Carney: Spiteful Tea Party 'Doing Harm to the Republican Party'

On Thursday, White House press secretary Jay Carney launched into an attack on the Tea Party, suggesting that conservatives were thwarting the will of the people and perverting House leadership on the debt ceiling issue and the government shutdown. “We should put everything on the table,” Carney said. “But what we cannot continue to do is punish the American people which is what the Tea Party Republicans are doing in the name of trying to extract partisan demands.”

Carney added, “The president has always said he will talk about anything. What he won’t do is pay a ransom…in exchange for Congress doing its fundamental job.” He continued by blaming the Tea Party, saying, “the Tea Party can’t get what it wants through normal legislative means or the ballot box.”

Over and over again, Carney blamed what he called the Tea Party subsection of the Republican Party for the current shutdown situation, despite the administration’s unwillingness to pass any piecemeal budgeting for particular portions of the government. “It’s spite, it’s deliberate harm to average folks out there,” he said of the Tea Party’s insistence on Obamacare changes. “They’re doing harm to the America people, they’re doing harm to the American economy, and they’re doing harm to the Republican Party, which by all accounts is bad for America,” Carney said, saying the country benefits from two strong parties working together, and ripping “one faction of one house of one branch of government.”

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).