Calling next week’s Senate roll call to defund Planned Parenthood a “legislative show vote,” GOP firebrand Ted Cruz said Republicans should do everything they can to eliminate federal money for the group — even if it means a government shutdown fight this fall.

He’s not alone. On Wednesday afternoon, 18 House Republicans told leadership that they “cannot and will not support any funding resolution … that contains any funding for Planned Parenthood.” Meanwhile, GOP social conservatives like Sens. James Lankford of Oklahoma and Jeff Sessions of Alabama said they’d consider supporting an effort to attach a spending rider that would eliminate Planned Parenthood’s $528 million in annual government funding to must-pass spending legislation this fall.


It’s a potentially ominous sign for GOP leaders desperate to avoid another shutdown debacle. While Cruz may be radioactive in the Senate GOP conference after calling his leader a liar, his analysis of next week’s vote has merit: With Democrats vowing to block the measure, Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) won’t be able to get the 60 votes he needs to advance the bill next week, a result that likely won’t satisfy a conservative base itching for confrontation over abortion.

In a Wednesday interview, Cruz said the GOP should go as hard as it can to block funding for Planned Parenthood, including the same strategy he tried to use to defund Obamacare in 2013: force the issue by blocking funding in a government spending bill that must pass by Sept. 30.

Asked whether he would support such a maneuver again, Cruz replied: “I would support any and all legislative efforts to defund Planned Parenthood. We do not need a legislative show-vote.”

On the other side of the Capitol, Rep. Mick Mulvaney (R-S.C.) said dozens of House Republicans will back his effort to oppose any spending bill — whether a continuing resolution stopgap or longer-term funding package — that includes any money for Planned Parenthood.

“This is one of those line-in-the-sand type of issues,” Mulvaney said Wednesday. “Every time we say we don’t want to spend money on something, the answer is it will provoke a shutdown.”

This weekend, Senate conservatives had pushed to attach defunding provisions to the must-pass transportation bill, but now they are shifting their sights to this fall’s government spending bill. Lankford, both a social conservative and an ally of leadership, said he’d support defunding Planned Parenthood “wherever we can get it,” and Sessions said Republicans “don’t need to take no for an answer” after Democrats reject the GOP defunding bill next week.

“Congress doesn’t have to fund any program it doesn’t think is justified. How does it get to be that a minority of the Democrats can dictate that a majority party has to fund programs it doesn’t believe in?” Sessions added. “We don’t need to go at it halfheartedly.”

Democrats say the GOP efforts will be futile. Republicans lost a 2011 fight to defund Planned Parenthood and a 2013 push to defund Obamacare plunged the government into a shutdown. Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) said a repeat of that show would be “gridlock” — but other party insiders warned the results could be even more consequential.

“The immovable object is about to meet the unstoppable force: Republicans cannot pass a bill that funds Planned Parenthood and congressional Democrats and President [Barack] Obama cannot vote for or sign a bill that defunds it,” said a senior Senate Democratic aide.

But many Republicans aren’t willing to go there yet, including the recipient of Cruz’s “show-vote” diss, Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), who’s working with Lankford, Sen. Joni Ernst of Iowa and party leaders to set up next week’s vote to slash Planned Parenthood’s funding.

“First things first. We’re going to try to see if we can win this vote. It’s a big, big battle and we’re going to try to see if we can get some Democrats to vote with us on this,” Paul said. “We are going to bring the fight to them.”

Another Republican presidential hopeful, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), refused to say a word when asked about the strategy.

Indeed, with Cruz using attacks on McConnell to raise campaign money, the confrontational tactics must catch fire beyond just the party’s right flank if supporters of defunding hope to force GOP leaders to include a controversial rider in a spending bill. Several GOP senators said in interviews that they weren’t ready to commit to a hard-line strategy or pledge to vote against any funding bill that included money for Planned Parenthood.

“Not there yet. Got to figure out how we do this,” said Sen. Jerry Moran (R-Kan.).

McConnell is pressing forward with the first vote in Congress to defund the women’s health-care organization since controversial videos surfaced of Planned Parenthood employees sifting through fetal tissue and discussing the price of handling body parts. His decision to keep the Senate in session into August to take on the controversy over Planned Parenthood has temporarily mollified some conservatives and anti-abortion groups, even if he has no chance of beating a Democratic filibuster.

But a failed cloture vote is going to leave many conservatives unsatisfied. And Senate GOP leaders have not discussed the more aggressive step of including a spending rider in the coming must-pass spending bill.

“The vote next week is something everybody felt like needed to happen. But I suppose that could be another way you could do it,” said John Thune of South Dakota, the No. 3 Senate Republican. “We haven’t thought that far ahead yet.”

But it’s clear that the conservative wing has. The 18 Republicans who wrote to House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) and his team on Wednesday constitute a crew that’s frequently been a thorn in the side of leadership. Several of them voted against Boehner for speaker and supported the Obamacare defunding fight.

“Hard to imagine a Republican-controlled Congress voting to continue federal funding of Planned Parenthood in September,” said Dan Holler, a spokesman for Heritage Action, a conservative lobbying operation.

But if the Republican Congress tries to block that funding, Democrats say they won’t go along with it. That places the federal government squarely in the cross hairs of a partisan shutdown fight this fall, after a summer of more leaked Planned Parenthood videos and rising conservative agitation across the country.

Though the amount of money that the parties are fighting over is minuscule compared with sums at stake in the GOP’s attempt to defund Obamacare in 2013, the dynamics are the same. Republicans are trying to balance governing with satisfying their conservative base while Democrats are agitating for a fight they believe will pay political dividends by revealing Republican overreach.

“I’m not going to tell you that there’s logic to what the Republicans” are doing, said Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.). Asked to respond to Republicans’ attempt to force Democrats to defund Planned Parenthood by linking it with a spending bill, she replied: “Not on my watch.”

Jennifer Haberkorn and John Bresnahan contributed to this report.