GOP blame game: Who lost the government shutdown?
According to their line of thinking, the party’s congressional leadership erred badly by dismissing the “defund” movement as a fool’s errand until it was too late, allowing the party to stumble into a shutdown with no strategy and no clear demands, rather than cooperating with conservatives to force President Barack Obama’s hand.
If the leaders didn’t think defunding Obamacare was achievable, the theory goes, then they could have pursued another set of demands using the leverage of the budget and the debt ceiling. By the time House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan proposed entitlement reform talks in an Oct. 8 Wall Street Journal op-ed, the battle lines were already drawn.
“John Boehner, Eric Cantor, Mitch McConnell, and John Cornyn will ensure that Obamacare is fully funded and give the American public no delay like businesses have,” RedState blogger Erick Erickson warned last week. “In doing so, they will sow the seeds of a real third party movement that will fully divide the Republican Party.”
If this thinking is anathema to establishment Republicans, there’s at least some political firepower behind conservatives who share Erickson’s views: both the Club for Growth and Heritage Action declared the Senate compromise to end the shutdown was a “key” vote for assessing lawmakers.
“There are no significant changes to Obamacare, nothing on the other major entitlements that are racked with trillions in unfunded liabilities, and no meaningful spending cuts either,” Club for Growth official Andy Roth wrote in a vote alert to lawmakers. “If this passes, Congress will kick the can down the road, yet again.”
Some men just want to watch the world burn
Read more: http://www.politico.com/story/2013/10/government-shutdown-republicans-who-lost-98426_Page2.html#ixzz2hzU8904p