Since the passage of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare, Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives have voted 42 times to completely de-fund the law. Most recently, the House voted several days ago to continue to fund the government — everything except Obamacare, that is. Now the continuing resolution has been tossed to the Senate for approval.
But Tuesday night tea party Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) engaged in an old fashioned stand-up-and-talk filibuster to block the removal of the Obamacre de-funding language from the resolution. Clearly Cruz was trying to import some of the House Republicans’ knack for self-beclowning into the upper chamber of Congress, much to the delight of Senate Democrats and to the growing disgust of Senate Republicans who have been smartly distancing themselves from Cruz, especially after Cruz likened a vote to end the filibuster against the resolution as a vote for Obamacare.
The fact remains that Cruz never had 60 votes to block the law — not even close. Therefore, much like the 42 House votes to de-fund the law, Cruz’s filibuster was pure cuckoo’s nest theater for the gawking delight of the radical tea party base, and yet another example of why the GOP would do well to amputate that festering wing of the party with extreme prejudice.
So, what did the senator talk about for all that time?
If you were playing the official tea party anti-Obamacare drinking game, your hangover will be brutal. Cruz successfully shoehorned into his remarks every single anti-Obamacare bumper sticker slogan ever devised. You name it, Cruz extrapolated it into a 20 minute monologue. Of course death panels were front and center, with Cruz asking at one point if we want “the IRS determining whether our mother lives or dies.” Scary. And a lie… [CONTINUE READING]