seem to want to have an exit strategy. he just has a trouble strategy. and then gop leaders getting caught on tape to their embarrassment talking the politics of this thing and not in a particularly public-spirited way. also the shutdown fight may be only the beginning. i think so. many republicans want to take the battle all the way to the debt ceiling and jeopardize this country s financial standing. the entire economy will be held hostage in the process. but it s not clear that speaker boehner is one of the wild men. and let s talk about the political stunts that are being pulled even today and certainly yesterday. we re going to show you here, texas republican randy neugebeuer. here he goes. how do you look at them and deny them access? it s difficult. billion, it should be difficult. it is difficult. park should have should be ashamed of themselves. i m an shamed. well, you should be. who are you prouder of, the park service people with those campaign hats on or a
that s a good explanation. grover said that? yes, grover on cruz. want to make sure. the mystery is why anyone thought he had a strategy or exit strategy or end game. it never made sense. the house republican extremists as i call them never had leverage to accomplish what they wanted to accomplish. what did they think would force the president to defund or delay obama care? they didn t have votes in the house, in the senate. they didn t have public opinion on their side. the supreme court hadn t endorsed it. there was a receive ren dumb. dee dee, go through that one more time. i m serious. do it again. say it again. they didn t have a majority go. they didn t have a majority in the house. they didn t have a majority in the senate. they didn t have the white house, the supreme court or public opinion. even though public opinion is divided on obama care, 70% of americans said they didn t want it defunded by shutting down the
going to take to open up this government? speaker boehner then has a choice, he can pander to his tea party elements and his caucus and say you re not going to get anything, it s our way or the highway or speaker boehner can present an exit strategy that makes sense. we want to open the government, we can do it in the next few minutes. it s not about 10, 20, 30 republicans. it s about one. will speaker boehner release the 16 republicans who said they would vote with us, to take this. as we speak, you and your fellow colleagues are beginning a series of votes on the house floor to fund five parts of the government. veterans, the national park service, and also among those is the nih, which of course, funds research, cancer research for everybody, including children. democrats are in a tough spot, right? that s the whole point, that s the republican strategy, to put you in a tough spot. that is the republican strategy, to put us in a tough
performance by speaker boehner. he s a capable man. but he is tired and he s frustrated. something is going on with john boehner there. that was so short, so brief. i suggested earlier there were two options. one is that he could breathe fire and speak to the base and say we re here, we made the fight. and we re going to continue to fight for a few days. or we could say here s our exit strategy. he did neither. he talked in sort of arcane language about this conference. we know the conference is not going to happen. i don t even know why he bothered to come out. steve suggests it s for the morning tv shows, but such a sultry display. he didn t have any passion about it. charles? he s looking for his exit ramp, he understands where the fight has to be. the dismissal, the attempt, there s no attempt whatsoever by harry reid or obama or anyone to reach out and actually have a compromise, which would have been easy to do, that makes it
so singing a different tune, but things change in the course of politics. we know that. john avalon, i know you heard dana bash s reporting at the top of the hour. she has these house leadership sources telling her they are planning on voting, albeit voting on a series of piecemeal bills to fund the government. do you think that s boehner s exit strategy here? well, it s a plan d. it s the best thing they ve got right now. the house leadership and speaker boehner are bending over backwards to try to appear like the reasonable folks in this conversation. just look at the way they framed the debate with speaker boehner disciplined with talking points, talking about how this was a vote last night to keep the government open and about fairness. i mean, that is a stretch by any objective standard. everybody knows that attaching a defund or delay to the spending bill shuts down the government. but the poll numbers show they need to frame this positively. privately boehner said this