CBS host Bob Schieffer on Sunday encouraged Rep. Matt Salmon (R-AZ) to come back to the "land of what's real" and realize that President Barack Obama was never going to sign bill that defunded his signature health care reform law.
"We just had a conservative Democrat and a Republican both say there's no way, no how that this is going to get done in the Senate," Schieffer explained during an interview on Face the Nation, adding that the push to defund Obamacare by forcing a government shutdown was like "a Kamikaze attack, a suicide mission."
"I find it ironic that the president will negotiate with Vladimir Putin, but he won't negotiate with Republicans in the House of Representatives," Salmon opined. "I heard loudly and clearly during the August recess, 'We want Obamacare gone.'"
Schieffer reminded Salmon that many business leaders -- and even elected Republicans -- agreed that Obamacare opponents in the House were "just wasting everybody's time by going down one of these exercises again to shut down the government."
"You know what's going to happen," the CBS host explained. "You can write this script now. They're going to strip out this thing -- to not fund Obamacare -- out of this bill in the Senate. They're going to wait until the very last minute, they're going to send it back over to the House. And then you're going to have to vote on whether we just shut down the government."
"Well, I would hope that [Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV)] would take the voice of the American people seriously," Salmon said. "But have a straight-up vote on the floor, that's all we're asking. This is what the American people want."
"But this is not the land of wishful thinking," Schieffer pointed out. "This is the land of what's real and what's going to happen."
He continued: "And even if you pass this, the president would veto it. And there are certainly not 67 votes in the Senate to override his veto. It's law."
