Senator Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) spent the last twenty-one hours on the floor of the U.S. Senate conducting a filibuster of the bill passed by the Republican House.  The bill, passed unanimously by House Republicans, approved funding of all government expenditures except the Affordable Care Act known as ObamaCare.  In protest to the tax increases being implemented on businesses, except for those that have been granted special waivers by the president, Republicans refused to allow the mandates of ObamaCare to proceed forward.

Sen. Ted Cruz is Horatius at the bridge fighting for freedom

Republican leadership is mocking Senator Cruz as the showboating junior Senator from Texas.  Former presidential candidate Sen. McCain (R-Ariz.) trashed Cruz’s filibuster as unnecessary political theatre.  Despite the fact that the vast majority of Americans object to the implementation of ObamaCare, Republican leaders like McCain believe the law cannot be stopped until the American public suffer the full consequences of the provisions of the law.

Democrats have been condemning Republican efforts as disobeying “the law of the land.”  Rush Limbaugh pointed out both Democrat and Republican fallacies over ObamaCare as being out of touch with both history and reality.  Democrats, he said, forget that slavery was once the “law of the land” upheld by the Supreme Court and declares that ObamaCare taxes and regulations are no different.  As for Republicans, he explained, the establishment has already forgotten that the junior senator of Illinois, who didn’t serve two years before he began campaigning, has won election twice as President of the United States.

So long as Cruz’s filibuster stands, Democrats will need sixty votes to alter the House bill and fund ObamaCare.  Should Cruz’s filibuster be broken, Democrats in the Senate will only need a simple majority, which they possess, to take the defunding language out of the bill and pass all the spending Obama desires.  The Senate has not passed a budget for the last five years.