House Votes to End Government Shutdown: What the Pundits Are Saying

The government shutdown is close to ending.

The House voted to end the government shutdown 284 to 144 Wednesday night. Earlier, the Senate voted to end the shutdown 81-18. The bill will now go to President Obama, who said in a televised speech that he will sign the bill if and that the government will reopen immediately after.

The bill contained none of the major changes to President Obama's budget that the Republicans had pushed for, which led pundits on the cable networks to question if the shutdown would damage the politicians who made it happen.

Anderson Cooper anchored coverage for CNN, where colleague David Gergen predicted Republicans would likely use similar tactics in the future.

"I am not at all convinced that the Tea Party learned their lesson out of this," Gergen said. He said Republicans will believe they did fight hard enough.

"Don't you imagine Democrats will come out of this feeling like they won? Their muscles are bigger, and [they] will be less willing to compromise," Gergen predicted

CNN's John King said the next round of elections will be make or break for the Tea Party candidates, and signal whether they have been hurt politically by the shutdown.

Fox News Channel's Bret Baier anchored a special report and spoke with White House correspondent Ed Henry. Henry said many people will be skeptical that a similar situation will not arise in the future. He speculated observers will think Republicans and Democrats have simply "kicked the can down the road," putting off their problems for another day.

On MSNBC, Chris Hayes speculated the Democrats learned to stand united during the shutdown by observing how the Republican party had acted in the past. Ben Domenech, from the right-leaning The Heartland Institute, looked back to the shutdown of the mid-1990s, noting Republicans had been united then because they had just won a resounding midterm election in 1994.

"In the 1990s shutdown, you had a united front because Newt Gingrich had led the Republican party out of the wilderness," Domenech said.

Hayes noted this was not the case with the current shutdown, because Republicans lost the 2012 presidential election.

Said Hayes: "That's what's so remarkable about this fool's errand. We just had an election which the Republicans demonstratively and very clearly lost." 

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