If John Boehner Really Had Chutzpah...

...what he'd do today is convince over 100 Members of his conference who have been griping about Ted Cruz and the Crazy Caucus to stand with him while he makes the following statement:

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Over the last several months, I was convinced by enthusiastic Tea Party conservatives that their defund Obamacare idea really had a chance to work. I admit I was against it at first. But they convinced me that I was trapped in politics-as-usual Washington thinking, and that what we had here was a one-time opportunity to turn the tables on Barack Obama and the Democrat Party. They were right. A House vote for defunding Obamacare along with the CR would set the stage for a battle in the Senate -- and with the House giving them momentum, a groundswell of opinion from small towns, from big cities, and from farms across America could finally put an end to this terrible socialist experiment. Tea Party conservatives had me smelling the phone wires and emails and spontaneous grass-roots demonstrations that would have started as soon as our plan passed the House and hit the Senate. And so we scheduled the vote.

Unfortunately, Senator Ted Cruz undermined all that by his pre-emptive surrender yesterday. What was once a promising strategy has been destroyed. There's no going back; as much as we wish it, conservatives are very sensible and pragmatic people, and there's no way they're going to rise up to support a plan when a prominent Senator who had been talking up the idea, one who had been thought to be a real conservative, has already admitted defeat.

Therefore, now that Ted Cruz has given away our chance of using the budget deadlines to end Obamacare, we're going to move ahead with a more positive plan, centered on the budget and the spending. After all, what Americans really want to know is: What about the spending? So we're going to solve his crisis that the president caused. We'll vote tomorrow to keep the government open for the year and to adjust our debt limit to account for the lower deficits that Republican policies have brought us. But that's not all: we're also going to force the Senate to vote on our new Balanced Budget Amendment, the one that answers the question: Where are the jobs? And we're going to make them vote again -- three times -- on a budget. That'll show 'em.

I've heard recently that whoever doesn't carry the fight against Obamacare is therefore basically an Obamacare supporter. I guess that makes Ted Cruz the biggest Obamacare supporter of them all. As for us, we've voted 41 times to repeal against this terrible program, and I pledge right now that we'll vote 41 more times if necessary. I'll never give up, and neither will any of us Republicans in the House of Representatives.

Thank you very much.