JUDY WOODRUFF: What do you think happens to those folks who — who tried so hard to defund Obamacare, defund health care law, who really wanted more out of this confrontation than they got? What happens to them?

DAVID BROOKS: Well, they will have to figure it out. They — they’re putting on a brave face today, but they were so legislatively incompetent.

Competence does essentially matter. They started a fight they couldn’t win, there was no possibility of winning, and they marched the party into disaster. So, can they really be unaware of that? Certainly, the rest of the party isn’t unaware of that.

If they hadn’t done this, we would have spent the last week talking about how badly the Obamacare website is rolling out. Sarah Kliff made that earlier — that point earlier on in the program. And so this was a colossal blunder.

If I were President Obama, what I would do right now to test this proposition, I would go full-bore on immigration. If the — well, I will keep calling them the reality caucus. If they can retake control, then they will pass something like what the Senate passed, and President Obama will have a big substantive victory.