Ted Cruz Moving Toward Longest Filibuster In American History

THE ONION has a great piece on this. It’s worth sharing. I’ll just provide a link:

@ http://www.theonion.com/articles/president-cruz-fondly-recalls-21hour-speech-that-s,34005/?ref=auto

Congress was given power over the purse — the power to appropriate money and to borrow it or raise it through taxes, because locating the power in Congress would force the president to constantly negotiate with Congress.
Fast forward 226 years to last Friday. President Obama called Speaker of the House John Boehner to say “he will not negotiate” with Congress on raising the U.S. government’s borrowing authority. The President, who claims to be a constitutional scholar, needs a refresher course.
Obama complains that by attaching conditions to the appropriations bill, House Republicans are “trying to mess with me.” HELLO!! Yes, they are, Mr. President, though Madison expressed it with more elegance and precision.
“An elective despotism is not the government we fought for,” Madison wrote in Federalist 58. A president with the power to borrow and spend at will would be just that.
In Federalist 62, Madison warned that it will be pointless for Americans to elect a Congress, if it in turn enacts laws “too voluminous to be read,” or if these laws then “undergo such incessant changes that no man who knows what the law is today can guess what it will be tomorrow.” That’s Obamacare. .
The health reform the President is insisting on implementing is a distorted, mangled, half-baked version of what Congress enacted in 2010. It is no longer the Affordable Care Act. The President is illegally picking and choosing what parts to keep. Gone is the employer mandate, the cap on out-of-pocket expenses, income verification for subsidy recipients, and over half the deadlines in the law. These changes are not just illegal.They shift billions of dollars in costs onto taxpayers, cheat seriously ill patients, leave employees in the lurch, all in a devious attempt to patch up an unworkable law.
Finally Obama claimed that “the most basic constitutional duty Congress has is passing a budget.”
Wrong again, Mr. President. Congress’s most basic duty is to protect and defend the Constitution, and withholding the money is the chief way to do it!