Oklahoma Republican Sen. Tom Coburn criticized Texas’ Sen. Ted Cruz for misleading the American people over Obamacare.
“To create the impression that we can actually defund Obamacare, when the only thing we control, and barely, is the House of Representatives, is not intellectually honest,” Coburn said on Thursday’s Morning Joe.
Coburn was highly critical of Cruz’ effort to defund Obamacare over the last few months. No budget defunding Obamacare would ever pass the Senate, let alone be signed by the healthcare bill’s namesake president, he said repeatedly, so Cruz’ efforts were really just hurting Republicans and misleading the public.
Coburn said Cruz’s talk-a-thon was great—“he spent some time talking to the American people”—but challenged him for doing so on a false pretense.
“The problem with politics is if you create expectations you can’t fulfill, that leads to disappointment,” Coburn said. “Our biggest problem in our country is that people don’t have any confidence in our future, they don’t have any confidence in the leadership, they don’t have any confidence in the politicians–a lot of the institutions they don’t have confidence in. We need to have leadership that pulls us back together and restores confidence, not divides us.”
Jane Timm