The Senate Deal to Fund ObamaCare: See How Your Members of Congress Voted Here!

Tonight, both the House and Senate voted on a Continuing Resolution that funds our government through January 15th of next year.  This deal also raises the debt ceiling through February 2014, and requires that both chambers go to conference on passing a budget resolution.

What the deal conpicuously lacks is anything that at all affects ObamaCare. The average American citizen is still subject to the full force of the law’s mandate that they buy health insurance or pay a fine.  Meanwhile, Congress, big business, and thousands of connected companies who received waivers are immune to these mandates for at least a year.

With the health insurance exchange websites imploding, and with ObamaCare being implemented completely unfairly, there has never been a better opportunity to unite both parties around stopping – at least temporarily – the implementation of this massive government intrusion in our health care. 

Instead, this deal achieved nothing.  Nothing, because Republican leadership was busier attacking Mike Lee, Ted Cruz, Mark Meadows, and Tom Graves (and many other principled conservatives) than they were about actually fighting the unpopular, unworkable, unfair, and unaffordable “Affordable Care Act”.

In particular, while the House was holding strong by passing Continuing Resolutions that funded all of the government but ObamaCare, many Republican members of the Senate decided to publicly oppose the efforts of defund or delay ObamaCare. With their help, this raw deal passed cloture in the Senate, 83-16.  The Republican Senators who voted to give up and fund ObamaCare were:

Lamar Alexander (TN)

Kelly Ayotte (NH)

John Barrasso (WY)

Roy Blunt (MO)

John Boozman (AR)

Richard Burr (NC)

Saxby Chambliss (GA)

Jeff Chiesa (NJ)

Dan Coats (IN)

Tom Coburn (OK)

Thad Cochran (MS)

Susan Collins (ME)

Bob Corker (TN)

Deb Fischer (NE)

Jeff Flake (AZ)

Lindsey Graham (SC)

Orrin Hatch (UT)

John Hoeven (ND)

Johnny Isakson (GA)

Mike Johanns (NE)

Mark Kirk (IL)

John McCain (AZ)

Mitch McConnell (KY)

Jerry Moran (KS)

Lisa Murkowski (AK)

Rob Portman (OH)

Tim Scott (SC)

John Thune (SD)

Roger Wicker (MS)

(NOTE: There was also a second, “final passage” vote on the bill. All of the above-named Senators voted “yes” on final passage except for Tom Coburn (OK) and Tim Scott (SC). These two senators, in effect, hedged their bets, voting on both sides of the issue, although they will argue that they were just voting to call up the bill so that they could vote against it. This argument isn’t persuasive, however, because everyone knew the bill would pass with an overwhelming majority. The cloture vote was the critical vote, and Coburn and Scott voted the wrong way, from FreedomWorks’ perspective.)

In the House, the deal passed, 285-144, with 87 Republicans joining 198 Democrats to fund ObamaCare and increase the national debt limit.  Click HERE to see how your Representative voted. 

If ObamaCare is allowed to take full effect on January 1st, 2014, those Republicans who voted to concede and allow the law to be fully funded will be as culpable for the harm it will inflict upon Americans as the Democrats they claimed to oppose.