Ted Cruz’s Long Speech

At this hour, Ted Cruz is still speaking on the Senate floor. He is, at this moment, reading Green Eggs and Ham as a bedtime story for his children, but until how he has carried on a long, substantive denunciation of Obamacare. The parts I listened to were very good. It isn’t exactly a filibuster, just a really long speech. Still, he clearly intends to follow in Rand Paul’s footsteps; it was Paul who brought back the old-fashioned, on-your-feet filibuster, and created a sensation doing it.

I am not crazy about Cruz’s plan to block cloture on the House resolution, but I applaud his speech. Obamacare is unpopular, and Republicans should pound away at it non-stop. Within the last few hours, reports have surfaced that House Republicans may attach a one-year delay in Obamacare’s individual mandate to the Senate’s “clean” continuing resolution. Obamacare may also feature in upcoming debates over raising the debt ceiling.

I think it is good for Republicans to keep pounding away at Obamacare with the procedural tools that come to hand, but the reality is that in the end, Obamacare must be repealed, and it can be repealed only by a Republican House, a Republican Senate and a Republican president. That is a tall order, but Obamacare’s growing unpopularity may help to bring it about.

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