“I’ve been trying to figure this out,” says one House Republican of the current standoff over funding the government. “It seems to me that Boehner could do whatever he wants with Democrats on the floor and still get about 180 or 190 of us. So why doesn’t he do that?”…

As the shutdown took hold, the House GOP leadership changed course from trying to limit Obamacare to an effort to mitigate the effects of the shutdown. Boehner and his colleagues came up with bills that would fund the National Park Service, the Department of Veterans Affairs, the Smithsonian, the National Gallery of Art, the Holocaust Museum, and the District of Columbia government. The bills were considered under special rules, which in the end meant that House Democrats were able to kill them — before Senate Democrats could kill them.

What distinguished the House agenda on Tuesday was that it wasn’t about Obamacare. The parks bill, for example, did not contain a provision to defund or delay the president’s national health care plan. The Smithsonian bill didn’t either. And so on. One could argue that with the government shut down, Obamacare was effectively defunded, at least for the many days the government remains closed. But the fact is, on Tuesday the Republican focus shifted from going after Obamacare to trying to undo the most visible negative consequences of the shutdown.