Why Republicans think they can't lose a showdown with Obama

"This is the second shut down where the GOP got blamed and saw no catastrophe at the ballot box," wrote RedState.com's Erick Erickson on Tuesday. "Every horror story every talking head within the GOP Establishment trotted out to scare congressmen and senators into caving turned out to be crap."

That sense of invincibility has slowly worked its way into Republican thinking about 2015. Before Republicans won the Senate, when they speculated about how control of the upper house would change politics, they universally assumed that putting bills on the president's desk would make him, not the GOP, look like the aggressor if he vetoed.

"The president knows that he has to sign appropriations bills that keep the government up and running," said Texas Senator John Cornyn in February 2014, before he won his primary for a third term. "We can package this in a way that would make it almost impossible for him not to sign them."

"The president has never had to deal with something on his desk," said Ohio Representative Jim Jordan at an April 2014 meeting of conservatives sponsored by the Heritage Foundation. A Republican Senate, he said, would "change the whole political landscape, the whole dynamic, and how American politics is going to work."

This month, as they've taken power, leading Republicans have insisted they were never talking about shutdowns when they talked about forcing bills on the president. On Tuesday morning, after the House GOP's weekly conference meeting, Virginia Representative Scott Rigell opened his phone and showed off, of all things, a spreadsheet. Republicans had drawn it up to explain their options if the president used an executive order to except millions of undocumented immigrants from deportation.

"They're calling for us, in there, to not over-react to this," said Rigell, pointing to the room where his colleagues had been meeting.

The preferred Republican plan was obviously not a shutdown. Kentucky Representative Hal Rogers, who would be re-elected to lead the Appropriations committee, was selling his colleagues on recession—on passing a funding bill now, and later removing the funds that the Obama administration was using on "amnesty."

That immediately stirred up emotions on the right. In those circles, it's clear that the president can be stared down on immigration. And it's clear that a fight, even if it led to shutdown, would be either rewarded or forgotten by voters when they returned to the polling booths in November 2016. The reality of PPACA had, after all, ended up winning elections for them in 2014. Why wouldn't the reality of Obama's new blunders elect the Republicans of 2016?

It's all deeply frustrating to Democrats. Virginia Rep. Gerry Connolly, whose district's contractors and federal employees recoiled at the shutdown, had subsequently watched his state re-elect its Republican congressmen and nearly knock off its popular Democratic senator. There clearly was no shutdown hangover for Republicans.

"From their point of view, frankly, while it had a temporary impact on their polling numbers, they fully recovered from that and paid no price at all on November 4," said Connolly, as he headed into a vote. "Politicians are all Pavlovian at a very elemental level. What's rewarded, what's punished. They look at that, and they think it seems to have been rewarded. It certainly wasn't punished

As Connolly talked, outgoing Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee chairman Steve Israel walked by. Seeing the 2014 election strategist prompted me to ask whether Democrats had over-estimated the electoral power of the "shutdown" message.

"Attention spans are short, and we live in a media world where even the hottest story fades really quickly," said Connolly. "That's ancient history by this point. I think we sometimes lost sight of the power of the news cycle."