by Ted Cruz
At one roundtable in Kerrville, a beautiful town in the Hill Country of central Texas, we met in a restaurant and bar owned by a husband and wife. They described how they recently had a terrific opportunity to grow their business, to nearly double it. From a business perspective, they thought it made a lot of sense. But they’d already passed on the opportunity. The reason? They currently employed between 35 and 40 people, and if they grew to more than 50 employees, they’d fall under Obamacare. And that would bankrupt them.
At that particular roundtable, the first four participants all described the exact same circumstance. Each of them had successful small businesses. Each had 30 to 40 employees. Each had significant opportunities to create more jobs. But if they expanded, their businesses would then become subject to Obamacare’s employer mandate, and with that extra cost, they wouldn’t be able to stay in business.
The people hurt most by that policy were not the men and women at the roundtable in Kerrville. As small business owners, they were struggling, but still able to make ends meet. Instead, the people suffering the most were the people they were not employing—the single moms, the teenagers in community college, and newly arrived immigrants looking for work they can’t find. Countless entry-level jobs—for dishwashers and busboys, for administrative assistants and custodial workers—simply don’t exist because of Obamacare.
Small businesses have an enormous impact on the American dream, because two-thirds of all new jobs come from small businesses. And, under Obamacare, millions of small businesses are not creating millions of new jobs.
At the table in Kerrville was another gentleman, who manufactured hunting blinds. He described how he recently moved his entire operation overseas to China. “I’d like to manufacture these blinds here in the United States,” he said. “That would be a hundred and fifty to two hundred good-paying manufacturing jobs right here in central Texas. But if I manufacture in America, the company would be subject to Obamacare. We can’t stay competitive in the market; we can’t stay in business under Obamacare.”
Finally, over to the right of the table was a woman who owned several fast-food restaurants. She already employed well over 50 employees and so staying below that threshold was not an option for her. Instead, she described how she has already forcibly reduced the hours of her employees to 28 or 29 hours a week because Obamacare kicks in at 30 hours per week.
At that point, her voice softened, and she started to choke up. “Many of these employees have been with us for five and ten years,” she said. “These are single moms, and these are people who are struggling. They can’t feed their kids with twenty-eight to twenty-nine hours of work a week. . . . But they can’t feed their kids if I go out of business, either.”
These are the voices Congress isn’t listening to. When I was listening to their stories in Kerrville, I couldn’t help but think about their challenges from the perspective of my father in 1957, washing dishes for fifty cents an hour. If he had been working today, the odds are high that he would have lost his job because of the $1.7 trillion in new taxes and crushing regulations like Obamacare hammering small businesses. And if my dad had been lucky enough to keep his job, the odds are overwhelming that he would have had his hours forcibly reduced to 28 or 29 hours a week.
You can’t pay your way through college like my father did on 29 hours a week. What the federal government is doing right now is yanking up the ladder of opportunity for millions, making it harder and harder for those who are struggling to achieve, or even imagine, the American dream.
I was reminded of this unfortunate reality in the spring of 2014, when I attended a large rally of roughly a thousand people in North Platte, Nebraska. A young woman came up to me, hugged me, and said, “Ted, I’m a single mom. My husband left me and won’t pay child support. I’ve got six kids at home, and I’m working five jobs. Not a single one of the jobs is even thirty hours a week, because Obamacare kicks in at thirty hours a week.”
The woman in North Platte told me about her struggles to keep clothes on the backs of her children, then added that the hardest thing for her is that she hardly ever gets to see her children. “I go from one job, to another job, to another job,” she said, her voice trembling, “and I don’t get to be the mom that my kids need me to be.”
Five years ago, when Obamacare was being debated, reasonable minds might have differed about whether it would raise costs, reduce quality, and kill jobs. But today, when we have seen firsthand its devastating impact on people who have lost their insurance and entry-level workers who have lost their jobs, the effect of Obamacare is no longer open to debate. American history is replete with misguided experiments and social engineering, and yet the disaster that is Obamacare stands unique in its scope and devastation. Today, given the suffering it has caused, the most reasonable, pragmatic approach is to acknowledge it isn’t working, repeal it, and start over.
So what was our plan to stop Obamacare? In Washington, pundits repeatedly intone that we had no plan, no strategy, and no hope of success. No doubt, I’ve got many personal faults, but, as a former Supreme Court litigator, failing to plan is not one of them. We had a systematic strategy, and I’m convinced that the fight we waged in the summer and fall of 2013 accomplished a great deal.
Beginning in the spring of that year, Mike Lee and I began asking our Republican colleagues, “What are we going to do to stop Obamacare from kicking in?” And week after week, they gave the same answer: nothing. Risk aversion dominated their thinking; a fight was risky, and could imperil reelection. Therefore, Obamacare was going to go into effect on September 30, and no Republicans had any strategy to do anything about it.
That answer was not acceptable to Mike and me, nor to the men and women who elected us. And so we suggested an alternative strategy: When the continuing resolution funding the government expired in late September, Congress should fund the entire federal government—but not Obamacare. This strategy was based on the principle that the Constitution is designed with checks and balances. The most significant check that Congress possesses is the power of the purse, and so we urged that Congress should continue to fund everything in the government—except Obamacare.
Our strategy of employing Congress’s power of the purse entailed a four-step plan for success. Step one was to take the case to the American people and mobilize millions of Americans against Obamacare. Step two was for the Republican majority in the House of Representatives to do the right thing by passing legislation funding the federal government but not funding Obamacare. Step three was for Senate Republicans to join with House Republicans to pass the same laws. And step four—the final step—was to systematically pick off red-state Democrats in the Senate, one at a time, until we had sufficient numbers to succeed and send the bills to President Obama’s desk.
This was, of course, the same strategy we had deployed—successfully—in the fights over drone strikes and President Obama’s gun control legislation: empower the grassroots to change the rules in Washington. But here the stakes were higher, and winning more difficult.
Mike and I were never Pollyannaish about what was possible about this plan. Nor did we ever promise anyone that it would be easy. In particular, we thought very hard about one critical obstacle and how to overcome it.
That obstacle was President Obama’s veto power. Because of it, the chances of fully defunding Obamacare were not high. Possible, I believed, but it would have taken a perfect storm. However, there were a lot of middle outcomes, where, if we united Republicans and put enough heat on red-state Democrats, Obama might feel enough political pressure to agree to some sort of compromise. Not everything, but a middle ground that at the very least gave some material relief to the millions suffering under Obamacare. (And, if you want to end up at a middle ground, you don’t start the negotiation by surrendering everything at the outset.)
When Mike and I explained this plan to our Republican colleagues, their reaction was immediate, visceral, and virtually unanimous. “Absolutely not!”
“A terrible idea!” Indeed, they openly laughed at the idea, telling Mike and me that we just didn’t understand how Washington works.
But when we asked them for their alternative, there were crickets. There was no alternative—do nothing was leadership’s alternative—but they vehemently opposed our plan. “Wait until the debt ceiling,” they advised. (Of course, when the debt ceiling did come along, their plan was once again . . . to do nothing.) Doing nothing was not an option.
We believed in the power of the grassroots—and that we should fight Obamacare from the outset—and so Mike and I started with step one. Together, we traveled the country barnstorming at rally after rally, where thousands upon thousands of Americans stood together to stop Obamacare. And the results were astonishing. More than two million Americans ended up signing the national petition at DontFundIt.com to stop Obamacare. And those millions then lit up the phone banks on Capitol Hill, calling their members of Congress to say stand up, lead, and do not fund Obamacare. Our colleagues had scoffed that the grassroots would rise up, but, by any reasonable measure, step one of the plan succeeded beyond all expectations.
Step two succeeded as well when, to the wonder of D.C. pundits, Republicans in the House listened to their constituents. Again, our Senate Republican colleagues had laughed that summer, saying there was no way on earth that the House would vote to defund Obamacare. Leadership didn’t like the plan. But, for a body reelected every two years, getting more than two million calls from your constituents has a powerful way of focusing the mind. House Republicans stood together to fund the federal government in its entirety and not to fund Obamacare.
Alas, step three was where the plan went awry. It depended on Senate Republicans standing together in support of House Republicans to defund Obamacare.
My assumption had been that the Senate Republican leadership would behave at this step as they had behaved on almost every other significant recent battle. I anticipated that they, and every Republican up for reelection in 2014, would vote with the conservatives, only because it was manifestly in their political self-interests to do so. Then, quietly behind the scenes, they would try to pick off 6 Republicans and urge them to join with the 54 Democrats so that our fight wouldn’t succeed. That was the Republican leadership’s modus operandi. What we did not anticipate was that Mitch McConnell and the GOP leadership team would decide to publicly, directly, and aggressively lead the fight against the House Republicans and in favor of Obamacare.
Perhaps they wanted to discourage conservatives like Mike and me from ever again rebelling against the party line. Or perhaps they were simply angry that a handful of senators would have the temerity to take our case straight to the American people. But for whatever reason, the Senate Republican leadership decided to direct their fire not on Democrats or on Obamacare, but on conservatives in their own party. The result was that, in unison, around twenty Republican senators went on television, on every single news channel, carpet-bombing the House Republicans—and us.
Why then, the critics said, did you shut down the government, if you didn’t have the support of the Senate Republican leadership? Two answers: One, if you wait for Senate Republican leadership, we will never stop Obamacare. At every stage, their plan was to avoid the fight.
And two, we didn’t shut down the government. Neither I, nor Mike Lee, nor the House Republicans even once voted to shut down the government. To the contrary, over and over again we voted to fund the government.
From the outset I stated repeatedly that we should fund the entire federal government and defund Obamacare. But after every vote in the House to fund the government, Harry Reid and the Senate Democrats said: We don’t like your legislation; therefore we’re going to shut down the government. They not only refused to vote for the House-passed bills that funded the government; they refused to even discuss or negotiate any possible relief for the millions being hurt by Obamacare.
Senator Reid’s conduct was politically understandable. He wanted a government shutdown. He said publicly he thought it would help Democrats politically. Both Reid and Obama decided that a shutdown was in their political interests, because they knew that the media would echo their talking points, which blamed the Republicans. They also knew that a predictable number of Republican senators would parrot those same talking points.
Thus, every time the House voted to fund the government, Senate Democrats voted it down on a party-line vote, and the media dutifully repeated that it was Republicans who had shut down the government.
When the Democrats blocked funding, the shutdown began, but under law, only 17 percent of government spending (that deemed “nonessential”) actually shut down. The remainder, the roughly 83 percent of government spending that is deemed “essential” (including Social Security and Medicare), continued uninterrupted.
The nightmare for Democrats was that they would “shut down” the government and nobody would notice. So they went out of their way to make the shutdown as painful for Americans as possible.
We all remember the absurd games the Obama administration played with visitors to the World War II Memorial in the nation’s capital, instructing park rangers to erect barricades to try to stop veterans from visiting a monument to their heroism. I was proud to join a number of members of Congress welcoming these veterans to the monument during the shutdown. More than one of those World War II vets came carrying wire cutters. One said to me, with a twinkle in his eye, “We stormed the beaches of Normandy. Do they really think a couple of metal fences can keep us out?”
Once the shutdown began, Mike and I spent a lot of time trying to strategize how to win the fight—even though our Senate leadership was actively working against us. We studied what had happened during the last significant shutdown, in 1995, when Republicans had also been blamed.
Republican House members who had gone through the 1995 shutdown told us that some of the strongest pressure on them to surrender to President Clinton came from constituents upset about the closure of museums and parks. Families would come to Washington with their kids looking for a wonderful vacation and discover the Air and Space Museum wasn’t open. They were furious.
Accordingly, we developed a strategy that tried to avoid those pitfalls with miniature continuing resolutions (CRs), or short-term bills that funded specific government programs. One mini-CR would fund national parks. Others would fund military salaries and benefits, the Department of Veterans Affairs, and the National Institutes of Health. Even if Democrats continued to force a shutdown, Republicans could use these mini-CRs to fund elements of the government that should not be held hostage to the Democrats’ shutdown; we would dare the Democrats to vote against them.
Throughout the shutdown, Mike and I met repeatedly with key House Republicans to share strategy. The most notorious of those meetings occurred at Tortilla Coast, a popular Capitol Hill restaurant. Since we had chosen to meet in a public place a few blocks from the Capitol, reporters naturally saw us, and speculation swirled as to what on earth we could have been discussing. That Tortilla Coast meeting has entered D.C. lore, and it’s a sign of how dysfunctional Washington is that it was deemed newsworthy that House and Senate members were actually meeting to work together.
At those early meetings, Mike and I pitched our “mini-CR” strategy to House Republicans. They liked it, took it, and ran with it. And at first, it worked.
The first mini-CR the House passed was to fund the salaries for our military. For weeks, Harry Reid had been threatening that a shutdown would halt salaries for our soldiers. But when the House mini-CR came over, Reid blinked and allowed it to pass. The political risks were just too great for him to stop it.
After that, the House passed mini-CRs for a number of other priorities, including our national parks, for the VA, and for the NIH. Each of these, Reid and the Democrats killed.
If we had actually been trying to win, Senate Republicans would have mounted a concerted political campaign focused on these mini-CRs. For example, Senate Democrats ha
d specifically objected to funding the VA. The CR for the VA said nothing about Obamacare; it just provided funding for the agency. Imagine if the Karl Roves of the world began running major ad buys in red states, like the following:
“Our veterans have risked it all for us, and yet Senate Democrats are holding the Department of Veterans Affairs hostage to try to force Obamacare on us. The House has passed legislation fully funding for the VA, but Democrats are blocking it. Call Senator Pryor (or Warner, or Begich) and tell him to stop playing games and fund the VA.”
That’s how we actually win fights, and it’s how we would have put enough pressure on red-state Democrats to start to get them to flip. But Republican leadership wasn’t interested in that.
Similarly, the House passed another mini-CR funding the NIH. And Democrats cynically blocked it. The vulnerability of their position was illustrated in the following press exchange between Harry Reid and CNN’s Dana Bash:
“You all talked about children with cancer unable to go to clinical trials,” Bash told Reid. “The House is presumably going to pass a bill that funds at least the NIH. Given what you said, will you, at least, pass that? And if not, aren’t you playing the same political games that Republicans are?”
But Senator Reid didn’t want to hear it, because he didn’t really care about NIH’s funding; he cared about preserving Obamacare at all costs. “What right do they have to pick and choose what part of government’s going to be funded?” he responded. (The answer to that particular question is found in Article I, section 9, clause 7 of the U.S. Constitution, which provides, “No Money shall be drawn from the Treasury, but in Consequence of Appropriations made by Law. . . .”)
To her credit, Bash did not meekly accept Reid’s dismissal of both her question and Congress’s power of the purse. “But if you can help one child who has cancer,” asked Bash, “why wouldn’t you do it?”
“Listen,” replied Reid in an irritated tone. “Why, why, why would we want to do that?”