Tea Party Express chief: The GOP should keep its promise to cut $100 billion, but a shutdown is a bad idea

I’m … not sure where this leaves us. Reid and Obama won’t agree to $100 billion in cuts unless there’s a shutdown and the public sides overwhelmingly with the GOP, which is unlikely. So you’re either in favor of averting the shutdown by compromising on a lesser amount now or you’re gung ho for doing whatever it takes, at whatever political cost, until we somehow get to the magic number of $100 billion. Or, I guess, there’s a third possibility: The GOP could get to $100 billion by cutting part of it now, via a compromise with Reid, and then cutting something extra later when they have more political leverage. Assuming Republicans and Democrats miraculously came together on a long-term fiscal reform plan in the trillions of dollars a la what Paul Ryan rolled out today, that would easily make up the difference. But actually, that’s what proponents of compromise have been saying all along: Let’s do a deal on this year’s budget for $33 billion or whatever and then move on to entitlements, where the real savings are.

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This wasn’t the only interesting bit to come out of her interview with the Monitor. Elsewhere, Kremer said that the TPE will carefully weigh a candidate’s electability going forward, even when — as in the case of Scott Brown — they’re clearly unhappy with what they’re seeing. Exit quotation: “I don’t think you’re going to get anybody more conservative than him. So sometimes it comes down to choosing the lesser of two evils and, of course that’s not what we want, but we can’t control everything.”

Update: Some commenters think she’s saying that they should shut the government down if they have to, but that it’d be a shame if it came to that. I don’t know; I honestly can’t tell. The Monitor thought she was saying that she opposes a shutdown, as did the Hill. Later in the clip she says patience is wearing thin with the GOP but that we can’t expect them to solve everything in three months, which made me think she might be open to a cut-some-now-and-the-rest-later solution. Judge for yourselves.

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