Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) made a few wise cracks over the weekend, including a joke drawing on Sen. Ted Cruz’s (R-TX) previous statement that he would throw himself in front of a train “to stop anything short of” Obamacare’s complete repeal.
“That idea has some merit to it,” McConnell joked Saturday at an Alfalfa Club dinner, according to The New York Times.
At an event in Willis, Texas, in 2012, Cruz said “I’ll throw my body in front of a train to stop anything short of its complete and total repeal,” referring to Obamacare.
Those comments and the joke by McConnell point to the internal GOP fighting over how to fight Obamacare in 2013 and the early part of 2014. Conservative outside groups like the Senate Conservatives Fund that’s aligned with Cruz pushed lawmakers to fight Obamacare even if it meant a government shutdown.
McConnell, no fan of Obamacare himself, still ended up tussling with those groups and becoming a primary target of the hard right for not embracing the any-lengths-imaginable approach to fighting the healthcare law.
