Senators Building 'Grassroots Army' to Pressure McConnell, GOP Leadership to Defund Obamacare

Conservative Republican senators will be using the August recess to organize a “grassroots army” to put pressure on Republican leaders, particularly Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY), to defund Obamacare during the budget negotiations that will ensue when they return to Washington. 

As Breitbart News reported, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) has called for such a “grassroots army” on the national scale to stop Obamacare and comprehensive immigration reform. 

Cruz (R-TX), along with Senators Mike Lee (R-UT), and Marco Rubio (R-FL), are leading the effort to defund Obamacare, which currently has the support of 13 Senate Republicans. Cruz and Lee have been promoting an online petition, www.dontfundobamacare.com, that already has over 250,000 signatures. They want to put pressure on McConnell to join them in supporting a measure to fund the government except for Obamacare. 

Cruz will be keynoting important events in Iowa and Florida, and he reportedly “plotted strategy with conservatives from the Senate and House shortly before Congress left town.” 

“If we see in the next 60 days hundreds of thousands or millions of Americans lighting up the phones, calling their House members, calling up their senators and saying, ‘Stand for principle, this isn’t working, it’s destroying the economy, it’s hurting jobs, it’s destroying healthcare, it’s driving up our premiums, defund it,’ that’s how we win,” Cruz recently told conservative lawmakers, according to The Hill. 

Rubio, who has lost support among Republicans and conservatives after being the face of the Senate’s immigration bill, will have events planned in Florida and recently appeared on the Mark Levin Show and said Obamacare was the issue where conservatives had to “draw the line.”

Lee has gone on Rush Limbaugh’s show to rally conservatives to pressure lawmakers because, “There would be no way that you could fund ObamaCare unless you got some Republicans in the House and some Republicans in the Senate to vote for it.” 

Republican senators like Richard Burr (R-NC), John McCain (R-AZ), and Tom Coburn (R-OK) have dismissed the defunding efforts, but McConnell has not taken a side. McConnell reportedly frets that “people will be signing up for Obamacare the day after the government shutdowns” and “wants to get rid of ObamaCare root and branch.”
 
Cruz and Lee have repeatedly said, though, that this may be the last, best chance to defund Obamacare. They have suggested the House should pass a bill to fund the government except for Obamacare. Then, they said it will be up to conservatives to “win the argument” and convince the nation that President Barack Obama and Democrats are willing to shut down the government in order to deny Obamacare exemptions to working class Americans that corporations have received.