Ted Cruz Bravely Joins Senate In Passing Bill He Yammered Against For 21 Hours

 
 During his 21-hour not-quite filibuster, Senator Ted Cruz (R-Alberta) warned that "Any senator who votes [to allow debate on the House continuing resolution to fund the government] is voting to give Harry Reid the authority to fund Obamacare" because, of course, once debate was allowed, then Reid could strip the language defunding Obamacare from the bill and send it back to the House. Because even if he had to stand alone, he would very definitely take his stand to stop that terrible usurpation of liberty.

And then two hours after his brave failibuster, he joined the rest of the Senate, which voted 100-0 to move the bill forward.

It's not hypocrisy, though, because he was only voting to allow debate, and he really likes the House bill because it defunds Obamacare:

An aide to Cruz told CNN Chief Congressional Correspondent Dana Bash that the senator always intended to allow formal consideration of the House measure, adding that Cruz would vote against it once Senate Democrats restored the Obamacare funding.

Words are hard, aren't they?

We think we'll just agree with Harry Reid's words about the very brave stand that Cruz didn't quite take: "It has been a big waste of time."

But hey, maybe now Ted can try his "shut down the military" scheme. That's almost certain to work.

In a side note, Cruz ended his failibuster by thanking the Senate staff for having "endured this Bataan death march," a metaphor that resulted in one of our favorite tweets of the whole sad ordeal, from Dave Weigel (happy birthday, Dave!), who caught a little slip by Chris Moody of Yahoo News:

Moody corrected the misspelling before we could get a screenshot, darn him. We just hope that Republicans' continued attempts to block Obamacare don't result in a government shutdown or debt default, because that would truly be a Trail of Tiers.

[ CNN ]