The Wall Street Journal
The freshman Texas Senator volunteers House Republicans for duty on his implausible defunding gambit.
So House Republicans have passed and sent to the Senate a budget that includes no funding for the Affordable Care Act, setting up a political showdown that could result in a government shutdown. We wish the GOP luck, since we support the policy if not the strategy. But however this charge into the fixed bayonets turns out, we hope the folks who planned it will take responsibility for what happens now.
That starts with Senators Mike Lee (Utah) and Ted Cruz (Texas), who joined with a handful of conservative groups to force Speaker John Boehner’s hand. In July they had vowed to mobilize a grass-roots “army” to support ObamaCare repeal. The legions never arrived, but the activists still insisted that any continuing resolution to fund the government had to zero-out ObamaCare. They recruited a rump minority of the House majority to defeat a budget that would have maintained the automatic spending cuts built into current law.
Messrs. Cruz and Lee have thus got their way, though it’s far from clear what they can accomplish. Senate Democrats have said they’ll strip the ObamaCare provision and send a budget back to the House, perhaps with higher spending levels. And even Mr. Cruz has already acknowledged he can’t do much in the Senate, where Republicans hold only 45 seats.
“Harry Reid will no doubt try to strip the defund language from the continuing resolution, and right now he likely has the votes to do so. At that point, House Republicans must stand firm, hold their ground, and continue to listen to the American people,” Mr. Cruz said in a statement last week.
The freshman Senator’s latest gambit is to pledge to filibuster the bill he asked the House to pass so it never reaches the Senate floor and Mr. Reid can’t strip the House language. But even if that succeeds, which is unlikely, it merely postpones the inevitable unless Mr. Cruz and Republicans want to prevent the Senate from passing any budget at all.
When Mr. Reid does send a budget back to the House, the question is what the GOP does then. If it passes another budget with the defund-ObamaCare provision, the Senate will refuse again, and we are headed toward a partial government shutdown. This won’t be the end of the world, but the politics are treacherous and unpredictable.
When Mr. Cruz demands that House Republicans “hold firm,” he means they should keep trying to defund ObamaCare even if it results in a shutdown that President Obama will blame on Republicans. It’s nice of him to volunteer House Republicans for duty. The supposedly intrepid General Cruz can view the battle from the comfort of HQ while the enlisted troops take any casualties.
The Lee-Cruz strategy, to the extent it’s about more than fund-raising lists or getting face time on cable TV, seems to be that if the House holds “firm” amid a shutdown, then the public will eventually blame Mr. Obama and the Democrats, who will then fold and defund ObamaCare. Or, short of that, Democrats might agree to delay the health-care law for another year past its launch date on October 1.
Miracles happen, but it would rank as one for the ages if Mr. Obama agreed to defund his signature Presidential achievement. A year’s delay would also be a victory, but Mr. Obama knows that punting the law past the 2014 election is risky if Republicans regain a Senate majority.
If Republicans are looking for a more plausible strategy, one idea would be to seek a year delay in the individual mandate to buy health insurance. Mr. Obama has already delayed for a year the business mandate to provide insurance for workers, and it is hard to defend helping business but not people.
Another idea would be to join Senator David Vitter’s effort to make Members of Congress and staff live under the same rules as ObamaCare. Democrats would hate defending their special carve-out. Both of these might seem more politically reasonable to independent voters than defunding a program that is already the law.
These columns opposed ObamaCare before it was known by that name, and we may have even been the first to call it by that name. We also don’t need any lectures about principle from the Heritage Foundation that promoted RomneyCare and the individual mandate that is part of ObamaCare. Or from cable TV pundits who sold Republicans on Mitt Romney despite RomneyCare.
The question is how to oppose ObamaCare when Republicans control only one house of Congress. Oklahoma Senator Tom Coburn points out that the defund and shutdown strategy is giving Mr. Reid an excuse to bust the spending caps and shift public attention away from ObamaCare’s flaws. The only real way to repeal the law is to win elections. Our strategy would be to conduct an island-hopping campaign that attacks the law’s vulnerable parts to help win those elections rather than invade the Japanese mainland.
But we’ve lost this debate, and Generals Cruz and Lee are in charge. If they do succeed and defund ObamaCare, we’ll gladly give them due credit. But if things don’t go well, let’s not hear any excuses about “the surrender caucus” or claims that it would all have worked out if only everyone were as brave and principled as the generals up at HQ.
A version of this article appeared September 24, 2013, on page A18 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: The Cruz Campaign.
