Sen. Mike Lee, dufus.
Utah Republican Sen. Mike Lee has dug himself a hole and can't put the shovel down. On Sunday he was forced to admit that the
government won't be shut down over Obamacare, but still says the program must be defunded.
"We all know that the government’s going to get funded," Lee said on "Fox News Sunday." "The question is whether the government gets funded with Obamacare or without it." [...]
The move is mostly an attention grab—Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) refused to back it, and many other Republicans have rejected the idea. Lee, a leader in the tea party movement, acknowledged as much to host Chris Wallace, given that President Barack Obama would never sign a bill that unravels his signature health care law.
He nonetheless used the White House's decision to delay the law's employer mandate by a year as proof that it should go unfunded.
Um, well, yeah, so we really can't shut down government over this but we really should because, um, Freedom! How precisely he'll defund Obamacare but not the rest of government and how he'll get the rest of the Senate and President Obama to go along with it without a big hostage like funding the government, Lee doesn't seem to know.
Having spearheaded what one fellow Republican calls the "dumbest idea I've ever heard," and kicking off a real intra-party fracture, now Lee is standing there holding the bag. Slapped down by his fellow GOP senators, he's got nothin'. But he's not going to shut up.