Ted Cruz delivered a marathon filibuster, or whatever you want to call the speech that was intended to be a filibuster, that lasted 21 hours and 19 minutes. In it, he mostly railed against Obamacare, though he touched such timeless topics as actor Ashton Cutcher, the book the Little Engine that Could, a reading from Green Eggs and Ham, a touching personal anecdote about his dilemma on whether to wear boots or shoes, and plenty of other nonsense.
“For lack of better way of describing this, it has been a big waste of time,” said Majority Leader Harry Reid. Not only was it a waste of time, it upset Cruz’s fellow Republicans, or at least the older ones, who are not so gung-ho about turning down the government to stymie Obama’s bill.
Republic Sen. John McCain, specifically, rebuked the younger Republican for his claim that Republicans didn’t do enough to stop the health care law in 2009, and also objected to Cruz’s comparison of those unwilling to vote against Obamacare with Nazi appeasers.
“I resoundly reject that allegation,” said McCain. “It does a great disservice to those Americans who stood up and said what’s happening in Europe cannot stand.”
Nothing shocks a person out of a depression better than some trauma, and the trauma the government is facing comes from Treasury Secretary Jack Lew who warned Wednesday that the nation will soon have spent its emergency borrowing capacity no later than Oct. 17. Certain republicans wished to include an Obamacare defunding clause into legislation that would simultaneously increase the government’s spending capacity, but despite Cruz’s marathon speech, that’s not likely to happen.
Though Cruz said he hopes “that Republicans can listen to the people, and that all 46 Republicans come together. Coming into this debate we clearly were not united, there were significant divisions in the conference. I hope those divisions dissolve, that we come together in party unity,” nevertheless his vision is something of a tea-party based Republican party, and that is unlikely to happen.