GOP and Tea Party bullies get hammered in budget negotiations.

The GOP got their wish. They are negotiating the budget and raising the debt ceiling under massive pressure now that they have dropped 10-15 points in the polls because of their extortionist antics.

But the pressure is not on the Democrats to negotiate, it's on the GOP for getting the country into this mess in the first place. Having turned down the President's magnanimous offer to raise the debt ceiling and approve the budget clean and then negotiate on equal footing, the GOP now get's to negotiate a deal with the voters breathing down their necks and will likely not only not get any of the concessions they wanted, they will now have to give concessions to the Democrats who are now negotiating from a place of extreme strength.

This is what happens when you bluff at cards and the other side knows you're bluffing. You lose.

And of course this is all the fault of the Tea Party lead by their favorite son, jr. Senator Ted Cruz of Texas. The Democrats and the GOP had a deal they had struck after spending most of 2013 in negotiations. Both sides agreed to pass a clean budget and a debt ceiling and the Democrats agreed to leave sequestor cuts in place, take the GOPs number for the budget and basically give them all they asked for.

Then the Tea Party got involved and jr Senator Ted Cruz drew a line in the sand. He decided he wanted to get rid of the Affordable Healthcare Act of 2010. A task all of his senior Senators, fellow Republicans in the House and even some or most of his own Tea Party told him was an impossible goal. But he decided to do it anyway and the ill advised, poorly planned and horribly executed offensive against the AHA began with no exit strategy and an unobtainable goal.

Now that it has failed completely and cause untold grief in the lives of tens of millions of U.S. citizens, the GOP has no bargaining chips left. Holding the budget and the debt ceiling hostage has only wrecked their approval ratings making them the lowest in any parties history. If they actually cause a default in the U.S.'s debt then it's a sure bet that the GOP will lose the House by a large margin in the 2014 elections and widen the Democrats gap of power in the Senate. So the GOP has to not only surrender their position on Obamacare, it's likely they will have to give the Democrats some of the budget numbers back and maybe even lose or reduce the sequestration due to eat another $21 billion from the budget in January. The only concession of merit the GOP is likely to get is the ability to say they got their "Serious talks" before they had to reopen the government and those talks amounted to a staggering loss on their part.

I hope the Tea Party takes this lesson to heart and realizes that taking America hostage is never a good idea.