Earlier this week, conservative economist and Hoover Institution fellow Thomas Sowell made a very extraordinary statement about Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) on Sean Hannity’s Fox News Channel show. Regarding Cruz’s calls to use the budget process to defund ObamaCare and taking a more aggressive posture in insisting upon government spending reductions before agreeing to raise the debt ceiling, Sowell had said if George Washington has insisted upon a Cruz-like strategy during the Revolutionary War, there wouldn’t be a United States today.
On Hannity’s Wednesday show, Cruz shot back at Sowell and said that you have to take on some of these fights on occasion.
“The great Thomas Sowell – I admire and respect,” Cruz said. “Listen, I have read his works all my life and he is a fantastic thinker. And I actually agree with just about everything he says except that unfortunately congressional leadership in the Senate, you have got to pick some battles to fight. I believe in picking your battles. I don’t believe we need to fight on everything. I think we need to fight on issues that matter. There have been two significant battles that I think we really should have fought on that I tried to fight on as much as possible.”
“They were number one, ObamaCare, the most disastrous law hurting millions across this country,” he continued. “And number two, the debt ceiling, because we’re bankrupting our kids and grandkids. And he said — Mr. Sowell said you should fight on fights we can win. I agree and if Republicans had stood on the debt ceiling — we had the votes to insist on meaningful spending reforms. And in fact, just a few years ago, Congress used the debt ceiling to get the Budget Control Act and we did that with Barack Obama as president and Harry Reid as majority leader. If we showed the same resoluteness now than we did then, we could have gotten spending reforms. Unfortunately, we just rolled over instead.”
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