General Discussion

The repubs were doing that to try and achieve their ends and it was wrong. I"m not sure that our doing it, even for a good cause, is much better.

How long would you be willing to use this leverage to try to force repubs to do something that you have no reason to think that they would do. How did you see this playing out? Did you think the repubs would suddenly grow a conscience and care? While they were being blamed for the shutdown, there are polls suggesting an increasing number of people were shifting to blaming both sides equally. Moreover, the repub base hadn't moved a bit -- they were happy to keep fighting Democrats, even though for many of them, they were cutting off their noses to spite their face -- hardly something that should surprise any of us.

So, again, how did you see this ending and when? Some will ask what was the point -- well, simply letting a clean CR be approved without pressing on the ACA would have been capitulation -- what we accomplished was bringing the ACA issue to the forefront and if the repubs don't yield at some point, they will pay a price at the polls.