Surrender: House Will Take Up Senate Plan to End Standoff

The Democrats’ plan doesn’t do a thing about our spending problem. It doesn’t change the trajectory that Obama will be the first president in American history to never have a budget during his entire run as president. It won’t make him a worthy or responsible steward of the nation.

But it is a surrender for the Republicans.

House Speaker John Boehner said Wednesday that the House “absolutely” will take up the new Senate budget plan — even if he has to rely on mostly Democrats to pass it — and that he expects the partial government shutdown to end by Thursday.

Boehner made the comments in an interview with Cincinnati radio station WLW-AM.

“We fought the good fight. We just didn’t win,” he said.

No, they didn’t. The Republicans got nothing. Obamacare goes forward, only now the government actually has to verify the subsidies. The debt ceiling is raised, the government will re-open tomorrow, so no more park rangers locking old people into hotels.

Democrats control 2/3 of Washington and they are as stubborn as their donkey mascot. That party once waged a civil war to preserve some really, really bad law. They closed down the government this time around, knowing that the media would provide air support throughout, and barricaded veterans from memorials. That’s how they play the game. They hate compromise and will hurt as many people as they can get away with to get their way. Harry Reid even said aloud that he wasn’t interested in helping kids with cancer. That was a quick blip. Had a Republican said that?

So how do you beat them? In the Republicans’ case, the divisions within their ranks didn’t help. “Wacko bird” didn’t help. Peter King spending more time assaulting Republicans than Democrats didn’t help. It also didn’t help to rant “you support Obamacare!” if you didn’t happen to agree with the strategy to stop Obamacare. A divided force will just about always lose to a unified force. The Republicans failed to divide the Democrats, while they went into the fight divided themselves.

Sometimes you just have to shake things up. Maybe this fight has done that. If so, it may yet yield fruit. But for now, it’s a loss. There is time to regroup before 2014. And before the next Obama-engineered budget fight, which is just a few weeks away.