In an interview set to air on Bloomberg’s “Political Capital with Al Hunt” on Friday night, Tennessee Republican Sen. Bob Corker predicted the current budget battle over the government shutdown and the debt ceiling will be resolved by the middle of next week.
According to a transcript provided by Bloomberg News to The Daily Caller, Corker explained that although House and Senate Republicans are “very different” on what it would take to end the impasse, he said he saw things “beginning to break.”
“I don’t know. I mean, I will say the House approach and the Senate approach right now is very, very different,” he said. “I think the end goal is the same, and that is to continue to notch gains as it relates to fiscal reforms that make our country stronger. But I’m talking about — when I say Senate side, Senate Republican side. But I really do think things are beginning to break. And I think that we will have a solution to this. … I’d be surprised if it goes all the way to the 17th. I think sometime mid-week this will all be resolved, if not sooner, candidly.”
Corker downplayed the efforts by his colleagues Sens. Mike Lee and Ted Cruz to use the budget fight as a way to defund or delay Obamacare.
“Look, it was dead before it started,” Corker said. “I mean, the idea, the tactic, the strategy, whatever you want to call this thing, I mean, I tweeted out way on the front end that, look, you know, I’m just an average guy from Tennessee, public school-educated. You know, I can count. … No, it was never a strategy that was sensible. No.”
And he isn’t holding out much hope for their efforts beyond this particular fight.
“Well, I mean, if you’re a constitutionalist, if you’re somebody who understands how our democracy works, it’s hard to pass a law when you have the majority in one body, and that’s what it would have taken,” he added. “So this was a box canyon. We projected that on the front end. The box canyon word has now made its place in American society, and, yes, this was a strategy that never was going to work. We tried to say that, and it’s a shame that we’ve ended up in this box canyon.”