HOUSTON
(CBS Houston/AP)— Republican Sen. Ted Cruz compared the glitches
plaguing the website for President Barack Obama’s signature health care
law to the methodologies of “Nigerian email scammers.”
The Tea
Party favorite received a rousing ovation during a rally of more than
1,000 supporters Monday in Houston while speaking out about the
Affordable Care Act, known also as Obamacare.
“You may have
noticed that all the Nigerian email scammers have become a lot less
active lately,” Cruz said, according to the Houston Chronicle. “They all
have been hired to run the Obamacare website.”
Cruz told supporters that he’s working for them and not for D.C. “party bosses.”
“People
are saying mean things about me,” Cruz said, according to the
Chronicle. “Who cares? At the end of the day, I don’t work for the party
bosses in Washington. I work for each and every one of you. What they
don’t understand is that we’re standing here together. We’ve got a
problem in Washington. They’re not
listening to the American people.”
Cruz
staged a quasi-filibuster for over 21 hours in the Senate late last
month, helping spark a budget fight in the Republican-led House that
partially shuttered the government in an attempt to sever funding for
the nation’s new health care law.
Then, with the country facing a
debt default, leaders in the Democratic-led Senate brokered a deal to
end the standoff — which Cruz dismissed as “selling the American people
down the river.”
“You don’t win a fight when your own team is
firing cannons at the people who are standing up and leading, which are
the House Republicans,” he said.
The deal sets up the potential
for another budget showdown in January. Senate GOP leaders, however,
have suggested that there won’t be a repeat of the shutdown or a
potential default crisis like in recent weeks.
Some political
observers now see Cruz as Texas’ most popular Republican. But his
approval ratings across the country may be slipping.
National
polls have shown that while Americans in general don’t love the health
care law, they oppose defunding it — especially if it means shutting
down the government. And many of Cruz’s Senate colleagues have bemoaned
the shutdown for tarnishing the GOP’s image
