New plan to defund ObamaCare: Filibuster the House bill that … defunds ObamaCare

posted at 5:21 pm on September 20, 2013 by Allahpundit

I thought I misread this at first, but no, apparently that’s the plan. Having convinced the House to bite the bullet and pass a CR that defunds O-Care, the Cruz/Lee “defund” contingent in the Senate now has no choice but to filibuster it. As David Freddoso, an opponent of the Cruz strategy, puts it, “You need to prevent a vote on defunding Obamacare in order to defund Obamacare.” Here’s what Cruz said about it this morning:

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“But the House was just step one. Step two is the Senate, where all accounts suggest Harry Reid plans to use procedural gimmicks to try to add funding back in for Obamacare.

“If Reid pursues this plan — if he insists on using a 50-vote threshold to fund Obamacare with a partisan vote of only Democrats — then I hope that every Senate Republican will stand together and oppose cloture on the bill in order to keep the House bill intact and not let Harry Reid add Obamacare funding back in.

“Now is a time for party unity; Senate Republicans should stand side-by-side with courageous House Republicans.

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The Senate Conservatives Fund supports a filibuster too:

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“Harry Reid needs 60 votes to approve his plan to fund Obamacare. If 41 Republicans stand strong and oppose cloture, they can defeat Reid’s plan to fund Obamacare. However, if Republicans waffle and vote for cloture, it will grease the skids for Reid’s plan to fund Obamacare. It’s pretty simple — any Republican who votes for cloture is voting to fund Obamacare.

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I.e. any Republican who votes to bring the House’s defunding bill to the Senate floor is actually voting to fund ObamaCare. That’s the messaging that “defund” supporters are stuck with right now.

Everyone understand why Cruz has been forced into this position? It goes back to the procedural quirk that Byron York wrote about last night and that I excerpted at length this morning. When Reid first introduces the House’s “defund” CR, it’ll face a cloture vote on whether to proceed to a debate about it. That requires 60 votes, but that should be no problem. Republicans will vote yes because they support defunding O-Care and Democrats will vote yes because they know it’s a necessary step to passing their own “clean” CR that includes funding for the law. Once that vote is over, though, Reid can strip out the “defunding” part of the House bill and then pass the new “clean” CR with simple majority votes. Thus, the only opportunity the Cruz/Lee contingent will have to stop Democrats from passing their own CR is by opposing the initial cloture vote on the House bill — even though that puts them in the singularly unusual position of trying to block a measure that was passed by their own party, which they themselves cheered all the way through passage in the other chamber.

Read more:

http://hotair.com/archives/2013/09/20/ne...unds-obamacare/