On Wednesday on Rush Limbaugh’s radio show, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) slammed those that claimed he and Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) went forward with their defunding Obamacare strategy without consulting other senators.
When Limbaugh asked Cruz what his response was to criticism that he “ignored the rules of the Senate” and did not “go to your party’s conference” to give other senators a heads-up on the defunding strategy, Cruz said that the “only folks I’ve seen making that argument are not, in fact, senators who attend the meetings.”
He said he has heard the criticism about his not having attended the “Thursday meeting of the conference”; he retorted that the “meeting is actually on Tuesday,” even though commentators are going on television “purporting to know what they’re talking about.”
“They don’t actually know what day the Senate meets,” Cruz said, noting that he has attended nearly all of those meetings.
He said he and Lee have been discussing strategies to defund Obamacare “ad nauseum” for the last six months and asking other Republican senators if they had alternatives.
On an appearance on Fox News Sunday, Karl Rove said of the defunding Obamacare strategy:
Mike Lee of Utah lays it out on July 9th without having ever brought it up at the Thursday meeting and the senators to say we’ve got an idea. I would suspect today, with all due respect to Mike, junior Senator from Texas, I suspect this is the first time that the endgame was described to any Republican senator. They had to tune in to listen to you to find out what Ted’s next step was in the strategy.
Lee’s communications director Brian Phillips immediately went on Twitter and said Rove was “LYING” because “Lee and Cruz brought it up to Senate GOP WEEKS before” they announced the defund effort.
@KarlRove is LYING. Lee and Cruz brought it up to Senate GOP WEEKS before announcing defund effort.
— Brian Phillips (@SenLeeComs) September 22, 2013
As Proof, Phillips said, “the fact that Lee/Cruz had 12 signatures on the letter when they announced it proves strategy was circulated before hand.”
.@KarlRove, the fact that Lee/Cruz had 12 signatures on the letter when they announced it proves strategy was circulated before hand.
— Brian Phillips (@SenLeeComs) September 22, 2013
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