A Time for Truth: Reigniting the Promise of America

by Ted Cruz

  That law, passed as part of the Compromise of 1850 to settle growing divisions over slavery across the young nation, allowed slave owners to demand the arrest, seizure, and return of escaped slaves. In March 1854, acting under the authority of the disgraceful law, a group of men that included a federal marshal tracked Glover down and took him to a Milwaukee jail to await his extradition.

  Learning of the capture, Sherman Booth visited Glover in prison and then, on horseback, rallied abolitionists to a protest in the courthouse square. As thousands gathered in support of the captured slave, Booth announced that Glover’s lawyers’ efforts to free him were failing. Knowing well the penalty for their action, a large group of men stormed the jail. Glover was liberated from his cell and then escorted back to Racine, where he made contact with the Underground Railroad and fled to Canada.

  “In Wisconsin the Fugitive Slave Act is repealed!” Booth exulted in his newspaper. “The first attempt to enforce the law in this state has signally, gloriously failed!” Four days later, Sherman Booth was arrested, facing charges for his willful incitement to violate federal law.

  Undeterred, Booth told his inquisitors in court that he stood behind his call for accused fugitive slaves to have trials by jury, a provision directly forbidden by the act. He maintained his opposition to the abominable federal law and said he was willing to face the consequences.

  Booth’s principled, impassioned determination to use any and all means to fight against an unjust and unconstitutional law led to a rare and memorable standoff between a state and the federal government that captured the nation’s attention. The state courts in Wisconsin refused to prosecute Booth, while a federal judge, in a separate trial, instructed jurors to find Booth guilty.

  Ultimately, in 1861, President James Buchanan decided to rid the nation of a case that continued to divide the citizenry, issuing a full pardon of Booth for his role in the Glover escape. The pardon was issued just one day before his successor took office—a man whose involvement in the divisive issue of slavery was just beginning: President-elect Abraham Lincoln. He was the first president elected to office under the Republican Party’s new banner—a party established to oppose slavery and defend human freedom.

  To this day, Samuel Booth stands as one of the great champions of human freedom. He was an American hero who believed that he owed allegiance to the Constitution and brooked no tolerance for laws that in his view perverted the rights God had granted to all of the people.

  In my time in Washington, no battle has consumed more energy than stopping Obamacare. On the evening of September 24, 2013, it began with a prayer.

  In my tiny “hideaway” office wedged into a dome in the Capitol Building, Senator Mike Lee and I bowed our heads, read from the Book of Psalms, and asked for the Lord’s guidance. I then walked to the floor of the U.S. Senate and announced, “I intend to speak in support of defunding Obamacare until I am no longer able to stand.”*

  I opened by noting that “all across this country, Americans are suffering because of Obamacare.” And yet politicians in Washington were not listening to the concerns of their constituents. They weren’t hearing the people with jobs lost or the people forced into part-time work. They had no answers for the people losing their health insurance, or the people who are struggling.

  With good reason, men and women across America believe that politicians get elected, go to Washington, and stop listening to them. This is the most common thing you hear from the man on the street, from Republicans, Democrats, Independents, and Libertarians: You’re not listening to me.

  The fight over Obamacare was an effort to change that. At the outset of my filibuster, I observed that “I hope to play some very small part in helping provide that voice for them.” And over the course of the next twenty-one hours, we used a new hashtag, #MakeDCListen, to help Americans communicate with those inside the Beltway. To date, it has received over a million mentions on Twitter.

  Before the filibuster began, I received some helpful advice from Rand Paul, who had recently delivered his own thirteen-hour filibuster on the use of drones against U.S. citizens. He said, “Number one, wear comfortable shoes. Number two, don’t drink a lot of water.”

  Rand didn’t follow his first piece of advice, because his filibuster had been unplanned. He said his feet hurt for two weeks afterward! But his recommendation put me in a bit of a moral quandary. Every day on the Senate floor up until that point, I had worn my argument boots—the same black, ostrich-skin cowboy boots I had worn before courts in Texas and before the U.S. Supreme Court.

  But even those boots can be uncomfortable when worn for that many hours in a row, so I went and bought a pair of black tennis shoes. During the filibuster I confessed to the American people that, to my great chagrin, I had taken the wimpy way out. But as the hours wore on and my legs began to cramp up, I was grateful for the tennis shoes.

  I also followed Rand’s second piece of advice; as he admitted later, his filibuster was defeated not by his legs but by his bladder. Senate lore suggests one alternative route, which was taken by the late Strom Thurmond in 1957 during his record-setting twenty-four-hour filibuster: Thurmond allegedly walked to the back of the Senate chamber and relieved himself into a bucket, while his feet remained planted on the Senate floor. There are many reasons why I followed Rand’s advice and drank only one small glass of water over the course of twenty-one hours, rather than following in the footsteps of Senator Thurmond. Among those reasons is C-SPAN.

  Indeed, the most frequent question I am asked about my filibuster is whether I had special provisions that enabled me to use the bathroom. Let me just say, having drunk only one small glass of water, I simply did not need to go.

  When you stand on your feet for twenty-one straight hours in defiance of the president, the Democratic Party, and even many in your own party, you find out who your friends are, who your adversaries are, and who’s in between.

  Over the course of the filibuster a number of allies stood by my side, none more courageously or indispensably than Senator Mike Lee. Mike was with me on the Senate floor during the entire course of the filibuster, from the beginning, through the dark of night, till the very end at high noon the next day. He repeatedly asked me questions that would fill twenty, thirty, or forty-five minutes to give my voice a rest so that I could resume the filibuster. Other supporters included the steady Kansan Pat Roberts; the fiercely conservative Alabaman Jeff Sessions; the Wyoming stalwart Mike Enzi; the Iowa senior statesman Chuck Grassley; and my friend and fellow Cuban-American Marco Rubio.

  Another tea party senator was notably less helpful. My friend Rand Paul came to the Senate floor to ask questions that seemed deliberately designed to undermine our efforts. He asked, “Do you want to shut down the government or would you like to find something to make Obamacare less bad?” And, “Will you accept a compromise? Will you work with the President?” His questions echoed the skeptical attacks of Mitch McConnell, and I marveled that Rand had decided not to be with us in this fight. Mike Lee is not an easily excitable guy, but he was so upset by this that I thought he was going to need a sedative.

  One of the most memorable aspects of the filibuster concerned my daughters. My two girls, Caroline and Catherine, are the loves of my life. They are precious balls of joy. Our family lives in Houston, and I commute back and forth every weekend. The single hardest aspect of my job is being away from them every week. It breaks my heart on Monday mornings when I walk out of the house and one girl grabs one leg, one girl grabs the other, and they say, “Don’t leave, Daddy.”

  Each night that I’m home, after they put on their pajamas and are ready for bed, I read them a story. So during my filibuster against Obamacare, I took the opportunity to do something I don’t usually get to do from Washington, D.C. At 7 p.m. Central time, right at their bedtime, I used C-SPAN to read them a pair of bedtime stories, before telling them good night.

  The first was a Bible story. The second was Dr. Seuss’s Green Eggs and Ham. The
delighted girls, in their pink PJs, got right up next to the television and giggled with glee.

  Now, my oldest daughter, Caroline, is a bit of a cynic. Absolutely nothing I have done in the Senate has impressed her . . . except for reading Green Eggs and Ham. When I came home afterward, Caroline looked at me with crossed arms. “Okay, Dad,” she said, “that was kind of cool.” We all enjoy small victories in life, and doing something that my then-kindergarten-aged daughter thought was “kind of cool” meant a lot to me.

  To this day, people all over the country bring me copies of Green Eggs and Ham to sign for them. When I was a child, it was my favorite story—the first I learned to read. (Actually, my mom was convinced I didn’t read it but simply memorized the words.)

  It is not surprising—or a bad thing—that among the parts of the filibuster that garnered the most attention were the bedtime stories, a Star Wars imitation, and a reference to a fast-food chain. The purpose was to highlight the harms caused by Obamacare, and by using humor, my remarks got heard by people who would never otherwise have listened. When Jon Stewart ridiculed them mercilessly (and hysterically), he also included a fair amount of the substance, that Obamacare was costing people jobs, health care, and their doctors. Likewise, the host of Saturday Night Live’s “Weekend Update” joked the next weekend, “Texas Senator Ted Cruz gave a twenty-one-hour speech on the floor of the Senate during which he read Dr. Seuss’s Green Eggs and Ham, did an impression of Darth Vader, and admitted his love for White Castle. I’m not sure what Cruz’s speech was arguing for, but I’m guessing legalizing weed.”

  Nearly five decades before there was a tea party movement to oppose Obamacare, there was a coffee party movement. It began in the early 1960s when doctors rallied together to try to save their profession and their patients from a federal takeover of the medical system.

  The doctors’ strategy was to enlist the most powerful allies they knew: their wives. Each of them would invite a group of friends over for coffee to hear a vinyl record with a ten-minute speech on it. The voice on the record belonged to the host of a weekly television drama called General Electric Theater. His name was Ronald Reagan.

  Toward the beginning of the record, Reagan noted that “most people are a little reluctant to oppose anything that suggests medical care for people who possibly can’t afford it.”1 But he explained that many of the people exploiting the public’s goodwill were really searching for “a mechanism for socialized medicine capable of indefinite expansion in every direction until it includes the entire population.”

  Reagan understood that there has always been a persistent embrace on the part of the left for socialized health care. It is for them the Holy Grail. But they are sailing into the winds of a freedom-loving public that knows that in every country where government takes over medicine, it has meant poor quality and fewer doctors. Socialized medicine has been tried around the world. And from Cuba to Great Britain, everywhere it has been tried it has proved an abject failure. Inevitably, it means low-quality care, rationed by bureaucrats getting between you and your doctor. Scarcity. Waiting periods. Denying individual choice and freedom is antithetical to the American way and our tradition of liberty.

  At times (as in Canada today) socialized medicine means waiting months or years to get an operation, because there are thousands of people ahead of you on a waiting list. At other times (as in France today) it means being told that your advanced age precludes you from receiving a hip replacement, because the government has decided that walking is for the young.

  Because the American public never did—and, I believe, never will—voluntarily choose the scarcity and rationing of socialized medicine, its proponents have always resorted to trickery, telling lies about the legislation they introduce and hiding their agenda for expanding it. For that reason the left doesn’t call it “socialized medicine.” They prefer the more innocuous, sterile term of a “single-payer system.” The “single-payer” is of course the government, which would then pay every doctor and health-care provider in the country. And when the government pays, it decides: what health care you receive; which doctor you see; how much is a fair price for a product or service in an elaborate scheme of wage and price controls.

  For nearly fifty years after the release of “Ronald Reagan Speaks Out Against Socialized Medicine,” Americans fought back against the statism that Reagan feared. Jimmy Carter’s efforts failed in the 1970s. So did Hillary Clinton’s in the 1990s. But in 2010, despite overwhelming opposition from the American people, President Barack Obama found just barely enough support in Congress, both houses of which were controlled by Democrats, to pass Obamacare.

  All of us remember President Obama looking at the television camera and saying, “If you like your health insurance plan, you can keep it. If you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor. Period.”

  This promise provided just enough political cover for Democratic legislators with moderate or conservative constituencies—like Arkansas and Louisiana—to vote for Obamacare. It was a promise that Obama repeated twenty-eight times while looking directly at the television cameras. And it was a promise that was flatly and unambiguously false. Indeed, it was in direct conflict with Obamacare’s purpose and plain text, which said that millions of preexisting policies were going to be rendered illegal.

  In its perpetual role as the praetorian guard of the Obama presidency, the New York Times has helpfully explained that President Obama simply “misspoke” when the falsehood was revealed. But one does not misspeak twenty-eight times. Nor is it “misspeaking” to deliberately and repeatedly state something that you know to be false.

  Jonathan Gruber, the self-described “architect” of Obamacare, later openly admitted that the law never would have passed if President Obama had told the truth about the fact that what was labeled a “penalty” for noncompliance was actually a tax. Gruber explained what the Obama team was cynically counting on: “And, basically, call it ‘the stupidity of the American voter,’ or whatever, but basically that was really, really critical to getting the thing to pass.”

  The edifice of lies on which Obamacare was built has by now been exposed at the expense of millions of Americans who have lost their health insurance, beginning with customers in the individual markets. More than six million of them have seen their health insurance taken away, have been informed that they can no longer see their doctors, or have seen their premiums grow by as much as 60, 70, and sometimes over 100 percent. In Texas, for example, a healthy, twenty-seven-year-old man in the individual market has already seen his premiums grow by more than 77 percent.

  The next people to feel the brunt of Obamacare are those in the small-group markets. In the coming years, more and more of the small-group clients will find their health insurance plans canceled and will be informed they can no longer see the doctors they have grown to trust.

  The final shoe to drop will be the pain inflicted on Americans employed by large companies. Roughly 100 million Americans get their health insurance from large-group employers, and as the costs of Obamacare rise and rise and rise, we will see more and more large-group employers cutting their health insurance and dumping all of their employees into the public exchanges, where they will suffer along with everybody else.

  You might be wondering whom, if anyone, is Obamacare even supposed to benefit? Well, all of this was ostensibly designed to extend health insurance to some portion of the people who didn’t have it. Not all of them, mind you. The Obama administration concedes that Obamacare will still leave some 26 million Americans without health insurance. But, the estimates go, in time as many as 14 million new people will get some insurance.

  That’s a good thing. But how would the American people have reacted if President Obama had said, In order to extend insurance to 14 million people, we’re going to jeopardize the health insurance of about 200 million Americans? Many of you will lose your policies, and your doctors. Others will see your premiums skyrocket. That is the absurd bargain at the heart of Obamac
are. That’s why Gruber noted, rightly, that it could be passed only through deception.

  You might also be wondering how the Obama administration thought they would get away with this disaster. I think their intention was simply to blame insurance companies when people started seeing their health insurance plans canceled. Liberals excel at vilifying the business sector, and the more they can demonize private-sector insurers, the more leverage they believe they will have for continuing to move toward the Holy Grail of the left that Ronald Reagan warned against in 1961—a single-payer, government-funded, socialized health-care system.

  There is a rich irony here, in that the large insurance companies eagerly embraced this radical agenda. They were lured into bed with Obamacare by the government’s promise to force every American to buy the insurers’ product, which would then be subsidized by the government. It reminds one of Lenin’s famous observation: “The capitalists will sell us the rope with which we will hang them.”2

  Obamacare is not only responsible for costing millions of Americans their health insurance. It has also cost millions their jobs. In an era in which 93 million Americans are not working due in large part to a host of job killers authored by Barack Obama, Obamacare is the biggest job killer of them all.

  Time and again, I have sat at small business roundtables in communities all across Texas. I generally begin by asking the small business owners to introduce themselves and to share an issue that is weighing on their hearts. Invariably, and without prompting, more than half the people there will name Obamacare as the single greatest impediment their businesses are facing.