One of the more irritating aspects of the recent government-shutdown unpleasantness has been the “I told you so” lamentations of the defund/delay plan’s critics — as if they had anything approaching a workable alternative. I highly recommend Andrew McCarthy’s weekend column. It’s a devastating takedown of the notion that Obamacare repeal is just a multi-election Republican winning spree away. Even if we were able to achieve a Republican perfect storm, sweeping the Senate in 2014 then taking the White House in 2016, does anyone foresee a filibuster-proof Republican senate majority? Isn’t the best-case outcome of that strategy a tweaking of the law not unlike, say, welfare reforms in the 1990s — positive changes that still leave intact a trillion-dollar-per-year, failed entitlement superstructure? …

What’s the Republican response to that? Remember this feeling, vote for us for the next two cycles, and we’ll make it better by 2017? I know the Tea Party’s answer. They laid their political futures on the line to stop a plan that is hurting millions of Americans, and they will keep doing so at every opportunity until this monstrosity is repealed.