benefit. Once polling in the low single digits, he captured the energy of the grass roots and channeled the resentment of the masses, upsetting Dewhurst in the August primary runoff.
Cruz attracted legions of conservative supporters, from Sarah Palin to the Tea Party Patriots to talk radio host Mark Levin. But no endorsement meant more than the one from Jim DeMint. And now, in Dallas a year later, the two men were reunited, with Cruz headlining a town hall event sponsored by Heritage featuring a stage-length banner behind him: “Defund Obamacare.”
The idea was not elaborate: Rather than repeal the health care law, conservatives argued, Congress could refuse to appropriate the funds to pay for it. Nor was it new: Tom Graves, the Georgia congressman who came to Washington in a special election shortly after the law was passed, had introduced the Defund Obamacare Act in July 2010. He reintroduced it each of the next two years, though few Republicans took the effort seriously. It wasn’t until 2013, with the specter of the exchanges opening on October 1 and the serendipity of Washington running out of money that same day (the start of the fiscal year), that the concept gained traction. By holding the rest of government funding hostage, the fantasizing went, Republicans would out-leverage Obama and compel him to dump his legacy-forging law. Cruz called Graves in July and asked to sponsor a companion bill in the Senate. A month later, as DeMint’s “Defund Obamacare” tour rolled through Texas, it was Cruz who stole the show and announced himself as the mission’s captain, daring the party’s establishment to stand in his way.
“We have to do something that conservatives haven’t done in a long time: We’ve got to stand up and win the argument,” Cruz declared in Dallas. “Republicans assume, with any impasse, that President Obama will never, ever, ever give up his principles—so Republicans have to give up theirs.” Building to a rhetorical crescendo, with the crowd now chanting the answers to his repeated questions, Cruz asked a final time, “How do we win this fight? Don’t blink!”
DeMint was no less dramatic. Calling the Affordable Care Act “probably the most destructive law ever imposed on the American people,” the Tea Party stalwart declared, “If you’re giving up the fight against socialized medicine, you’re almost giving up on the country.”
Most Republicans didn’t feel they were giving up, or blinking, or abandoning principle. The argument over Obamacare had been lost: The bill passed the House, passed the Senate, was signed into law, was upheld by the Supreme Court, and was validated by Obama’s reelection. Polling that showed the bill’s relative unpopularity was meaningless at this point. Unless Republicans believed that the president was willing to abolish the law bearing his name, their threats to defund it could produce only one outcome: a government shutdown.
“I think it’s the dumbest idea I’ve ever heard of,” Republican senator Richard Burr, one of Boehner’s closest friends in the Congress, told reporters that summer. “Listen, as long as Barack Obama is president, the Affordable Care Act is going to be law.”2
Burr’s remark earned him attack ads on the radio back in North Carolina, courtesy of DeMint’s former group, the Senate Conservatives Fund. Meanwhile, DeMint’s new plaything, Heritage Action, spent half a million dollars in August on localized ads urging House Republicans to sign a letter that had circulated from an obscure freshman lawmaker, Mark Meadows, urging Boehner to defund Obamacare.
Whatever their tactical preference, the overwhelming majority of Republican voters, activists, and politicians seemed to sincerely believe that the Affordable Care Act represented a threat—if not to their own insurance plans, then to the relationship between the government and its citizenry. That said, the battle over the president’s signature law offered a unique window into the shadowy motives and incentives of the leading belligerents in the GOP civil war.
For DeMint, it was an opportunity to rid Heritage of its scarlet letter, the individual mandate.
For the rest of the professional conservative class, it was an opportunity to flex financial muscle while recruiting and mobilizing their armies; Charles and David Koch, through their umbrella group, Freedom Partners Chamber of Commerce, spent more than $200 million on the anti-Obamacare effort, according to the New York Times.3
For Cruz, it was an opportunity to establish ideological supremacy among the nascent 2016 Republican field, capitalizing on Rubio’s immigration stumble. (During a meeting that summer in Mike Lee’s office, as Cruz and top conservative activists plotted the defunding plan, Rubio arrived late. “The prodigal son is