The conservative activist organization FreedomWorks cheered conservative Sens. Mike Lee, Ted Cruz, and Marco Rubio for their effort to defund Obamacare by political and legislative means.
The junior senators are urging Mitch McConnell to block all continuing-resolution budget bills until they can pass the Defund Obamacare Act, which Cruz is spearheading with a full public relations campaign. As The Daily Caller reported, Georgia Republican Rep. Tom Graves introduced the bill in the House, marking the fourth time that Graves has introduced the Defund Obamacare Act. Graves’ first three attempts to pass the bill, the most recent of which came in March, all failed. With a Democratic-controlled Senate, this fourth and most visible effort will meet a similar fate.
Republican Sens. Bob Corker of Tennessee and Richard Burr of North Carolina strongly criticized the effort of the three junior senators, while Oklahoma Sen. Tom Coburn suggested that the plan’s political backlash could jeopardize Republican efforts to hold the House of Representatives in the 2014 midterms.
“Senators Lee, Cruz and Rubio are leading the charge against ObamaCare, while other Republicans are preemptively accepting defeat,” FreedomWorks stated Tuesday, cheering the popular young trio of senators.
“In 2009, the President forced an unpopular law on the American people using supermajorities and parliamentary acrobatics to pass a bill that nobody had even read. Now, the President himself admits the law isn’t ready for implementation, as connected insiders look for ways to exempt themselves from the mandate. Why fund a bill that already has bipartisan consensus that it’s a mess?,” FreedomWorks stated.
FreedomWorks also threatened moderate Republicans who might be inclined to work on other legislative efforts before the midterms.
“We agree with Lee: If you fund ObamaCare, you own it. If you are a Republican turning your back on any opportunity to dismantle ObamaCare before enrollment begins, you’d better have a good explanation for your constituents when they demand a town hall over August recess.”
Cruz won 45 percent of the vote and the virtual presidential nomination in a 2016 conservative straw poll held at Colorado Christian University’s Western Conservative Summit, where he spoke this past weekend.
Republican New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, meanwhile, has involved himself in a high-profile war of words with Rand Paul and, in effect, with the first-term libertarian-minded Senate Republicans who might be seeking the presidency in 2016. Christie, who cited the 9/11 attacks as justification for his belief that libertarianism is a “dangerous thought,” lost to Paul by three points in a recent Public Policy Polling survey of 2016 GOP contenders.
“As to the games they play down in Washington, D.C., with all the threats, and the yelling back and forth. That’s what people are sick and tired of,” Christie said Tuesday at a press conference that became a video clip posted to Youtube by his office.
