About a month ago, before the government shut down and we approached default, Businessweek ran a cover article titled Jim DeMint, Congressional Republicans Shadow Speaker. The article discusses the influence Jim DeMint, a former Republican senator, who left the Senate in January to run the Heritage Foundation. Heritage is one of the partisan think tanks we were discussing the other day.
This summer he proposed a radical idea:
These days he’s selling the idea that it’s not too late to kill the health-care law. In each city, hundreds and sometimes thousands of true believers crammed into hotel ballrooms to hear him explain how, with enough pressure on legislators, Congress could be persuaded to withhold funding for the law and thereby halt it before public enrollment begins on Oct. 1. “The House holds the purse strings,” DeMint told his crowds. If Republicans keep them cinched, he promised, the law would fail.
DeMint got Sen. Cruz to support the idea, and it took off from there:
DeMint assumes that Republicans have leverage because funding for the federal government will run out on Sept. 30, and if Congress doesn’t pass a continuing resolution to keep the government open, it will shut down the next day. That’s an outcome neither party wants, but one DeMint calculates Obama would do almost anything to avoid—including making concessions on his signature law. So in August, as the defund tour wended its way through the country, DeMint was pitching the idea of a continuing resolution that funds everything except Obamacare. Scores of Republican congressmen and senators signed on, including Texas Senator Ted Cruz, who joined DeMint onstage in Dallas to endorse the idea.
While we now know the outcome of the whole debacle, it is worth noting that the idea came not from a member of Congress, but from DeMint. This is yet another example of the influence think tanks, interest groups, and lobbyists have over our representatives.
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