2016 Postmortem

DonViejo

(60,536 posts) Fri Oct 18, 2013, 12:14 PM Oct 2013

The Author of the "Defund Obamacare" Letter Doesn't Want to Write It Again

By David Weigel

Ted Cruz gets most of the media's credit/blame for the goverment shutdown. But as Cruz would tell audiences, his vote in the Senate wasn't all that relevant to whether Obamacare would be funded. The House of Representatives held the power of the purse; it was up to them to defund. The real movers on the strategy were Georgia Rep. Tom Graves and North Carolina Rep. Mark Meadows, the authors (respectively) of the defund-Obamacare bill and the pledge to oppose any continuing resolution that didn't defund.

So Cruz might now be dodging questions of whether he'd "shut the government down again." Meadows has mellowed. That process began as soon as the media started coming after him for the letter. "I’m one of 435 members and a very small part of this," he said on the first day of the shutdown.

After the shutdown ended, Meadows told a local paper that he always wanted to prevent the madness.

Congressman Mark Meadows said Thursday he fought up to the final hours to prevent it from occurring and worked hard over the last 16 days to stave off its impact on his district.

In a phone interview Thursday as he drove home from Washington, Meadows said he spent 30 minutes with an Obama administration aide at the Capitol the night before the Oct. 1 shutdown “trying to work things out, seeing if there are some areas we could make tweaks to Obamacare and avoid a shutdown.”

full article
http://www.slate.com/blogs/weigel/2013/10/18/the_author_of_the_defund_obamacare_letter_doesn_t_want_to_write_it_again.html?wpisrc=newsletter_jcr:content