Nice Day for a Filibuster

Senator Ted Cruz
Senate TV/AP Photo

It was a good 21 hours 19 minutes. It deserves comment. I like a good, real filibuster—as opposed to the virtual kind the Senate has done over the years where they say, “You don’t have a supermajority of votes to end a filibuster, so let’s say we’re filibustering and call it a day,” without actually doing the long talking part.

This wasn’t officially a filibuster, technically. It was a long—very long—speech, calling attention to the issue and actually talking about it.

I listened in here and there, and always Senator Ted Cruz was making cogent arguments against Obamacare—except for the break he took to read Green Eggs and Ham to his children for their bedtime. I also heard Senator Mike Lee of Utah, taking a turn, well into the night (about quarter till 3:00 AM EDT) before I turned off my computer for the night.

It’s kind of funny that so much vitriol has been aimed at Cruz and not at Lee, since they were partners in this. I’m not sure why, except that the liberal media is starting to do a hatchet job on Cruz lest he begin to appear presidential. They’ve tried to portray him as crazed, extremist, and unstable.

But if you watch someone stay calm, reasonable, and cogent for 21 straight hours, without food or rest—and he looks a lot better than Jimmy Stewart at the end of the filibuster in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington—then you lose credibility when you claim he’s unstable and crazed.

One of the highlights came in the last hour. Senator Dick Durbin might have been thinking he was on more equal ground taking on a very tired Senator Cruz. But he got schooled. Durbin wanted Cruz to admit to wanting to deprive 50 million Americans of their ability to have health insurance, while he and his family enjoyed the very full coverage available to Congressman. Cruz said he’d answer the question as soon as Durbin answered the three questions Cruz had asked him and Durbin had sidestepped. And then Durbin, thinking he’d gotten him where he wanted him, insisted he was like a witness refusing to answer the question in a trial.

What Durbin forgot was that you never ask a witness a question you don’t know the answer to. Cruz’s answer: “No, Senator, I’m eligible for the congressional plan—but I’m not enrolled in it.” Ouch! Cruz also got Durbin to admit that the way he planned to handle problems with Obamacare was case-by-case, giving exemptions to his cronies as they are asked for, while the American people without powerful friends will be stuck, as Cruz later described it, not just riding in coach, but in the baggage compartment.

The purpose of the marathon speech was to prevent discussion in favor of funding Obamacare, and Cruz was successful at that. He set up circumstances to separate those voting to shove Obamacare down the throats of Americans and those fighting against that monstrosity.

Cloture on the bill is the vote that matters. It will probably happen around noon Friday (possibly as late as Saturday), probably by the time you read this.

The Senate requires 60 votes to close debate on a bill, or cloture. But it only requires a simple majority of 51 votes on an amendment. So if Harry Reid gets cloture, then he will file one amendment to the continuing resolution bill sent up from the House; the amendment will be to eliminate the exclusion of Obamacare from the continuing resolution funding, so it gets fully funded along with the rest of government. And a simple majority of 51 (all Democrat) votes would be the pre-decided Senate vote.

So a vote for cloture by any Republican is a vote to allow Democrats the power to ruin our lives with Obamacare without any Republican opposition. No Republican who claims to be against Obamacare can make such a vote without their betrayal becoming obvious, and some (John McCain, for example) are furious about being put under that scrutiny.

Any Republican who votes for cloture, thus voting for funding Obamacare, deserves to be replaced in the next election. In my state, I’m totally confident in Senator Cruz, but I’m still watching Senator Cornyn; I've already met a candidate running against Cornyn. Very Texan, a little Quixotic, but I'm willing to take a serious look at him if I need to.

Meanwhile, if, by some unexpected miracle, all the Republicans stand firm against funding Obamacare, it puts the Democrats on the hot seat. Several (I think seven) Democrat senators are up for reelection in states that favored Romney in the last presidential election; the people in those states already lean red. If it becomes crystal clear that those senators are at fault for force-feeding us Obamacare, dragging down our economy and our health care as a result, there’s a good chance they lose their seats. Under those high pressure circumstances, a few Democrats might defect, but not if Republicans aren't standing united.

The more likely scenario is that cloture passes with a handful of GOP votes, Obamacare gets put back in the bill, and it gets returned to the House—with just a couple of days left before the current continuing resolution expires. It’s sort of a hot potato game: whoever gets stuck with the bill when the timer goes off gets the blame for shutting down the government.

Of course, government shutdown is not that big a deal. It has happened many times over the decades, with almost no notice. The world doesn’t end. Essential services continue uninterrupted. Which ought to be a clue—if it’s not essential, just don’t let government do it. And, as I said Monday, the 1995 shutdown is remembered as a PR nightmare, but it was a net plus for Republicans, despite the blame heaped upon them.

Since blame gets heaped on Republicans regardless, what could be the harm in standing firm—especially when standing firm against Obamacare is what the vast majority of Americans want and need?

So it’s time to call/contact your senators, and then your congressmen, and pray for God to guide them, to regain the blessed constitutional republic God granted us, after much sacrifice of blood and treasure, more than two centuries ago.

Defund It

Senators Mike Lee and Ted Cruz
image from here

I’m on Team Ted Cruz/Mike Lee/Marco Rubio on defunding Obamacare—even if the other side threatens to shut down the government and blame Republicans for it.

The House, where government funding originates, has done its job and put through a continuing resolution (before the current one expires September 30, since the Senate has refused to pass an actual budget for years) that continues current funding through mid-December, with no changes—except without funding for Obamacare. It’s particularly important to defund NOW, because key provisions kick in October 14. It has to be stopped.

I could spend a very long post enumerating the anti-American, harmful effects to health care and the entire economy, but I’m guessing if you’re reading this, you already have an adequate list of your own. We all know the ironically named Affordable Care Act makes medical care less affordable and less available—while giving all kinds of intimate control over our lives to cold, distant bureaucrats. Nothing about the thousands of pages in the bill, and the hundreds of thousands of additional regulations, can be identified as an improvement over what we had--which had plenty of problems mainly caused by separation from market forces. I don’t think we can even give the bill and regulation writers the assumption that they meant well.

So, since we’re agreed on that—and a solid majority of Americans are agreed that the whole thing needs to be scrapped—the question at hand is how to put a stop to it. Before all our freedom options are done away.

In an ideal world—well, in an ideal world, this would never have been proposed, let along been passed; and in an ideal world the Supreme Court would never have stretched the Constitution beyond breaking point to declare this monstrosity lawful. But in a hypothetical ideal world, what should happen next is that the Senate should agree to the continuing resolution minus Obamacare spending. Let’s say that would happen. Then the spending bill would go to the president for a signature. In an ideal world (so, one with a different president), the president would see that the American people have spoken—loudly—through their representatives, that they do not want this bill, so he would acquiesce and sign the defunded bill. And then he’d go ahead and encourage Congress to vote to repeal (again for the House, but the Senate is the bottleneck).

But since this isn’t an ideal world, what can we expect in the Senate? That depends on how much fight the Republicans have in them—and add to that a little bit of worry among Democrats about the heavy anti-Obamacare majorities among voters. Do they want to kill their careers over this extremely unpopular monstrosity, just because their Democrat president says they have to?

Democrats have the majority. So much is in their hands. As it was, entirely, when the bill passed in 2010.

At this past Saturday’s local Tea Party meeting, one of our speakers was Paul Bettencourt, the Tax Man. He used to be Harris County Tax Assessor. Currently he’s running for Dan Patrick’s state senate seat (the large and conservative District 7) while Dan Patrick runs against David Dewhurst for state Lieutenant Governor. Bettencourt also has a gig on the radio (the Dan Patrick owned AM 700 The Voice in Texas), talking about taxes and politics. We know in Texas we have Ted Cruz on our side. John Cornyn, who is more long-time establishment, was a question. But Bettencourt said they had Senator Cornyn on the radio, pressed him pretty hard, and believe he has now committed to vote for defunding.

I have since seen a fair amount of corroboration from Senator Cornyn. He has made the declaration pretty clearly. This was from his Facebook page this morning: “I intend to support the House bill that defunds Obamacare and will vote against a bill that funds it.” There’s also a piece in the Dallas News on his announcement. A couple of days ago I got a link to sign Cornyn’ petition to defund Obamacare. (I signed it, in addition to the Ted Cruz petition I signed weeks ago, just to make sure Senator Cornyn knew constituents out here back that decision.)

Paul Bettencourt suggested getting hold of friends in other states and encouraging them to contact their senators, to encourage them to vote in favor of the continuing resolution that defunds Obamacare (which, for technical procedural reasons, also includes standing firm against a cloture vote).

If nothing else, one thing that the vote should do is, as Bettencourt put it, “put jerseys on every senator,” so you know what team they’re on. That gives some significant leverage in the next election.

If, by some miracle, we were able to get to the point where there is a choice between defunding Obamacare or shutting down the government—the very thing establishment Republicans fear—that would be a great blessing. The fear comes from what happened in 1995, with the government shutdown during Clinton’s term. It was a public relations nightmare for Republicans. The GOP got blamed for everything from shutting down national parks to starving children.

But PR isn’t everything. We need a reminder of what actually happened back in 1995.

Bettencourt recounted a part of the story I hadn’t known. On Sunday, the 21^st day of the shutdown, Senate leader Bob Dole caved. He had been worried about his image, since he was thinking of running for president. What he didn’t know was that Clinton had already decided to fold on Monday, the 22^nd day of the strike.

Had Dole waited, the GOP would have won the entire battle. But even as it was, Clinton took on welfare reform—claimed it as his own, but we got it, so that was a win.

Last time around the media portrayed the shutdown as a disaster for the GOP. But it actually wasn’t. In the next election, the GOP won something like six Senate seats and held the House. Clinton kept himself politically afloat only by co-opting GOP policies as his own. Rush Limbaugh reviewed the history a couple of months ago, in anticipation of this week’s showdown--worth reading.

Back then, the media voice for the GOP was very limited. As Rush put it, “In 1995 I was it, as far as conservative media goes. The blogosphere had not come into existence; the Internet was still essentially an infant in this regard. There were no other conservative talk shows. Fox News was still two years away. I was it. It was still a media monopoly: ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, Washington Post, New York Times, local news, you name it. I was it.”

That’s what I’ve been thinking. The mainstream media will malign conservatives no matter what we do—even if we played for the media audience by praising Obamacare against all the evidence. MSM is a lose-lose black hole for conservatives. There is no changing that. Nor is there getting through to the uninformed voters, who just don’t pay attention. But we have more media outlets now. The internet is, so far, still a free voice. Fox News isn’t as conservative as the MSM portrays it, but it’s at least not the propaganda arm of the administration. The true story will get out—it will be told to every ear willing to listen.

And what is the worst that can happen from a temporary government shutdown? The president will try to make it as painful as possible—just as with the sequester, where he has cut soldier food in Afghanistan to two cooked meals a day (because there’s not enough money with the sequester temporary cuts in the rate of increase, even though there is plenty for him to use Air Force One to transport his dog to wherever he’s vacationing). He will try to make it appear Republicans are trying to starve children and kill old people—same old same old.

But there are other voices now. And it’s possible that, even with the worst case scenario, people will notice little more than occasional irritations at government—nothing new. And with every painful choice the president makes, there will be new voices pointing out that it was his choice, with the purpose of inflicting pain.

If that’s the worst case scenario, maybe it’s worth finally getting past the fear and standing on principle.

The worst-case scenario if this fails is dire. Business and labor already agree that Obamacare is an abomination. Putting off employer mandates was done for two specific reasons: First, employers couldn’t do it, and the effort threatened to pretty much shutting down the economy that is already (still) floundering under this administration. Second, the worst damage was put off until after the 2014 election, because Democrats would have been demolished by the knowledge that Obamacare was the cause of so much pain.

So even the Democrats realize Obamacare is a gross negative for America. Since we all know that, now is the time to act on that truth.