This comes from an interview with a Boehner confidant from a former member of the Ohio GOP delegation in the House Steven LaTourette.
Speaker John Boehner fought shutdown strategy, ally says
By Seth McLaughlin - The Washington Times
Mr. LaTourette, who like Mr. Boehner is an Ohio Republican, said Mr. Boehner never thought that linking the funding of Obamacare to a government shutdown was a good idea but went along with the strategy after Mr. Cruz’s 21-hour filibuster made the defending push the “cause celebre” of somewhere between 30 and 50 members of the House GOP caucus.
“He came up with not one but two plans to save these folks from themselves, and they rejected it,” Mr. LaTourette said on C-SPAN. “And when you reject it, you are left with either a continued government shutdown, or you have to yield to a deal that is worked out by [Senate leaders] Mitch McConnell and Harry Reid.”
Conservatives in the House torpedoed Mr. Boehner’s last-ditch efforts to put a dent in Obamacare while reopening government and raising the nation’s debt ceiling. They said his plan left too much of the Affordable Care Act intact — though the deal that lawmakers eventually passed was much more to the liking of Democrats than what Mr. Boehner had originally proposed.
I wish we knew what was in the two plans Boehner proposed. Maybe the details will emerge later.
The Tea Party pushed the shutdown and default up until the bitter end, rather than to besmirch their fanatical purity by accepting a lesser demand in their ransom note to the nation as Speaker Boehner was arguing for. They knew Boehner wouldn't enforce the Hastert rule on the Senate's bill, so the "somewhere between 30 and 50 members of the House GOP caucus" decided to make a pyrrhic stand against the evils of health care reform, and fiscal solvency.
And here's the results of the Tea Party's recent antics reflected in this BRAND NEW CBS poll on Congress:
Poll: Post-shutdown, Congress disapproval at all-time high
In this poll conducted after the 16-day government shutdown ended, 85 percent of Americans disapprove of the way Congress does its job - the highest percentage ever recorded since CBS began asking the question in 1977. Just 9 percent approve, matching the all-time low recorded two years ago.
There you have the the American People's verdict on the recent shenanigans of the Republican fanatics in the House.
And they echo their opinion of similar events resulting from a deliberately planned crisis from two years ago.
I detect a pattern here.
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