Cruz reluctant to support GOP's latest health care bill
‘Right now, they don’t have my vote,’ senator says at UT appearance.
U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz said Sunday that he is not yet ready to vote for the last-ditch Republican effort to repeal and replace Obamacare, jeopardizing the bill’s already slender chances of passage.
“Right now, they don’t have my vote, and I don’t think they have (Utah Sen.) Mike Lee’s either,” Cruz said at a joint appearance at the Texas Tribune Festival with his Texas Republican colleague, Sen. John Cornyn.
Cornyn announced he would seek a fourth term in the Senate in 2020 and endorsed Cruz for re-election.
Cornyn, the No. 2 Republican in the Senate, is backing the lat- est Republican effort to repeal the health care law, but Cruz said he and Lee suggested changes that needed to be made to get their votes that the authors — Sens. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., and Bill Cassidy, R-La. — accepted but then dropped.
“Now, I want to be a yes. I want to get there because I think Obamacare is a disaster, but the price to get there, I believe, is
focusing on consumer freedom,” Cruz said. “If you want prices to go down, Econ. 101, you want more choices, more options, more freedom.”
“What does Obamacare do?” he asked. “Fewer options, less choices, less competition, prices rise. And if you want people to have access to health insurance, you want prices to fall.”
Texas Tribune co-founder and CEO Evan Smith, who moderated the conversation at Hogg Memorial Auditorium at the University of Texas, noted that the Senate has only until the end of September to use the budget reconciliation process to repeal and replace Obamacare with a simple majority of 50 votes, with Vice President Mike Pence, casting the tiebreaking vote.
But, without elaborating, Cruz said, “Sept. 30 is a bogus deadline.”
“We can do budget reconciliation or resolution at any point,” he said.
With all Democrats opposing the bill, it is not at all clear how the 52 Senate Republicans get to the 50 votes they need. Sens. Rand Paul, R-Ky., and John McCain, R-Ariz., have said they won’t vote for the legislation, and Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, said on CNN’s “State of the Union” on Sunday, “It’s very difficult for me to envision a scenario where I would end up vot
ing for this bill.” Also, Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, has not said how she will vote.
The bill would repeal much of the Affordable Care Act, enacted in 2010, including its penalties for people who don’t buy insurance and larger employers that do not offer coverage to employees. It would roll back the Affordable Care Act’s expansion of Medicaid and give states control over health care by distributing block grants through 2026.
McCain said he opposes the bill not on its merits but because it has not gone through the regular order of hearings and debate in the Senate. But Cruz said there is not another issue that has been so thoroughly debated in recent years — and, for all practical purposes, voted on by the American people — as Obamacare.
Cornyn endorsement
On Cruz’s and Cornyn’s political relationship with each other, Smith noted that Cornyn had not yet endorsed Cruz for-re-election, just as Cruz did not back Cornyn in his 2014 Republican primary.
Cornyn replied that he had told Cruz at a recent breakfast that, in the interests of a united Texas delegation in response to Hurricane Harvey, he was backing him for a second term.
“I think it’s really important, particularly in light of the challenges brought by this huge natural disaster,
that we stand together as a Texas delegation and there’s no space between Sen. Cruz and me when it comes to doing work for our state,” Cornyn said. “So I told him I’d support him in his re-election, and I think it’s important to do so to send the message that Texans, when it comes to something like the recovery after this natural disaster, that we are going to stand together and not be distracted.”
Cruz will face U.S. Rep. Beto O’Rourke, an El Paso Democrat, for Senate next year. Cruz dismissed O’Rourke as out of step with Texas voters.
“I don’t think Texans want a far-left Democrat in the Senate,” Cruz said.
Smith interviewed O’Rourke on stage at Rainey Hall on Saturday, and the contrasts between the two candidates on the issues are plain.
O’Rourke wants to keep Obamacare in the short term, expand Medicaid in states such as Texas that haven’t done so and move toward Medicare for all.
Differing DACA views
On the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, which protects from deportation immigrants who arrived illegally in the United Sates as children and meet certain requirements, O’Rourke said he is open to a compromise bill to enshrine what was an executive action by President Barack Obama into law, as long as it doesn’t involve the deportation of any of those 800,000 “dreamers” — including 141,000 in Texas, the second most of any state.