Texas Senator Ted Cruz seems now likely to break the record for an individual filibuster, surpassing South Carolina Senator Strom Thurmond, who set the record at 24 hours and 18 minutes in a filibuster against Civil Rights legislation in 1957.
Cruz will likely enter the record books at just before 3 pm today, but it will be for naught, as the ObamaCare program will be part of our health care system no matter what Cruz says or does!
And in the process, we are discovering how senior Republicans, including Minority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, Senator John Cornyn of Texas, Senator Saxby Chambliss of Georgia, and Senator Orrin Hatch of Utah, among others, are decrying the damage it does to the Republican brand.
But, at the same itme, Rand Paul of Kentucky, Mike Lee of Utah, and Marco Rubio of Florida are joining the Tea Party rebellion in the GOP, which can only rent the party asunder over time.
So Barack Obama is watching the Republican Party fall apart over his signature domestic achievement, and guaranteeing Democratic victory for the Presidency in 2016, and likely control of the Senate continuing, and a good chance to regain the House of Representatives in 2014.
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
HAHA! Thanks for sharing a moment of humor in a situation that is not at all funny!
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.â€
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!
True data on the Affordable Care Act: http://www.thepeoplesview.net/2013/09/vindication-obamacare-average-family.html