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A source in Congress tells Breitbart News that Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and Senate Minority Whip John Cornyn are using their leadership positions to pressure other Republicans to oppose Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) in his campaign to defund Obamacare. "Right now in the Senate, Mitch McConnell and John Cornyn are actively whipping Senators to shut down debate on the House continuing resolution so that Harry Reid can gut it with just 51 votes,” a senior congressional staffer with intimate knowledge of the situation said in an email to Breitbart News. “Unbelievably, they actually are leading the fight to fully...

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) broke with Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) on Monday, revealing that he won't filibuster legislation to fund the government in service of conservative goals to defund Obamacare. The Republican leader's decision is a major blow to the push by Cruz and powerful conservative activist groups, who wanted Republicans to unite and filibuster a continuing resolution until Democrats caved agreed to gut funding for the Affordable Care Act. "Senator McConnell supports the House Republicans' bill and will not vote to block it, since it defunds Obamacare and funds the government without increasing spending by a penny,"...

Don’t be fooled by this political theater going on in Washington, DC. The fix is in and both sides are trying to fund ObamaCare while saving face. The whole of House Republican Leadership thinks you are stupid. They have passed a bill that they know will be changed by Harry Reid before it goes back to the House in a few days. The smoking gun will happen when Boehner allows a Senate passed government funding measure to come up in the House minus the provision defunding ObamaCare. You wait and see. Also, know that Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell is...

Video at link.

A Morning Joe kind of Republican? With Joe Scarborough absent today, was Nicolle Wallace assuming the role of the Republican who gets more satisfaction from ripping fellow members of her party than in criticizing Democrats? Wallace mocked congressional Republicans who are trying to defund ObamaCare, analogizing them to two-year olds on scooters racing into traffic against a red light. She suggested that the "adults" in the party need to restrain them. View the video here.

Faced with a politically risky push by some Republicans to defund ObamaCare, other party members are turning to an alternative strategy: delay it instead. Republicans are divided on how to confront the Affordable Care Act. Some, such as Sens. Ted Cruz of Texas and Mike Lee of Utah, are pushing to permanently defund it. But attaching such a measure to a resolution that funds the government after Oct. 1 runs the risk of a government shutdown if it doesn’t pass. If that happens, Republicans fear they would be blamed. Former White House chief of staff Karl Rove told Fox News...

As the deadline to fund the federal government nears, Republican leaders are struggling mightily to come up with legislation that can pass the House. Over the weekend, leadership staffers fired off anxious e-mails and uneasy veteran House members exchanged calls. Both camps fear that a shutdown is increasingly likely — and they blame the conservative movement’s cottage industry of pressure groups. But these organizations, ensconced in Northern Virginia office parks and elsewhere, aren’t worried about the establishment’s ire. In fact, they welcome it. Business has boomed since the push to defund Obamacare caught on. Conservative activists are lighting up social...

When Trader Joe's announced it was dropping health benefits for part-time workers, it reassured them that they'd be no worse off as a result. "We believe that with the $500 from Trader Joe's and the tax credits available under the (Affordable Care Act), many of you should be able to obtain health care coverage at very little if any net cost to you," noted CEO Dan Bane in a memo to employees revealed this week. In other words, Trader Joe's — like some other companies — has decided to shift its health care costs onto federal taxpayers via the subsidized...

A new CNN poll is out. Strikingly, it shows that only 39% of Americans support all or most of Obamacare, which is drastically below the 51% mark the same polling found at the beginning of the year. More and more Americans see themselves, their family members, and friends losing jobs, losing benefits, and losing security. But Republicans refuse to fight to defund the legislation. We are reduced again to Senator Mitch McConnell engaged in head pats for conservatives designed to generate seal claps from activists. Senators McConnell, along with Senators Cornyn of Texas, Coburn of Oklahoma, Coats of Indiana, Alexander...

A document House Majority Leader Eric Cantor distributed to all House Republicans on Tuesday, obtained by Breitbart News, confirms that he is planning to make it appear as though the House is voting to defund Obamacare while using a legislative procedural trick which would allow the Democrat-controlled Senate to strip defunding language from the Continuing Resolution. * * *

The federal government granted Indiana a year-long Obamacare waiver on Tuesday, allowing the state to continue to run its own Medicaid pilot program, The Washington Post reports. Indiana, along with Iowa and Arkansas, requested major exemptions from the law, and is the first state to receive one. “Securing a waiver to continue the Healthy Indiana Plan is a victory for Hoosiers enrolled in this innovative program and will ensure that Indiana remains at the forefront of consumer-driven healthcare in the United States,” Republican Gov. Mike Pence said in a statement. Pence will now consider expanding Medicaid under the state’s “Healthy...

Eric Cantor is always looking for new and imaginative ways to screw conservatives. He has Pete Sessions (R-TX), as Rules Chairman, helping him with his latest creative way to screw conservatives. I’ve already well documented Pete Sessions’s increasingly bitter attitude toward Ted Cruz and staggering contempt of his own constituents who want to defund Obamacare. Cantor and Sessions’ latest idea tops even his most absurd shenanigans. The plan is to pass the real CR that fully funds Obamacare, then pass a fake bill that defunds Obamacare. The Senate will pass the CR, and throw the defunding bill in the garbage....

Text of the Continuing Resolution (CR) that will fund the government for 60-75 days will be released on Tuesday, the conservative source said, before a House vote on Thursday. The move comes abruptly as conservatives are ramping up their final push on House leadership with a big Tea Party rally outside the Capitol on Tuesday calling for Obamacare’s defunding.House Speaker John Boehner’s spokesman Michael Steel told Breitbart News the “CR will include defunding ObamaCare,” but would not specify whether or not a certain procedural “trick” the GOP leadership used in a similar situation in 2011 will be employed yet again.Breitbart...

Louisiana Republican Rep. Bill Cassidy might be feeling some empathy for Mitt Romney after a challenger has compared his past health care bills to Obamacare. On Wednesday, Rob Maness, who is running against Cassidy in the 2014 Senate race, coined the term “Cassidycare,” attacking the congressman for bills he proposed as a state senator that bear similarities to some of the components of the Affordable Care Act. The two are challenging Sen. Mary Landrieu, a Democrat who has represented the Bayou State since 1997. “Mary Landrieu was the deciding vote on Obamacare through the Senate but Mr. Bill Cassidy, who...

<p>110,000 current and soon to be eligible retirees working for IBM woke up to an unpleasant surprise this morning, when the WSJ reported that as a result of soaring healthcare costs, the tech bellwether giant will be terminating its company-sponsored health plan and instead giving (soon to be former) beneficiaries a lump sum payment to buy coverage on a health-exchange: a move which the WSJ characterized as indicating that employers are unlikely to keep providing the once-common benefits as medical costs continue to rise. The reason why all IBM retirees will have to find alternative, third-party, retirement coverage upon hitting the Medicare eligible age of 65 is that "IBM said the growing cost of care makes its current plan unsustainable without big premium increases." And to avoid those premium increases, the costs will find a clearing price either in a private exchange (supposedly competitive, realistically monopolistic), or will end up commingled with other public healthcare funding. End result: IBM benefits, everyone else loses.</p>

Health Reform: More bad news for Obama-Care this week: Another state announced huge rate increases, and another labor union rebelled over the harm it will do to members. Yet, this train wreck just keeps on rolling. ObamaCare may very well be the worst law ever passed by the federal government in the history of the U.S. The public didn't want it in the first place — going so far as to elect a Republican senator in solidly Democratic Massachusetts to try to stop it — and they've hated it ever since. The latest IBD/TIPP poll finds that just 38% want...

Turning back the clock to 2012, President Barack Obama took a shot at defeated rival Mitt Romney. Speaking about how funding education ought to be a bipartisan idea during remarks in Scranton, Pa., Obama suggested the same should be the case with his signature health care law. “These are ideas that should have bipartisan support,” Obama said of his education priorities. “Of course, so should Obamacare, it’s actually a really good idea. It’s going to work. It used to be a Republican idea. There’s a governor of Massachusetts who set it up. It’s working well.”

Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers, number 4 in House GOP Leadership, said the effort by conservatives to defund ObamaCare is "not realistic." She advocated a piece-meal approach to repeal, delay or defund individual provisions of the sweeping health care overhaul. The debate will likely dominate discussions within the Republican caucus when Congress returns next month. “To get the entire bill repealed, or defunded, is probably not realistic,” McMorris Rodgers said. “But I do think there are provisions in the law that we can get delayed, or provisions in the law we can get defunded.” The government's spending authority expires on September...

Via the Daily Caller. No surprise that he feels this way, but I believe his comments here are the first time he’s pooh-poohed a shutdown publicly. Which, in itself, tells you what a terrible idea the GOP leadership thinks it is: McConnell’s desperate to pander to tea partiers in hopes of avoiding a serious primary challenge in Kentucky next year but the thought of a shutdown is simply a bridge too far, even though he’s getting killed for it on sites like Red State. In fact, John Cornyn, McConnell’s deputy in the Senate leadership and another guy who’s terrified of...

The chairman of the House Budget Committee says there's a better way of repealing President Barack Obama's health care law than shutting down the government this fall — a path some Republican conservatives are backing. “We, all Republicans, want to repeal and replace Obamacare. … We’re having a debate about the best way of achieving that goal, the best strategy,” Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) said Sunday on CBS News’s “Face the Nation.” Ryan, who was the GOP vice presidential nominee in 2012, pointed out that a government shutdown wouldn't impact entitlements, including Obamacare. “Rather than sort of-swinging for the fences...