Meet One of Ted Cruz's House Cheerleading Squad

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The final vote in the House of Representatives was 285-144. As Jason Easley reported, all 144 House members who voted to crash the economy were Republicans.

This vote also crashes the GOP talking point that it was Democrats who wanted the government shutdown. Not a single Democrat joined the Kamikaze crowd who were so determined to deny poor people access to healthcare, they were willing to shut down the government AND crash the economy to get what they want.

Earlier Renee Ellmers, announced she intends to vote against Americas economy because the bill already passed in the Senate didn’t exclude a ransom payment to the Tea Party.

It just doesn’t have enough in it for me to vote for it, to warrant raising the debt ceiling (and) adding to our nation’s problems with spending,

Ellmers deserves special mention because this is the same Renee Ellmers who voted to furlough people that live from pay to paycheck, then had the nerve to announce that she’s keeping her government paycheck because she “needs it.”

Ellmers conceded that the House would vote to end this Tea Party imposed crises, though she remains “hopeful” that Republicans will learn what they need to believe in and achieve in a “realistic sense“.

Obviously, the 87 Republicans who joined with Democrats to end this nonsense learned that you can’t achieve what you want in a realistic sense by holding innocent Americans hostage. You can’t undo the hostage taking by releasing one hostage at a time. They also learned threatening to push the economy off a cliff in the name of denying poor people access to a doctor didn’t accomplish anything other than causing a lot of people to suffer and hurting our international reputation.

If Republicans really are interested in learning something it’s this: hold America and the American People hostage to impose your ideology on us and it will bite you right in the polls.

Many of us are breathing a sigh of relief because the adults in the room prevailed. Relief that it’s over this time, while hoping that the Kamikaze crew isn’t crazy enough to try this again in February.

Too many people will spend weeks and months rectifying the damage that Republicans caused. Unlike Renee Ellmers, 800,000 furloughed government employees had to manage with condescending lectures to get loans, instead of their paychecks. Many of them live pay check to pay check and they will be feeling the burn of this stunt for weeks and months..

While the Tea Party played games under the pretense that this was about fiscal responsibility and because they dream of denying poor people access to doctors, real people suffered. Needy families were cut off or saw their services disrupted. Cancer patients were denied treatment. Science stopped as did food inspections.

Fiscal responsibility means paying your bills. It does not mean using government employees as pawns, World War II Vets as props or raising Confederate flags at the White House. It doesn’t mean taking billions of dollars out of our economy and endangering our credit rating.

Image Screenshot from CSPAN Live Stream