As conservatives escalate their efforts to shut down the government if Obamacare is not defunded, a familiar voice of reason is returning to the fray to send them a message: Dream on.
Rep. Tom Cole (R-OK), a deputy majority whip, has taken to the airwaves over the last 24 hours to pour cold water on GOP attempts to demand that the party withhold support for keeping the federal government open after Sept. 30 unless Obamacare is gutted.
He has dismissed the conservative effort as a “temper tantrum” and likened it to “blackmail.”
“Seems to me there’s appropriate ways to deal with the law, but shutting down the government to get your way over an unrelated piece of legislation is political equivalent of throwing a temper tantrum,” he said Wednesday on Fox News. “It’s just not helpful.
There’s a lot of gamesmanship involved in the political process. Moves are made to get the other side to blink or shift positions ever so slightly. One of the reasons that the GOP has been so awful at this in recent memory is because there is always someone in the upper ranks who would rather make his or her inner attention whore happy by knee-capping a faction of the party in the press rather than accomplish anything.
It’s not that there isn’t any merit at all to what Cole is saying, it’s just that there is no need for him to be saying it in public.
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