Ted Cruz finally ends his 21 HOUR faux filibuster against Obamacare

Senator Ted Cruz, who vowed to speak out against Obamacare on the Senate floor 'until I am no longer able to stand', has finally stopped talking after 21 hours.



Cruz began his crusade to deny funding for Obama's overhaul of the U.S. healthcare system - branding it the country's 'biggest jobs killer' - at 2.41 p.m. on Tuesday and stopped at midday today.

But the stunt was never technically a filibuster as he was always going to have to stop talking for an already-scheduled vote on the House bill at 1:00 p.m. Wednesday.



The tea party conservative had navigated disparate topics including the American revolution, sending a man to the moon, his Cuban-born father and the impact of the health care law.

And in more bizarre moments, he recited the Dr. Seuss children's book 'Green Eggs and Ham' and compared the fight against Obamacare to the battle against the Nazis.



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No sign of stopping: Tea party conservative Ted Cruz began speaking out in a battle to defund Obamacare on the Senate floor at 2.41pm on Tuesday - and he's still talking

CHIEF FILIBUSTER: TED'S TOP 10

1. 'I will credit my father, he invented…green eggs and ham... he would put green food coloring in. Green Eggs and Ham was my favorite book as a little boy.'

2. On comparing fighting Obamacare to fighting the Nazis: 'If you go to the 1940s, Nazi Germany. We saw in Britain, Neville Chamberlain, who told the British people, "Accept the Nazis. Yes, they'll dominate the continent of Europe but that's not our problem. Let's appease them. Why? Because it can't be done. We can't possibly stand against them".'

3. On comparing the costs of sending a man to the moon to the cost of defunding Obamacare: 'The moon might be as intimidating as Obamacare'

4.'It is apparently very, very important to be invited to all the right cocktail parties in town. Now, I'll confess: I don't go to a whole lot of cocktail parties in town.'

5. 'I like their little burgers…I'm a big fan of eating White Castle burgers .'

6. 'You know, almost all of us are in cheap suits with bad haircuts. Who cares?'

7. 'They want to make this about a battle of this senator versus that senator, this person versus that person. So it's all personal. It's like reading the Hollywood gossip pages.'

8. 'I don't know if it's the water, something in the air, the cherry blossoms, but people get here and they stop listening to the American people.'

9. 'We don't work for the lobbyists with tasseled loafers who walk the halls, but the single mom working in the diner.'

10. 'I guarantee all of the pundits that we see going on TV and intoning in deep baritone voices, "This can’t be done." If this were back in the 18th century, they would be going on, I don’t know, maybe [with] pigeon carriers or something.'



In surpassing the 18 hour and 23 minute mark this morning, Cruz and his allies notched up the fourth longest occupation of the floor since precise record-keeping began in 1900.

It also eclipsed March's 12-hour, 52-minute speech by Sen. Rand Paul, who like Cruz is a tea party lawmaker and potential 2016 presidential contender.



Paul was demanding information on the Obama administration's use of drones to monitor Americans.



Cruz had aimed to scuttle the Senate Democrats' vote that would send a budget bill back to the house without a measure that would defund the president's signature health care law.

Conservative Republicans have threatened to level an ultimatum at the president: Defund Obamacare, or risk a government shutdown and the GOP's refusal to raise the federal government's all-important debt ceiling.

But the mechanics of advancing the bill were overshadowed by Cruz's filibuster, which included a reading of Dr. Seuss' 'Green Eggs and Ham' to his daughters back home in Texas.



'When Americans tried it, they discovered they did not like green eggs and ham and they did not like Obamacare either,' he said. 'They did not like Obamacare in a box, with a fox, in a house or with a mouse. It is not working.'



But his actions have provoked anger on both sides of the house as many of his GOP colleagues accuse him of poor strategy and enjoying political grandstanding at the expense of other Republicans.



A Pew Research Center poll published Monday shows that 39 percent of Americans would blame Republicans for a government shutdown, while 36 percent would blame Democrats.

Not wishing to go it entirely alone Sen. Cruz drafted in some help a few hours into the parliamentary stunt, yielding the floor to Sen. Paul, then to Sen. Marco Rubio, and again for a question from Kansas Sen. Pat Roberts.



Utah's Mike Lee, Louisiana's David Vitter and Alabama's Jeff Sessions also asked questions, pausing the forward motion for minutes at a time while Cruz caught his breath.



The Texas Republican is trying to halt the implementation of President Obama’s national health insurance overhaul, and said he's acting on behalf of '26 million Texans and 300 million Americans'.

But Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, the chamber's top Democrat, put down a marker earlier in the day with a promise that 'there will be no filibuster today'.



While Cruz apparently didn't get the memo, or more likely ignored it, it's unlikely his filibuster-by-committee will change any results.

By Senate rules, there will be a vote Wednesday no later than 1pm on a motion that will bring Reid closer to fending off House Republicans' efforts to deny federal dollars to enforcing or implementing the Affordable Care Act.

A more meaningful filibuster, if one is offered, would be a less dramatic affair, consisting of 41 or more Republican senators acting in concert to block a different kind of vote on Friday.



Cruz yielded to Marco Rubio after he had been talking a little more than three hours, a far cry from the 13-hour marathon that Sen. Rand Paul engaged in, solo, back in March That vote, known as cloture, would stop debate on the spending bill and call a final vote – which the Democratic majority would certainly win.

But cloture can be stopped if a single senator objects, and it requires a supermajority of three-fifths, or 60 votes, to override any naysayer.

Majority Leader Harry Reid holds all the cards in the Senate, but it's unclear what will happen after he cuts Obamacare-defunding language out of the budget and sends it back to the House

Even Rand Paul's epic filibuster in March, he conceded Tuesday, only succeeded in delaying the confirmation of John Brennan to lead the CIA, a nomination that Paul turned into controversy.

'My filibuster delayed things for 13 hours, but didn't stop things,' he said on Fox News.

But Cruz cruised on, conceding that Reid's control of the Senate calendar rendered his tactics little more than political theatre.

The Senate, he said, is like 'wrestling matches where it's all rigged. The outcome is predetermined, and it's all for show.'

But throughout, he has returned to his primary theme.

'Obamacare isn't working,' Cruz said. 'There are politicians in this body who are not listening to the people.'

'It is apparently very, very important to be invited to all the right cocktail parties in town,' Cruz sniped at his colleagues. 'At the end of the day we don't work for those holding cocktail parties in Washington D.C. We don't work for the intelligentsia who live in cities and write editorials for big newspapers. We work for the American people.'



He reserved special scorn for the large majority of Democrats who deserted the Senate floor during the proceedings, which is not uncommon during filibusters.

Et tu, Mitch? Rumors have swirled around D.C. fingering Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell for sending unflattering talking points about Cruz to media organizations. McConnell has not been supportive of efforts to scuttle Obamacare funding in the Senate

'A lot of members of this body have, at least so far, not showed up to battle,' Cruz said. 'The chattering class is quick to discipline anyone who doesn’t fall in line.

One line that dominated a half-hour of Cruz's stemwinder concerned Republicans' claims that Obamacare has cost Americans their jobs, as small companies announce layoffs to reduce their workforces beneath the 50-employee threshold in the health care law.

'Some politicians suggest people in this country are lazy, don't want to work,' he said. 'I think Americans want to work. Why aren't people able to get jobs? Because Obamacare is killing jobs.'

Vitter, the Louisiana Republican, has proposed a Senate amendment that would force members of Congress and their staffers to enroll themselves in Obamacare's health insurance exchanges. Congress and the White House have been granted exemptions by the Obama administration.

President Barack Obama sat with former President Bill Clinton on Tuesday for a public 'conversation' about Obamacare, which became a tag-team defense of the Democrats' health care policies

'If the Vitter Amendment passes,' Cruz predicted dryly, 'if Congress is subject to the same rules of the American people, there might be a few congressional staffers that tender their resignation.'

Other Republicans, however, have been less than supportive. Fox News Sunday host Chris Wallace expressed shock over the weekend when some in the GOP began providing him with opposition research targeting Cruz. Rumors immediately swirled around Washington, blaming Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell.



'Each day I learn what a scoundrel I am,' Cruz said of the media frenzy surroundign fellow Republicans who have slammed him publicly for his tactics.

'Most Americans could not give a flying flip about politicians in Washington. Who cares? Most of us are in cheap suits with bad haircuts.'

