Maddow to Republicans: Your 'brilliant plan' got you nothing, so now what?

On Wednesday night's edition of "The Rachel Maddow Show," host Rachel Maddow highlighted the end of the shutdown saga that Republicans instigated two weeks ago and noted that for all the fuss and bother and all the histrionics on the part of Sen. Ted Cruz (R-UT) and others, the Republicans got nothing in the final deal. President Barack Obama and the Democrats held fast in the face of the hostage-taking tactics and in the end, they prevailed.

"We've got to get out of the habit of governing by crisis," Obama said in his remarks Wednesday night. "My hope and expectation is that everybody has learned that there's no reason we can't work on the issues at hand."

Maddow followed the president's remarks by recounting the saga that landed the nation here, the plan by House Republicans to shut down the government if Democrats and Pres. Obama did not do the impossible and repeal the Affordable Care Act -- also known as Obamacare.

"This was their brilliant plan! They thought this would work!" Maddow said. "The Democrats would never let the government shut down."

As for the Republicans, she said, "Once they had an actual shutdown on their hands, they did not have a plan for what to do next."

The GOP caucus threw out a spray of demands, ranging from defunding and delaying parts of Obamacare to birth control to the Keystone XL pipeline, all of which the Democrats rejected as Republicans sank lower and lower in public opinion.

All of the demands on their "long, weird, ever-changing ransom note," Maddow said, were rejected, but the Democrats did allow them to say that they were insisting on income verifications for some ACA applicants, a provision that was already in the Act.

"We know tonight," said Maddow, "that of their entire list, they're going to get nothing. Nothing."

"You can argue for what you want through the legislative process," she said, while rolling footage of a beleaguered and sweaty-looking Rep. John Boehner (R-OH), "by trying to make legislation, amend bills, do great in debates, win votes" and win elections.

"But when you lose policy fights, and you lose elections," she concluded, "the line was drawn here tonight to say, 'You know what, there is not a third way. There is not another means of policy-making available to you in Washington that involves you destroying things unless you get your way."

And if you try to do it that way, she said, "you will get exactly nothing. Nothing!"

Watch the video, embedded via MSNBC, below: