Tea Party Ringleader Admits GOP Shut Down Government for Nothing

What if I told you that one of the leaders of the tea party strategy to stop Obamacare by shutting down the Federal government didn't actually believe it was possible to repeal Obamacare until 2017 at the earliest but pushed forward with his plan anyway?

You'd probably get pretty mad, right? Shutting down the government over an unrelated policy dispute is bad enough, but if the people shutting the government down didn't even believe that their strategy would work, then they'd be guilty of inflicting pain and creating chaos for absolutely no reason whatsoever.

It might be hard to believe that anyone would admit to such a thing, but Wednesday morning on Fox News, that's exactly what Heritage Action CEO Michael Needham did. He started out by explaining that Republicans had shut down the government because they don't want to "allow" Obamacare to "go forward" because they believe it must be stopped "before January 1":

The reason the government is shut down is Obamacare is unfair, it's unaffordable, it's unworkable, every single day there's more evidence of that coming out. House Republicans have remained strong in saying we are not going to let this bill go forward. We're not going to allow this to be inflicted on the American people. [...]

I think that almost every member of the House Republican conference, if not all of them, is deeply concerned about Obamacare, and knows that we have to do something before January 1 to stop it.

Then, less than sixty seconds later, he admitted that this strategy was doomed:

Well, everybody knows that we're not going to be able to repeal this law until 2017, and that we have to win the Senate and win the White House.

Well, as infuriating as the GOP nihilistic strategy has been, one thing is for sure: It's now a whole lot less likely that come 2017, they'll still be in control of the House—let alone the Senate or presidency.