White House: Tea Party 'Holding The Economy Hostage'

Asked what the point of a meeting between President Obama and Republicans over the government shutdown was if President Obama had no intention of budging on the funding of the government, White House press secretary Jay Carney had no answer. Instead, he said, “The fact of the matter is that the President’s only position is that the government ought to be open….He’s not asking the Republicans for anything in return for them doing their jobs. He’s not attaching any partisan or personal agenda item to that responsibility. The position the Republicans have had…is that ‘Give us what we want or we’ll shut down the government.’ The opposite is not true. The President has not asked for anything. It’s not a concession to the President of the United States…to open the government…to not trash our economy.”

“The only party here making demands about reopening our government…is the Republican Party, and more narrowly, the Tea Party,” Carney said. Obama, Carney said, was making no demands on Republicans and threatening shutdown, especially with regard to gun control. Carney suggested that Republicans were “holding the economy hostage.”

Ben Shapiro is Editor-At-Large of Breitbart News and author of the New York Times bestseller “Bullies: How the Left’s Culture of Fear and Intimidation Silences America” (Threshold Editions, January 8, 2013).