http://blog.sfgate.com/nov05election/2013/10/16/gop-sane-caucus-never-again/GOP Sanity Caucus: “Never again”Carolyn Lochead
October 17, 2013
Senate Republicans emerged Wednesday from the Capitol meeting that ended the shutdown and debt ceiling crisis at least for a couple of months, saying, “Never again,” followed by, “I told you so.”
Except Sen. Ted Cruz, of Texas, the firebrand who proved that he knows how to stay on message, despite humiliating House Speaker John Boehner and leading his party off a cliff without a parachute, clearly, based on their comments, earning the disdain of most of his GOP colleagues, some of whom he might need for any presidential ambitions.
Cruz said he would not block the agreement, because for the first time in weeks, he admitted that delaying a vote would accomplish nothing. Zero. “There is no benefit to delaying this vote for a couple of days,” Cruz said — unless pushing the United States into default is considered a benefit, and apparently Cruz does not go that far. He called it “a bad deal for the American people,” and asserted that these selfsame “American people rose up and forced the House to listen” whereas “the Senate has not.”
But the “timing of the vote (to reopen the government and avert a default) has no impact on the outcome.”
Politicians apparently more in touch with reality indicated that if anything, the American people rose up and were crushing the GOP under an avalanche of horrendous polling.
Sen. Kelly Ayotte of New Hampshire: “It’s time for us to move on.” “We never got an answer,” she said, to “how (Tea Party conservatives) were going to achieve what they were purporting to achieve….The strategy was not smart from the beginning…it’s demonstrable on its face because the government was shut down and the health care exchanges were open.”
Sen. Jeff Flake, R-Ariz.: “Some of us never wanted to go there…Let’s hope we don’t go down this shutdown road again for awhile.”
Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz.: “I hope it’s another 15 years before we go through this exercise again.” Constituents are “very, very angry. They don’t like the government but they don’t want it shut down.”
Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah: “I feel very badly about the way the Speaker of the House has been treated by members of his own party…It’s time to act like adults.”
