Lee in his proper place, three paces behind Cruz.
Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) thinks the plan his master Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) came up with to pick the winners and losers in the federal government for funding is a good one. This is the plan that House Republicans
pissed on last week but decided to follow today, since they've run out of any other way to look like idiots. So here's Mike Lee, wanting the Senate to
follow suit.
Lee said on the Senate floor that he supports passing temporary budgets for the Department of Defense, Homeland Security, the federal courts, NASA and the Interior Department so that their operations could continue while Congress debates funding for the Democrats’ health-care law.
"This is an effort to compromise, an effort that is badly needed," Lee said on the floor.
The House Republicans want to fund the Veterans Administration, National Parks/Smithsonian and Washington, D.C., with their mini spending bills. The Republicans unsurprisingly prioritize the stuff that goes with guns and big marble buildings as opposed to
feeding women and children or providing cancer treatments. That's compromise, they tell us.
Lee has also backed away from making demands that Obamacare be mutilated in some way, saying, "Let’s leave Obamacare for another day and not hold hostage the vast majority of government functions." The government functions, that is, that his campaign donors are going to care about. While Lee says it's time to move on from Obamacare to getting government functioning again, he still wants to claim "credit for kickstarting the effort to use the federal budget as leverage to halt funding for Obamacare." Maybe he doesn't want to be Cruz's puppy dog anymore. Now that the whole scheme is falling down on their heads, Ted Cruz might just be willing to give Lee all the credit.