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Sen. Bernie Sanders is warning that Sen. Ted Cruz has already harmed the country. Sanders said, ‘The right wing extremists like Cruz have already done this country irreparable harm.’

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MSNBC’s Thomas Roberts asked Sen. Sanders if he thought Ted Cruz was going to muck up the works. Sanders answered, “I have no idea, but all I can say is that the right wing extremists like Cruz have already done this country irreparable harm. All of the world, people are looking at the strongest economy in the world, at the international leader, and they are saying what is going on in this country. And I think it’s going to take us many, many years on the international level to recover from this fiasco.”

Now that a deal is finally in place, it is time to think about much damage Cruz and the Republican Party have caused this country. There will not be a full accounting of the economic damage caused by the Republican shutdown and debt ceiling threats for months, but a rough estimate by Think Progress suggested that the shutdown had cost the economy $2 billion one week ago. Double that number plus a bit more and it looks like the shutdown has cost the economy between $4-$5 billion.

Ted Cruz unleashed the equivalent of a natural disaster on the U.S. economy, and the end result will be that the Republicans will pass the same legislation that they could have passed before they shutdown the government.

Sen. Sanders other point was that this shutdown was also a waste of time. Instead of debating serious issues, the country has spent weeks catering to extremists who decided that they wanted to shutdown the government, and not pay our bills.

The only things accomplished by the government shutdown are that Sen. Cruz has raised a few million dollars and his national profile before the 2016 election. Sen. Sanders was right. Each manufactured Republican crisis hurts the global credibility of the United States of America. Republicans think they are hurting Obama and scoring political points, but they are damaging the credibility of the entire country.

Since they no longer have the ability to start wars in our name, Republicans have moved on to destroying our credit and credibility. Long after this latest debt ceiling deal is history, the damage caused to the national economy by Ted Cruz and his extremist political cult will live on.