Republican political operatives want to remind everyone who’s paying attention that conservative House members are itching for a fight, and impossible to control.

More than half of the GOP conference, they warn, is prepared to breach the debt limit — despite catastrophic economic risks — and many more still would be willing to let appropriations lapse at the end of March, to trigger the same kind of government shutdown Newt Gingrich lead in 1995.

They also want you to remind you that President Obama was just as adamant in 2011 that he would not allow Republicans to threaten a debt limit breach as a way to leverage policy.

“Just so everyone’s clear, the position the President took today was the same one he started with in 2011,” John Boehner’s spokesman Brendan Buck tweeted after President Obama’s Monday press conference.

These claims are beginning to look like wishful thinking.