Days after the end of a government shutdown that lasted 16 days members of the Republican Party are trying to do damage control and are lashing out at the tea party affiliated members of the Party who forced the unpopular shutdown, according to the Associated Press.
The far right wing of the Republican Party were the most adamantly against passing a continuing resolution to fund the government without including provisions that would defund the Affordable Care Act; the hated health care reform law referred to as Obamacare has become the focal point of House Republicans as they have voted over 40 separate times to repeal or defund the law.
By Thursday Democrats were trying to pin all of the blame on Republicans, especially those who are facing re-election in 2014.
"It's not like a Biblical Passover, where there's blood on the door to mark the virtuous," Fergus Cullen, a former Republican Party chairman in New Hampshire, told the Boston Globe. "Every Republican will get slaughtered. They will all suffer for the sins of one or two."
When the tea party movement began it was widely embraced by the mainstream of the Republican Party, in particular because of the energy its followers showed, and the GOP was able to win more seats in both houses of Congress in 2010 and 2012 because of it, the Boston Globe reports.
Mike Murphy, a Republican strategist, harshly rebuked the tea party faction of his party as he referred to is as "the stupid wing of the Republican Party," according to the Associated Press.
"There's tension and there ought to be a questioning of whether we ought to listen to such bad advice," Murphy said "We took a huge brand hit. It's self-inflicted... I'm glad there are no elections tomorrow."
A poll conducted by the Pew Research Center shows that the tea party's image has taken quite a hit from the failed attempt to force the Democrats' hand over the Affordable Care Act. Nearly half of the people surveyed, 49 percent, said that they had an unfavorable opinion of the tea party. In 2010 only 25 percent of respondents expressed an unfavorable opinion of the movement.
The way that people responded to Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, is probably most telling about the effect the shutdown will have on the party. Cruz made a name for himself by speaking on the Senate floor against the Affordable Care Act for hours in a sort of filibuster and had advocated for the tactic of forcing a government shutdown over the law.
The Pew Research poll found that Cruz's popularity among tea party Republicans soared in October with 74 percent of respondents having a favorable opinion of him. Among non-tea party Republicans negative opinions of Cruz almost doubled between July and October; 16 percent found him unfavorable in July with 31 percent sharing that opinion in October.
