But there are different Republicans, with different intentions, and not all of them were frowning as the week of their party's public shame came to a conclusion.
It is certainly true that Texas Senator Ted Cruz has become a political punch line -- the Canadian-born Republican whom Democrats would most like to see the Grand Old Party nominate for president. House Speaker John Boehner's name is likely to enter the lexicon as an antonym for "leadership." Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell is going to be spending an inordinate amount of time discussing the term "Kentucky kickback." And it may even be dawning on the Tea Partisans that the whole "defund Obamacare" gambit was a charade.
The real point of the exercise in chaos that the country was just dragged through was the chaos itself.
And the beneficiary of it all is the Republican who has suddenly stepped back into the limelight after laying low through most of the shutdown: House Budget Committee chairman Paul Ryan, R-Wisconsin.
Fully aware that the American people have no taste for a "grand bargain" that might see the implementation of at least some of his Ayn Rand-inspired "survival-of-the-fittest" proposals for means-testing earned-benefit programs, for taking the first steps toward privatization of Social Security, for turning Medicare and Medicaid into voucher programs, Ryan has for years been looking for an opening that makes his proposals seem "necessary."
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The 2012 election, when he was his party's "big ideas" guy, and its nominee for vice president, confirmed that there was no electoral route to advance his agenda. Americans rejected Ryan, overwhelmingly. He could not even carry his home state for the Romney-Ryan ticket, which was defeated by a 5 million popular-vote margin and a 332-206 Electoral College blowout. Ryan knew that it would take more to get his opening. And the crisis of the past several weeks in Washington provided it.
Some analysts were surprised when Ryan voted against the deal to temporarily end the shutdown and raise the debt ceiling. They shouldn't have been. While it's true that Ryan -- an enthusiastic backer of the 2008 bank bailout -- is a reliable vote for the agenda of the Wall Street speculators who fund his campaigns, he wasn't going against his political patrons when he joined 143 other House Republicans in voting "no." Rather, the Budget Committee chairman -- who just reported raising more than $1 million in fresh campaign funds in the third quarter of 2013 -- was voting to strengthen his own hand as he steps into the ring for the next stage of an inside-the-Beltway fight that is far from finished.
The deal that ended the shutdown set up a high-stakes conference committee on budget issues. If there is to be a "grand bargain," this is where it will be generated. And Ryan -- the most prominent of the 14 Democrats, 14 Republicans and two independents on the committee -- is in the thick of it.
The Budget Committee chairman says it would be "premature to get into exactly how we're going to" sort out budget issues.
But no one should have any doubts about the hard bargain he will drive for. In the midst of the shutdown, Ryan jumped the gun by penning a Wall Street Journal op-ed that proposed: "Reforms to entitlement programs and the tax code..."
"Here are just a few ideas to get the conversation started," Ryan wrote. "We could ask the better off to pay higher premiums for Medicare. We could reform Medigap plans to encourage efficiency and cut costs. And we could ask federal employees to contribute more to their own retirement."
Translation: Get ready for the radical reshaping of Medicare so that it is no longer a universal program. Make way for more price-gouging by the private companies that sell supplemental insurance. Launch a new assault on public employees who have already been hit with wage freezes and furloughs.
And Ryan will not stop there.
He never does.
That's why the Democrats on the conference committee -- led by Senate Budget Committee chairman Patty Murray, D-Washington -- must be exceptionally wary.
