Republican senator Ted Cruz blamed Democrats on Monday for provoking an imminent government shutdown, claiming majority leader Harry Reid was "using the threat of default to force Obamacare on the American people".
Setting conventional Washington wisdom on its head, Cruz tried to reverse responsibility for the latest budget stand-off in the hope of garnering support from moderate Republicans and limiting growing public anger toward his party.
The latest twist to the increasingly-surreal Congressional blame game came as Cruz was prevented from resorting to procedural measures that would have frustrated a Democratic plan to "clean up" the bill and take out the threat to President Obama's flagship healthcare reform.
The original combined bill, passed by the House of Representatives on Friday, is widely seen as a last-ditch Republican effort to block the Affordable Care Act before it is implemented next month by holding government finances to ransom.
But Cruz argued the opposite on Monday, insisting that Senate Democrats were passing up an opportunity to prevent a government shutdown by not simply voting for the House bill in its current form.
"No American wants a government shut down. I don't want a government shutdown and no one in this party does," said Cruz.
"Five minutes ago the Senate could have acted to prevent a government shutdown. We could have avoided the spectre and the countdown clock would disappear but [majority leader Reid] would rather risk a government shutdown because he supports a law called Obamacare."
Senate Democrats hope to strip the healthcare threat out of the funding bill before sending the "clean" version back to the House of Representatives in the hours leading up to next Monday's budget deadline.
But the rhetorical blame game matters because Cruz is hoping to persuade moderate Republicans in the Senate to block any vote at all until the Democrats agree to negotiations over healthcare.
By portraying a shutdown as the fault of Democrats, Cruz hopes he can remove the stigma of a no vote for moderate Republicans who are wary of being blamed in the long run and reluctant to block passage of the current House bill just for tactical purposes in the short-run.
Cruz and conservatives in the House have vowed to repeal Obamacare using all methods at their disposal because they fear that creeping government control of healthcare is bad for patients and the economy.
"Three years ago this body passed Obamacare in a straightline vote and in the time since, Americans have learned that it's not working," said the Texan senator. "It's the single biggest job-killer in America."
Harry Reid defended his decision to prevent Cruz from using a 60-vote threshold to block efforts to strip out the healthcare amendment. "Most of us think the Senate has enough 60 vote hurdles as it is. We don't want to add any more barriers," he told Cruz in the Senate debate on Monday afternoon.
"The American people are really fed up and I would bet that most Americans would rather we avoid shutting down the government."
Reid's tactics mean that Senate Republicans will now either have to block progress of the bill entirely or allow it be amended with a simple 50-vote majority and passed back to the House without the healthcare threat attached.
