The Republicans Admit Defeat

Ted Cruz, senator from Texas, has admitted defeat: The man who led a 21-hour filibuster against Barack Obama’s health reforms in September has announced that he will not oppose the deal announced in the Senate to end the government shutdown and raise the debt ceiling.

As the architect of the strategy of refusing to vote on the budget in exchange for concessions on Obamacare, the Texan has turned a lot of people against him. Even the Houston Chronicle, which had supported him in 2012, has expressed regret. But Ted Cruz has garnered millions of email addresses and $800,000 in campaign contributions for the third quarter and that should keep him going for a while.

Speaker of the House John Boehner has also had to concede the failure of his strategy, announcing that he would agree to a vote by the House on the bill financing the government budget despite his previous opposition. Contrary to his promises, he seems to have accepted that the law will pass with the Democrats’ votes. “We fought the good fight. We just didn’t win,” he said regretfully.

Can the speaker keep his job? He is the big loser in the psychodrama of the last two weeks, finding himself rejected by both the White House and his Congressional group. The political pundits do not think that he is truly in danger: Nobody wants to take his place given the current divided state of the Republican party. Purists in the conservative movement, such as the website The Federalist, are, however, calling for his resignation.

The shutdown crisis has shown that the Republican Party is more ripped apart than ever. After its defeat in November 2012, the GOP vowed to deal with its image problem among young people, women and Hispanics. Over the past two weeks, its popularity has reached an all-time low: According to the latest NBC/Wall Street Journal poll, only 24 percent of Americans have a positive view of the Republicans. The “blame game” promises to be a bloody one. John McCain, who from the very start has said that it was suicidal to try to obtain a deferment of Obamacare by taking the budget vote hostage, qualified the freeze of public services as “shameful.”

Referring to the current Republican Party, Rush Limbaugh, who is generally a bit of a troublemaker, said that never before in his life could he remember “any major political party being so irrelevant.”

But all is not lost for the Republicans. In the government finance deal, they obtained from the Democrats the renewal of the spending cuts included in the 2011 austerity budget, also known as the “sequester.”

Many of them, such as Senator Saxby Chambliss, only accepted the compromise proposed by the Senate — government financing until Jan. 15 and raising of the debt ceiling until Feb. 7 — because it is solely applicable in the short term.

They intend to continue fighting against Obamacare, whose launch they describe as a fiasco — or, as the Patriot Post website subtly affirms, worthy of the German airship the Hindenburg. And they are already exploiting the structural weaknesses of the HealthCare.gov computer system, which is supposed to handle registrations.

So, rendezvous on Jan. 15, 2014 for another shutdown …