Tom Graves: The Man Behind the Campaign to Defund Obamacare

Photo Credit: Alex Wong/Getty ImagesTom Graves was a man ahead of his time.

Long before Ted Cruz was orchestrating 21-hour homilies on the Senate floor, Graves, a Republican congressman from Georgia, was waging a lonely—and largely anonymous—campaign to defund the Affordable Care Act.

Graves won a June 2010 special election that brought him to Washington amid a dead legislative summer leading up to midterm elections. It was then that the former Georgia state representative saw an opportunity to influence the debate over President Obama’s recently passed health care law. And those efforts forever changed his path in Congress.

Having run in the months immediately following Obamacare’s passage, Graves felt a unique connection to the electorate and its disapproval of the new law. But he saw no Republican proposal to stop the government from paying for it. Intent on filling this legislative “vacuum,” Graves in July 2010 introduced the Defund Obamacare Act—the very first bill he authored in Congress, and one he would introduce in each new session.

Three years later, as Republicans grappled with a stalled appropriations process and ongoing anxiety over financing the law, the phone rang in Graves’s congressional office. It was a staffer in Cruz’s office. Cruz wanted to become the Senate cosponsor of Graves’s defund bill, the staffer said. Would the Georgia congressman be interested in teaming with the senator from Texas?

The rest, as they say, is history.

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