Ted Cruz tells Republicans not to blink when it comes to defunding Obamacare.
Related: Don't blink when it comes to watching Cruz—you don't want to miss a moment of the hilarity.
Even Ted Cruz
admits his plan to defund Obamacare by shutting down the federal government has "zero" chance of of success, but that isn't stopping him from
continuing to push his doomed scheme—and he's even come up with
a new argument for why Republicans should be looking forward to a government shutdown.
In an interview, Cruz expanded on his ideas, saying that his Republican opponents are “haunted by ghosts of shutdowns past” but that the conventional wisdom on the 1995 battle between Newt Gingrich and Bill Clinton is wrong.
“There was some political pain, to be sure. Bill Clinton took a two-by-four, using the bully pulpit of the presidency, to congressional Republicans. But I think it’s worth underscoring that the direct result of Republicans’ standing up and being willing to fight that fight is we saw year after year of balanced budgets come out of the federal government,” Cruz said.
To recap: According to Ted Cruz, the reason we had a balanced budget from fiscal years 1998-2001 was that Republicans were willing to shut down the federal government in the winter of 1995. It had nothing to do with with economic growth, and certainly, it had nothing to do with the fact that the deficit actually began shrinking when President Clinton raised taxes back to sustainable levels in his first year in office.
By Ted Cruz's logic, the reason that the deficit began to grow again once President Bush took office had nothing to do with economic weakness or the fact that he undid President Clinton's tax policy—it was the fact that Republicans didn't shut down the government. If they'd just been willing to repeat 1995, then cutting taxes would have magically kept the budget in balance.
And by his logic, we'd be better off today if Republicans had just been willing to shut down the government after last November's election. Instead, they agreed to President Obama's proposal to let some of President Bush's tax cuts for the wealthy expire. Sure, the budget deficit is now on pace to be half of what it was when Bush left office—thanks in no small part to the increased revenue from those tax increases—but in Ted Cruz's world, we'd probably be running a surplus now if Rand Paul and Mitch McConnell had just had a bigger pair of you-know-whats.
With advice like this, it's really not hard to see why Cruz has become the darling of the freakshow.