House Republicans who didn’t support tying government funding to ObamaCare now find themselves too committed to the strategy to back down, according to twin reports by David Drucker and Byron York of the Washington Examiner. Both writers said GOP leadership would likely seek to conflate budget negotiations with the raising of the debt ceiling in an effort to extract concessions to justify their efforts, even as they admitted they don’t know what those concessions are.

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“We’re not going to be disrespected,” Marlin Stutzman (R-IN) told Drucker Tuesday night. “We have to get something out of this. And I don’t know what that even is.”

“This is not just about Obamacare anymore,” said Michael Grimm (R-NY).

Drucker described a caucus that had entered this charge reluctantly, but that now said it had gone too far to reverse course.

“House GOP leaders and most of their rank and file never supported conservatives’ efforts to use the budget bill and the threat of a government shutdown to defund Obamacare, fearing a political backlash,” Drucker wrote. “But

having gone as far as they have, House Republicans now say they won’t back down. And they expect to score political points in the process.”

York found that exact sentiment echoed by party members he spoke to.

“I think there’s a sense that for us to do a clean CR now—then what the hell was this about?” one House Republican told him. This is despite the fact that most believe a “clean continuing resolution”—one that funded the government without affecting the Affordable Care Act—would easily pass the House were it brought to a vote.

York wrote that House leadership may pitch a “grand bargain,” of the type that has been tried many times before—a tactic he termed a “Hail Mary”:

House Speaker John Boehner and leading Republicans like Paul Ryan and Dave Camp are apparently reviving the old goal of a “grand bargain” — a budget deal that would include entitlement reforms, tax reform, and a new budget agreement, while also restoring government spending and raising the debt ceiling. The idea is that with the debt ceiling deadline coming up on Oct. 17, Republicans and Democrats could fix all, or at least many, of their problems in one fell swoop.Such “grand bargain” attempts have failed in the past, and there is little reason to believe one will succeed now. And not just because Obama and Democrats are intransigent,

which they are. The fact is, this is Oct. 3, meaning there are just two weeks before the nation hits the debt ceiling. Could Republicans get even their end of a “grand bargain” together in time?

They may not have a choice, York wrote: “GOP leadership, having rejected the option of passing a clean continuing resolution, simply doesn’t have any other ideas on how to get out of the current mess.”

[h/t Washington Examiner]

[Image via Cleveland.com]

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Tags: Byron York, David Drucker, GOP, Government Shutdown, grand bargain, John Boehner