Tea Party Cruz-missile crashes and burns

Posted by AzBlueMeanie:

To paraphrase Shakespeare, Ted "Calgary" Cruz "struts and frets his hours upon the stage, And then is heard no more. It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing." – Macbeth Act 5, scene 5, 19–28. After 21 hours, Sen. Cruz ends anti-Obamacare speech.

Calgary accomplished nothing but his own self-aggrandizement among the GOP crazy base, and complicating matters for the GOP House leadership, whom he will set up to blame for his own hair-brained scheme.

The Tea Party Cruz-missile crashed and burned today, failing to stop the U.S. Senate from moving forward on a Continuing Resolution to keep the government open and funding "ObamaCare." Senate votes to proceed with spending bill:

The Senate moved Wednesday to take up a House-passed temporary
spending bill that defunds President Obama’s health-care law, despite
Sen. Ted Cruz’s more than 21-hour attempt to delay the legislation.

Shortly after 1 p.m., the funding bill passed its first
procedural hurdle in the Senate, which voted unanimously to invoke
cloture on a motion to proceed on the House’s continuing resolution. The
Senate now is scheduled to hold up to 30 hours of debate on the funding
bill.

[Update: The vote was 100 to 0. Calgary voted
for cloture after saying he'd vote against cloture and urging his
colleagues to do the same. What a fraud!]

* * *

The Senate then essentially choked off the first filibuster hurdle on
its own version of the funding bill, marking the first step toward
allowing Democrats to include funding for the health-care law that had
previously been stripped out by the House.

Speaking on the Senate floor after Cruz ended his talkathon, Sen.
John McCain (R-Ariz.) blasted the freshman senator from Texas for
suggesting during his speech that Republican lawmakers had not fought
hard enough to stop the health-care law before Congress passed it in
March 2010. McCain said he “campaigned all over America” last year to
“repeal and replace Obamacare.” But “much to my dismay,” he said, “the
people spoke . . . and they reelected the president of the United
States,” who had campaigned on going ahead with the law.

McCain
also vigorously objected to Cruz’s comparison of “pundits” who say that
Obamacare cannot be defunded to politicians who appeased Nazi Germany
before World War II.

“I resoundingly reject that allegation,”
McCain said. He said Cruz had told him that he was not comparing U.S.
legislators to Nazi appeasers, but McCain called that “a difference
without a distinction” and said he still objects to Cruz’s language.

* * *

After the procedural vote, the senators launched a debate that centered
on their competing visions of the health-care law, with Republicans
demanding its repeal and Democrats defending its accomplishments today.

* * *

Democrats [argue] that elections are the ultimate polls and that
voters faced a clear choice last year between presidential candidates on
opposite sides of the issue. Voters rejected the one — GOP candidate
Mitt Romney — who had campaigned on acting to repeal Obamacare as his
first order of business, Democrats said.

Sen. Timothy M. Kaine (D-Va.) noted that in his own Senate race in Virginia, he had defeated a candidate who favored repeal.

Sen.
Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) charged that Republicans were risking a government
shutdown to indulge their “obsession” with the health-care law. “The
good news is that obsessive-compulsive disorder is covered under
Obamacare,” he said.

With Senate passage all but certain on
a bill that will include funding for the health-care law, Cruz’s
controversial talkathon had the effect of giving House Speaker John A.
Boehner (R-Ohio) and his colleagues only a few hours to respond with a
different version of the legislation.

Both houses of Congress must reach agreement on funding legislation by
Monday night to prevent most federal agencies from closing on Tuesday.
Meanwhile, a similarly contentious debate is simmering over raising the
federal debt ceiling. Treasury Secretary Jack Lew warned Wednesday that the nation will exhaust its emergency borrowing capacity no later than Oct. 17.

Tick-Tock, Baby.

UPDATE: Great idea from Ed Kilgore at the Political Animal blog: "[I]f Republicans do succeed in shutting down the federal government next
week, HHS ought to put up huge banners everywhere that read: “Obamacare:
Still Open For Business.” Maybe buy some billboards in some heavily
Republican areas of the country. But that wouldn’t be civil, would it?"

UPDATE: Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo nails it:
Projection Much?

Cruz tells Limbaugh some Senators "think their voters are gullible rubes."

That would be Teddy Calgary.