Republicans in Congress are determined to show a unified front this week, with many conservatives in the House arguing they are finally working together to defund Obamacare.
“I don’t think we’ve ever been this unified,” Representative Raúl Labrador (R-ID) said of his party at Thursday’s Conversations with Conservatives, hosted by Heritage on Capitol Hill.
On Thursday, the House voted on a continuing resolution that includes language to defund Obamacare. Almost every House Republican voted for the legislation. The previous day, Labrador and others were quick to compliment House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) for shifting to agree with conservatives who have pushed for offering such a bill all summer.
Next week, the fight will pivot to the Senate, and that is where Senators like Ted Cruz (R-TX) and Mike Lee (R-UT) are leading the way.
Cruz, on a conference call with conservative bloggers on Thursday, promised to keep the pressure on but was quick to assign responsibility to the American people, too.
“The next 11 days are going to be decided by the people of the United States,” Cruz said. “The key to winning this fight is the grassroots tsunami that has built over the past weeks—the nearly 1.5 million who have signed the national petition at DontFundIt.com—growing larger and larger and larger.”
Cruz said he sees one of his primary roles as a conservative Senator as that of a “cheerleader” for the Republican majority in the House. In turn, House Republicans were quick to credit the American people for getting engaged on the issue of defunding Obamacare, and to credit the conservatives in the House for amplifying those voices.
“The involvement of the American people cannot be ignored in this, and their voices were heard,” Representative Jeff Duncan (SC) said Thursday. “The American people got engaged, and so I don’t want to discount them at all. I give them all the credit to getting us to where we are now.”