House Conservative: Boehner Emerging from Shutdown 'a Hundred Percent Stronger'

A South Carolina conservative told CNN that he expects “a small group” of Republicans to vote against the Senate compromise on the government shutdown and debt ceiling deal tonight in the House.

But, Rep. Mick Mulvaney (R-S.C.) said, he expects “it will pass overwhelming out of the House tonight with both Republican and Democrat support.”

Mulvaney said one of the things that got lost in the shutdown drama “was that the narrative is that we were trying to get rid of Obamacare, completely defund it. The last offer that we sent the Senate before tonight was simply a one-year delay to the individual mandate. To reach out to people and say, look, the president has issued 1,100 special exemptions to his friends, most recently, about a month ago, to corporations. We thought our families should get the same treatment under the law as those politically protected entities.”

“Ultimately, you have to believe. I mean, you have to really believe. You’re going to be in this business for a living, if this is what you choose to — if you’re going to leave your family and come up and do this in Washington, D.C., you have to believe that good policy is good politics. You might as well go home if you start making your decisions based upon political polls, you shouldn’t be here in the first place,” he said.

“We believe that what we did was right. We did it for the right reasons.”

Mulvaney admitted, “We lost.”

“And the folks who said we were going to lose turned out to be correct, I can’t argue with that. But we do believe that what we were doing was for the right reasons. Not doing it to hurt people,” the congressman said. “…Were people hurt by this? Sure, 85 percent of the government was open, but that’s not much consolation to you if you were in the 15 percent — if you needed the 15 percent of the government was closed.”

The Tea Party lawmaker also said House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) will emerge from the shutdown not damaged, but “a hundred percent stronger.”

“No one blames him for this. We didn’t have the votes. We did not have the votes yesterday,” Mulvaney said. “I supported the compromise that the speaker offered yesterday, so did really good conservatives, myself, Jim Jordan, Raul Labrador, Justin Amash. We supported that compromise. We could not get him the votes. That was our failure. We did not deliver the votes in the House. It wasn’t the speaker’s fault.”