Oklahoma Senator Tom Coburn throws cold water all over Sen. Mike Lee’s desire to defund Obamacare, saying the Senate doesn’t have the political power to make it happen.
Coburn, appearing on CBS’s Face the Nation, told host Bob Schieffer that the GOP won’t allow a shutdown of the government over Obamacare.
“We do not have the political power to do this,” he said on Sunday. He chalked up the existence of the movement, led in the Senate by Republican senators Ted Cruz and Mike Lee, to a “tremendous demand among special interests” to dismantle the president’s signature legislation.
Coburn, a physician, maintained that Republicans will not allow a government sutdown over the issue of Obamacare and, more importantly, simply don’t have the votes to do so. “We are not about to shut the government down over the fact that we cannot, only controlling one house of Congress, tell the president that we are not going to fund any portion of this, because we can’t do that.”
Here’s the video:
