WaPo:
In 2013, freshman Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas said he had a plan to do something that seemed impossible. He could force President Obama to strip the funding from the landmark health-care law that had come to bear his name — Obamacare — by threatening to shut down the government.
To some other conservatives, there was a problem with Cruz’s plan.
It still seemed impossible.
To succeed, Cruz needed a novel way to outmaneuver the Democrat-led Senate and then pressure Obama to undercut his signature domestic policy achievement.
But Cruz didn’t have one. Instead, his critics said, he offered only a fanciful theory that if the GOP flirted hard enough with a shutdown, Democratic lawmakers and the White House might lose heart and surrender.
~~~ Cruz’s gambit didn’t work. Neither Senate Democrats nor Obama gave an inch on their cherished law. Instead, the government shut down for 16 days, and Republicans in Congress were blamed for it — including by other Republicans, who said they had distracted attention from the disastrous rollout of the HealthCare.gov website.
Today, the drama that surrounded the shutdown — including Cruz’s 21-hour Senate speech, in which he read “Green Eggs and Ham” to his daughters via the C-SPAN feed — is the defining moment of a Senate tenure that has helped make Cruz the favorite Republican presidential candidate for many conservatives.
To those supporters, the shutdown signaled the depth of Cruz’s commitment to rein in government.
But for many Republicans in Congress, this was the episode that soured them on Cruz. Many suspect that he always knew his plan would fail but went ahead with it anyway — expecting that he would personally benefit from the exposure, even if his party lost a damaging fight.
“He knew that. He knew it. He knew it,” former senator Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) said. “It wasn’t about the shutdown. It wasn’t about the Affordable Care Act. It was about launching Ted Cruz.”
Not one of them would sign AHC into law, only one fought as hard as he could with the available tools at hand, they vilify him for it but took the seats that came from the fight he alone waged. It wasn’t the first time the government shut down, and Obama tried hard to make it very painful for the little people. Now jealous of the fame he rightly earned with his hard work, they continue to vilify , he calls them out they rally to the center, a center we the people have rejected in 2 elections. Go along to get along, move along please.
Electing such people to the House is like inviting in termites. Their objective is to break the government, figuring they will then be able to remake the nation to their own liking. They know that otherwise they could never gain the consent of the people do what that remaking would entail.
Have you ever heard Grover Norquist’s strategic maxim? Starve the beast. What that strategy entails is deliberately depriving government of the revenue it needs to pay for the services and programs it provides, pushing them to collapse. You do that by repeatedly cutting taxes, while placing all blame for the rising debt that is the inevitable consequence on your political opponents and the programs that you dislike. Have you noticed anything like that happening recently?
You have no idea how hard things could become for “the little people” if the republican right were given free rein. They’re not really about the well being of “the little people,” or about individual freedom to make one’s own choices, or about keeping government out of your most personal business. They’re about using government as a facilitator. People should think carefully what it is the forces behind the political right are actually wanting government to facilitate. You’ll almost always have to figure this out for yourself, because the specific details of anything they’re proposing will almost always be vague, or missing entirely.
Greg a perfect description of President BO congratulations.