Liberals are positively tickled that Ted Cruz is going to be signing up for Obamacare.
“One day after announcing his plan to run for president and ‘repeal every word of Obamacare,'” Think Progress reported, “Ted Cruz confirmed that he plans on using Obamacare’s new state-level marketplace to enroll in coverage himself.”
“Ted Cruz becomes the newest Obamacare customer,” reads the gleeful Daily Kos headline.
“Senator Ted Cruz hates Obamacare so much that he single-handedly shut down the federal government for 16 days in 2013 trying to defund the health-care law,” says a Daily Beast summary of CNN’s report. Now “Cruz and his family will need to get insurance through the Affordable Care Act.”
“Delicious irony,” enthuses a website that advertises itself as offering “real liberal politics.”
Another liberal blogger likened this revelation to “anti-gay preachers” getting “caught having same-sex affairs.”
The Senate Democrats’ official Twitter account was filled with cheer.
Ted Cruz: Obamacare for me, but not for thee. #ACAWorks http://t.co/AqEXYaCb0G
— Senate Democrats (@SenateDems) March 24, 2015
Damn, snap, mic dropped!
Yes, there’s a certain level of Alanis Morrisette-style irony in Cruz being on Obamacare. This is especially the case because members of Congress were only compelled to participate in the exchanges because of a Republican amendment.
But Cruz isn’t enrolling in Obamacare because it’s awesome, or because he wants to get all the amazing Obamacare for himself and repeal it for everybody else.
He’s enrolling in Obamacare because the law requires him to have health insurance and it is now exceedingly difficult to access the individual insurance market except through the exchanges.
Let the liberal who still paid the Clinton tax rates after the Bush tax cuts cast the first stone.
In other news, Cruz likely pays higher tax rates than he proposes in his tax plan, complies with gun control laws he might prefer to repeal and would be subject to the estate tax regardless of his personal feelings about it.
Next up, Cruz drinks water containing fluoride.
Expect investigative pieces about Rafael Cruz accepting Social Security payments and Medicare. The Cruz family has also been known to use public roads and not to rely on privatized lighthouses.
Cruz was born in Canada. Why, he should be on single payer instead!
Surely Senate Democrats can provide better evidence that a law #works than the fact that people with large public profiles comply with it.
Does anyone doubt that if Cruz declined to cover his children he would be portrayed as a monster? Or if he decided to become an individual mandate scofflaw, he would be portrayed as a dangerous radical? He might as well have walked around in a tinfoil hat and started muttering about black helicopters.
As it happens, Cruz appears likely to forego the 75 percent employer contribution he could get as a member of Congress and instead access Obamacare from Texas, which doesn’t have a state exchange.
That means Cruz would use HealthCare.gov to get health insurance, at the same time the Supreme Court is considering ruling taxpayer subsides for federal exchange customers illegal.
If you don’t think Cruz is going to use that fact to his advantage in the upcoming presidential race, this must be your first campaign.
Fasten your seatbelt, as the law requires. The silly season is here. And like Obamacare — and maybe voting next — your participation in it is mandatory.
W. James Antle III is managing editor of The Daily Caller and author of the book Devouring Freedom: Can Big Government Ever Be Stopped? Follow him on Twitter.