Written by Laurie Higgins and David E. Smith

Our federal lawmakers are back in their districts as the U.S. Congress has adjourned for a five-week recess. But that doesn’t mean that all is quiet on the national front. In fact, there is a battle shaping up in the U.S. Senate over whether Obamacare will be defunded. 

U.S. Senators  Marco Rubio (R-FL), Mike Lee (R-UT), and Ted Cruz (R-TX) are spearheading an effort to oppose any budget than includes funding for Obamacare, which would result in a government shutdown. Though their effort is unlikely to succeed, particularly with the weak-willed, flip-flopping, non-leadership of Republicans like Senator Mark Kirk who supported the Rubio/Lee/Cruz effort before he opposed it, there are very good reasons for conservatives to vigorously support it.

While the inestimable Charles Krauthammer calls the Rubio/Lee/Cruz plan “nuts,” the equally inestimable Steve Hayes, senior writer for The Weekly Standard, writes  (more persuasively, in our humble opinion):

It was a bold move. And if ever there were a time for being aggressive, it’s now.

For years, health-policy experts, economists, and Americans with basic math skills have understood that the Affordable Care Act wouldn’t work as advertised. It simply wasn’t going to be possible to (a) provide insurance to 30 million more Americans, (b) improve the quality of care, and (c) save money.

In the years since the law passed, the contradictions of the undertaking created a growing number of fissures in the foundation of Obamacare—obvious to those looking closely but largely unnoticed by the masses. That has changed in recent weeks. With longtime supporters openly questioning the viability of the reforms and the administration itself tacitly acknowledging major flaws, the edifice of Obamacare has begun to crumble. It’s a big moment.

The arguments against the Rubio/Lee/Cruz plan are that it won’t get passed and that the effort will backfire against Republicans who will get blamed for even the possibility of a government shutdown. (Of course, rational people would see that a government shutdown would be equally the fault of Obama for his refusal to compromise on a budget unless it funds his pet health care project.)

Concerns about blame are not unreasonable concerns, but they reflect the all too common short-view mindset of too many conservatives.

Look at the strategic plan of homosexual and gender-confused activists. For years, decades even, they recognized their goal of normalizing homosexuality and its attendant issues (same-sex adoption, civil unions, same-sex “marriage,” and laws permitting cross-dressing men to use women’s bathrooms) seemed but a hopelessly doctrinaire pipedream, and yet they proposed policies and laws that had no immediate chance of passing. They recognized that these seemingly extreme efforts serve a strategic purpose—multiple strategic purposes, in fact.

Steve Hayes articulates one of those purposes:

…it’s not enough to point to polls showing that Obamacare is unpopular or to highlight news articles demonstrating the many problems with the implementation of it. [Sen. Lee’s] efforts may succeed in pushing Republican leaders to come up with an actual strategy to stall Obamacare.

In a must-read National Review article about Obama’s arrogant lawlessness, Kevin Williamson points to the dramatic systemic changes that Obamacare will help institutionalize:

[Obamacare] amounts to that fundamental transformation of American society that President Obama promised as a candidate: but instead of the new birth of hope and change, it is the transformation of a constitutional republic operating under laws passed by democratically accountable legislators into a servile nation under the management of an unaccountable administrative state. The real import of Barack Obama’s political career will be felt long after he leaves office, in the form of a permanently expanded state that is more assertive of its own interests and more ruthless in punishing its enemies. At times, he has advanced this project abetted by congressional Democrats, as with the health-care law’s investiture of extraordinary powers in the executive bureaucracy, but he also has advanced it without legislative assistance — and, more troubling still, in plain violation of the law. President Obama and his admirers choose to call this “pragmatism,” but what it is is a mild expression of totalitarianism, under which the interests of the country are conflated with those of the president’s administration and his party.

Americans have a troubling willingness to acclimate or inure themselves to that which they should never acclimate or inure themselves. It frees them from engaging in icky political action and from the epithet-hurling of the left that inevitably follows such action. Perhaps this dire warning from Williamson will nudge Americans to the supposedly too dramatic action urged by U.S. Senators Rubio, Lee, and Cruz.

Illinois Family Institute and virtually every pro-life activist and organization in the nation are very concerned about Obamacare’s HHS Mandate, which requires employers to provide insurance coverage that includes abortifacients and contraception coverage. This requirement violates many Christian employers’ rights of conscience by requiring them to provide that which their faith tells them is morally wrong.  

Thankfully, our friends at Alliance Defending Freedom are heavily involved in the fight to defend these Christian business owners’ right to make business decisions that accord with their. We must hold them up in prayer and ask God to allow them to prevail in the courts for the sake of religious freedom. 

Moreover, defunding Obamacare would send President Barack Obama and his administration a clear signal that we the people do not want this particular health care reform, including the abortion pill mandate. It also would prevent the Obama Administration from implementing other potentially dangerous provisions of Obamacare, including the funding of abortion and euthanasia-lite “death panels,” or what Howard Dean euphemistically refers to as Obama’s “health care rationing body.”

While defunding Obamacare will not end our fight against the HHS Mandate, since that mandate does not rely on appropriated funds, it would be an important step in the right direction for the defense of life and religious liberty.

According to a World Magazine article on this issue, U.S. Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) says, “‘The only way we win this fight is if the grassroots rise up and demand of our elected representatives that they stand up and do the right thing…. Success depends upon hundreds of millions of Americans standing up and demanding this.’”

If conservatives cared a wee bit less about being called “extreme” by the extreme left mainstream press, perhaps we could accomplish more.  So let’s do our part here in Illinois. 

Take ACTION:  Click HERE to send a message to U.S. Senators Dick Durbin and Mark Kirk to ask them to stand with the 12 U.S. Senators who are opposing funding Obamacare. 

Read more:

Defund Obamacare Now  (National Review Online) 

Durbin Dismisses Cruz’ Effort to Defund Obamacare (Illinois Review)

The Case Against Obamacare  (Heritage Foundation)

Obamacare Threatens Very Life of Republic (Family Research Council)

Defunding Obamacare: Worth a Try (Cato Institute)

 Three Important Upcoming Events:

–>  September 14th – IFI’s 3rd Annual Fun. Run. Walk in Joliet 
(Click HERE for more info)

–> October 4th — IFI’s Fall Banquet with Dr. Benjamin Carson in Northlake 
(Click HERE for more info)

–> October 23rd — IFI’s Defend Marriage Lobby Day in Springfield  
(Click HERE for more info)