Enter
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.”
So after all the “come die on
this hill with me” ads, and the
broadsides against Boehner’s plan
— mocking it as a surrender to
Harry Reid — Cruz just ... surrenders to Harry Reid. And with that,
it seems like GOP leadership in
Washington voted unanimously to
raise the hackle-ceiling sky high.
Of course, beneath all of the
backbiting, there is reality — and
the reality is that Cruz is correct.
As Byron York explains here, Cruz
and his like-minded Senate allies
are constrained by certain Senate
rules and actually do not have the
option to filibuster. Not even one
of those old-timey, talk-until-youpiss-yourself filibusters.
And as Niels Lesniewski of Roll
Call explains, the simple fact of
the matter is that there are procedural options available to Reid
to do precisely what Cruz is saying will happen. The Senate will
have the votes to strip the Obamacare part of the law and pass a
clean continuing resolution, at
which point it bounces back to the
House. (From there, in theory, the
House can keep sending it back to
LOOKING FORWARD
IN ANGST
HUFFINGTON
09.29.13
the Senate, but the conditions in
the Senate aren’t likely to change
anytime soon.)
So, the basic bottom line here
is that Cruz is right about what’s
realistically possible, but GOP
leaders are nonetheless well-andrightly pissed off at Cruz for ginning up all this mad, stand-andfight foolery that denied Boehner
More than anything else,
it’s a battle between the
House and the Senate