Saying their patience is at an end, conservative activist groups backed by the billionaire Koch brothers and other powerful interests on the right are mobilizing to pressure Republicans to fulfill their promise to swiftly  repeal the Affordable Care Act. Their message is blunt and unforgiving, with the goal of reawakening some of the most extensive conservative grass-roots networks in the country. It is a reminder that even as Republicans control both the White House and Congress for the first time in a decade, the party’s activist wing remains restless and will not go along passively for the sake of party unity.

The founder of the family dynasty, Fred Koch, born in 1900, grew up middle class in a small town just east of the Texas Panhandle and rose quickly. A few years after graduating from M.I.T., he helped found an engineering firm in the oil industry that did well enough to make him rich by the time he was in his early 30s. It would be hard to think of a rich oilman in the Southwest who wasn't right-wing during Fred Koch's midcentury heyday, but Koch seems to have been especially so. A period spent doing business in the Soviet Union in 1930 left a deep impression on him. In 1938 he wrote to a friend that Germany, Japan and Italy were "the only sound countries in the world." In 1958 he became one of the founders of the John Birch Society. In 1960 he published a pamphlet called "A Business Man Looks at Communism," in which he wrote: "The colored man looms large in the Communist plan to take over America."

Next year, the Kochs will have a Congress loaded with crackpots ready to serve their agenda. There will be show hearings, bills will be introduced, meaningless votes will be taken. In the end, health care and clean energy will march on. The Kochs, to close with another film reference, will be like Harold Lloyd in one of the great scenes from the silent movie era - hanging from the hands of a giant clock. It may cost them half a billion dollars to learn that they can t stop time.

By drawing public attention to layoffs by subsidiaries of Koch Industries across the country - a chemical plant in North Carolina, an oil refinery in Alaska, a lumber operation in Arkansas - Democrats are seeking to make villains of the reclusive billionaires, whose political organizations have spent more than $30 million on ads so far to help Republicans win control of the Senate.

Democrats have been staggered by a $20 million advertising blitz produced by Americans for Prosperity, the conservative advocacy group organized and financed by the Koch brothers, billionaire industrialists. The ads take aim at House and Senate candidates for re-election who have supported the health law, and blame them for the hyped-up problems with the law s rollout that now seem to be the sole plank in this year s Republican platform.

More than a thousand miles from the labor tumult in Wisconsin - where his name shows up on the signs of protesters and a liberal blogger impersonating him got through to the governor on the phone and said "gotta crush that union!" - the real David H. Koch was greeted rather more warmly here Friday when he officially opened a new cancer research institute bearing his name.