Find Out How Your Lawmakers Voted on Government Spending Bill That Averts Shutdown and Funds Planned Parenthood (check out who is authorizing the murder of our babies.)

The bill passed easily in the Senate 78-20.

Mitch McConnell should be forced to resignl.

Ted Cruz: GOP Leadership Won’t Fight to End Planned Parenthood’s Federal Funding

Senator Ted Cruz, R-Texas, criticized GOP leadership for failing to mount a fight to end taxpayer funding for Planned Parenthood.

Sen. Ted Cruz delivered a blistering critique of Republican leadership Thursday, just hours before lawmakers held what he described as a “show vote” attempting to end Planned Parenthood’s taxpayer funding.

The Texas Republican summoned a handful of reporters, including The Daily Signal, to his Senate office to blast his own party for surrendering on the issue before even attempting to fight President Barack Obama and Democrats.

“The reason why Republicans always lose these fights is because Republicans assume Barack Obama is the Terminator—he will never stop, he will never give up—and Republicans surrender at the outset,” Cruz said.

A short time later, Republicans failed to overcome a Democrat-led filibuster of Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s short-term government spending bill. The plan included a one-year prohibition on funding Planned Parenthood.

Planned Parenthood, America’s largest abortion provider, is engulfed in a controversy stemming from a series of undercover videos about the harvesting and sale of body parts from aborted children.

Cruz has led the fight in the Senate against Planned Parenthood’s $500 million in taxpayer funding. He attributed its failure to Republican leadership’s decision to rule out a government shutdown.

“From a Democrat’s perspective,” Cruz said, “why would you let an appropriations bill pass if you can just wait until the end of the fiscal year, come right up to the edge of the cliff, and know Republican leadership will surrender? You don’t even have to guess on it. They promised you from the outset.”

This isn’t the first time Cruz finds himself amid a fight with leadership over a government shutdown. Two years ago, he rallied conservatives in their quest to defund Obamacare. The government closed for 16 days.

Cruz said Republicans failed to learn from that experience. The following year, he noted, many Republicans campaigned against Obamacare, and the GOP won a landslide election to take control of the Senate and expand its majority in the House.

“In 2013, when we were fighting against Obamacare, all the Washington graybeards went on television and said over and over again, ‘This is a catastrophic mistake. This will hurt Republicans.’ The Wall Street Journal opined that Cruz is the minority maker,” he told reporters.

“Not only did it not happen, it was exactly the opposite. It was one of the most overwhelming tidal-wave victories in history. And the No. 1 issue … was Obamacare,” Cruz said. “And it does not occur to Republican leadership there is any possible connection between energizing and mobilizing millions of Americans across this country and then winning a tidal-wave election on that exact issue in the very next election.”

Following the failure of Thursday’s plan to cut off Planned Parenthood funding, Cruz expects the Senate to abandon the abortion fight and move to a measure that Democrats will support. The same thing has played out before—in 2013 on Obamacare, last year with the so-called “CRomnibus,” and earlier this year with funding for Obama’s executive actions on immigration.

Cruz called Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi the de facto leaders of Congress for their ability to control the agenda. Republican leadership, he said, should take a lesson from their playbook.

“Republicans need to act like Republicans. Leadership needs to lead. Together,” Cruz said, “we need to actually honor the commitments we made to the men and women who elected us.”

Cruz said this is a point that he stresses to his Senate colleagues. They wonder, he said, why Americans are dissatisfied with Congress—and Republicans in particular. A Fox News poll released this week, for example, asked Republican voters if they think the GOP-led Congress is doing all it can to block Obama’s agenda. Two-thirds (66 percent) said no. In the same poll, 51 percent of all voters said they felt betrayed by politicians from their own party.

“You want to understand why people are mind-explodingly furious with Washington?” Cruz said. “Republican leadership has handed all of their authority to Barack Obama and Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi.”

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151 House Republicans voted against the spending bill. On the last day of the fiscal year, Congress approved a short-term spending measure that keeps the federal government operating through Dec. 11.

The bill as show above passed easily in the Senate, 78-20:

The bill faced strong dissension in the House, where 151 Republicans voted against it because the bill does not cut off federal funding for Planned Parenthood (vote roll call here).

President Barack Obama signed the spending bill late Wednesday.

The vote was notable in the House in that it provided a chance for candidates for upcoming leadership races to weigh in on a controversial issue in the caucus.

Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., who is the leading candidate to replace Speaker John Boehner, voted for the measure.

His only opponent for speaker, Rep. Daniel Webster, R-Fla., voted against the bill, as did Rep. Tom Price, R-Ga., who is one of two lawmakers running for majority leader.

The other majority leader contender, Rep. Steve Scalise, R-La., voted for the spending bill.

Some House members believed that the vote on the continuing resolution, as the funding measure is known, would be telling in how potential new leadership may handle future issues.

Conservatives argued that leadership candidates would be judged on if they stood up to Planned Parenthood in the face of a potential shutdown.

“It’s unfortunate that this thing passed,” said Rep. Jim Jordan, the chairman of the House Freedom Caucus, in an interview with The Daily Signal. “But I think the most unfortunate thing is we should have back on July 14, when the first [Planned Parenthood] video came out, went full commitment to making this a national debate and really elevating it and going all in. We could have been in a position to win, but we didn’t, and this is the part that frustrates me.”

Jordan added:

“Our new leadership has to commit, whoever that happens to be, to the same effort on things that we’ve told the voters we were gonna do—like we all told them we were pro-life, right?—we have to have the same intensity in getting those things done that we did on, for example, trade promotion. We have to demonstrate we are actually fighting on the things we said and have that full debate. And that’s what we are not doing.”

Taking a different view, Rep. Charlie Dent, a moderate Republican from Pennsylvania, told the The Daily Signal that conservatives were wrong to try to hold up the spending measure to cut off funding for Planned Parenthood.

“Leadership will look feckless and ineffective if they try to appease the rejectionist members of this conference,” Dent said.

“Going forward,” Dent remarked, “leadership will have to find a way to move forward on five or six measures that must be resolved, including a budget agreement, tax extenders, the debt ceiling, and a long-term transportation measure. All will require a level of compromise required to move beyond the warfare and get to a better place.”

The continuing resolution funds the government at a rate of $1.017 trillion annually for the next two and a half months. Senate leaders argued the deal gives Congress time to negotiate a budget deal with the president, though Obama has been pushing Congress to break the spending caps imposed by the 2011 Budget Control Act.

The continuing resolution also provides $74.7 billion for the Overseas Contingency Operations fund and reauthorizes the Federal Aviation Administration, E-verify program, and Internet Tax Freedom Act.

Senate Republican leaders introduced a government spending bill last week that included a one-year moratorium on funding for Planned Parenthood. The legislation also directed the $235 million in savings derived from the government funding allocated for Planned Parenthood to be directed to community health centers.

That bill, however, was blocked in the upper chamber, after it failed to reach the 60 votes needed to advance.

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