http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2013/09/22/Chris-Wallace-Top-DC-Republicans-Sent-Oppo-Research-to-Hammer-Cruz
'TOP' DC REPUBLICANS SENT OPPO RESEARCHTO 'HAMMER' CRUZ
On Sunday, Chris Wallace, the host of Fox News Sunday, said that Republicans in Washington were savaging Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) behind Cruz's back before Cruz's appearance on the program to discuss defunding Obamacare.
In an appearance on Washington D.C.'s Fox 5 to preview his Sunday show, Wallace said, "I will tell you I have never in my time in Washington seen a party so upset with one of its own members."
He said he had been flooded with opposition research on Cruz--from Republicans. Later on Fox News Sunday, Wallace said these "top Republicans" gave him "unsolicited research and questions" to "hammer" Cruz.
"Since we announced that Ted Cruz was going to be on the show, I've been getting background research and questions going after Cruz not from Democrats but from other Republicans," Wallace said on Fox 5. "They really feel he has put them in this corner that they can't get out of gracefully and they're not very happy with him."
In an exclusive op-ed for Breitbart News on Saturday, former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, who has also been savaged by establishment Republicans, urged Cruz to stay strong in the face of inevitable attacks from fellow Republicans and suggested they compare "shiv marks" the next time they meet:
"We’re now, once again, subjected to the “anonymous sources” backstabbing game. The Capitol Hill cowards are rushing to anonymously denounce Senator Cruz to any reporter with a pad and pen.Welcome to our world, Ted. The same people have been denouncing conservatives like me for years (right after they ask for help fundraising for themselves or endorsing the latest candidate they’ve suckered into paying their exorbitant consulting fees). We can compare shiv marks next time we meet, my friend."
http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2013/09/22/Cruz-to-Senate-GOP-A-Vote-for-Cloture-Is-a-Vote-for-Obamacare
CRUZ TO SENATE GOP: 'A VOTE FOR CLOTURE IS A VOTE FOR OBAMACARE'
On Fox News Sunday, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) said Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) will want to use "brute political force" to insert Obamacare funding into the House bill next week with a 51-vote threshold and any Republican who supports a cloture vote for that will be supporting Obamacare.
Cruz said that "no pundit in Washington thought it was possible" until last week that the House would pass a bill to defund Obamacare, and that is why Republicans need to unite to support the House bill and ensure Reid does not insert an amendment to add Obamacare funding to the continuing resolution that the House passed last Friday. That resolution funds the government except for Obamacare, which Senators like Cruz and Mike Lee (R-UT) had been insisting for months, even as establishment Republicans resisted and demeaned their efforts. Congress and President Barack Obama must agree to a resolution to fund the government before October 1 to prevent a shutdown.
Cruz said Reid wants to use "brute political power to force Obamacare funding through with just Democrats" like he passed Obamacare three years ago.
"If the majority is going to run the minority over with a train, the minority has the ability to stop them," Cruz said. "A vote for cloture is a vote for Obamacare."
Cruz insisted that since it takes 60 votes to get cloture to stop Reid from inserting an amendment to fund Obamacare, Republicans can unite to deny "cloture when the Majority Leader is abusing power." That, Cruz said, would be supporting House Republicans and the House bill because a cloture vote would allow Reid to ultimately change the House's bill by adding Obamacare funding to it.
Cruz said if Reid wants to ignore the House's bill and the "will of the people," then it should be an "easy decision for Senate Republicans to stand united and to support House Republicans."
"If Senate Republicans stand together, we can stop Harry Reid from doing this," Cruz said.
Cruz also said if Reid succeeds in adding Obamacare funding because other Senate Republicans vote for cloture, the House has to again lead and stay strong to defund Obamacare since the House is the only body where Republicans have a majority. If that happens, Cruz said Senate Democrats in red states--like Sens. Mark Pryor (D-AK) and Mary Landrieu (D-LA)--can then be targeted to defund the bill that is harming Americans, especially working class Americans who are losing health insurance and seeing their premiums rise.
If there is still a stalemate, Cruz said the House should pass separate continuing resolutions to fund parts of the government--like the military--and it would then be "perilous" for Reid to shut down the military to deny the American people the Obamacare exemptions special interests and Congress have received.
"We should stand our ground," Cruz said, noting that Reid would ultimately be responsible for shutting down the government in such a scenario. Cruz also mentioned that Reid should listen to the American people that do not like Obamacare, which he said is such a bad law that unions and even Senate Democrats want out of it.
Obama to Boehner: No Deal on Debt Limit, Defunding Obamacare
Friday, 20 Sep 2013 08:38 PM
"The president called the speaker this evening to tell him he wouldn't negotiate with him on the debt limit," the spokesman said in a statement. "Given the long history of using debt limit increases to achieve bipartisan deficit reduction and economic reforms, the speaker was disappointed, but told the president that the two chambers of Congress will chart the path ahead.
"It was a brief call," the Boehner spokesman said.
The president also called House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, the White House said.
"The president telephoned Speaker Boehner and told him again that the full faith and credit of the United States should not and will not be subject to negotiation," an administration official told Politico in a statement. "The president reiterated that it is the constitutional responsibility of the U.S. Congress to pass the nation's budget and pay the nation’s bills."
Obama's calls came as the House of Representatives voted to temporarily finance the federal government while defunding Obamacare. The 230-189 vote set up a showdown with the Senate and the White House.
House Republicans said on Wednesday they were preparing legislation to raise the government's $16.7 trillion debt limit.
Leaders have said that they were considering including such options as blocking Obama administration plans to curb coal ash pollution; forcing civil servants to contribute more to their retirement plans; requiring Congress to approve many major regulations; and defunding Obamacare for a year.
Obama has said he wants Congress to send him legislation that simply extends the debt limit and has said that he will not negotiate the matter.
The government is expected to exhaust its borrowing authority by late October. That would threaten a first-ever federal default, which many analysts believe would deal a severe blow to the economy.
Meanwhile, Republican leaders have said they do not want a federal default and have noted that past presidents, including Obama in 2011, have negotiated over earlier bills to extend the debt limit.
In a video released on Thursday, Boehner questioned Obama's willingness to negotiate with Russian President Vladimir Putin over the chemical weapons issue in Syria but not with Republicans.
"Why is the Obama administration willing to negotiate with Putin on Syria ... But not with Congress to address Washington's spending problem?" the text from the ad asks.
The United States and Russia reached a deal last week in which Syrian President Bashar Assad would give up his nuclear arsenal to be destroyed via international standards. The threat of a U.S. military strike against Syria was staved off by the agreement.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/republicans-trying-to-mess-with-me-obama-tells-crowd-at-missouri-auto-plant/2013/09/20/bec53dce-2218-11e3-a358-1144dee636dd_story.html
Republicans ‘trying to mess with me,’ Obama tells crowd at Missouri auto plant
Video: Speaking at a Ford Motor Co. plant on Friday, President Obama accused Republicans of "trying to mess with me" instead of governing responsibly.
Obama railed at length against Republican lawmakers, whom he accused of “holding the economy hostage” by threatening not to fund the government and not to raise the government’s debt limit.
Video
House Speaker John Boehner called the passage of a Republican spending plan “a victory today for the American people.”
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Who voted for the House stopgap budget plan?
The proposal embodies what one GOP lawmaker calls “The Tom Principle.“
A step-by-step guide to what’s next in the shutdown showdown
Continuing resolutions, and Obamacare, and a shutdown, oh my! A guide to what’s next.
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“Unfortunately right now, the debate going on in Congress is not meeting the test of helping middle class families,” Obama said. “They’re not focused on you. They’re focused on politics. They’re focused on trying to mess with me. They’re not focused on you.”
Obama’s rousing speech at a growing Ford manufacturing plant here on the outskirts of Kansas City amounted to an opening salvo against House Republicans heading into another intense skirmish over federal spending.
Obama spoke a couple of hours after the House passed a short-term budget bill that would pay for government operations through mid-December but withhold funding for Obama’s signature health-care law.
Obama at times sought to belittle GOP lawmakers. “The most basic constitutional duty Congress has is to pass a budget,” said the president, a former constitutional law lecturer. “That’s Congress 101.”
Obama also addressed Republicans’ threats not to raise the government’s borrowing limit later this year, noting that every president over the past half century, Republican and Democratic, has done so as a matter of course. Threatening not to raise the limit, he said, is “the height of irresponsibility.”
“This is not some abstract thing,” Obama said, adding that not raising the debt limit would be “profoundly destructive” and send the country into “an economic tailspin.”
Obama used the phrase “deadbeat nation” at least three times. “We are not a deadbeat nation,” he said in one instance. “We don’t run out on our tab. We’re the world’s bedrock investment. The entire world looks to us to make sure the world economy is stable.”
At one point, sounding exasperated, Obama said of Congress: “Just do your job.”
Rep. Emanuel Cleaver (D-Mo.), who represents Kansas City and skipped Friday morning’s vote to fly here with Obama, said he and the president spoke about the budget battle aboard Air Force One.
Cleaver declined to reveal what Obama told him, but said of his own view, “I think it’s just another point of embarrassment in a long line of them. This time, however, the embarrassment might lead to a reentry into a recession.”
Obama’s visit to the Ford Kansas City Stamping Plant, which makes parts for the popular F-150 truck, had the feel of a campaign rally, complete with Bruce Springsteen playing as Obama shook hands at the rope line. The president appeared at ease, wearing no suit jacket and rolling up the sleeves of his blue dress shirt. He made multiple shout-outs to the Kansas City Chiefs, the NFL team that’s 3-0 after a win Thursday night.
Obama noted that back home in Chicago, he owns a 2008 Ford Escape, a model once built in Liberty, although the assembly line was moved to Louisville, Ky.
“I may roll in a Cadillac now,” Obama quipped, “but I don’t own it. I rent it, just like my house. The lease runs out in three and a half years.”
Obama’s visit was orchestrated to showcase the rebounding U.S. automobile manufacturing industry. Although Obama drew criticism for his 2009 bailout of General Motors and Chrysler, both companies — as well as Ford, which received no bailout funds — are now profitable.
“We bet on the American worker – we bet on you – and today that bet has paid off,” Obama said as he addressed roughly 1,000 Ford employees and other guests. “America’s auto industry has come roaring back.”
Obama toured the cavernous facility, where huge machines were humming, pressing sheets of metal into hoods and doors for F-150 trucks. The plant is growing significantly, from 2,500 workers in May to an expected 4,500 next year, according to statistics provided by the White House.
http://hotair.com/archives/2013/09/20/new-plan-to-defund-obamacare-filibuster-the-house-bill-that-defunds-obamacare/
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:
“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.
The Senate Conservatives Fund supports a filibuster too:
“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.
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.
Now, serious question: Why would Reid care whether the House bill is filibustered? We’re headed for deadlock here between the House and Senate one way or another. If Dems succeed in invoking cloture on the House bill and then strip out the O-Care funding, just as everyone expects will happen, then the ball is back in Boehner’s court. Either he can hold firm for awhile and risk a shutdown or he can cave and pass Reid’s “clean” CR. If, on the other hand, Cruz and Lee succeed in filibustering the House bill, then the Senate will pass nothing and … we’ll still be facing a shutdown. Except now, instead of simply blaming Republicans for it, Democrats will add the curious detail that Republicans in the Senate ended up blocking their own party’s bill in order to make it happen. Even worse, a successful filibuster would mean that red-state Dems like Landrieu and Begich who are up for reelection wouldn’t have to take a very tough vote in favor of funding ObamaCare as part of their party’s “clean” CR. If you’re going to go to the mat and shut down the government over ObamaCare, at least make vulnerable incumbents from the other party sweat through it.
The virtue of the filibuster from the “defund” standpoint is, I guess, that it would take the decision on whether to cave out of Boehner’s hands and put it in the hands of Senate Republicans, who include the most ardent “defund” backers like Cruz and Lee. But that assumes that 41 of them would stick together to extend the shutdown indefinitely, which they surely wouldn’t. In fact, they almost certainly won’t get 41 even for the initial filibuster attempt, when Reid first brings the House bill to the floor. Shutdown skeptics like Coburn and McCain have lots of political cover to vote for cloture now: By voting against a filibuster, they can say that they voted to bring a bill that would have defunded ObamaCare to the floor. They’d rather have this in Boehner’s hands than Cruz’s. And Cruz, of course, understands all of this. He’s under no illusions that the filibuster idea will succeed. I think his pushing for it is aimed mainly at his critics in the House who’ve been grousing that he expects them to do the heavy lifting on his “defund” scheme. Fine, Cruz seems to be saying; if they want me to be the main obstacle to a “clean” CR rather than John Boehner, I’ll try to block it in the Senate even if it means doing something as awkward as filibustering a House bill I support. But it’ll fail and he knows it, and Boehner will be back on the hot seat soon enough. What he’s doing here is simply showing that he’s willing to take some heat himself before Reid’s scheme succeeds and the spotlight shifts back to the House.
Here he is yesterday vowing to use every procedural measure he could to block O-Care. He wasn’t kidding.
FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 20, 2013
White House: Obama will veto any House bill that attempts to defund ObamaCare
POSTED AT 1:21 PM ON SEPTEMBER 19, 2013 BY ALLAHPUNDIT
Ted Cruz seizes the obvious talking-point opportunity:
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