So, the battle is over, and sanity prevailed. Unfortunately the war is anything but over, and once we get past the Christmas and New Years holidays, I fear we can only look forward to more. There is scant evidence that the Tea Party Republicans with House Speaker John Boehner have learned anything from this costly debacle. They are itching to to the same thing in a few more months.

For one, Sen. Ted Cruz the presumptive Tea Party presidential candidate in 2016, still insists that shutting down the government and going to the brink with default was “responding to the will of the American people.” That in spite of the dozens of national surveys that showed exactly the opposite: that an overwhelming majority of Americans DID NOT want the government shutdown. Smiling Ted apparently gets his own special numbers from his Facebook or Twitter accounts. But leave it to someone not in Congress to sum up this absurdity. Marilyn Huston, a Republican activist in Keene, NH is quoted in the local newspaper after the vote as saying that President Obama bears the brunt of responsibility because — in her bizarre words — “He sees it his way, his way only and doesn’t realize he represents the whole country.” Incredible. That’s the point, Ms. Huston: he does represent the entire country, and the Tea Party does not. Never has. What a truly peculiar perversion of reality.

Sadly, the Tea Party’s doomed effort seems to have further divided what remains of the Republican Party. Those moderates in the party — who believe there is a role for government — are now split from their radical conservatives colleagues, who are not interested in or prepared to govern. By default, that leaves us only the Democrats to oversee this Republic ad infinitum. And even I don’t think that’s a wise course. We need two — at least two — active, legitimate political parties who are willing to debate and compromise and govern on the basis of serving the best interests of the country. But if there’s only one party that fits into that broad category, the best interests of this democracy are not being met.

Mercifully the Tea Party still represents a small minority of the American people and American political thought. The shrill, small voices of the Tea Party may have reached their ascendancy with this latest political feud; we can all hope so. Noise and emptiness are their values, blind denial is their strategy. For all the chaos and money this cost the country — upwards of $24 billion over 16 days? — it didn’t work. The Tea Party takeover was a failure, just like the people who promulgated it knowing it could not succeed. But if we believe the Tea Party zealots have learned anything from this, we are mistaken. Like the worst sort of nightmare, I am expecting they will return, in ever smaller numbers, ever louder, coarser voices, and with ever more empty ideas. A scary thought, and it isn’t even Halloween yet.