Exclusive–Cruz: GOP 'Terrified' of Fighting to Defund Obamacare

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) told Breitbart News that Republicans in Washington are scared to fight the Democrats and President Obama on efforts to defund Obamacare in the next two months.

“The House has voted 39, 40, 41 times to repeal Obamacare,” Cruz said in a phone interview. “Every one of those has been an empty symbolic vote that had no chance of being enacted.” 

“If we can get 41 Republicans in the Senate to stand together, or if we can get 218 Republicans in the House to stand together, we can win this fight,” he claimed. “The dirty little secret is an awful lot of Republicans are terrified of this fight. They’re very, very happy to cast symbolic votes against Obamacare so they can go to their constituents and point to how terribly, terribly opposed to Obamacare they are.” 

“But this fight scares them because they believe Republicans will be blamed politically for shutting down the government,” Cruz explained.

As for how to approach defunding Obamacare, Cruz agreed with the approach Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) proposed in a recent interview with Breitbart News. Cruz said, “Here’s how I think we should proceed: I think the House should pass a Continuing Resolution that funds the federal government in its entirety except for Obamacare and that explicitly prohibits spending any federal money on Obamacare.” 

“What will happen next, we know very well because we’ve seen this play out before, President Obama and Harry Reid will scream and yell that ‘the mean, nasty Republicans are threatening to shut down the government over Obamacare,'” Cruz predicted. 

“At that point, Republicans have to stand up and fight and make the argument and say ‘no, we have voted to fully fund the government, every bit of the government, why is it that President Obama is threatening to shut down the government in order to force Obamacare down our throats? He’s already granted a waiver for big corporations, why does President Obama want to shut down the government to force the same burdens on hardworking American families that he’s willing to exempt big corporations from?'” he explained.