by the police. The woman in the car was killed; a police officer and a Secret Service agent were injured, the Capitol police said. The Capitol spent half an hour or so in lockdown, with senators, congressmen, and their staff members hidden in their offices or anywhere they could find—John Boehner was reportedly in the cloakroom—wondering whether this was the expression of someone’s anger, and at whom.

“What a sick twisted old man to say, why would we want to do that?” Sean Hannity, of Fox News, said to Ted Cruz. They were talking about Harry Reid, the Senate Majority Leader, whose answer to a question about funding for the National Institutes of Health had become, for them, the story of the shutdown.

Once House Republicans refused to pass a spending bill on Monday night, the N.I.H. had to stop enrolling new cancer patients in clinical trials, among them some thirty children. This was such an indictment of the shutdown that the G.O.P. had suggested a micro-appropriation—part of a “piecemeal” funding tactic to keep anger at bay. Reid, talking to reporters, called it cherry-picking and said that he wanted the whole bill, sticking to that after Dana Bash, of CNN, asked why he wouldn’t help just one child with cancer if he could. If you listen to the exchange, something Reid then says—“Why would we want to do that?”—clearly refers to the pitting of different people hurt by the shutdown against each other. But he did give Fox a line, if one dependent on the idea that Reid would think that caring for children was an alien concept. “Pretty sick,” Hannity said, as Cruz tried to look sad. Also, “cold, callous, heartless, mean-spirited, hateful.” Guest after guest was outraged.

“We had a good day for the anarchists,” Harry Reid said Tuesday morning, when the Senate met briefly to deal with the House’s final, late-night act of legislative vandalism. Twice Monday the House Republicans were sent a bill, approved by the Senate, to keep the government open for about six weeks. The first time, they added a measure to put off much of Obamacare for a year. The second time, the Republicans effectively threw the thing over their shoulders, muttering about maybe sending it to a conference committee. By then midnight had come, the fiscal year had run out, names were being called, and reporters were tweeting about the smell of alcohol. Within hours, there were barricades up around museums and libraries in Washington; eight hundred thousand federal workers had been told to stay home while others got messages saying that they were essential to the preservation of life and property and had to come in—it just wasn’t certain when or if they’d get paid. Is that how anarchists operate, or people who don’t care, or are simply somewhat mad? (If real anarchists were in charge, one of the first federal-government operations to go down—the panda cam at the National Zoo—might have been the only thing left running.) Who are these House Republicans, and what have they done with our government?

On Saturday night, members of the House stayed up late screaming, voting after midnight; on Sunday morning, the Senators, after perhaps a peek at what their colleagues had passed—unserious amendments to a spending bill that would have kept the government open for just two and a half months while delaying Obamacare for a year—pulled the covers back over their heads and said they’d deal with it on Monday. A good part of the government will shut down at midnight, when the fiscal year ends, if there’s no agreement; the Senate Democrats’ plan is to wait until this afternoon to reject the amendments, giving the House only enough time to reject or approve a clean spending bill, rather than initiating an extra cycle of legislative sabotage. We’ll see in a few hours how well that works. Tuesday is also the day that insurance exchanges, marketplaces where the forty-eight million uninsured Americans can buy affordable or subsidized plans, will open. And that is what the G.O.P. wants to stop. So far, the Republicans have been wrapped up in deciding whether their fight is best compared to the Bataan Death March (Senator Ted Cruz, in his non-filibuster) or to the passengers of flight United flight 93’s stand against Al Qaeda hijackers (Congressman John Culberson, reportedly shouting after John Boehner announced the latest plan: “Like 9/11—let’s roll!”). Both parties have indulged in metaphors involving ticking bombs and guns to the head—just another day in Congress.