A GOP member of the U.S. House has been quoted in recent days calling fellow Republicans "lemmings" and blasting moves that allowed the funding for the federal government to run out as they opposed Obamacare.
But Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Calif., was among the members of Congress early on to call for wholesale removal of the president's signature law, so what is going on?
He told WND he thinks Obamacare should be repealed, but he doesn't think allowing a federal government shutdown is going to help the GOP.
"We played right into their hands. We don't control the media, and we don't have the votes," he said. "I knew this was going to happen to us. This was what I was trying to avoid."
He explained that he anticipated the Democrats would be "ruthless" in their fight to preserve the health-care takeover that many Americans loathe.
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"We saw what these guys did when they passed Obamacare," he said. "They are ruthless. They use every tactic, and they all stayed together."
Republicans, he said, need to be "very strategic" about their fights, since they have a majority in the U.S. House but do not have the majority in the Senate and do not control the White House.
"We don't have very many cards to play," he said. "This was dangerous."
The scenario developed like this: Senate Democrats and Obama demanded from the House a "clean" continuing resolution that would fund all of the government, including Obamcare. House members, who had received a flood of complaints from their constituents, first wanted to defund Obamacare, then make changes then delay it.
All of those proposals were rejected out of hand by Senate Democrats.
"We should challenge Obamacare at every chance that we get," Nunes told WND.
But he said it was just wrong to be involved in a government shutdown the same day Obamacare kicked in.
Now that the shutdown has come about, however, he said, the fight must go on.
"I'm going to fight and keep fighting, it. This is just a very bad spot we're in," he said.
The real solution, he said, would be for "the president to work with the Senate and House to come up with whatever areas we can agree on to get the debt under control and fix the health care program's problems."
"I don't hold a lot of faith in this White House [to do that]," he said.
Nunes is the author of "Restoring the Republic,"Â which offers an alternative to unprecedented government spending, historic deficits and gathering foreign threats to America.
"We can either reassert fiscal discipline and reduce the government to the size envisioned by our Founders, or we can continue on the current path of spending ourselves into oblivion," he argues.
He says strategies include breaking America's dependence on Middle East oil, reforming Social Security and Medicare to keep bankruptcy at bay, making the tax code simple and fair, and protecting America's interests overseas.
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