A Time for Truth: Reigniting the Promise of America

by Ted Cruz

  It was a chilling answer, especially from someone purporting to be concerned about improving health care. He didn’t help his cause when he condescendingly added, “To have someone of your intelligence suggest such a thing maybe means you’re irresponsible and reckless.”

  If Washington Republicans had actually been playing to win, they would have welcomed the national debate with Reid about why he was going to hold hostage a child with cancer in order to force Obamacare on the American people. They would have aired Reid’s statement in television commercials around the country. But they didn’t do it, because Republican leadership didn’t want to win.

  Some readers might think that sounds a little harsh. You might assume they wanted to win, but just couldn’t. Their behavior suggested otherwise.

  Leadership showed their true intentions about midway through the shutdown. We were getting pounded on television (including by about twenty Senate Republicans) and leadership was doing nothing to put the heat on the Democrats. Nor did they do any polling to even try to see how we could win. So I decided to spend my own political money on national polling. The results were unsurprising: Republicans largely blamed Democrats for the shutdown, and Democrats blamed Republicans.

  But, critically, Independents were nearly evenly divided (with just 6 points differential). And fully 22 percent of Independents were undecided. We tested multiple messages, and the polling showed that undecided Independents (and Democrats) swung sharply our way if they heard the following: “Republicans are working hard to fund government priorities, but Democrats are refusing to compromise or negotiate.”

  When the Senate Republican leadership grudgingly gave me a few minutes at our caucus’s lunch to review the results of the poll, I explained that the numbers showed this was a strong winning message. Even if they were unhappy to be where we were, I urged, it was in all of our interests to win this battle.

  The very next day, at a strategy session among the Senate Republicans, our leadership stood up and instructed Republicans to go on television with the following message: Harry Reid and the Senate Democrats are negotiating with us to compromise and end the shutdown.

  Not only was this messaging not productive; it was the exact same message that Reid would have asked us to carry if he had looked at our polling.

  At every stage in the battle to defund Obamacare I said that a compromise was possible, and a compromise would be anything that provided meaningful relief to the millions of men and women suffering under that most misguided of social experiments. Several weeks after the filibuster, I hoped President Obama would begin to discuss a solution when he invited Senate Republicans to the White House to discuss the shutdown. But I wasn’t optimistic. This was not a president who plays well with others, including his own party in Congress, most of whom he ignores. It seemed unlikely that his invitation to the White House was an invitation to find common ground.

  Nevertheless, I trooped dutifully up Pennsylvania Avenue and sat respectfully in the East Room of the White House with my Republican colleagues. President Obama entered the room and began one of the most bizarre meetings I’ve ever been in. He announced: I just want you to know I will not negotiate. I will not compromise. I will not give in on anything. The government will remain shut down until you agree to everything I want.

  I’ve never seen anyone ask someone else to come over, only to explain that he’s not willing to discuss, negotiate, or compromise on anything. But then again, we never have seen a president like Barack Obama.

  The president was clearly on the same page with Harry Reid. He knew his media lapdogs would report that it was Republicans who were refusing to compromise. He knew the Democrats in Congress cared nothing about keeping the shutdown going as long as possible. And he knew the Republican leadership in the Senate would give him everything he wanted.

  That’s exactly what happened. On October 16, 2013, the Republican Senate leadership agreed to fund Obamacare in exchange for . . . nothing. Later that night, both houses of Congress voted for this surrender, which did nothing to protect the American people from Obamacare. The next day, President Obama signed it into law.

  Fifty-two years after concerned Americans at coffee parties had listened to Ronald Reagan warn against socialized medicine, the radical left was now one step closer to its Holy Grail of a single-payer, government-run socialized health-care system.

  The Obamacare defund fight could have turned out differently. Imagine, if you will, the entire fight with one minor detail changed: Imagine what would have happened if Republican Senate leadership had simply decided . . . let’s support House Republicans. We may not like it, but let’s stand together as Republicans, against the Democrats and against Obamacare.

  With that one small change, we would have been able to focus at the outset on red-state Democrats. We would have been able to target ads, focusing on their blocking funding for veterans and cancer funding and a host of other vital priorities. We could have worked to energize the grassroots in their states to light up the phones to those Democrats.

  And, if we had done so, there’s a good chance quite a few of them would have gone to Harry Reid and said, “Get us out of this. We’re getting killed back home. Unless you want to lose the majority, let’s compromise.”

  Admittedly, unless it had gone perfectly, it probably wouldn’t have stopped Obamacare altogether. But the odds are significant that we would have been able to achieve real, meaningful relief for the millions who have been hurt by this disastrous law.

  But that didn’t happen.

  Even so, the battle accomplished a great deal. At the time, nearly every pundit in D.C. said that the shutdown would doom Republicans, that the Obamacare fight would ensure that Harry Reid remained majority leader.

  They were wrong. Even with leadership undercutting us, the defund fight did something remarkable: It elevated the national debate over Obamacare. It highlighted the millions of Americans who were losing their jobs, being forced into part-time work, losing their health insurance, losing their doctors, and facing skyrocketing premiums. And it made clear that it wasn’t because of nefarious insurance companies (the Obama administration’s original culprit, upon whom they intended to blame the cancellations); it was because of this failed law.

  In November 2014, Republicans won a historic victory at the polls. We won more seats in the House than any year since the 1920s. We won nine new Senate seats, and retired Harry Reid as majority leader. And the number-one issue that Republican candidates campaigned upon—the top subject of campaign ads across the country—was Obamacare.

  Did it occur to anyone in Washington that our winning a tsunami of an election focused on Obamacare maybe, just maybe, was a direct result of our having energized and mobilized millions of Americans against it? Not for a moment.

  But it’s true nonetheless. And, even more important, I believe we’ve laid the predicate for ultimately repealing this law. As a result of the amazing efforts of the grassroots, of our working so hard to highlight the immense harms, support for Obamacare has plummeted. In November 2014, Gallup found that just 37 percent of Americans approved of Obamacare.

  In March 2014, Pew found that 53 percent of Hispanics disapproved of Obamacare. And in December, a Fox poll showed that 57 percent of women disapproved of Obamacare, and 60 percent of young people (under 35) likewise disapproved.

  This is going to be a central issue—if not the central issue—in the next election. And as a result of the tremendous mobilization of the grassroots—and our winning the substantive argument that the law is failing badly—I am convinced that, come 2017, a Republican president will sign legislation repealing every word of it.

  We need real health care reform. But it should expand competition and empower patients, and disempower government bureaucrats from getting between us and our doctors. We should allow people to purchase insurance across state lines (which is currently illegal), which will in turn create a fifty-state national marketplace for low-cost catastrophic coverage. If
you want more coverage, you want more choices and lower costs. Obamacare gives us fewer choices and higher costs.

  We should expand health savings accounts, so we can save in a tax-advantaged manner for routine healthcare and prevention. And we should make health insurance portable, so it goes with you from job to job, which goes a long way to eliminating the problem of preexisting conditions. High-risk pools at the state level can solve the rest of that problem.

  Personal, portable, and affordable. That should be where we go after repealing Obamacare.

  But if it’s up to Washington, to the career politicians in both parties, that will never happen. That’s why changing Washington—empowering the grassroots to demand something different—is so incredibly important.

  * Some pundits quibble over whether my speech was technically a “filibuster.” A traditional filibuster cannot be stopped by another senator, because the speaker has control of the Senate floor. But Majority Leader Harry Reid had the floor locked up under preexisting time agreements. It could be weeks before the floor was open and a senator could rise unimpeded. And time was of the essence: Obamacare was set to kick in on September 30. We had to impact the debate before then, so I took the floor pursuant to an agreement that Reid would get it back no later than noon the next day, a little more than twenty-one hours hence.

  CHAPTER 10

  Obama’s Vacuum of Leadership

  Only 250 miles separate Cairo and Jerusalem—roughly the distance between Washington D.C. and New York City—and yet in the late autumn of 1977, the two cities couldn’t have been farther apart.

  When the Egyptian president’s plane touched down for a historic visit to Ben-Gurion Airport, Egypt and Israel had been at war for decades. The last conflict, the Yom Kippur War, mushroomed into a regional conflagration that killed ten thousand and left many more casualties. By the time the guns went silent, Israel occupied Egyptian territory in the Sinai Peninsula, and a state of war endured. Only the slightest provocation on either side might invite more bloodshed and more death.

  Which was what made the visit—after the sun had set and Sabbath had ended on Saturday, November 19, 1977—so stunning to the rest of the world.

  When his feet touched the tarmac, Anwar Sadat, a trim, serious man with a black mustache and a receding hairline, had become the first Arab leader ever to visit the Jewish state in its entire existence. The dramatic pilgrimage was the culmination of months of secret negotiations.

  The following day, President Anwar Sadat prayed at the al-Aqsa Mosque on the Temple Mount, visited the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and the national Holocaust museum, called Yad Vashem. Then he turned to the real business of the visit, a historic address to the Israeli parliament that only weeks ago seemed unimaginable.

  “I come to you today on solid ground to shape a new life and to establish peace,” Sadat said. “But to be absolutely frank with you, I took this decision after long thought, knowing that it constitutes a great risk.”

  It was a historic overture to peace, and what began that day in the Knesset would be consummated at the White House in 1979 with a historic peace treaty between Israel and Egypt. Sadat would also turn his country away from the Soviet Union and toward an enduring alliance with the West. Forging ties with the Jewish state and the West would earn Sadat enduring hatred in the Arab world, especially among Islamist radicals committed to Israel’s destruction. Back in Cairo, the Muslim Brotherhood and its affiliated Islamist groups marched against Sadat’s supposed betrayal.

  On October 6, 1981, a radicalized Muslim officer broke formation in a presidential military parade in Cairo, reached for grenades from under his helmet, and threw them at Sadat. The Egyptian president died from his wounds several hours later.

  Sadat risked his life, and sadly lost it, because he had the courage to speak the truth about the need for peace with Israel. He stood against the radical Islamists for whom nothing less than the destruction of the Jewish state was satisfactory. But his act of vision and courage still echoes through the Middle East.

  On January 21, 2009, Hillary Rodham Clinton was sworn in as the nation’s sixty-seventh secretary of state.* Standing alongside President Obama, the new secretary vowed to bring American “smart power” to bear on the problems of the world. Four years later, she left office with America’s international standing in tatters. In the years since, the situation has deteriorated even further.

  Our world is far more dangerous now than it was when President Obama took office. His Nobel Peace Prize notwithstanding, peace is receding today faster than it has in a generation. President Obama and Secretary Clinton projected weakness, and weakness has proven provocative. Today, Russian president Vladimir Putin is on the march in Ukraine and eyeing the Baltic states. China is making an aggressive effort to exert global power by intimidating U.S. allies and demanding new territorial concessions, from South Korea to Japan to the Philippines to Taiwan and Singapore. Cuba is exporting arms to North Korea.

  Consider the example of Egypt, which in the years since Sadat has grappled with violence, chaos, and extremism. Across the globe, there are hundreds of millions of peaceful Muslims, but a committed minority are using radical Islam to promote murder, torture, and barbarity. In recent months, there was a leader who courageously took rhetorical aim at the radicals corrupting the Islamic faith and posing a danger to the free world. That leader, sadly, was not an American president.

  Though it barely registered in Western newspapers, on the first day of 2015, General Abdul Fattah al-Sisi spoke out about the need to confront the radicals within the Islamic faith. The Egyptian president, himself a Muslim, called for “a religious revolution.” He challenged his fellow Islamic leaders to stand against the radicals who use their faith to kill innocents. “It’s inconceivable that the thinking that we hold most sacred should cause Muslims worldwide to be a source of anxiety, danger, killing and destruction for the rest of the world,” he said. While al-Sisi may not be a champion of democracy, his initiative and courage is keeping the Muslim Brotherhood at bay. And, like Sadat, he is bravely risking his life to speak the truth.

  Ironically, five years earlier, President Obama also spoke in Cairo—and at the very same institution. But his message was nearly the reverse. His remarks, called “A New Beginning,” were widely seen in the Arab world as aligning the United States with the Muslim Brotherhood.1 In effect, he apologized for America’s role in the region before his presidency and seemed to share the grievances of the anti-American radicals who, only months later, would topple the Egyptian government.

  In the months and years of chaos that followed the so-called Arab Spring, the terrorist group ISIS reclaimed much of Iraq, crucifying Christians, beheading journalists, and imposing a reign of terror. And Iran continued its relentless pursuit of nuclear weapons.

  There was also the matter of four dead Americans at the U.S. compound in Benghazi, Libya: Ambassador Chris Stevens, the first U.S. ambassador killed on duty since the Carter years; foreign service officer Sean Smith; and retired Navy SEALs Tyrone Woods and Glen Doherty. The September 11, 2012, attack on the Benghazi compound was coordinated and carried out by radical Islamic terrorists. Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta testified to the Senate that he knew “immediately” that it was a terrorist attack. And yet for weeks President Obama and Secretary Clinton insisted instead that it was a spontaneous protest over an Internet video.

  The administration’s feckless response to Benghazi was emblematic of President Obama’s long-standing approach to radical Islamic terrorism—three words that almost never enter his vocabulary in the same sentence. In his worldview, the real root problem behind terrorism is disaffected youth who have been antagonized by American and Western imperialism. He and his administration dogmatically refuse to call terrorism “Islamic” or “Islamist,” nor will they reference “jihad.”

  Thus, when a jihadist gunned down killed down fourteen people at Fort Hood, Texas, the administration called it “workplace violence.” When Islamists murd
ered Jews in a kosher deli in Paris, Obama described their anti-Semitic rampage as simply “random” violence. When ISIS beheaded twenty-one Coptic Christians, the White House suggested it was merely because they were “Egyptian citizens.” To the contrary, they were murdered because of their faith, and, as Pope Francis powerfully observed, “their blood confesses Christ.”

  It is impossible to defeat an enemy when you can’t even admit that it exists.

  Of all the national security threats facing America, none is greater than the continued efforts of Iran to acquire nuclear weapons capability. And yet, instead of acting resolutely to ensure that can never happen, President Obama has relaxed sanctions and entered extended negotiations that have dramatically increased the chances of a nuclear Iran. The president’s deputy national security advisor, Ben Rhodes, has described an Iranian nuclear deal as “probably the biggest thing President Obama will do in his second term on foreign policy.” He compared it to Obamacare, for the second term. (I think he meant that as a compliment.)

  Toward that end, Obama has encouraged a “new beginning” with Iran, where since 1979 Shiite mullahs have forged one of the world’s most brutal, anti-American tyrannies. Indeed, Iran has for thirty years positioned itself as the implacable foe of America and our allies. Every year on “Death to America Day”—yes, that’s an actual day—the Iranian government celebrates the anniversary of the hostage-taking at the U.S. embassy in Tehran. Iran has also functioned as a leading state sponsor of terrorism, overseeing deadly attacks from Beirut to Buenos Aires. And even under severe economic sanctions that crippled the economy, the mullahs have been pursuing both nuclear weapons and the short- and long-range missiles to deliver them against such sworn enemies as Israel, which the Iranians have vowed to erase from the earth.