Ball: Conservatives Are Tired of Boehner & McConnell Calling Shutdowns ‘Political Poison’

 TODD: “Okay. Look, Molly this is probably going to shut down the government. And Republicans are fighting. I mean, Hugh, I think you’d agree to this, you wanted to put it on the president. The fact is, Republicans are in disagreement on how to handle this issue. It’s highly charged. The base of the party, frankly, most of the party, Republican party, wants this to be their alibi.”
BALL: “Absolutely. And you heard a number of candidates on the stage on Wednesday night saying that they would agree with going there. And you do have a lot of conservatives.”
TODD: “So just let me pause you. I’ll put up, it was actually about half the field was for it. I want to put up a graphic. And about half of the field was against it. You can see here on screen of who was for using Planned Parenthood to shut down the government, and those that were against it And it really does split along your sort of governing and non-governing lines.”
BALL: “Absolutely. And you have Republicans saying, “Well, first of all, how is this political poison when we just did it a couple years ago” and went on to win big in the midterms?”
TODD: “Right.”
BALL: “So this argument that, “Oh, we can’t do it, it’ll kill the party, we’ll never win a presidential election,” a lot of them don’t buy it. You have Mitch McConnell saying, “We can’t do this,” John Boehner is saying, “We can’t do this.” And, you know, conservatives have heard this from them again and again, and they’re tired of it. And they want this to be the hill that they die on.”