United States Congress of Fail (Part 3)

[GreyhoundFan]

"Establishment gears up for Steve Bannon’s war on the GOP leadership"

Spoiler

If “war” against the Republican establishment is what former White House strategist Stephen K. Bannon wants, then war is what he will get.

Deep-pocketed supporters of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.) and other GOP leaders have resolved to fight a protracted battle over the next year for the soul of the party in congressional primaries. “It’s shaping up to be McConnell, the Senate Leadership Fund and the Chamber against Bannon,” said Scott Reed, the senior political strategist for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. “And we will take that fight.”

But the task will not be easy. Strategists from both sides of the party’s divide say recent focus groups and polling have shown that the frustration within the Republican base has only grown since the 2016 election, stoked by an inability to repeal and replace President Barack Obama’s health-care law. President Trump, meanwhile, has continued to cast his presidency in opposition to the current ways of Washington, which could encourage primary voters to buck the system in a way that endangers House and Senate incumbents.

“Just as in 2008, the election did little to let the air out of the tires,” said Steven Law, the president of the Senate Leadership Fund, a super PAC allied with McConnell that plans to spend heavily on Senate primaries in support of incumbents. “The raw material of the electorate is just increasingly volatile.”

The first battle will conclude this month in Alabama, where the incumbent senator — establishment-backed Luther Strange — is fighting uphill against former state Supreme Court judge Roy Moore, a conservative evangelical jurist who has twice been removed from the bench for defying legal decisions. Known for his conviction that Christian teachings are the source of all government authority, Moore has twice been elected statewide to the Supreme Court, but he also lost two primary campaigns for governor, in 2006 and 2010. He bested Strange by a margin of 39 percent to 33 percent in the first round of Senate primary voting last month.

Rep. Mo Brooks (R-Ala.), who came in third in the first round of primary voting, threw his support behind Moore at a rally Saturday. “It is truly amazing the audacity, the ego of the special-interest groups and the political action committees as they try to buy this United States Senate race thinking that with impunity they can run over the people of the state of Alabama,” Brooks declared.

In a sign of fights to come, the two Republican candidates are now competing to demonstrate their disgust with Washington politics. Strange, who was appointed this year to take the seat of Attorney General Jeff Sessions, begins one of his most recent television ads looking at the camera and announcing that he is “mad at Washington politicians.”

Moore describes his campaign as an effort to hurt McConnell, drain the swamp and bring more radical policies to the Senate, including a possible effort to impeach sitting U.S. Supreme Court justices for affirming the constitutionality of same-sex marriages.

Although Trump has endorsed Strange, Bannon is backing Moore — and using the conservative website he runs, Breitbart News, to hammer the incumbent as a “swamp monster.”

Allies of McConnell have been blanketing the Alabama airwaves to shrink Moore’s polling lead. After spending nearly $4 million on ads before the first primary vote in August, the Senate Leadership Fund plans to blitz the state with another $4 million before the Sept. 26 runoff. So far this year, the super PAC has raised more than $11 million, including a $1 million infusion from hedge fund manager Paul Singer last month, federal filings show.

The Republican National Committee and the National Republican Senatorial Committee have also sunk money into the race to defend Strange. The Business Council of Alabama, working with the U.S. Chamber, plans a major employee get-out-the-vote operation to support Strange by arguing that he will be better for the state’s industry and jobs. The chamber has also paid for a statewide mailer and an ad campaign that will include a spot during Saturday’s Alabama and Auburn college football games. “There is no taking it back,” Reed said. “Alabama is the big enchilada.”

The Senate Leadership Fund is also taking aim at Bannon himself in an effort to tarnish his position as a champion of the Trump political movement. Law released a statement on Tuesday calling Bannon “dead wrong” for using a recent “60 Minutes” interview to criticize Trump’s decision to fire former FBI director James B. Comey.

At the Chamber, Reed echoed the criticism of Bannon for breaking with Trump. “He is turning into a rallying point for the alt-right, which is kind of bizarre because half of what he does is damage his former client and friend, whom he served as chief strategist for,” Reed said.

Bannon declined to comment. But a person familiar with his thinking described the pushback by McConnell allies as “the corrupt and incompetent political class” taking on Trump’s base.

Bannon’s allies scoffed at the notion that the McConnell-allied groups could drive a wedge between Trump’s supporters and Bannon. “At the end of the day, folks like that think the president’s base is stupid,” said a person close to the conservative media executive. “It shows the arrogance of the Republican political class in Washington.”

To counter the onslaught against Moore, the conservative advocacy group Great America Alliance, which is now overseen by Bannon protege and former deputy White House political director Andy Surabian, released a digital ad Tuesday featuring a montage of grainy photos of McConnell and Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) that argues over a rock-n-roll score that Strange was “appointed by the swamp.”

The group and its allies do not intend to match the volume of anti-Moore ads on television, but there are plans for a bus tour of the state by conservative activists in the next couple of weeks to support the Moore campaign, culminating in a major rally before the election. Former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, who has endorsed Moore, is expected to travel to Alabama to appear as part of the tour.

And Moore allies have hope that their side will see an infusion of big money, too. Great America and its sister super PAC have new links to Bannon and his political patrons, the wealthy Mercer family. The former White House strategist does not have a formal role with the organizations, but he helped install Surabian as the top strategist at the advocacy group, according to a person familiar with his role.

Ed Rollins, the veteran GOP strategist who leads Great America PAC, said he has recently “exchanged some ideas” with Bannon, for whom he said he has “great respect.” And he has also been in talks with the Mercers, influential but idiosyncratic donors who often buck the GOP party establishment.

“We are having discussions but no formal ties at this point,” Rollins said of the family. “The more we can get going in the same direction, the better. We certainly have had some conversations.”

If they decide to put serious sums into groups taking on establishment candidates, hedge fund magnate Robert Mercer and his middle daughter, Rebekah, could help fuel the GOP’s latest internecine battles. Before supporting Trump in the 2016 presidential campaign, they gave $13.5 million to a super PAC that backed Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, Trump’s longest-lasting challenger for the nomination.

A spokeswoman for the Mercer family did not respond to a request for comment.

But there are already indications the Mercers plan to use their money to take on GOP incumbents this cycle. In late July, Robert Mercer gave $300,000 to a super PAC allied with former Arizona state senator Kelli Ward, who is challenging Republican Sen. Jeff Flake in the state’s primary, federal filings show.

Mercer also contributed $50,000 this summer to a new super PAC, Remember Mississippi, set up by an aide to state Sen. Chris McDaniel, who is considering challenging GOP incumbent Sen. Roger Wicker in the state.

Meanwhile, the pro-Trump super PAC America First and its sister advocacy group — which have emerged as the president’s officially approved outside groups — have largely stayed out of the intraparty fights. Since making a small digital ad buy for Strange in early August, before the first round of voting in the Alabama special election, the PAC has not invested any money in the contest.

Trump’s own apparent ambivalence over the Alabama race hints at the complicating factor he is likely to play in the coming fights. Although he endorsed Strange, he has not yet cut any political advertisements.

After the first round of primary elections, he tweeted congratulations to both men who made it through to the runoff, notably listing Moore’s name first. “Congratulation to Roy Moore and Luther Strange,” the tweet said, adding, “Exciting race!”

White House legislative director Marc Short said this week that Trump “continues to stand by” his Strange endorsement. Trump announced late Saturday on Twitter that he would visit Huntsville, Ala.. on Saturday to campaign for Strange.

Republican strategists aiming to defend incumbents say they expect Trump to be an unreliable partner in the coming season. The president tends to approach questions of political loyalty on a case-by-case basis instead of as a party leader. And he is intent on keeping some distance from Republican congressional leadership, which has so far failed to deliver on his promise of Obamacare repeal.

In many ways, the coming 2018 contests will be a rematch of high-stakes primary fights that have taken place every two years since the 2008 election, when self-branded tea party challengers began trying to unseat incumbent Republicans. Flake and Sen. Dean Heller (R-Nev.), who both face reelection next year, expect populist primary challenges this year. Several primary contests will be for seats with no Republican incumbent, such as those in Michigan, Montana and possibly Utah, where party insiders worry that the more anti-establishment candidates could jeopardize Republicans’ general-election hopes.

“2018 is going to be a wave election, and it is going to be an anti-incumbent wave election,” said Eagle Forum Fund President Ed Martin, who has been traveling the country to hold events to pressure moderate Republicans to support the Trump agenda. “Any Republican that is in office as an incumbent is on the line.”

After the 2010 and 2012 elections, which saw Republicans lose Senate races in Missouri, Delaware, Indiana, Colorado and Nevada with tea party candidates, both the Chamber and McConnell decided to be more aggressive in Senate primaries. Since then, the insider powers have tended to have the upper hand, winning the Senate elections they have contested in the primary. McConnell himself survived a tough tea party challenge in 2014, and a huge influx of television spending helped Sen. Thad Cochran (R-Miss.) hold off a strong primary challenge that same year.

Reed said the Chamber got involved in eight House races and one Senate contest in 2016, and won each. He expects to outperform expectations again over the coming months.

“I think it’s going to be an epic challenge, and we are seeing it in Alabama to start,” he said. “The polls look bad. We’ve got two weeks. We know what we need to do. That’s why we are in this business.”

If the Repugs had a soul, I'd say this is a battle for the soul of the party. But, instead, it's a bunch of snakes attacking each other.

[onekidanddone]

When TT first said "Chuck and Nancy" I thought of Sid and Nancy.  So not the same thing.

[onekidanddone]

1 hour ago, GreyhoundFan said:

"Establishment gears up for Steve Bannon’s war on the GOP leadership"

If the Repugs had a soul, I'd say this is a battle for the soul of the party. But, instead, it's a bunch of snakes attacking each other.

I was just coming here to post about this. I'd love to see them implode.   So it is Bannon and caribou barbie  backing one of these sickos and Trump backing the other.  Good, go ahead and splinter.  Turn on each other. Republicans eating their own.

[GreyhoundFan]

20 minutes ago, onekidanddone said:

So it is Bannon and caribou barbie  backing one of these sickos and Trump backing the other.  Good, go ahead and splinter.  Turn on each other. Republicans eating their own.

I wouldn't shed a tear if the Repugs ended their party this way. Wouldn't it be appropriate, since they are the "right to bear arms" party?

[onekidanddone]

15 minutes ago, GreyhoundFan said:

I wouldn't shed a tear if the Repugs ended their party this way. Wouldn't it be appropriate, since they are the "right to bear arms" party?

I feel like I'm on the school yard watching two bullies punching each other out and I'm yelling "Fight Fight".

[GreyhoundFan]

9 minutes ago, onekidanddone said:

I feel like I'm on the school yard watching two bullies punching each other out and I'm yelling "Fight Fight".

I agree and hate myself for it. I need this administration to be over.

[GrumpyGran]

11 hours ago, onekidanddone said:

I feel like I'm on the school yard watching two bullies punching each other out and I'm yelling "Fight Fight".

Oh, no, it's much sleazier than that. Believe me, there is nothing these two sides won't do to win this fight. Sessions has vaulted Alabama up to star status in the party.

And, oh shit, I may have to go see my mother in Birmingham before this is settled. The commercials, oh, the horror!

[GreyhoundFan]

OH FFS: "Senate GOP tries one last time to repeal Obamacare"

Spoiler

Obamacare repeal is on the brink of coming back from the dead.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and his leadership team are seriously considering voting on a bill that would scale back the federal government’s role in the health care system and instead provide block grants to states, congressional and Trump administration sources said.

It would be a last-ditch attempt to repeal Obamacare before the GOP’s power to pass health care legislation through a party-line vote in the Senate expires on Sept. 30.

No final decision has been made, but the GOP leader has told his caucus that if the bill written by Sens. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) and Bill Cassidy (R-La.) has the support of at least 50 of the 52 GOP senators, he will bring it to the floor, Graham and Cassidy say. That would give Republicans one more crack at repealing the Affordable Care Act, a longtime party pledge.

Right now, support for the bill — which would replace Obamacare’s tax subsidies with block grants, end the law’s individual insurance mandate and scale back its Medicaid expansion — among Republican senators is short of 50 votes. But McConnell and his lieutenants will gauge support this week in private party meetings with help from President Donald Trump, administration and Capitol Hill sources said.

“McConnell and his team are engaged and serious about the vote and working with the conference to build support for Graham-Cassidy,” a source familiar with the bill’s prospects said Sunday. The “White House is also operating with all hands on deck.”

White House officials began making calls last week to Republican Senate offices and plan to whip Senate votes this week, an administration official said. Supporters of the Graham-Cassidy bill have tried to keep their efforts to round up votes quiet so far, this official said, but the push is ramping up.

Graham has publicly begged for Trump to help build support for the bill, and it appears to be paying off. The president asked about the Graham-Cassidy proposal in conversations this weekend in Bedminster, New Jersey, and is likely to call senators this week while he is in New York at the United Nations, the administration official said, though much of the work will be done on the senior staff level.

The new activity marks a significant shift for GOP leaders after several senior Republican senators panned the bill’s prospects earlier this month. But Cassidy estimates he is now just a handful of votes short of passing the bill, and other senators are beginning to press for another vote before they turn their attention to tax reform this fall.

Some Republicans believe that if the bill were put on the floor Monday, it would have the support of 49 senators.

“All we need is one more,” Sen. Pat Roberts (R-Kan.) said of the repeal effort, which failed in July after GOP Sens. John McCain of Arizona, Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska voted no on a slimmed-down repeal bill.

Graham and Cassidy’s bill amounts to a new approach and was introduced just last week, but Senate Republicans have already sent it to the Congressional Budget Office for analysis and have demanded the agency expedite the score, a Republican aide said. The Senate is in session only three days this week, so any Obamacare repeal vote would occur the last week of September, giving the CBO another week or so to evaluate the proposal. A bipartisan fiscal funding deal passed earlier than usual this month, leaving the Senate GOP with an opening at the end of a month usually filled with brinkmanship.

McConnell is expected to discuss the matter with his leadership team on Monday, then weigh support for the bill with his full caucus on Tuesday. At lunch last Thursday, most of the caucus pushed for another try on health care, and McConnell was favorably inclined, as long as it won’t fail again.

“McConnell is behind it,” Graham said in an interview late last week. Republicans are “not going to tolerate us just sitting around saying we did the best we could. One and done is not going to do it.”

It’s an incredibly steep task. Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) said he is a “no,” panning the bill as “Obamacare lite.” And Republicans believe Collins also won’t vote for it, though she has not made a final decision. Graham-Cassidy backers can’t afford to lose another vote.

McCain has been cautiously open to the approach, but some more conservative senators could scuttle it since the bill keeps many of Obamacare’s taxes. Some senators are expected to wait until the CBO score arrives until making a final decision.

The White House is aware the votes aren't yet there, the administration official said: "It's still a long ways to go."

Republicans say McConnell won’t bring up the bill if there is any chance of failure, given the dramatic collapse in the summer.

“McConnell would like something to pass. But he also knows that getting 50 to vote for that is a challenge,” said a Republican aide tracking the bill. “They show him it has 50, he'll schedule a vote.”

Even if the bill passes the Senate, there is no guarantee the House would take it up — and if it did, Speaker Paul Ryan and his caucus would have to pass the bill with no changes due to the Senate’s deadline to use “reconciliation.” The House passed a dramatically different Obamacare bill this spring.

Despite the long odds, Senate Republicans are hesitant to give up given the beating they have taken from the president, his staff and the GOP base. If the Senate GOP could revive Obamacare repeal, it would help lift a cloud of conservative angst hanging over the Senate majority after July’s failure.

The collapse of that effort is hurting incumbent senators up for reelection and could fuel primary challenges next year, senators said.

And passage of a repeal bill could get the Senate GOP back in the good graces of Trump, who has repeatedly courted Democratic leaders Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer this month. Trump is obsessed with action on repeal of Obamacare, a seven-year GOP campaign promise, and his urgency will only heat up as a deadline looms, officials said.

"He keeps saying ‘repeal and replace, repeal and replace,’" said a second administration official. "He is going to keep pushing for something on this.”

Bitch McTurtle just won't freaking give up. Even though they're not supposed to be able to take it up again after September 30, he'll find some obscure way to do so. He just won't rest until millions are screwed over. I'll be calling my senators tomorrow morning, not that they would vote for this crap.

[sawasdee]

Please Rufus this will just be more 

[GrumpyGran]

2 hours ago, sawasdee said:

Please Rufus this will just be more 

The biggest thing Obama did so it's got to go! 

[GreyhoundFan]

More about the zombie crap: "The new GOP health-care measure goes further than the failed one"

Spoiler

A dealbreaker in July may not be a dealbreaker in September.

The latest Obamacare overhaul bill gaining steam on Capitol Hill slashes health-care spending more deeply and would likely cover fewer people than a July bill that failed precisely because of such concerns. What’s different now is the sense of urgency senators are bringing to their effort to roll back the Affordable Care Act, with only a dozen days remaining before the legislative vehicle they’re using expires.

The political prospects for the bill, offered by Sens. Bill Cassidy (R-La.) and Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.), seemed to be improving by the hour Monday. A key Republican governor, Arizona’s Doug Ducey, signaled support for the legislation, and some moderate senators whose votes are crucial have either signed onto the bill or at least haven’t ruled it out yet. Ducey opposed the Senate leadership’s Better Care Reconciliation Act — which was defeated in July — and his opposition heavily influenced the decision by Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) not to back that measure.

Worries over steep Medicaid cuts and how many people could potentially lose protections or their health coverage altogether drove the GOP effort into a ditch at the end of July, when BCRA failed by seven votes.

It’s hard to see how the Cassidy-Graham plan resolves those concerns. In many cases, it could make them even more acute. The Congressional Budget Office has said it will release a “preliminary assessment” of the measure next week, which will provide some information on its effects on the budget. But the CBO said it would be “at least several weeks” before it can estimate whether people would lose insurance and whether premiums would spike.

The measure would actually cut federal health-care spending even more than BCRA, and aim the cuts more directly at states that expanded Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act. It was the governors and senators from those states who were most deeply worried about Medicaid cuts to begin with.

In fact, compared with both the House and Senate health-care bills, the Graham-Cassidy measure would more drastically remold the ACA by giving states virtually unlimited control over federal dollars currently being spent on marketplace subsidies and Medicaid expansion. It would also allow states to opt out of virtually all of the ACA’s insurer regulations by obtaining waivers.

It would work roughly like this: Starting in 2021, the federal government would lump together all the money it spends on subsidies distributed through the ACA marketplaces and expanded Medicaid programs covering poor, childless adults living at up to 133 percent of the federal poverty level.

This approach would generally result in less money for states that expanded Medicaid under the ACA and more money for states that didn’t. That’s because Graham-Cassidy would redistribute the money allotted to the 30 states that opted to expand Medicaid under the ACA and spread it out among all 50 states.

The government would redistribute all that money to states through what’s known as a block grant. These block grants would be based on a formula that, among other factors, takes into account the state’s share of low-income adults — an approach that would generally result in less money for states that expanded Medicaid and more money for states that didn’t.

So Texas, for example, would see an increase in its federal health-care funding, while states such as Alaska or Arizona (which both expanded Medicaid) would see a decrease. That could make it harder for Cassidy to convince senators from those states — Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski and McCain, who is being treated for brain cancer, namely — to support his bill.

Cassidy’s own state, Louisiana is among the states that stand to lose the most funding under this approach. Others include California, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Kentucky, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Montana, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, North Dakota, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont and Washington, whose Medicaid expansion dollars would be cut anywhere from 35 to 60 percent.

By 2026, the federal government would be spending 17 percent less on subsidies and Medicaid expansion overall than under current projections, according to an analysis by the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities.

Then, in 2027, states would face a big fiscal cliff, when the Cassidy bill would halt all that spending. That’s a major step further than BCRA, which would have retained the marketplace subsidies (despite reducing them somewhat) and allowed states to keep Medicaid expansion (albeit paying for these enrollees at the normal matching rate and not the ACA’s expanded matching rate).

The Graham-Cassidy bill does pretty closely mirror BCRA in how it treats the regular Medicaid program. It would convert that program to a per capita system based on the number of enrollees in a state instead of the open-ended funding approach the federal government currently takes.

Under the measure, regular Medicaid funding (not including expansion) would be 8 percent lower by 2026; it would have been 9 percent lower that year under BCRA.

But there’s another way the Cassidy bill goes further than previous Obamacare rollback measures: It would allow states to opt out of the law’s “essential health benefits,” the baseline services insurers must cover. That means there will no longer be a rock-solid prohibition on charging higher premiums to people with preexisting medical conditions, although states would need federal waivers.

The second version of BCRA — which Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell rolled out in mid-July with an amendment from Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) — would have allowed insurers to opt out of those regulations but only if they also sold a fully ACA-compliant plan on the marketplaces.

The bottom line is this: The Cassidy bill will appeal to most conservatives in the House and the Senate, who can make the case to their base that they’re unshackling states from federal mandates and giving them huge leeway to construct a health-care approach that works best for them.

But if the moderate Republicans go along with this latest approach, they’d have to ignore the type of hefty Medicaid cuts they had previously opposed.

 

[GreyhoundFan]

Please, Rufus, please: "Could Democrats take the Senate? The odds are against them, but they have a shot.'

Spoiler

Strange things are afoot in Alabama, where there’s a special election underway to fill the Senate seat that Attorney General Jeff Sessions vacated when he joined the Trump administration. Luther Strange, who was appointed by the governor to fill the seat, came in second in the primary behind controversial former judge Roy Moore — although calling Moore “controversial” is like calling President Trump “colorful” (it’s true, but it doesn’t begin to capture it).

Now the two are headed for a runoff next week. And whatever the outcome of the Alabama race, it looks like a positive harbinger for Democrats’ chances of taking back the Senate next year.

The likelihood that Moore will win the runoff has raised the possibility that the race could actually be competitive in the general election in December. Democrats have nominated a strong candidate in Doug Jones, a former U.S. attorney who successfully prosecuted two Ku Klux Klansmen in connection with the 1963 bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church. Nevertheless, Jones winning seems like a remote possibility, since we’re talking about a state that Trump won by 28 points.

I spoke this morning with a Democratic aide involved in the party’s Senate efforts, who didn’t give me much reason to think that the party believes it has a chance in Alabama. They’re certainly watching to see what happens, but it doesn’t look as though they’ll be swooping in to help Jones — nor does it seem like he wants them to, since a bunch of Washington support could do him more harm than good.

That doesn’t mean there isn’t a lot of discomfort about that race on the GOP side. But Republicans are less worried about losing the seat than they are about Moore coming to the Capitol and becoming a symbol of their party’s extremism. Moore was twice elected chief justice of the Alabama Supreme Court, and twice removed from that office because of his contempt for earthly law, the first time for refusing a judicial order to remove a massive Ten Commandments monument he had installed at the court, and the second time for instructing Alabama officials to ignore the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling legalizing same-sex marriage. He also recently said that the 9/11 attacks may have been God’s punishment on America because “we legalize sodomy” and “legitimize abortion.” Trouble is, that doesn’t necessarily make him unpopular in Alabama, at least not with the Republican majority.

But even if Democrats probably can’t steal that seat, Alabama does portend trouble for Republicans. Trump has endorsed Luther Strange, and Mitch McConnell’s super PAC is pouring millions of dollars into the state to boost Strange’s campaign. Meanwhile, Stephen K. Bannon is backing Moore. This kind of bitter internecine battle is going to happen in other places as well, potentially weakening Republican incumbents or even leading to the nomination of extremists who have trouble winning the general election.

But will it be enough for Democrats to take back the Senate? It won’t be easy. Democrats will be defending 25 of the 33 seats up for reelection. That includes seats in 10 states that Trump won in 2016 (Florida, Indiana, Michigan, Missouri, Montana, North Dakota, Ohio, Pennsylvania, West Virginia and Wisconsin). Since Republicans currently control the Senate by a 52-48 margin, Democrats would have to hold all those seats, then flip at least three Republican seats in order to take control. The problem is that only one GOP senator up for reelection — Nevada’s Dean Heller — is from a state Hillary Clinton won.

In order to take back the Senate, Democrats would first have to take out Heller and the next-most-vulnerable GOP incumbent, Jeff Flake of Arizona. Flake and Trump apparently hate each other’s guts, and the senator will probably get a primary challenge from the right, which he could well lose, because his approval ratings are abysmal (18 percent in this poll). Democrats also potentially have some strong candidates in that race, especially Rep. Kyrsten Sinema.

But even if Democrats win those two seats, they’d have to hold every last one of their own seats to get to 50-50. Whenever I asked the Democratic aide about flipping seats, he would say that their first priority is defending their red-state incumbents — and he pointed out that in many of those states, there are nasty GOP primaries developing, which helps make holding the seats an achievable goal.

What’s more, when you look at those races, what you see is a lot of savvy politicians such as Joe Manchin and Claire McCaskill who have carefully navigated the ideological complexities of their states. Then you add in the fact that 2018 could be a “wave” election in which Democratic turnout is boosted by anger at the Trump administration — and Republican turnout is dampened by the fact that their party isn’t delivering on their promises — and Democrats getting to 50-50 looks possible.

But to get control, they’d need one more seat, and that’s where things get really tough. The best chance may be in Texas, where Ted Cruz is up for reelection. Cruz’s popularity is middling at best, and Democrats have a potentially strong candidate in Rep. Beto O’Rourke. But still, it’s Texas. If Bob Corker of Tennessee decides to retire (he’s still mulling), that could be another possibility — but it’s also a deep-red state.

Races like those are outside shots whose likelihood of a switch would improve greatly if 2018 turns into a genuine wave election like those in 2014, 2010 and 2006. Right now Democrats are reluctant to say they think it will be a wave, just that they want to be ready to take advantage if it happens. Recruitment is a big part of that, and most signs are that Democrats are getting the candidates they want.

So on one hand, you have a bunch of factors pushing toward Democratic wins: an unpopular Republican president, fractious Republican primaries, good recruiting for the Democrats and bad recruiting for the Republicans, a GOP-led Congress that hasn’t accomplished much, and issues such as health care that will push Democratic voters to get to the polls. On the other hand, you have structural factors that favor Republicans: the fact that their voters always turn out more in midterm elections, plus a map that is just about as good for the GOP as the party could hope for. What it adds up to is that Democrats have a shot — but the odds are still against them.

 

[GrumpyGran]

15 hours ago, GreyhoundFan said:

More about the zombie crap: "The new GOP health-care measure goes further than the failed one"

  Hide contents

A dealbreaker in July may not be a dealbreaker in September.

The latest Obamacare overhaul bill gaining steam on Capitol Hill slashes health-care spending more deeply and would likely cover fewer people than a July bill that failed precisely because of such concerns. What’s different now is the sense of urgency senators are bringing to their effort to roll back the Affordable Care Act, with only a dozen days remaining before the legislative vehicle they’re using expires.

The political prospects for the bill, offered by Sens. Bill Cassidy (R-La.) and Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.), seemed to be improving by the hour Monday. A key Republican governor, Arizona’s Doug Ducey, signaled support for the legislation, and some moderate senators whose votes are crucial have either signed onto the bill or at least haven’t ruled it out yet. Ducey opposed the Senate leadership’s Better Care Reconciliation Act — which was defeated in July — and his opposition heavily influenced the decision by Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) not to back that measure.

Worries over steep Medicaid cuts and how many people could potentially lose protections or their health coverage altogether drove the GOP effort into a ditch at the end of July, when BCRA failed by seven votes.

It’s hard to see how the Cassidy-Graham plan resolves those concerns. In many cases, it could make them even more acute. The Congressional Budget Office has said it will release a “preliminary assessment” of the measure next week, which will provide some information on its effects on the budget. But the CBO said it would be “at least several weeks” before it can estimate whether people would lose insurance and whether premiums would spike.

The measure would actually cut federal health-care spending even more than BCRA, and aim the cuts more directly at states that expanded Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act. It was the governors and senators from those states who were most deeply worried about Medicaid cuts to begin with.

In fact, compared with both the House and Senate health-care bills, the Graham-Cassidy measure would more drastically remold the ACA by giving states virtually unlimited control over federal dollars currently being spent on marketplace subsidies and Medicaid expansion. It would also allow states to opt out of virtually all of the ACA’s insurer regulations by obtaining waivers.

It would work roughly like this: Starting in 2021, the federal government would lump together all the money it spends on subsidies distributed through the ACA marketplaces and expanded Medicaid programs covering poor, childless adults living at up to 133 percent of the federal poverty level.

This approach would generally result in less money for states that expanded Medicaid under the ACA and more money for states that didn’t. That’s because Graham-Cassidy would redistribute the money allotted to the 30 states that opted to expand Medicaid under the ACA and spread it out among all 50 states.

The government would redistribute all that money to states through what’s known as a block grant. These block grants would be based on a formula that, among other factors, takes into account the state’s share of low-income adults — an approach that would generally result in less money for states that expanded Medicaid and more money for states that didn’t.

So Texas, for example, would see an increase in its federal health-care funding, while states such as Alaska or Arizona (which both expanded Medicaid) would see a decrease. That could make it harder for Cassidy to convince senators from those states — Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski and McCain, who is being treated for brain cancer, namely — to support his bill.

Cassidy’s own state, Louisiana is among the states that stand to lose the most funding under this approach. Others include California, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Kentucky, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Montana, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, North Dakota, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont and Washington, whose Medicaid expansion dollars would be cut anywhere from 35 to 60 percent.

By 2026, the federal government would be spending 17 percent less on subsidies and Medicaid expansion overall than under current projections, according to an analysis by the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities.

Then, in 2027, states would face a big fiscal cliff, when the Cassidy bill would halt all that spending. That’s a major step further than BCRA, which would have retained the marketplace subsidies (despite reducing them somewhat) and allowed states to keep Medicaid expansion (albeit paying for these enrollees at the normal matching rate and not the ACA’s expanded matching rate).

The Graham-Cassidy bill does pretty closely mirror BCRA in how it treats the regular Medicaid program. It would convert that program to a per capita system based on the number of enrollees in a state instead of the open-ended funding approach the federal government currently takes.

Under the measure, regular Medicaid funding (not including expansion) would be 8 percent lower by 2026; it would have been 9 percent lower that year under BCRA.

But there’s another way the Cassidy bill goes further than previous Obamacare rollback measures: It would allow states to opt out of the law’s “essential health benefits,” the baseline services insurers must cover. That means there will no longer be a rock-solid prohibition on charging higher premiums to people with preexisting medical conditions, although states would need federal waivers.

The second version of BCRA — which Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell rolled out in mid-July with an amendment from Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) — would have allowed insurers to opt out of those regulations but only if they also sold a fully ACA-compliant plan on the marketplaces.

The bottom line is this: The Cassidy bill will appeal to most conservatives in the House and the Senate, who can make the case to their base that they’re unshackling states from federal mandates and giving them huge leeway to construct a health-care approach that works best for them.

But if the moderate Republicans go along with this latest approach, they’d have to ignore the type of hefty Medicaid cuts they had previously opposed.

 

So they're going to tell their constituents that this is a good idea because the federal government won't be able to tell them how their state gets to spend the money. Then 2021 comes around and they tell them it's a moot point because there is no money anymore. Nice trick. Especially because Graham will have just been re-elected.

[47of74]

Rep Dana Rohrabacher (R-Fuckstick) is now claiming the Democrats are behind Charlottesville. 

 

Quote

Rohrabacher isn’t buying that conspiracy theory, but he’s deep into another — that Democrats were behind last month’s white nationalist riots in Charlottesville, Va. Oh, and calling them white nationalist riots is a liberal media deceit, he said.

“It’s all baloney,” Rohrabacher said. 

Under Rohrabacher’s scenario, a former “Hillary and Bernie supporter” got Civil War re-enactors to gather under the guise of protecting a Robert E. Lee statue there. 

“It was a setup for these dumb Civil War re-enactors,” Rohrabacher said. “It was left-wingers who were manipulating them in order to have this confrontation” and to “put our president on the spot.”

 

[sawasdee]

Yeah, Civil War reenactors always chant "Jews will not replace us!" and the Nazi slogan "Blood and soil". It's part of every Gettysburg reenactment.

[GreyhoundFan]

Oh please, oh please... "New health-care plan stumbles under opposition from governors"

Spoiler

Senate Republicans and the White House pressed ahead Tuesday with their suddenly resurgent effort to undo the Affordable Care, even as their attempt was dealt a setback when a bipartisan group of governors came out against their proposal.

The collective criticism from 10 governors arrived as Vice President Pence and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell tried to rally support for the bill, which is sponsored by GOP Sens. Bill Cassidy (La.), Lindsey O. Graham (S.C.), Dean Heller (Nev.) and Ron Johnson (Wis.).

But it was unclear whether the opposition would ultimately derail the attempt, as key Republican senators including Lisa Murkowski of Alaska said they had yet to make up their minds.

“We ask you not to consider the Graham-Cassidy-Heller-Johnson amendment and renew support for bipartisan efforts to make health care more available and affordable for all Americans,” the governors said in their letter.

They added that they prefer a bipartisan push to stabilize the insurance marketplaces that Sens. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.) and Patty Murray (D-Wash.) had been negotiating before talks stalled on Tuesday evening.

The governors who signed the bill are particularly notable, since some are from states represented by Republican senators who are weighing whether to back the bill. Among them: Alaska Gov. Bill Walker (I), who holds some sway over Murkowski, a potentially decisive vote who opposed a previous Republican effort to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act.

Nevertheless, Murkowski said Tuesday afternoon that she was still weighing her options and explained how her position on the bill might ultimately differ from her opposition to an earlier repeal bill that failed dramatically in July.

“If it can be shown that Alaska is not going to be disadvantaged, you gain additional flexibility. Then I can go back to Alaskans, and I can say, ‘Okay, let’s walk through this together.’ That’s where it could be different,” she said.

But Murkowski, who has been in close touch with Walker, said she did not yet have the data to make such a determination.

Alaska’s other Republican senator, Dan Sullivan, said he was still mulling whether to support the bill.

On Tuesday, Pence traveled from New York, where he was attending the annual U.N. General Assembly, to Washington with Graham in a sign of the White House’s support for the proposal.

“My message today is I want to make sure that members of the Senate know the president and our entire administration supports Graham-Cassidy,” Pence told reporters on the flight down. “We think the American people need this.”

Graham added that President Trump called him at 10:30 p.m. Monday.

“He says, ‘If we can pull this off, it’ll be a real accomplishment for the country,’ ” he recalled.

Pence attended the weekly Senate Republican policy luncheon, where he said the current health-care system is collapsing and the bill fulfills key GOP promises to return control to states and rein in federal entitlement programs, according to several GOP senators.

Afterward, McConnell declined to ensure a vote on the bill but said his team is working to secure sufficient support.

“We’re in the process of discussing all of this. Everybody knows that the opportunity expires at the end of the month,” said McConnell, referring to the limited window Republicans have to take advantage of a procedural tactic to pass a broad health-care bill without any Democratic support.

The current bill would give states control over billions in federal health-care spending and enact deep cuts to Medicaid. The Medicaid cuts are a major source of concern to the governors, both in terms of imposing a per capita cap on what states would receive as well as putting restrictions on how they could spend any federal aid on their expanded Medicaid populations.

The fact that the bill also would bar states from taxing health-care providers to fund their Medicaid programs posed a problem for several governors, as well.

In a sign of how alarmed state officials are about the prospect of the possible funding cuts, the Louisiana Health Secretary sent a letter to Cassidy on Monday saying the bill “singles-out Louisiana for disproportional cuts to our Federal funding” and “introduces the specter” of a state waiver process that could eliminate protections “affecting those with pre-existing conditions or complex and costly conditions.”

“This would be a detrimental step backwards for Louisiana,” wrote Gee, who posted her letter on Twitter Tuesday.

And while Walker has not played a visible role in the national health-care debate until now, certain aspects of the new bill pose an even bigger challenge for Alaska than previous proposals. Health-care premiums are particularly expensive in the state, given its many remote areas: premiums on the ACA market average roughly $1,000 a month for an individual, according to the most recent federal data.

Since the federal tax credits over time would be equalized and based on the number of low-income people in a given state, that new calculation would eliminate the more generous subsidies Alaska now enjoys.

“It’s a substantial amount of money, for Alaska,” said Larry Levitt, senior vice president for special initiatives at the Henry J. Kaiser Foundation.

Given the complex nature of the Graham-Cassidy proposal, it is difficult for both state officials and health-care analysts to predict exactly how much money a given state would gain or lose if it were enacted. But early estimates suggest that states with expanded Medicaid programs and active participation on the ACA market could face major cuts.

An initial estimate for Colorado, according to state officials, suggests that it could lose at least $700 million in annual federal funding by 2025. Since the state has roughly 450,000 in its Medicaid expansion program and another 100,000 receiving premium tax credits on its health care exchange, that could translate into hundreds of thousands of Coloradans losing coverage.

The governors who have been most outspoken in their criticism of the bill have been negotiating behind the scenes to bring as many state executives on board as possible, according to aides, tweaking the letter’s language over the past couple of days to get maximum support.

Also among the governors signing the letter: John Kasich (R-Ohio) and Brian Sandoval (R-Nev.). Sandoval’s positioning puts him at odds with Heller, who has been touting the bill as a co-sponsor.

Pence said Trump told him to reach out to some Democrats. He spoke to Sen. Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.) over the weekend. But after reviewing the bill, Manchin said, the senator told Pence’s aides he could not support the legislation.

Schumer said he’s confident no Democrat will vote for the legislation because “it hurts people in every state.”

Democrats had been working furiously in the past 24 hours to advance talks between Alexander and Murray on a deal to immediately stabilize insurance marketplaces with federal subsidies. The negotiations rapidly escalated after weeks of slow but consistent talks after it became clear that Senate GOP leaders were serious about holding a health-care vote before the end of the month, according to several Senate aides.

Alexander on Tuesday downplayed expectations of reaching an agreement this week, telling reporters that the pair had reached an impasse.

“During the last month, we have worked hard and in good faith but have not found the necessary consensus among Republicans and Democrats to put a bill in the Senate leaders’ hands that could be enacted,” Alexander said in a statement.

Several Republicans said those talks were stymied last week after a group of 15 Democrats led by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) introduced a “Medicare for all” plan to extend federal benefits to all Americans.

Graham said the decision for his colleagues on health care is stark: “Socialism or federalism.”

“If you’re a Republican, chances are you believe in federalism. . . . I believe that most Republicans like the idea of state-controlled health care as opposed to Washington-controlled health care,” Graham said.

I hope they can't get their act together. We need this new deathcare bill like we need a couple extra holes in each of our heads.

[GreyhoundFan]

Another spot-on piece from Jennifer Rubin: "The McConnell mentality keeps the Senate and Congress dysfunctional"

Spoiler

Imagine if all serious differences forging a bipartisan bill could be overcome, allowing for some genuine security for the most vulnerable in our society and moving closer to consensus on health care. It might encourage similar moves on other issues. It might restore some trust in government.

Well, we had it and because it was bipartisan, non-extreme and did not afford the Republican Senate a win for the sake of winning and the chance to get back in the good graces of the manifestly unfit and unstable president, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) stepped in to nix it.

That is what, according to multiple sources, happened yesterday as Sens. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.) and Patty Murray (D-Wash.) cleared the decks on substantive issues. But then Alexander got yanked back. He hinted at the pressure he was under when he told the press he was “not a magician.” Too embarrassed to acknowledge he’d been stomped on by McConnell, he put out a patently disingenuous statement. “Senator Murray and I had hoped to agree early this week on a limited, bipartisan plan to stabilize 2018 premiums in the individual health insurance market that we could take to Senate leaders by the end of the month,” he said. “During the last month, we have worked hard and in good faith, but have not found the necessary consensus among Republicans and Democrats to put a bill in the Senate leaders’ hands that could be enacted.” In fact the only problem was his majority leadership, desperately straining to please the president with a partisan, fly-by-night repeal of Obamacare.

Murray hit back with her own statement. “I was very glad that Chairman Alexander kicked off this bipartisan process to tackle health care uncertainty and the higher premiums facing families if Congress doesn’t act. We’ve held hearings, we’ve had discussions that included over half the Senate, and we’ve negotiated in good faith for weeks to try achieve, as Chairman Alexander puts it so well, ‘a result’ for our constituents.” She conceded that she made “some tough concessions to move in Chairman Alexander’s direction when it comes to giving states more flexibility.” However, she let on, “Republican leaders have decided to freeze this bipartisan approach and are trying to jam through a partisan Trumpcare bill, but I am confident that we can reach a deal if we keep working together—and I am committed to getting that done.” One couldn’t help but fear a bit embarrassed for Alexander, a seasoned legislator who had been rapped on the knuckles and retreated like an obedient school boy.

Minority Leader Sen. Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) confirmed what everyone minimally plugged into the day’s events on the Hill knew: “This is not about substance. We gave them many of the things they asked for, including copper plans and wide waiver authority. The Republican leadership is so eager to pass Graham-Cassidy that they’re scuttling a balanced, bipartisan negotiation.”

It would have been one thing had the GOP bill at issue been solid legislation designed to help Americans get affordable healthcare coverage. It’s not; it’s a more indiscriminate assault on Medicaid and support for the health care exchanges than prior bills. As Axios reported, it does not even contain sweeteners that would have made it palatable to some members. Without a gradual wind-down of Medicaid expansion, “Graham-Cassidy comes with a steep cliff after which all funding for both the subsidies and Medicaid expansion would disappear.” It has no pool of money for opioid abuse treatment. Obamacare taxes remain in place but not iron-clad protection for those with pre-existing conditions. When and if voters find out what’s in it, they may be outraged to find out that tens of millions of Americans will go without coverage.

The way in which this is being forced forward — by sabotaging an actually bipartisan, regular-order bill — is a particularly personal slap in the face of Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) who made an impassioned plea last time around for regular order and bipartisanship. McCain has implored his colleagues to work together in open, not by stealth and connivance. These kind of machinations (no full scoring, a rush to judgment, crush bipartisan alternatives, etc.) are not what McCain has spent his life defending; the trickery surrounding Cassidy-Graham provides one more sign that under McConnell’s tutelage the Senate has become a more pompous version of the House (in which party discipline is sacred, not the tradition of open debate). McCain will need to brush aside any last minute guilt-tripping appeals from his friend Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) if he is once more to block the Senate’s road to ruin and secure his legacy.

As a source close to Murray told me, squashing the Alexander-Murray effort made clear bipartisanship will be punished, not rewarded. Instead, a pattern will be established: Crush bipartisan compromises and force-feed a partisan bills even if they accomplish few if any of the objectives Republicans or Trump promised. It will not be fully scored when it must come to the floor next week to get under the wire of the current fiscal year, whereby they can use reconciliation to pass with zero Democratic support.

One comes away convinced so long as the mentality of “win at any cost for the sake of winning” prevails — with no concern for the substance of immensely consequential legislation and active hostility to bipartisan solutions — Congress will remain a dysfunctional mess. McConnell will not change, and so only a change in the Senate and/or House majority will bring about a new approach to governance. Tuesday was a vivid example of why good governance and Republican majorities no longer mix.

Wow, that last statement is something, coming from a conservative writer. She's right, though.

[GreyhoundFan]

Color me unsurprised: "Under latest health-care bill, red states would benefit disproportionately"

Spoiler

The latest Republican proposal for curtailing the Affordable Care Act was assembled with such haste that it may get a vote before a full cost estimate is finished. But it is not a new idea.

At its core, the bill introduced by Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.) and Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) would implement a decades-old conservative concept, capping the amount that taxpayers spend on Medicaid and giving states full control over the program. As he’s sold the legislation to conservative governors and activists, Graham has described it as a possible triumph for federalism, and a way to end the progressive dream of universal health care managed from Washington.

“Let’s get back to the basics of being conservative,” Graham said in a Saturday interview with Breitbart News. “We take the money that we would spend on Obamacare in Washington, and we block grant it to the states.”

What’s new, thanks to the Affordable Care Act, is a discrepancy in state-by-state funding that would be flattened out by the block grants. Most states used the ACA’s funding to expand Medicaid; some Republican-run states, liberated by the Supreme Court’s decision to make the funding optional, did not. As a result, 14 of the 15 states that would stand to gain from block grants are run by Republicans; Democratic megastates including California, New York and Massachusetts would lose billions of dollars, a feature both Graham and Cassidy have talked up to conservatives.

“We will either have to kick hundreds of thousands of people off of health care, or we will have to dramatically increase taxes,” said Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.), in one of a string of Monday night floor speeches by Democrats.

“No longer will four blue states get 40 percent of the money,” said Graham to Breitbart. “A state like Mississippi, they get a 900 percent increase. South Carolina gets 300 percent.”

Graham, elected in 1994’s “Republican revolution” to his first term in the House, was present for Capitol Hill’s first serious block-grant campaign. In 1995, in one of many attempts to devolve power from Washington, congressional Republicans teamed up with governors to both cap Medicaid spending and chop up the program’s funding in “MediGrants,” for each state to apply to their own designs.

The proposal died after President Bill Clinton — using one of the pens Lyndon Johnson used to enact Medicaid — vetoed it, denouncing the “wrongheaded cuts” favored by Republicans.

“The president has to realize that Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society has failed,” said Newt Gingrich, then the House speaker.

The block-grant concept remained in conservative thought, and reemerged in 2010, when Rep. Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.), then a ranking member of the House’s tax-writing committee, included the idea in a flashy “Roadmap for America’s Future.” In 2011, newly elected Gov. Scott Walker (R-Wis.) joined a delegation of conservatives in Washington to testify for the wisdom of devolving Medicaid to states.

“It’s the biggest challenge out there,” Walker said of state Medicaid spending. “We have maintenance efforts that require us to maintain things by the federal government when we have other things that would work better to manage those costs.”

Barack Obama’s own veto plan made the block-grant dream futile. This year, Ryan included the idea in the American Health Care Act, the House’s vehicle for “repealing and replacing” the ACA.

“Medicaid, sending it back to the states, capping its growth rate, we’ve been dreaming of this since I’ve been around — since you and I were drinking at a keg,” Ryan told National Review Editor Rich Lowry in March. “We’re on the cusp of doing something we’ve long believed in.”

In the 1990s, and recently, supporters of block grants have pitched them as ways to control costs without simply kicking people off of Medicaid. The slower growth in funding, and higher obligations on states, are described as problems that could be fixed once money was liberated from the federal leviathan. At last week’s rollout of the Senate bill, former senator Rick Santorum (R-Penn.) repeatedly cited Congress’s experience with welfare reform to argue that states could succeed where Washington failed.

“You ever hear a governor come to Washington and complain about not having enough money for their welfare program?” Santorum asked. “No, you don’t, because we gave them flexibility.”

But the shrinking of the welfare rolls, which began in boom times, continued even as poverty increased. Between the 1996 passage of welfare reform and 2013, the number of families living on $2 a day or less rose by 150 percent, according to the National Low Income Housing Coalition.

And the constituency for Medicaid is larger, with 74 million recipients, than the 3 million-plus Americans who receive Temporary Assistance for Needy Families. While some Republican governors, including Walker, have pleaded for Congress to block-grant Medicaid, Graham and his allies have struggled to get a majority of governors on board. The majority of states, which expanded Medicaid under the provisions of the ACA, would see money clawed back and redistributed.

“It is not practical for New Hampshire to craft a system with over $1 billion in cuts to federal funding,” Gov. Chris Sununu (R-N.H.) said on Monday.

“This particular proposal, in part because of how it’s designed, would have major consequences for a state like Massachusetts,” said Gov. Charlie Baker (R-Mass.) earlier in September, during a Senate hearing on moving past repeal. “It assumes that the cost of health care should be the same everywhere.”

The discrepancies in state-by-state Medicaid spending, created when some states declined to expand Medicaid, have already befuddled some Republicans who are now expected to push the bill through.

“This bill keeps 90 percent of the spending of Obamacare and reshuffles it,” said Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), the most resolute Republican opponent of the legislation, who said it would have made more sense if the legislation zeroed out the spending of the ACA.

And there are risks in one favorite talking point — that passing the bill would allow red states to fund private health-care options, while blue states could go their own way. Sen. John Neely Kennedy, Cassidy’s Republican colleague from Louisiana, said Monday that he worried about blue states experimenting with their block grants in ways that would expand government-run, universal coverage.

“If you give California and New York a big chunk of money they’re gonna set up a single-payer system,” said Kennedy. “And I want to prevent that.”

Kennedy, a folksy freshman senator, is not expected to oppose the final bill. But Louisiana, which expanded Medicaid in 2016, is among its losers. According to the left-leaning Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, Louisiana would get roughly $2.3 billion less in health-care funding over 10 years, as funding was capped and redistributed to neighboring states.

Estimates like CBPP’s may be the only ones that voters see, as the Congressional Budget Office announced Monday it would not be able to provide detailed numbers before September 30, when Republicans lose the ability to pass a bill on a party-line vote.

“I just don’t care about the coverage numbers,” Cassidy said last week, “because their methodology has proven to be wrong.”

That ass Cassidy doesn't care about the coverage numbers because he's not going to lose HIS coverage.

[GreyhoundFan]

"No one listens to women when they speak around here"

Spoiler

Over the weekend, the president of the United States retweeted to his 38 million Twitter followers a video clip doctored to show him driving a golf ball off the tee and between the shoulder blades of Hillary Clinton — “CrookedHillary” in the tweet — knocking the former secretary of state and Democratic presidential nominee to the ground.

Eighty-four thousand people “liked” this violent takedown of Trump’s former opponent.

A woman has been speaker of the House (and proved substantially more effective than the two men who succeeded her), another came within a whisker of the presidency, and others (Republican Sens. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Susan Collins of Maine) wield the decisive votes on health-care and other legislation. But recent events make it feel as if we’re in an earlier time, when a woman’s job in politics was simple: sit down and shut up. This no doubt is the work of a president who, by word and deed, made sexism safe again, giving license to shed “political correctness” and blame troubles on minorities, immigrants and women.

Trump’s golf tweet no doubt was inspired by the attention Clinton has gotten for her new book, which has been met with a predictable response: wishing the woman who won the popular vote would “shut up and go away” — as Fox News’s Greg Gutfeld put it. Many reviewers and commentators said similar.

The public disagrees; the book is a No. 1 bestseller.

Clinton isn’t the only woman being told lately to shut up. When Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) rose on the House floor this month to oppose an amendment by Rep. Don Young (R-Alaska), Young twice called Jayapal, 51, a “young lady,” and said she “doesn’t know a damn thing.” (Young later apologized.)

This brought to mind Sen. Richard Burr (R-N.C.), who at two different hearings in July shut down Sen. Kamala D. Harris (D-Calif.) when she aggressively questioned witnesses. Burr, chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, ordered her to be silent and lectured her about “courtesy.”

And this, in turn, echoed Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s infamous silencing of Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) on the Senate floor in February when she read a letter from Coretta Scott King criticizing Jeff Sessions: “She was warned. . . . Nevertheless, she persisted.” Male senators reading the letter received no rebuke.

Another new book by another strong woman, NBC’s Katy Tur, recalls the abuse she suffered during the campaign when Trump taunted “Little Katy” and ordered her to “be quiet” during a news conference. Tur describes him kissing her before a TV appearance: “Before I know what’s happening, his hands are on my shoulders and his lips are on my cheek.” Of course, Trump has done worse, boasting about grabbing women by the genitals, bragging publicly about his penis size, and more.

Alas, it’s not just words. The latest Senate attempt at Obamacare repeal, drafted by four men, would eliminate Obamacare’s requirement that insurers cover maternity care and funding for Planned Parenthood, one of the largest providers of women’s health care. Tweeted Sen. Mazie Hirono (D-Hawaii): “A group of men wrote a devastating health care bill & are now trying to push it through w/o debate. It’s almost like we’ve been here before.”

In the White House last week, Trump was meeting with advisers and lawmakers when, as The Post’s Ashley Parker and others recounted, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), the only woman in a room with 10 men, twice tried to answer a question. Both times, she was spoken over. Finally, the former speaker of the House broke through. “Does anybody listen to women when they speak around here?” she asked.

Apparently not.

Pelosi described that memorable encounter to me on Friday, when I saw her in New Haven, Conn., at the wake for Luisa DeLauro, the longest serving alderman in the city’s history and mother of Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.). To me, Luisa DeLauro, who died last week at 103, was “Grandma Louise,” because I’m married to Rosa’s stepdaughter, Democratic pollster Anna Greenberg.

The funeral for Luisa, a pioneering woman in politics, juxtaposed with the outrageous treatment Pelosi endured in the White House days earlier, left me with an unwelcome realization about the persistence of sexism in this business. Grandma Louise was born on Christmas Eve in 1913, seven years before women won the right to vote. As a young woman of 19, serving as the secretary of the 10th Ward Democratic Club, Luisa was optimistic as she exhorted women to engage in politics in a 1933 article. Rosa read Luisa’s words from long ago at the funeral: “We have gradually taken our place in every phase of human endeavor, and even in the heretofore stronghold of the male sex: politics. . . . Come on, girls, let’s make ourselves heard.”

The “girls” are speaking, loudly. But does anybody listen to women when they speak around here?

As a woman, I can say this is not uncommon. I'm in the tech field and the "boys" don't like to listen.

[GreyhoundFan]

NOOOOOOOOOOO: "Senate girds for final Obamacare repeal vote"

Spoiler

The Senate will vote next week on the latest bill to repeal Obamacare — but the outcome is anything but certain.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) plans to put a bill written by Sens. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) and Bill Cassidy (R-La.) to a vote, hoping that a looming Sept. 30 deadline to pass the bill with just 50 votes will create enough pressure to finally pass a repeal of the health care law, his office said.

"It is the leader’s intention to consider Graham/Cassidy on the floor next week,” a spokeswoman said.

McConnell has told colleagues he will only bring up the bill if it will succeed. The statement does leave some wiggle room to not proceed with a vote.

It's still anyone's guess whether the bill's backers can get to 50 votes. One Republican senator suggested that McConnell may ultimately decide to bring the bill up for another failed vote, in part to show GOP donors and President Donald Trump that the Senate GOP tried again.

Trump himself joined the ongoing debate Wednesday night, tweeting that Graham-Cassidy was a "great Bill."

"I would not sign Graham-Cassidy if it did not include coverage of pre-existing conditions. It does!" Trump tweeted, alluding to recent attacks on the bill that it won't protect patients with congenital or pre-existing illnesses.

Sens. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) and Susan Collins (R-Maine) are viewed as hard “no's.” And Sens. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska), who opposed a previous iteration of repeal in July, are not sold on the proposal.

In an interview, McCain sounded like he could end up tanking a bill written by Graham, his close friend.

“Nothing has changed. If McConnell wants to put it on the floor, that’s up to McConnell,” McCain said. “I am the same as I was before. I want the regular order.”

Asked if that means he’s a "no" vote, McCain said: “That means I want the regular order. It means I want the regular order!”

Paul, who has come under criticism from fellow Republican senators and Trump himself for his adamant opposition to the Graham-Cassidy measure, showed no sign of backing off Wednesday. In an interview, the Kentucky senator said he plans to demand a vote next week — should the bill actually come to the floor — on an amendment that would simply repeal the entirety of the health care law.

That amendment would go further than a vote Paul secured in July that repealed the main pillars of Obamacare, including the coverage mandates and the Medicaid expansion.

"My objection is that it keeps the vast majority of Obamacare spending and then just redistributes it in a different formula. That, to me, isn’t what I promised," Paul said. "I'm going to have a vote on repealing the whole thing and we’ll see how people stand on that."

Murkowski said Wednesday that she is still undecided, stressing that she needs "full understanding as to numbers and formulas" under the Graham-Cassidy bill.

"Just last evening, late, my team was on the phone with the folks from [Health and Human Servies] because we’ve got hard questions about numbers that we feel that we deserve an answer to," Murkowski said. "So we’ve been working through that."

The latest proposal would turn federal health insurance funding into block grants for states, wind down Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion and rescind the law’s coverage mandates. Notably, there will be no complete analysis by the Congressional Budget Office by the time a vote comes up, leaving lawmakers unsure what the bill’s effects on premiums and coverage will be.

That's been a major critique from Senate Democrats, who are again chastising Republicans not only for the substance of the Graham-Cassidy bill but how Republicans are scrambling to pass it before Sept. 30. Senate Minority Whip Dick Durbin of Illinois said Wednesday that "we're going to do everything we can to make it clear how bad this bill is, offer the appropriate amendments and hope that three Republicans will join us in stopping it."

The uncertainty surrounding the last-ditch repeal push has kept many center-right senators on the sidelines, including McCain, Murkowski and Sens. Rob Portman (R-Ohio) and Shelley Moore Capito (R-W.Va.). However, at a party lunch on Tuesday before leaving for the week, the vast majority of senators expressed support for holding a vote on the bill, according to an attendee.

The party’s chief vote-counter, Majority Whip John Cornyn of Texas, said party leaders are delivering an urgent message to wavering Republicans.

“It really seems to be picking up some momentum. And I think it’s happening pretty quickly,” Cornyn said in an interview. “We don’t have long to act so that’s why things seem to have sprung up here after people thought health care was dead. This is our last opportunity.”

Cassidy and Graham have been working feverishly to educate senators about the bill, working with CBO to get them the most information possible, a source familiar with the process said. The duo, along with former Sen. Rick Santorum (R-Pa.), spent Wednesday morning meeting with McConnell and working on Murkowski and Sen. Dan Sullivan (R-Alaska), hoping to overcome their concerns that block grants could slash funding to Alaska.

“We’re very interested in helping Alaska because Alaska has 750,000 people. And a land mass bigger than Texas,” Graham said, referring to a provision in the bill that could help low-density states such as Alaska.

Most of the whipping will focus on McCain and Murkowski. Both took an immense political risk in rejecting the GOP’s “skinny” repeal in July, and Republican senators believe that if the two of them support the bill, the rest of the undecided Republicans will fall in line.

“It’s going well,” Cassidy said of the discussions with McCain and Murkowski. “I don’t want to say in play … but they are open to these discussions.”

Please call your senators, even if they are Dems. This can't pass. It will screw so many people.

[GreyhoundFan]

"The new Republican plan to repeal Obamacare is the worst one yet"

Spoiler

Republicans have come up with an innovative, new plan to repeal Obamacare.

Instead of cutting health-care spending for the poor and letting insurance companies once again discriminate against the sick in the name of personal freedom, they want to cut health-care spending for the poor and let insurance companies once again discriminate against the sick in the name of state freedom.

Like I said, it's innovative.

Now, there are two things you need to know about this last-ditch effort to eliminate Obamacare.

The first is that Republicans only have until Sept. 30 to do so. That's when their ability to pass a health-care bill with just 50 votes in the Senate instead of the 60 it takes to beat a filibuster will turn into a legislative pumpkin, assuming that they want to preserve this power for their tax cuts later on (which, it goes without saying, they do).

The second is that this latest plan, which they've settled on by default since they've already voted down all their others, might actually go further to cut health-care spending than their previous ones. We can't say for sure, though, because the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office won't have time to conduct a full analysis beforehand.

So what do we know?

Well, the big picture is this plan, co-sponsored by Sens. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) and Bill Cassidy (R-La.), would take all the money Obamacare currently spends on subsidizing health insurance and expanding Medicaid, and give some of it back to the states directly. This is what is known as a “block grant.” But there are a couple of key differences here.

The first is that this money would come with far fewer strings attached than it does under Obamacare. States, for example, could go back to letting insurance companies charge sick people more — good luck affording coverage if you have a preexisting condition like diabetes, or depression, or … acne? — or de facto do so by selling skimpy plans to healthy people and more expensive ones to everybody else. Not to mention that they wouldn't be required to use this money to help cover people like they are now. If they wanted to, they could put this money toward things like paying providers or keeping out-of-pocket costs down — worthwhile goals, but not ones that would give insurance to somebody who doesn't have it.

The second difference is who would get the money. Cassidy is worried it's “not fair” that "37 percent of the revenue from the Affordable Care Act goes to Americans in” the “four states” of California, New York, Massachusetts and Maryland. He has a point — just not for the reason he thinks. The important thing to understand is that these states get so much of the spending not only because they have a lot of people, but also because they have a lot of people on Medicaid after they accepted Obamacare's expansion of the program. This would be a much smaller share of the total, though, if Texas and Florida had done the same. But they didn't, and neither did a lot of Republican-controlled states.

Poor people in red states, then, really are getting left behind by a system that, thanks to the Supreme Court, allows their governors to decide to leave them behind.

But rather than try to get these states to accept the mostly free money the federal government has been dangling in front of them, Republicans have an alternative approach. To rectify the injustice of, say, Idaho's government deciding not to expand Medicaid like Illinois, Republicans would simply take money from Illinois to give to Idaho. No, really. Cassidy-Graham wouldn't give states the same amount of money in block grants that they got from Obamacare, but would rather divvy the whole pot up based on a fairly esoteric formula that would benefit rural states and ones that didn't expand Medicaid at the expense of urban states and ones that did.

California and New York would, according to the left-leaning Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, be the biggest losers under this redistributive scheme, while Texas and Georgia would come out the most ahead.

The third difference is how much money there'd be at all. It turns out that the block grants wouldn't just move money from blue to red states. They'd also cut how much money there was in the first place.

Indeed, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities estimates that, in 2020, Graham-Cassidy's block grants would start out $26 billion smaller than what states would have gotten from Obamacare, and would then grow so slowly that by 2026 they'd be $83 billion smaller. But that 34 percent cut in 2026 is nothing compared to what would happen in 2027: a 100 percent cut. Yes, that's right. The block grants would disappear entirely in 10 years. Sure, Congress might renew them at that point, but it really might not. That'd still be a lot of money to come up with — money that Republicans would much rather use on, say, tax cuts.

The final difference is what it would do with Medicaid. That's nothing less than a fundamental transformation of it. Like previous Republican plans, you see, it would turn Medicaid from an open-ended program that grows as need does to one that's capped on a per capita basis and only grows according to inflation — and a particularly low rate of it, at that. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimates that this, together with an end to Obamacare's Medicaid expansion for the working poor, would result in Medicaid spending being 26 percent lower in 10 years, and 35 percent lower in 20 years.

None of this is really new, of course.

Cutting Medicaid for the poor, health insurance subsidies for the middle class, and protections for the sick is what almost every Republican plan would do. What's different about Cassidy-Graham, though, is just how disruptive it would make this. That's because it wouldn't keep any of Obamacare's structures in place, not even watered down versions, like other Republican plans would.

Instead, it would force individual states to set up their own health-care programs, give them a lot less money to do so than they're getting now, and, to top it off, force them to plan for the possibility of losing it all 10 years from now. They would ostensibly be doing this out of fealty to federalism — what could be better than letting states decide for themselves if they want to make insurance unaffordable for sick people? — but this freedom to not cover as many people isn't one that a lot of governors want. Even Republicans John Kasich of Ohio, Brian Sandoval of Nevada and Charles Baker of Massachusetts have come out against it.

After all, you can't cut this much health-care spending without costing tens of millions of people their coverage. We won't know if that'd be something like 20 million or 30 million until the CBO has time to run the numbers, but we know those are probably in the ballpark.

Meet the new Trumpcare, same as the old Trumpcare.

I've just called both my senators again. They are very against this monstrosity. It chaps my hide that so many think that Lindsey Graham isn't a typical Repug because he has said things against the TT. This plan shows he hates people just as much as the other Repugs. Well, he doesn't hate rich people who don't need insurance.

[candygirl200413]

McCain I read as of late did say he was leaning towards supporting it. https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/9/18/16329082/obamacare-repeal-cassidy-graham-doug-ducey-john-mccain

I've called everyday this week my repug and dem senators, I haven't called my repug in a while just because he is scum but deseprationis looming with such a disasterous health bill that I make sure to do it during my commute to classes this week.

[sawasdee]

This guy is freaking scary!

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/roy-moore-disrupts-alabama-senate-race--and-prepares-for-new-level-of-defiance-in-washington/2017/09/21/2a88a4a2-9e38-11e7-9083-fbfddf6804c2_story.html?utm_term=.28489087ecbb

Spoiler

DECATUR, Ala. — With the thunder and fire of an old-time revivalist, U.S. Senate candidate Roy Moore rose before the assembled souls at the Redemption Baptist Church, a front-runner in the polls days out from an election that could rattle the rickety structures of the Republican Party.

“You think that God’s not angry that this land is a moral slum?” asked Moore, 70, reciting a rhyming poem he had written years earlier during a 50-minute address before several dozen believers. “How much longer will it be before his judgment comes?”

Republican primary voters across the country have been trying since 2010 to elect angry, outsider candidates who promise to disrupt the ways of Washington. But no one in recent history has promised to be quite as disruptive as Moore, a former chief justice of the Alabama Supreme Court who has twice been removed from the bench for defying judicial orders.

And few have divided the GOP as Moore’s candidacy has, producing a momentous power struggle over an election that is likely to turn out less than 20 percent of Alabama’s Republican voters but could nonetheless set the tone for the coming 2018 election battles.

In August, Moore won the first round of primary voting with 39 percent of the vote, and then won the endorsement of the third-place finisher weeks later. Now, with the election just five days away, Moore leads public polling averages with a nine-point edge over Sen. Luther Strange, the man appointed to replace Attorney General Jeff Sessions.

Strange, a 6-foot-9-inch former prosecutor in the conventional mold of his colleague, Sen. Richard C. Shelby (R-Ala.), is bolstered by millions of dollars pouring into the state from establishment Republicans including Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce — and even by President Trump, who plans to hold a rally for Strange in Huntsville on Friday.

But many of Trump’s core supporters remain with Moore, who relentlessly praises Trump’s policy agenda on the campaign trail. So are a hodgepodge of conservative iconoclasts: former Trump adviser Stephen K. Bannon, his Breitbart media operation, former Alaska governor Sarah Palin, “Duck Dynasty” star Phil Robertson and evangelical leaders from across the country.

And for now, they are winning, revealing with startling clarity the gaping divide between Trump’s most ardent fans and GOP leaders — and setting up, among other things, the uncomfortable possibility that many of them could turn out to see Trump as he tries to prop up Strange, and then vote for Moore.

The central argument of Moore’s campaign is that removing the sovereignty of a Christian God from the functions of government is an act of apostasy, an affront to the biblical savior as well as the Constitution. Among the prices he says this country has paid for denying God’s supremacy: the high murder rate in Chicago, crime on the streets of Washington, child abuse, rape and sodomy. It’s a crisis he hopes to address next year from the floor of the Senate.

“We have forgotten the source of our rights,” Moore preached during that church appearance, quoting from memory several books of the Bible, along with the Declaration of Independence, Abraham Lincoln, George Washington and a U.S. Supreme Court decision from 1892. “We put ourselves above God. And in so doing, we forgot the basic source of our morality.”

Moore has always been controversial, and proudly so. As a judge, he denied granting custody of three teenagers to their mother, who was in a lesbian relationship, writing that her private behavior was “an inherent evil against which children must be protected.”

In his current campaign, he has called for the impeachment of judges, including possibly Supreme Court justices, who issue rulings for same-sex marriage and sodomy.

He also acts nothing like a professional political candidate. During the final days of a brutal campaign, which has featured withering, daily television and direct-mail assaults on his character, he invited a reporter to spend hours alone with him traveling through the state. Unstaffed by campaign aides and tethered to the outside world only by a flip-phone, Moore offered a seat in his family’s pew for Sunday church services, welcomed a tag-along when he visited with his 90-year-old mother, gave a tour of his home and property in rural Gallant and then offered to speak on the record for a two-hour drive, with a quick stop for lunch with his wife, Kayla, at a roadside Cracker Barrel, where they both ordered the Sunday Homestyle Chicken.

The last 50 years, Moore argued, has witnessed the tragic removal of God from public life, from schools, from government, that was never intended under the Constitution’s establishment clause. “There is no such thing as evolution,” he explained at one point as he waited for his lunch. Species might adapt to their environment, he continued, but that has nothing to do with the origins of life described in the Bible. “That we came from a snake?” he asked rhetorically. “No, I don’t believe that.”

Moore’s on-the-record candor arises from an earnest desire to make sure that his unconventional ideas about the Constitution and God, which he has recorded in three separate books, are accurately portrayed for a national audience. “One thing I do not want you to do, because it’s not right, is to say that I believe in biblical punishments,” he explained during the drive, which included periodic rain storms that blotted out the rolling forest and farmland. “I’ve been accused of saying I want to kill homosexuals because the Bible says. And I don’t.”

As a historical matter, there is little debate over the religious convictions of the founding Americans. But Moore has used these admonitions to take the position that any legal orders that defy a conservative evangelical view of “the law of nature and nature’s God,” as Thomas Jefferson put it, are illegitimate, unconstitutional and should not be obeyed.

“The Constitution is the supreme law of the land, not what judicial supremacists say it is,” he explained. “It’s not debatable when it contradicts reason.”

In 2003, when a federal judge ordered Moore to remove a monument to the Ten Commandments he had installed at the Supreme Court of Alabama, he refused. Like a soldier ordered to murder civilians, he could not, as an officer sworn to the Constitution, carry out an illegal command, he explained. He was removed from office as a result.

Alabama’s electorate returned Moore to his old post 10 years later — just in time for the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling establishing a constitutional right to same-sex marriage. Moore again rebelled, writing a flurry of memos and decisions, telling the governor to “oppose such tyranny” and announcing that the order should not be accepted as the “rule of law” since human beings are not “at liberty to redefine reality.” He was suspended from the bench without pay and voluntarily retired.

Underlying all of these actions, and his latest designs on elective office, is an unwavering vision of key constitutional questions as moral choices between good and evil. “Sodomy is against the laws of nature,” he explained, before comparing it to a man or woman who has sex with a donkey. “Let’s say the court decides to get rid of the law of gravity and says you can jump off the Empire State Building. Can they do that? No, they certainly can’t do that.”

A fighting instinct

Moore’s hometown of Gallant boasts a post office, a church and 855 residents, according to the 2010 Census. Other than that, there is not much to distinguish it from the farmland and forest that surround it. Moore started building his house here on weekends nearly 50 years ago, when he was still a twenty-something bachelor working as a deputy district attorney.

He was living in a trailer at the time — a graduate of the U.S. Military Academy and a Vietnam veteran who viewed hard manual labor as his hobby. “When I say I built it myself, I laid the block,” he explained, as he approached the property. “I hand-dug the foundation, and laid the rock and filled the rock with cement that I mixed by hand.”

He also built the dining room table that his family still uses, and he hand-carved the bedposts on the four-poster bed he shares with his wife under plaques displaying the Ten Commandments. After his four kids joined them, he built a pool outside the back door, 15 feet deep with a jumping platform nearly as high. He then installed a circulating waterfall, which he decorated with another marble display of the Ten Commandments. A third set of commandments sits on the fireplace mantel.

In Moore’s home office, where he does his writing, he hung a couple of antique rifles in glass cases. “Guns, guns, guns. I’ve got lots of guns,” he said, passing through. “Guns you don’t see.”

Such details are not incidental to Moore’s political views, because a defiant, individualist attitude has always driven him, nearly as much as the ideas he espouses. Ask him for his story, and he tells it as a series of confrontations.

When he arrived at the U.S. Military Academy, the first in his family to go to college, he suffered hazing from his fellow students — on account, he believes, of his strong Southern accent and small-town education. He began training as a boxer, deciding to literally fight back and win the respect of his fellow cadets. In Vietnam, he ran a military police company supervising the stockade in Da Nang. It was toward the end of the war, when drug use and low morale among draftees were rampant. Amid threats on his life for his strict demands for discipline, he challenged anyone in the company to take him on in the boxing ring.

By the time Moore became a prosecutor, he had little patience for the conventions of the legal community. He complained to the county grand jury about law-enforcement budget problems, a breach of protocol that earned him an investigation by the Alabama State Bar Association.

When Moore campaigned for district attorney years later, the legal establishment turned against him and he lost. He said he was so angry that he moved to Texas, and spent a year studying kickboxing so that he could come back home and beat a local black belt, unaffiliated with the legal community, in a tournament in the county seat. He won. “One thing my father always taught me is the one thing they can’t take from you is what you know,” Moore explained. “That’s why when I go to defend myself, I learn things.”

Decades later, the attitude never dimmed, nor did his fighting instinct. As a Republican judge, Moore has criticized the current Senate for letting fears of a government shutdown be used to allow Planned Parenthood to receive federal funding. He now supports a raft of conservative political positions, saying he will increase funding for the military, work to secure the border either through military deployment or a wall, fight to repeal the Affordable Care Act and oppose former president Barack Obama’s executive orders, including protections for undocumented immigrants who came to this country as children.

Moore is open to granting some of those same immigrants a chance to eventually stay in the U.S., if they return to their country of origin first and meet certain qualifications. “To put them all in the same pot, to say you are all welcome or all rejected seems harsh,” he said. “That’s the kind of thing I can negotiate on.”

One thing he won’t negotiate is his view of how the Senate conducts its business. He carries with him a pocket pamphlet he published containing his legal theory of God’s supremacy, along with the key documents that he claims as evidence for the argument. This includes a full copy of the Constitution, which he has begun to mark up in recent weeks, noting each place where the document lays out voting margins in the legislative branch.

Nowhere, he notes, does the document permit the Senate to require 60 votes to bring a vote — a convention that has on occasion tied the hands of the party in power. He says he plans to help end the practice if he wins election, though he won’t say how. “I got a plan,” he said with a smile. “I’m not going to tell you.”

That attitude could predict a new level of disruption in the U.S. Senate, where individual members still have significant powers to upend proceedings and slow down legislation. Many of his supporters are counting on it.

“Watch if he doesn’t do exactly what he says he will do,” says Dean Young, a longtime Moore friend and adviser, who helped coax him into the Senate race. “They can kick him off every committee. They can blackball him. It won’t matter if it’s one man against 99 in the Senate. We all know Judge Moore will be that one man.”

Whether that happens is now largely out of Moore’s hands, a question of who turns out on Tuesday and what role negative campaign ads and Trump’s endorsement will play in the result. He will continue to campaign into the final days, warmly greeting all the supporters who stop him as he makes his way through the Cracker Barrel. ““You know, I don’t pray to win,” he tells his crowds on campaign stops. “I pray that God’s will be done.”

He's advocating a theocracy. I thought that the Constitution mandated separation of Church and State?

And I can't even  with all the evolution denying politicians. If they can ignore the overwhelming evidence that the world is more than 6000 years old, they can also ignore overwhelming evidence that their legislation is damaging, not helping, those who voted for them.(See: Lindsay-Cassidy Health Bill.)

I bet the only work if fiction of whose premise Moore's ever approved is The Handmaiden's Tale

[fraurosena]

Good grief. It looks like Cassidy and Lindsay (and I bet a whole lot of other repugliklans) got rapped on the knuckles, hard, by their donors and have to have another go at trying to revive that dead horse of a zombie care bill in order to appease the people who are greasing their palms with greenbacks. 

At least, that's the only more or less logical explanation I can come up with for this eyerolling idiocy. 

[GreyhoundFan]

Alexandra Petri does great snark, but sadly, this one is almost too true: "Sorry I can’t go to your thing. I must call my senator to plead for my life."

Spoiler

An email template from the near future.

I am sorry I cannot make it to your event, but I have to call Congress every eight minutes to plead for my life.

Would I like to go to your wedding/bar mitzvah/coffee date/movie/quiet place where sleep is possible? You bet. But you know that if I don’t call my senator and register my opposition, the new Terrible Health-Care-Ending Bill to Unleash Boils Across the Land, Replace the Rivers with Blood and Slay All the Firstborn will go through, and the time between those bills is getting shorter and shorter.

It is not that I don’t want to be there for your life milestone. I do! I am just really concerned that my senator might prefer for this state to have six costly nowhere bridges studded with diamonds than to prevent millions of people from being flung off their insurance, and I am not willing to take that chance, not even for the six minutes that will pass between the inception of this bill and its introduction on the Senate floor for a vote.

(Just a minute; in the course of typing this response they have already introduced another bill and I have to call again.)

Sorry. I’m back. On a related note, I am sorry that last week I set your baby hastily on the ground and rushed to a landline telephone to plead with my senator, but I am just doing what I can to stop people with preexisting conditions from losing access to care. I am sure Warren will thank me when she is older.

Was it rude of me to run screaming out of the team meeting just as you had fired up your PowerPoint presentation? Undoubtedly. But was it not even more rude of the Senate to decide that if we did not call them within 90 seconds we would all be thrown into a high-risk pool filled with nurse sharks? (An especially mean touch, since those have NURSE in the name yet are not nurses but SHARKS.)

(Sorry, again, in the few moments it took me to type that sentence, a new, terrible Obamacare replacement has been introduced and is rapidly heading toward the floor for a vote without a CBO score or even a fun, memorable acronym.)

Back. I don’t enjoy this any more than you do. Would I like to not have to sit here all day every day staring into the Internet trying not to blink, lest during the time it takes me to shut my eyes and open them the Senate holds enough of a semblance of a debate on a bill to placate a skimpy majority of senators? Undoubtedly. But we no longer have that luxury.

I could swear that only a month ago I was able to read an entire letter from the AMA denouncing a proposed Obamacare replacement before the bill reached the floor, but now I do not even have that kind of time. Why, I remember when Senators used to have to stand in front of the media and insist that they were not in favor of letting people lose their coverage. Now, they just hiss at the press in the hallways as they run from the Non-Committee to the Non-Debate.

So, I’m sorry I cannot be there. I cannot be anywhere. I have not gone underground in months. I cannot risk it. What if, during the few seconds I was left without cell reception, John McCain inexplicably decided he did not care about regular order any longer? Then where would we be?

We are locked in this battle until one of these bills passes, or all the callers die. But I repeat myself.

I feel like this is my life.