http://www.politico.com/story/2015/12/mitch-mcconnell-ted-cruz-marco-rubio-obamacare-repeal-216367Behind McConnell's campaign to win over Cruz
The senate majority leader marshaled a secret weapon that ultimately would work in his favor: Anti-abortion groups.
By Seung Min Kim , Burgess Everett and Jennifer Haberkorn
12/03/15 05:32 AM EST
Mitch McConnell is close to pulling off a feat that at first seemed impossible: Coax Ted Cruz and antagonistic conservative groups to back his strategy to repeal Obamacare.
For weeks, Cruz, a 2016 GOP presidential candidate and chief McConnell nemesis, and conservative Sens. Mike Lee and Marco Rubio threatened to vote against a House-passed bill dismantling the health care law, insisting that it didn’t go far enough in the Republican quest to finally send a sweeping Obamacare repeal to the White House.
Now, nearly a dozen GOP sources say Cruz and Rubio are almost certain to support the bill that kills significant portions of Obamacare, though they hadn’t yet made their position official. Lee has already endorsed the new measure, which goes even further than the House legislation, saying Wednesday that he “wholeheartedly” supports it.
McConnell marshaled a secret weapon that ultimately would work in his favor: Anti-abortion groups.
Since the summer, the Senate majority leader had spoken with influential organizations opposing abortion such as National Right to Life and the Susan B. Anthony List to ensure they would back his move to link the Obamacare repeal with a measure to defund Planned Parenthood. The groups wield significant influence in a Senate GOP caucus that is now almost uniformly anti-abortion, and they wanted to put defunding on the president’s desk.
At the same time, members of the Values Action Team, a small group of GOP senators led by Sen. Roy Blunt (R-Mo.), served as key Senate emissaries to social conservatives. And more recently, anti-abortion groups vowed to score against any senator who rejected the anti-Planned Parenthood provision, exerting additional pressure on conservative lawmakers who would have seen their sterling pro-life ratings tarnished if the defunding language was dropped.
That coordinated strategy, along with revisions to the House bill that satisfied GOP holdouts, helped McConnell push the firebrand presidential contenders toward the “yes” column on the health care legislation that always had a narrow margin of error. Lee, Cruz and Rubio were expected to issue a joint statement Wednesday endorsing the bill, although that had not been released as of the evening.
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http://www.politico.com/story/2015/12/mitch-mcconnell-ted-cruz-marco-rubio-obamacare-repeal-216367#ixzz3tHyU9FSg
