United States Congress of Fail (Part 2)

[GreyhoundFan]

"Hating government doesn’t solve problems"

Spoiler

In its current iteration, the Republican Party truly seems to believe that the solution to every problem involves throwing more money at rich people. This explains the health-care fiasco in the Senate, and it’s why President Trump and Congress have yet to address a single major problem the country faces.

Everything is secondary to the GOP’s two opening legislative priorities: gutting Obamacare and passing a tax cut.

The president has talked a lot about infrastructure, but he has offered no plan and Congress shows few signs of coming up with one anytime soon. Trump loves to say he wants to help those battered by economic change. But his actions in this sphere have been entirely symbolic. There are no comprehensive proposals for, say, using training, community colleges and the apprenticeships he was touting recently to open up new opportunities.

There have been steps to eliminate regulations protecting workers, consumers and the environment, rationalized as job-creation measures. This is just trickle-down economics in another form: Whatever fulfills the desires of the most-privileged sectors in our society is declared to be good for everyone else. But God forbid that government do anything to help the non-rich directly.

It’s not true that every problem has a government solution. But it is true that certain problems can be addressed only by government. One of these is helping all Americans afford a decent health-insurance policy. It’s this simple: To cover everyone, government has to spend a lot of money.

Why? Because unless you get your coverage from an employer or have an income in excess of (conservatively) $75,000 a year, the expense of insurance is crushing to your household budget.

“In 2017,” the Milliman Medical Index reported last month, “the cost of healthcare for a typical American family of four covered by an average employer-sponsored preferred provider organization (PPO) plan is $26,944.”

This figure includes out-of-pocket costs, but insurance itself is expensive enough. This month, the National Conference of State Legislatures pointed out that “annual premiums reached $18,142 in 2016 for an average family.”

Now, consider this: Someone working full time at $10 an hour earns $20,800 a year before taxes; at $15 an hour, $31,200; at $20 an hour, $41,600. The median household income in 2015, according to the most recent Census Bureau figures, was $56,516.

Is it any wonder that it’s so hard for so many to buy health insurance?

Putting health coverage within reach of everyone thus requires either large-scale subsidies for private plans or direct government spending, as in Medicaid and Medicare. The Senate bill would toss 22 million people off health insurance for one basic reason: It cuts federal spending on Medicaid and insurance subsidies by about $1 trillion and then plows most of that into tax reductions.

There is no getting around it. You can’t do what the GOP wants to do without hurting a lot of people. This is why pious pleas for the parties to work together are, for now, empty. Of course it would be far better for Democrats and Republicans to agree on ways to improve our health system, and it’s nice to hear a few GOP senators saying so.

To get to that point, Republicans would have to abandon the fiction that they can slash spending on subsidies and Medicaid without anyone paying a price. They also need to accept that it will take government action to rein in health-care inflation — for example, through harder bargaining with drug companies.

Republicans did not always fixate on taxes and smaller government above all else. Dwight Eisenhower was bold in building the interstate highway system and creating federal student loans. Richard Nixon — yes, Nixon — was similarly forward-looking in creating the Environmental Protection Agency and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. Oh, and Nixon actually proposed universal health coverage.

This health-care imbroglio should be the Republicans’ moment of truth. If tax cuts and scaling back government are all that matters to them, they should stop pretending they even care about solving problems that require substantial government outlays. They can out themselves as economic libertarians, which would at least be intellectually coherent.

Or they can drop the tax obsession and admit that delivering what most Americans want from government will make it large and complicated. A start would be acknowledging, along with nearly every other conservative party in the world, that if you hope to guarantee health care for all, only some form of Big Government can get you there.

I so agree with the first line.

[GreyhoundFan]

This is an interesting analysis of what it will take to pass McTurtle deathcare: "If these two Republicans can’t agree, the Senate can’t pass its health-care bill"

Spoiler

They came to the Senate together amid less fanfare than some of their 2010 classmates, with lower profiles that didn’t lead to presidential bids.

But Sens. Rob Portman (Ohio) and Patrick J. Toomey (Pa.) were intellectual forces inside the Republican caucus from the moment they took the oath in January 2011.

Portman, a former White House budget director, and Toomey, a former Wall Street executive who ran the anti-tax Club for Growth, got picked seven months into office for a special committee to cut the debt. They sit next to each other on the Finance Committee, the crown jewel of tax and health-care policy.

And they both found ways to win reelection from neighboring states by building a unique coalition that included suburban professionals and rural conservatives, latching onto niche local issues that resonated through the din of President Trump’s boisterous campaign.

Now, six months into their second term, Portman and Toomey stand apart on the most critical issue preventing a deal to repeal the law that helped launch their careers, the Affordable Care Act.

Both men ran sharply against Obamacare. But now, Portman has become the de facto leader of moderates and mainstream conservatives from states that accepted the law’s expanded federal funding for Medicaid coverage. Toomey has galvanized conservatives behind his proposal to cut that program and provide what some consider the most dramatic curtailment of an entitlement program in a generation.

The dispute between Portman, 61, and Toomey, 55, has grown contentious behind closed doors. Neither senator lacks for self-confidence, and they have jousted over both the policy and the political fallout of those ideas, often talking past each other in a bid to win support from their fellow Republicans.

There are other issues that could still derail the proposal from Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), who has delayed an initial test vote on the nearly 150-page draft until at least mid-July. But there is simply no path for victory unless these two senators, so similar in many ways, bridge their divide on this core issue.

The two senators seem to have emerged from their 2016 reelections with vastly different outlooks.

“I continue to have real concerns about the Medicaid policies in this bill, especially those that impact drug treatment at a time when Ohio is facing an opioid epidemic,” Portman said this week, citing the issue that became his personal rallying cry last year.

“What we’re trying to do is free the states and free the marketplace to discover ever-better ways to deliver services,” Toomey said Sunday on CBS’s “Face the Nation,” returning to his core, economically conservative roots.

Democrats are accusing Republicans, particularly Toomey, of shading their views last fall to win reelection in swing states without explaining how their opposition to the ACA would affect voters.

“It would have been devastating for him, there’s no ifs, ands or buts about that. That’s the problem with this election — there were promises made and everything that was promised is not being lived up to,” Sen. Jon Tester (Mont.), who ran the upper chamber’s Democratic campaign arm last year, said of Toomey. Pennsylvania has more than 700,000 residents benefiting from the expanded Medicare provision. Ohio has almost the same number.

“We’ll see what the end result is,” Tester said of Portman’s hesitancy to support McConnell. “I mean, talk is cheap unless you can back it up with a vote.”

Allies to the two senators reject the idea that they hid their views of former president Barack Obama’s signature accomplishment as president, having cast many votes to repeal the legislation during their first term in the Senate. Toomey’s opponent tried to make his fiscally conservative views a focus of the campaign.

But Toomey blunted that conservative portrait by co-writing gun control legislation that was popular in the Philadelphia suburbs, where he far outperformed Trump and wove together a different coalition to win by less than 100,000 votes out of more than 6 million cast.

In Ohio, Portman became the face of the effort to defeat the heroin epidemic that has ravaged his state — and has now spread to every corner of the country. That cause blunted questions about his views on trade and budgets against a stumbling opponent, helping him win by more than 20 percentage points.

Neither senator publicly supported Trump’s candidacy last fall. Portman withdrew his endorsement after The Washington Post unveiled a video of Trump discussing groping women. Toomey never told voters whom he supported until polls had closed.

Yet it’s Toomey, having never won by more than 2 percentage points, who has taken up the conservative mantle. In the proposed phaseout of the Medicaid expansion that McConnell has floated, Toomey won a significant, long-term cap in the program’s spending. Remarkably, it’s a more conservative position than the House-passed bill — which Trump has publicly called “mean” in its treatment of the working poor.

That in turn has prompted heated discussions between Portman and Toomey, with the Ohio senator believing the position is a political loser in the Midwestern states that provided the foundation for Trump’s presidency — and McConnell’s Senate majority.

Portman has long been described as a moderate, but often in a mistaken way. His demeanor is collegial, and he’s long enjoyed a good relationship with the Capitol’s press corps. But on policy, he has been a regular McConnell ally — until now.

Portman opposed the 2013 bipartisan immigration bill, and during the 2011 special debt committee deliberations, Democrats privately gave up on Portman as a lost cause not looking for a deal while they continued to pursue Toomey’s support. They viewed Toomey as slightly more conservative and, therefore, more valuable. If he agreed to a deal, it would have attracted more buy-in from other Republicans than if it were Portman.

On Monday, as Reuters first reported, McConnell “dressed down” Portman over his current position and reminded him that as George W. Bush’s budget director, he had supported entitlement reform.

Portman has requested a $45 billion fund to battle opioids, citing a Harvard study in which $4.5 billion a year on Medicaid spending goes toward drug treatment.

“I still have many of those same concerns. So the Senate draft falls short and therefore I do not support it in its current form,” Portman said.

I'm still hoping that this ridiculous piece of crap bill doesn't pass.

[fraurosena]

If anyone had any doubts that the Repugliklans will do just about anything to suppress voting, doubt no more:

 House Republicans Just Voted to Eliminate the Only Federal Agency That Makes Sure Voting Machines Can’t Be Hacked

Quote

 In a little-noticed 6-3 vote today, the House Administration Committee voted along party lines to eliminate the Election Assistance Commission, which helps states run elections and is the only federal agency charged with making sure voting machines can’t be hacked. The EAC was created after the disastrous 2000 election in Florida as part of the Help America Vote Act to rectify problems like butterfly ballots and hanging chads. (Republicans have tried to kill the agency for years.) The Committee also voted to eliminate the public-financing system for presidential elections dating back to the 1970s. 

 “It is my firm belief that the EAC has outlived its usefulness and purpose,” said Committee chair Gregg Harper (R-MS), explaining why his bill transfers the EAC’s authority to the Federal Election Commission. 

Thirty-eight pro-democracy groups, including the NAACP and Common Cause, denounced the vote. “The EAC is the only federal agency which has as its central mission the improvement of election administration, and it undertakes essential activities that no other institution is equipped to address,” says the Brennan Center for Justice.

This move is particularly worrisome given reports that suspected Russian hackers attempted to access voter-registration systems in more than 20 states during the 2016 election. Moreover, the Presidential Commission on Election Administration set up by President Obama in 2014 outlined an “impending crisis” in voting technology and the Brennan Center found that 42 states used voting machines in 2016 that were at least a decade-old and at risk of failing. The EAC was the agency tasked with making sure these voting systems were both modernized and secure.

The EAC is not a perfect agency. It lacked a quorum of members from 2010 to 2014 and was paralyzed by inaction. Then, last year, its executive director unilaterally approved controversial proof-of-citizenship laws in Kansas, Georgia, and Alabama, which the federal courts subsequently blocked.

But given the threats to American democracy at this moment, the EAC needs to be strengthened, not replaced.

It’s particularly ironic that the Trump administration is preparing to launch a massive investigation into nonexistent voter fraud based on the lie that millions voted illegally while House Republicans are shutting down the agency that is supposed to make sure America’s elections are secure. It’s more proof of how the GOP’s real agenda is to make it harder to vote.  

This is just beyond belief. 

[GreyhoundFan]

"Mitch McConnell, America’s No. 1 obstructionist, is trying to make big things happen"

Spoiler

Mitch McConnell never particularly took offense when his opponents branded him America’s No. 1 obstructionist, the Darth Vader of Capitol Hill. Call him dark, call him evil, he embraced it all, even posting the most biting cartoons on his office wall.

He was happy to let others handle the oratory and the inspiration and the fleshing out of a governing philosophy. Addison Mitchell McConnell Jr., the 75-year-old senior senator from Kentucky, would focus on the winning part.

Based on the electoral math alone, this should be the Senate majority leader’s moment, the veteran lawmaker finally in command with an inexperienced president and a young House speaker as his partners in a united Republican government.

Despite this week’s embarrassing decision to slam the brakes on the replacement of Obamacare — which President Trump promised would happen “immediately” after he took office — McConnell may yet push through some version of the Senate’s health-care plan. But even if he does, it’s clear that the man who titled his autobiography “The Long Game” faces an extended period of ideological division within his party, deeply damaged relations with the Democrats, and an uncertain bond with an impatient and impetuous president.

Fueled by a lifelong quest for tactical advantage rather than by any enduring ideological flame, McConnell had long hoped for this chance, finally, well into his fourth decade in the Senate, to make big things happen, just like his role model, Mike Mansfield, the 1960s and ’70s leader who presided over a generation of Democratic policy initiatives that reshaped the nation.

But now, after many years of goal-line stands, McConnell is under pressure to put some points on the board on big-ticket issues such as health, tax reform and infrastructure. Whether he can do that will depend on his ability to pivot from blocking to building.

For decades, McConnell has been celebrated (and bashed) as an obstructionist, a leader who was effective at derailing the other side’s initiatives, without much of a track record in achieving big things for his own team.

“Maybe we should call him Senator Stonewall McConnell,” one of his home state mayors said in 2013. She was a Democrat, but she meant it as a compliment.

Now, however, McConnell must find his way to majorities in a Senate where his party holds a two-seat advantage and where Democrats have pledged to at least match McConnell’s mastery of the art of paralysis.

“He has a really, really difficult challenge,” said former House speaker Newt Gingrich. “It’s a very narrow majority and it’s divided within itself.” But Gingrich, who led his chamber of Congress in the 1990s with a high-octane mix of soaring rhetoric, constant media presence and persistent evangelism for his conservative philosophy, says McConnell may yet tote up some wins because he is a different kind of political leader.

“Mitch is like a really good engineer, trying to think through every day, ‘How do I get the machine operating?’ ” Gingrich said. “He’s got senators who do television better. He’s got guys who do the great oratory. The tools that make Mitch effective are steely determination, enormous willpower and endless patience. He wants to be known as the guy who gets things done.”

Pushing past adversity

McConnell’s first big challenge of the Trump presidency produced a win, but it wasn’t pretty.

By winning the confirmation of Neil M. Gorsuch to the Supreme Court this spring, McConnell proved he could wield his divided Republican caucus as a battering ram. But to win with only Republican support, McConnell decided he had to go nuclear, reversing generations of tradition by lowering the required number of votes to approve the judge’s nomination from 60 to 51. In 2010, when McConnell was in the minority, he called the prospect of that same fundamental change in how the Senate does business “one of the most brazen single-party power grabs in legislative history.”

“For a long time, McConnell had convinced a lot of Democrats that he was at bottom a defender of the institution, someone you could at some level do business with,” said Adam Jentleson, who was deputy chief of staff to then-Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) “He’s been revealed as someone who’s really about accruing power for himself.”

On the surface, McConnell has always eschewed the trappings of power. He does his own laundry. He mainly leaves the social circuit to his flashier colleagues. His dour manner and downturned mouth make him a caricature of the old-school, backroom lawmaker.

But McConnell loves to be underestimated. He doesn’t talk much about himself — he declined to be interviewed for this article — but he knows what got him where he is today. As a toddler, he began a two-year battle against polio. His mother took him to Warm Springs, Ga., where Franklin D. Roosevelt fought the same disease. There, McConnell underwent four 45-minute physical therapy sessions a day.

“I’ve always felt that it had a big impact on me in terms of focus, discipline, and if you stick to it even under adverse circumstances, you may succeed,” McConnell told The Washington Post in 2011. He has some difficulty going down stairs, observers say, but he recovered well enough to become a successful high school baseball player.

The effort to replace the Affordable Care Act presents McConnell with abundantly adverse circumstances, a challenge unlike any he has faced. McConnell is trying to bull through a divisive and unpopular piece of legislation that would make sweeping changes to domestic policy with no cross-party support and a caucus better accustomed to saying no than yes.

When Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine), a moderate who is openly skeptical of the GOP health plan, was asked whether McConnell mishandled the drive toward a vote, she said: “He did what he thought was best. It isn’t the way I would have done it. But, you know, he did his best.”

McConnell built his majority by fielding candidates who waged war against Barack Obama to devastating effect. Getting many of those same lawmakers to coalesce around a far-reaching rewrite of existing law has been agonizing.

Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.), who arrived in the Senate in 2015, sees parallels between McConnell’s predicament and what he experienced as only the second Republican speaker of his state’s House in a century. “Our conference naturally had this muscle memory of you get up and you stop things from happening,” he explained. “You didn’t have a great expectation that you were going to be moving anything.”

During Obama’s presidency, McConnell often marshaled his rank and file to resist the president’s agenda. But when necessary, he could and did strike last-minute, bipartisan deals, such as the secret negotiations with then-Vice President Joe Biden that extended the George W. Bush-era tax cuts in 2010 and the bailout deal for the financial services industry that he cut with Reid after the economic collapse in 2008.

Contrary to McConnell’s popular image, Gingrich argues that the majority leader’s ultimate aim is to return the Senate to the kind of bipartisanship that once made it the place where overheated political passions cooled off. “It’s not what some people think, but he told me that what he wants most is to recreate a bipartisan institution,” Gingrich said.

That would involve returning to once-routine practices such as seeking votes from members of both parties and vetting bills in open committee hearings rather than crafting them, as McConnell did with the health-care bill, in secret sessions for Republicans only.

That legislative idyll is unlikely to return anytime soon. McConnell’s allies say that’s because the Democrats have taken on the obstructionist role that Republicans played in the Obama years. Democrats, naturally, reverse the blame.

McConnell took pride that for some years he sat at the desk once used by Henry Clay, the Great Compromiser of the 19th century. But throughout his career, McConnell has persuaded many Republicans and Democrats alike that he is fiercely partisan.

In 1984, in his first race for Senate, McConnell was badly trailing the incumbent Democrat until Roger Ailes, the future architect of Fox News but then a Republican campaign consultant, made McConnell a TV ad that showed a pack of barking bloodhounds hunting for the Democrat, Walter Huddleston, because he’d missed so many votes in Washington. McConnell won the election and a reputation for rough tactics.

In an era when bipartisanship has become a gutter slur for many voters, McConnell for a long time had it both ways: He became a defender of tradition who nonetheless wouldn’t hesitate to do what it takes to win.

Throughout the Obama years, he expressed contempt for Democrats who he said were breaking with Senate tradition by acting unilaterally. Then, when Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia died early last year, McConnell blocked Obama’s nomination of Judge Merrick Garland to take Scalia’s place. Republicans saw that ultimate obstruction as a historic and vital maneuver that not only kept a conservative majority on the court but built momentum to hold the Senate majority and win the presidency. McConnell called it “one of the happiest nights of my Senate career.”

To Democrats, however, the blockade “showed the lengths he was willing to go to put aside any notions of comity, norms and traditions,” Jentleson said. “Garland was McConnell saying, ‘Look, if I am the leader when Obama gets a strong majority on the court, and I lose the Senate majority after two years, I’m in a very precarious position.’ Blocking Garland was McConnell’s insurance against a challenge from the right. And for Democrats, Garland was a turning point.”

A practical approach

McConnell has never been encumbered by the stereotypical politician’s passion to be loved. He calls himself a master of the unexpressed thought — in sharp contrast, he notes, to the current tenant in the White House.

When he does speak, he is succinct and blunt. Will Trump get Mexico to pay for a new border wall? “Uh, no,” McConnell said earlier this year. Are Republicans too focused on slamming the brakes on anything Democrats try to do? “I am a proud guardian of gridlock,” McConnell said during the Clinton presidency. Did the Senate’s Republican leader have any grand initiatives planned for the Obama years? “The single most important thing we want to achieve,” McConnell said in 2010, “is for President Obama to be a one-term president.”

Halfway through his sixth term in the Senate, McConnell is the rare senator who says he never had presidential aspirations — and means it. “I’m the leader of the Senate Republicans,” he said a few years ago. “I don’t aspire to be the leader of the party.”

McConnell’s allies say his practical approach and dry wit may seem like a throwback to days when more of Washington’s business was done in smoke-filled, closed-door rooms, where deals did get done. But some Democrats and Republicans alike say McConnell has undermined his power by helping to build the populist fervor that led to Trump’s victory.

“By opposing Obama at every turn, no matter what, you are ginning up an anti-government, anti-elite kind of feeling,” said Al Cross, a University of Kentucky professor and political writer who has watched McConnell closely for decades. “He saw Obama as a huge existential threat: If Obama got a lot done on a bipartisan basis, like Lyndon Johnson or FDR did, he’d leave [Republicans] as a permanent minority. He wasn’t going to let that happen.”

Now, with Trump and Republicans in Congress dependent on voters who want swift and dramatic change, McConnell must manage expectations. “He’s not buffeted by short-term controversies,” Cross said. “He doesn’t get too far out in front on issues or policy. Politics is business to him.”

He calls himself a conservative but was never driven primarily by ideology. He was for abortion before he was against it. He pushed for disclosure of all campaign donations, then became a leader of the drive to allow unlimited, undisclosed spending. He was an early and vocal skeptic about the tea party movement and worked hard to recruit Senate candidates who were more moderate than him. But when he faced a tea-party-inspired primary opponent in 2014, McConnell tacked to more populist rhetoric.

Now, the expert tactician is in an unfamiliar spot. McConnell wanted a vote on health care before the July 4 recess, a deadline he will miss. GOP senators, many of whom are less than excited about their bill, are heading home, expecting to face immense blowback from voters.

McConnell has effectively become the chief salesman for a product that isn’t selling. His margin for error remains razor-thin.

But there is no sign of panic. McConnell has never been captive to a president’s initiatives, not even to a Republican president. In 2007, McConnell stood with President George W. Bush in support of his last major initiative, an overhaul of U.S. immigration policy that would have given illegal immigrants legal status and repositioned the Republican Party. But McConnell, facing reelection the following year, read the situation and made his move. Two weeks after standing with the president, McConnell said the people of Kentucky opposed the bill. He voted against it and it died.

He's a sneaky SOB.

[candygirl200413]

IT BLOWS MY MIND HOW THESE FUCKING ASSHOLES OF REPUBLICANS CONTINUALLY RUIN OUR DEMOCRACY.

(Sorry seeing turtleman's face plus getting rid of the election assistance committee made me wanna scream). Pence and them are also asking for voters information (last 4 digits of SSN among other things). I think it also hurts more that no one on the republican side will do anything since they all get to profit. ugh.

[milkteeth]

[GrumpyGran]

8 hours ago, GreyhoundFan said:

"Mitch McConnell, America’s No. 1 obstructionist, is trying to make big things happen"

  Hide contents

Mitch McConnell never particularly took offense when his opponents branded him America’s No. 1 obstructionist, the Darth Vader of Capitol Hill. Call him dark, call him evil, he embraced it all, even posting the most biting cartoons on his office wall.

He was happy to let others handle the oratory and the inspiration and the fleshing out of a governing philosophy. Addison Mitchell McConnell Jr., the 75-year-old senior senator from Kentucky, would focus on the winning part.

Based on the electoral math alone, this should be the Senate majority leader’s moment, the veteran lawmaker finally in command with an inexperienced president and a young House speaker as his partners in a united Republican government.

Despite this week’s embarrassing decision to slam the brakes on the replacement of Obamacare — which President Trump promised would happen “immediately” after he took office — McConnell may yet push through some version of the Senate’s health-care plan. But even if he does, it’s clear that the man who titled his autobiography “The Long Game” faces an extended period of ideological division within his party, deeply damaged relations with the Democrats, and an uncertain bond with an impatient and impetuous president.

Fueled by a lifelong quest for tactical advantage rather than by any enduring ideological flame, McConnell had long hoped for this chance, finally, well into his fourth decade in the Senate, to make big things happen, just like his role model, Mike Mansfield, the 1960s and ’70s leader who presided over a generation of Democratic policy initiatives that reshaped the nation.

But now, after many years of goal-line stands, McConnell is under pressure to put some points on the board on big-ticket issues such as health, tax reform and infrastructure. Whether he can do that will depend on his ability to pivot from blocking to building.

For decades, McConnell has been celebrated (and bashed) as an obstructionist, a leader who was effective at derailing the other side’s initiatives, without much of a track record in achieving big things for his own team.

“Maybe we should call him Senator Stonewall McConnell,” one of his home state mayors said in 2013. She was a Democrat, but she meant it as a compliment.

Now, however, McConnell must find his way to majorities in a Senate where his party holds a two-seat advantage and where Democrats have pledged to at least match McConnell’s mastery of the art of paralysis.

“He has a really, really difficult challenge,” said former House speaker Newt Gingrich. “It’s a very narrow majority and it’s divided within itself.” But Gingrich, who led his chamber of Congress in the 1990s with a high-octane mix of soaring rhetoric, constant media presence and persistent evangelism for his conservative philosophy, says McConnell may yet tote up some wins because he is a different kind of political leader.

“Mitch is like a really good engineer, trying to think through every day, ‘How do I get the machine operating?’ ” Gingrich said. “He’s got senators who do television better. He’s got guys who do the great oratory. The tools that make Mitch effective are steely determination, enormous willpower and endless patience. He wants to be known as the guy who gets things done.”

Pushing past adversity

McConnell’s first big challenge of the Trump presidency produced a win, but it wasn’t pretty.

By winning the confirmation of Neil M. Gorsuch to the Supreme Court this spring, McConnell proved he could wield his divided Republican caucus as a battering ram. But to win with only Republican support, McConnell decided he had to go nuclear, reversing generations of tradition by lowering the required number of votes to approve the judge’s nomination from 60 to 51. In 2010, when McConnell was in the minority, he called the prospect of that same fundamental change in how the Senate does business “one of the most brazen single-party power grabs in legislative history.”

“For a long time, McConnell had convinced a lot of Democrats that he was at bottom a defender of the institution, someone you could at some level do business with,” said Adam Jentleson, who was deputy chief of staff to then-Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) “He’s been revealed as someone who’s really about accruing power for himself.”

On the surface, McConnell has always eschewed the trappings of power. He does his own laundry. He mainly leaves the social circuit to his flashier colleagues. His dour manner and downturned mouth make him a caricature of the old-school, backroom lawmaker.

But McConnell loves to be underestimated. He doesn’t talk much about himself — he declined to be interviewed for this article — but he knows what got him where he is today. As a toddler, he began a two-year battle against polio. His mother took him to Warm Springs, Ga., where Franklin D. Roosevelt fought the same disease. There, McConnell underwent four 45-minute physical therapy sessions a day.

“I’ve always felt that it had a big impact on me in terms of focus, discipline, and if you stick to it even under adverse circumstances, you may succeed,” McConnell told The Washington Post in 2011. He has some difficulty going down stairs, observers say, but he recovered well enough to become a successful high school baseball player.

The effort to replace the Affordable Care Act presents McConnell with abundantly adverse circumstances, a challenge unlike any he has faced. McConnell is trying to bull through a divisive and unpopular piece of legislation that would make sweeping changes to domestic policy with no cross-party support and a caucus better accustomed to saying no than yes.

When Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine), a moderate who is openly skeptical of the GOP health plan, was asked whether McConnell mishandled the drive toward a vote, she said: “He did what he thought was best. It isn’t the way I would have done it. But, you know, he did his best.”

McConnell built his majority by fielding candidates who waged war against Barack Obama to devastating effect. Getting many of those same lawmakers to coalesce around a far-reaching rewrite of existing law has been agonizing.

Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.), who arrived in the Senate in 2015, sees parallels between McConnell’s predicament and what he experienced as only the second Republican speaker of his state’s House in a century. “Our conference naturally had this muscle memory of you get up and you stop things from happening,” he explained. “You didn’t have a great expectation that you were going to be moving anything.”

During Obama’s presidency, McConnell often marshaled his rank and file to resist the president’s agenda. But when necessary, he could and did strike last-minute, bipartisan deals, such as the secret negotiations with then-Vice President Joe Biden that extended the George W. Bush-era tax cuts in 2010 and the bailout deal for the financial services industry that he cut with Reid after the economic collapse in 2008.

Contrary to McConnell’s popular image, Gingrich argues that the majority leader’s ultimate aim is to return the Senate to the kind of bipartisanship that once made it the place where overheated political passions cooled off. “It’s not what some people think, but he told me that what he wants most is to recreate a bipartisan institution,” Gingrich said.

That would involve returning to once-routine practices such as seeking votes from members of both parties and vetting bills in open committee hearings rather than crafting them, as McConnell did with the health-care bill, in secret sessions for Republicans only.

That legislative idyll is unlikely to return anytime soon. McConnell’s allies say that’s because the Democrats have taken on the obstructionist role that Republicans played in the Obama years. Democrats, naturally, reverse the blame.

McConnell took pride that for some years he sat at the desk once used by Henry Clay, the Great Compromiser of the 19th century. But throughout his career, McConnell has persuaded many Republicans and Democrats alike that he is fiercely partisan.

In 1984, in his first race for Senate, McConnell was badly trailing the incumbent Democrat until Roger Ailes, the future architect of Fox News but then a Republican campaign consultant, made McConnell a TV ad that showed a pack of barking bloodhounds hunting for the Democrat, Walter Huddleston, because he’d missed so many votes in Washington. McConnell won the election and a reputation for rough tactics.

In an era when bipartisanship has become a gutter slur for many voters, McConnell for a long time had it both ways: He became a defender of tradition who nonetheless wouldn’t hesitate to do what it takes to win.

Throughout the Obama years, he expressed contempt for Democrats who he said were breaking with Senate tradition by acting unilaterally. Then, when Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia died early last year, McConnell blocked Obama’s nomination of Judge Merrick Garland to take Scalia’s place. Republicans saw that ultimate obstruction as a historic and vital maneuver that not only kept a conservative majority on the court but built momentum to hold the Senate majority and win the presidency. McConnell called it “one of the happiest nights of my Senate career.”

To Democrats, however, the blockade “showed the lengths he was willing to go to put aside any notions of comity, norms and traditions,” Jentleson said. “Garland was McConnell saying, ‘Look, if I am the leader when Obama gets a strong majority on the court, and I lose the Senate majority after two years, I’m in a very precarious position.’ Blocking Garland was McConnell’s insurance against a challenge from the right. And for Democrats, Garland was a turning point.”

A practical approach

McConnell has never been encumbered by the stereotypical politician’s passion to be loved. He calls himself a master of the unexpressed thought — in sharp contrast, he notes, to the current tenant in the White House.

When he does speak, he is succinct and blunt. Will Trump get Mexico to pay for a new border wall? “Uh, no,” McConnell said earlier this year. Are Republicans too focused on slamming the brakes on anything Democrats try to do? “I am a proud guardian of gridlock,” McConnell said during the Clinton presidency. Did the Senate’s Republican leader have any grand initiatives planned for the Obama years? “The single most important thing we want to achieve,” McConnell said in 2010, “is for President Obama to be a one-term president.”

Halfway through his sixth term in the Senate, McConnell is the rare senator who says he never had presidential aspirations — and means it. “I’m the leader of the Senate Republicans,” he said a few years ago. “I don’t aspire to be the leader of the party.”

McConnell’s allies say his practical approach and dry wit may seem like a throwback to days when more of Washington’s business was done in smoke-filled, closed-door rooms, where deals did get done. But some Democrats and Republicans alike say McConnell has undermined his power by helping to build the populist fervor that led to Trump’s victory.

“By opposing Obama at every turn, no matter what, you are ginning up an anti-government, anti-elite kind of feeling,” said Al Cross, a University of Kentucky professor and political writer who has watched McConnell closely for decades. “He saw Obama as a huge existential threat: If Obama got a lot done on a bipartisan basis, like Lyndon Johnson or FDR did, he’d leave [Republicans] as a permanent minority. He wasn’t going to let that happen.”

Now, with Trump and Republicans in Congress dependent on voters who want swift and dramatic change, McConnell must manage expectations. “He’s not buffeted by short-term controversies,” Cross said. “He doesn’t get too far out in front on issues or policy. Politics is business to him.”

He calls himself a conservative but was never driven primarily by ideology. He was for abortion before he was against it. He pushed for disclosure of all campaign donations, then became a leader of the drive to allow unlimited, undisclosed spending. He was an early and vocal skeptic about the tea party movement and worked hard to recruit Senate candidates who were more moderate than him. But when he faced a tea-party-inspired primary opponent in 2014, McConnell tacked to more populist rhetoric.

Now, the expert tactician is in an unfamiliar spot. McConnell wanted a vote on health care before the July 4 recess, a deadline he will miss. GOP senators, many of whom are less than excited about their bill, are heading home, expecting to face immense blowback from voters.

McConnell has effectively become the chief salesman for a product that isn’t selling. His margin for error remains razor-thin.

But there is no sign of panic. McConnell has never been captive to a president’s initiatives, not even to a Republican president. In 2007, McConnell stood with President George W. Bush in support of his last major initiative, an overhaul of U.S. immigration policy that would have given illegal immigrants legal status and repositioned the Republican Party. But McConnell, facing reelection the following year, read the situation and made his move. Two weeks after standing with the president, McConnell said the people of Kentucky opposed the bill. He voted against it and it died.

He's a sneaky SOB.

Aside from just despising him, I find this sad. It seems he is beyond obsessed with his agenda: remain in power and get the win! You would think a man his age might want to spend the last 10 or 15 years of his life enjoying his family, relaxing a little.

And all for what? Barring a huge 180, his legacy is set. Despite what Newt Gingrich says-and I'll be hooking in downtown Myrtle Beach, making $1000 an hour before I believe anything that man says-Mitch will always be know by most in this country as a hypocrite and an obstructionist. Another Trump victim, although he had already dug his own grave.

[GreyhoundFan]

An interesting opinion piece from Jennifer Rubin: "Maybe the GOP split is already here"

Spoiler

Since President Trump entered office, the running debate in the political class has focused on the degree to which the GOP is now the party of Trump. Will it ever repudiate him? Could traditional conservatives split from Trumpian populists? These are all variations on a theme — the fate of the GOP in the age of Trump.

Since the special elections and the firing of FBI Director James B. Comey, conventional wisdom has held that there will be no internal reckoning within the GOP unless and until the 2018 midterms. Look how docile Republican leaders are! See how Republicans in polls are sticking with him?

Perhaps the split already is underway. Consider four events: 1.) The Senate by a 98-2 vote passes Russia sanctions the White House did not want and, to boot, puts limits on executive discretion to waive them; 2.) Senate conservatives and moderates, in a pincer movement, halt Trumpcare. The president’s notion that it does not cut Medicaid is wildly repudiated by senators from Medicaid expansion states. (The emperor has no clothes; the bill does not have enough support); 3.) A significant number of GOP senators and congressmen condemn the president’s vulgar tweets directed at Mika Brzezinski; and 4.) Moderate House members now threaten to derail the budget (without which there can be no budget reconciliation).

As to the last of these, Politico reports:

Tuesday Group co-chairman Charlie Dent (R-Pa.) is gathering signatures on a letter asking Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) to intervene in House Budget Chairwoman Diane Black’s plan to cut $200 billion in mandatory spending in the GOP budget.

The Tuesday Group letter — which sources say has about 20 signatories so far — warns that the Tennessee Republican’s proposal is “not practical” and “could imperil tax reform,” according to a draft of the letter obtained by POLITICO. The letter also encourages GOP leaders to work with Democrats to reach a budget agreement setting higher spending levels for fiscal 2018 — something the letter suggests could be paired with a vote to raise the debt ceiling. This comes on top of near universal rejection of the president’s budget which chopped away large sections of the government and largely eviscerated soft power resources (State Department and foreign aid).

Taken together, there does seem to be the spirit of defiance rolling through the GOP ranks. We are five months into this presidency, and factions have already formed in both houses — the disagreement being in which direction (hard-right or center-right) they will pull the party. Both, however, are in revolt against the Trump agenda — a peculiar mix of xenophobia, pro-Russian genuflecting, reverse Robin Hood economics and contempt for government.

To be sure, some of the unrest is process-oriented. For reasons that still escape me, the White House and the House speaker thought they could force-feed prebaked agenda items to their troops, who would dutifully swallow hard and follow direction. Many have not.

However, a good deal of the uprising has to do with substance, and here we see the general outline of the post-Trump struggle that will unfold. Emboldened by one act of defiance, lawmakers feel more comfortable doing it a second and third time. There is no benefit of the doubt extended to the White House.

On one side stand the ossified conservatives, who espouse an anti-government animus that has little resonance with an electorate demanding more, not less, from government. They embrace the know-nothingism of populism but plant their flag on the far-right wing of the party on everything from discrimination against gays to climate-change denial to anti-immigrant hysteria. On the other side stand, in both the House and Senate (and importantly, the governorships), the so-called moderates, some of whom are actually quite conservative but nevertheless reject both Trump and the zombie conservatism from the 1980s. As we’ve discussed, these are not split-the-difference compromisers. They have strong views on immigration (pro), the safety net (they want one), climate change (they believe in it), globalization (it’s here to stay) and Russia (against).

In a sense, then, Trump has already lost control of the party. For now, this takes the form of factional warfare and paralysis, but few can look at the past few weeks and say Trump has a grip on the rank and file. He cannot keep Sen. Richard Burr (R-N.C.) from investigating the Russia scandal or Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) from calling foul on Medicaid cuts or Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) from devising harsh anti-Russia sanctions.

More and more, lawmakers are choosing to shake their heads in disbelief at Trump’s willful ignorance  — and then ignore him. We hope this is a trend that builds, not a momentary spasm. Rebels should be encouraged and respected, even when their specific policy preferences strike us as off-base. The country needs two sane parties, both working against an unfit president.

I think she may be giving non-leadership Repugs a bit too much credit, but it would be nice if it were true.

[GreyhoundFan]

A good op-ed from the NYT: "Understanding Republican Cruelty"

Spoiler

The basics of Republican health legislation, which haven’t changed much in different iterations of Trumpcare, are easy to describe: Take health insurance away from tens of millions, make it much worse and far more expensive for millions more, and use the money thus saved to cut taxes on the wealthy.

Donald Trump may not get this — reporting by The Times and others, combined with his own tweets, suggests that he has no idea what’s in his party’s legislation. But everyone in Congress understands what it’s all about.

The puzzle — and it is a puzzle, even for those who have long since concluded that something is terribly wrong with the modern G.O.P. — is why the party is pushing this harsh, morally indefensible agenda.

Think about it. Losing health coverage is a nightmare, especially if you’re older, have health problems and/or lack the financial resources to cope if illness strikes. And since Americans with those characteristics are precisely the people this legislation effectively targets, tens of millions would soon find themselves living this nightmare.

Meanwhile, taxes that fall mainly on a tiny, wealthy minority would be reduced or eliminated. These cuts would be big in dollar terms, but because the rich are already so rich, the savings would make very little difference to their lives.

More than 40 percent of the Senate bill’s tax cuts would go to people with annual incomes over $1 million — but even these lucky few would see their after-tax income rise only by a barely noticeable 2 percent.

So it’s vast suffering — including, according to the best estimates, around 200,000 preventable deaths — imposed on many of our fellow citizens in order to give a handful of wealthy people what amounts to some extra pocket change. And the public hates the idea: Polling shows overwhelming popular opposition, even though many voters don’t realize just how cruel the bill really is. For example, only a minority of voters are aware of the plan to make savage cuts to Medicaid.

In fact, my guess is that the bill has low approval even among those who would get a significant tax cut. Warren Buffett has denounced the Senate bill as the “Relief for the Rich Act,” and he’s surely not the only billionaire who feels that way.

Which brings me back to my question: Why would anyone want to do this?

I won’t pretend to have a full answer, but I think there are two big drivers — actually, two big lies — behind Republican cruelty on health care and beyond.

First, the evils of the G.O.P. plan are the flip side of the virtues of Obamacare. Because Republicans spent almost the entire Obama administration railing against the imaginary horrors of the Affordable Care Act — death panels! — repealing Obamacare was bound to be their first priority.

Once the prospect of repeal became real, however, Republicans had to face the fact that Obamacare, far from being the failure they portrayed, has done what it was supposed to do: It used higher taxes on the rich to pay for a vast expansion of health coverage. Correspondingly, trying to reverse the A.C.A. means taking away health care from people who desperately need it in order to cut taxes on the rich.

So one way to understand this ugly health plan is that Republicans, through their political opportunism and dishonesty, boxed themselves into a position that makes them seem cruel and immoral — because they are.

Yet that’s surely not the whole story, because Obamacare isn’t the only social insurance program that does great good yet faces incessant right-wing attack. Food stamps, unemployment insurance, disability benefits all get the same treatment. Why?

As with Obamacare, this story began with a politically convenient lie — the pretense, going all the way back to Ronald Reagan, that social safety net programs just reward lazy people who don’t want to work. And we all know which people in particular were supposed to be on the take.

Now, this was never true, and in an era of rising inequality and declining traditional industries, some of the biggest beneficiaries of these safety net programs are members of the Trump-supporting white working class. But the modern G.O.P. basically consists of career apparatchiks who live in an intellectual bubble, and those Reagan-era stereotypes still dominate their picture of struggling Americans.

Or to put it another way, Republicans start from a sort of baseline of cruelty toward the less fortunate, of hostility toward anything that protects families against catastrophe.

In this sense there’s nothing new about their health plan. What it does — punish the poor and working class, cut taxes on the rich — is what every major G.O.P. policy proposal does. The only difference is that this time it’s all out in the open.

So what will happen to this monstrous bill? I have no idea. Whether it passes or not, however, remember this moment. For this is what modern Republicans do; this is who they are.

I think this piece really lays bare the Repug mentality.

[GreyhoundFan]

"With health bill looming, senators aren’t rushing into the July Fourth spotlight"

Spoiler

Sen. Susan Collins will celebrate the Fourth of July within view of the Canadian border, at a remote northeastern Maine town’s annual parade. Sen. Lisa Murkowski will appear on the other end of the continent in an old timber town on an isolated Alaskan island.

These two Republican senators, critical swing votes in the debate over health-care legislation, are not exactly rushing into the public spotlight to engage their constituents on the controversial plan and their own decision-making about the proposal.

Then again, at least they have released information about where they will be. That’s more than most Senate Republicans have done at the start of a 10-day break wrapped around the nation’s Independence Day celebration. This creates the belief among liberal activists that Republicans are trying to hide, which in turn primes every public moment to become that much more confrontational.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) wanted to avoid this by passing the Better Care Reconciliation Act by Friday, believing that Republican senators might have faced some heat back home over the coming week — but then would have been able to focus on many other issues for the rest of the summer.

Instead of reaching agreement, rank-and-file Republicans demanded more time to review the proposal and to try to negotiate more compromises, with a final vote not likely until late July.

That timeline will run right up against the start of the traditional summer break, with Congress scheduled to leave Washington on July 28 and not return until after Labor Day. This is exactly what McConnell was trying to avoid, a scenario in which Republicans replay the same political summer that Democrats endured in 2009 as they delayed and delayed consideration of what eventually became the 2010 Affordable Care Act.

The longer the issue remained in the public sphere, the more it consumed every interaction Democrats had at home with their constituents. The month of rowdy town halls in August 2009 in particular created exactly the optics McConnell was trying to sidestep this time around.

“It would have been better if we had been able to finish it,” Sen. Roger Wicker (R-Miss.) lamented as he left the Senate on Thursday, pondering the likelihood that the rest of the summer would focus on this one politically troubling issue. “I’m just saying, if I had my druthers, I wish we had gone ahead and gotten the product agreed to.”

Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.), another holdout on the legislation, got the first dose of what’s likely when senators hold public events for the foreseeable future. On Friday, in Baton Rouge, Cassidy tried to discuss flood relief — a critical issue in his state — only to be interrupted with chants of “health care, health care.”

Democrats, who are unified in their opposition to the GOP effort to repeal Obamacare, are watching in amazement as the Republicans handle the issue in the same political circumstances they faced eight years ago. They contend that the issue will only get worse for Republicans and could lead to more bad coverage, just as Democrats faced in 2009.

“It could very well, I sure hope so,” said Rep. James E. Clyburn (D-S.C.), who was the House majority whip in charge of rounding up votes for the legislation back then.

Some Republicans dismiss worries about timing. Rewriting the laws governing health care, they say, will always be a laborious process because the issue is so prominent in people’s lives.

These Republicans say they want their colleagues to focus less on the process and instead get the policy right.

“No matter what you do, you eventually go home and you have to explain your vote,” said Rep. Greg Walden (R-Ore.), chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, which wrote much of the House’s version of the bill. “Whether that’s this week, next week, the week after or the August break.”

Walden spent the previous four years running the House Republican campaign arm, which last year was still running ads blasting Democrats for their support of “Obamacare” — more than six years after the law passed on party-line votes.

Lawmakers who know the issue and can talk fluently about it will be best positioned to weather what is shaping up to be a stormy 2018 midterm election for Republicans. “It comes with the territory. You better know what you’re voting for and why, and be able to go home and explain it,” Walden said.

The biggest division among Senate Republicans remains how to handle the ACA’s provision allowing states to expand Medicaid to provide coverage to millions of additional low-income families. The provision is fully paid with federal funds now and is set to shift in a few years to require states to pick up 10 percent of the tab.

Cassidy and Murkowski are among the Senate Republicans from states that accepted that Medicaid expansion and have deep concerns about McConnell’s plan to force states into a near 50-50 split in funding, as well as another conservative plan to impose strict spending caps on the original entitlement program that primarily serves low-income children, the disabled and the elderly.

This bloc has left McConnell far short of the minimum 50 votes he needs (with Vice President Pence ready to cast a tiebreaking vote). McConnell will spend the next few weeks trying to forge consensus to pass the legislation. And that means Republicans have to continue talking about the issue — or hiding from their constituents.

On Tuesday, even in Wrangell, an island town with fewer than 2,500 residents in the Alaskan panhandle, Murkowski will march in a parade and almost certainly face questions about how she will vote on health care.

And in Eastport, population 1,300 — long considered the easternmost city in the nation — residents of greater Moose Island are also likely to pepper Collins with questions.

And that’s why some Republicans fear that time will only hurt the legislation’s chances.

“Things start going backward over the Fourth. I think a lot of people then start to think about, you know, it’s less likely to make a deal,” said Rep. Mark Meadows (R-N.C.), a conservative who led some of the House’s health-care negotiations in the spring. “Having negotiated all my life, if you get close, it’s better to stay and get it done.”

Well, I'm sure many Repugs will be hiding out. They don't want to answer any questions.

[GreyhoundFan]

"If this scam works as planned, Republicans could still destroy Obamacare"

Spoiler

President Trump spent some of the weekend on the phone with wavering GOP senators, pressuring them to get them behind the GOP repeal-and-replace bill. Meanwhile, Democrats and supporters of the Affordable Care Act are laying plans to escalate the pressure on moderate Republican senators who continue to worry, among other things, that the GOP bill’s deep cuts to Medicaid would result in tens of millions fewer people with coverage.

One key battleground right now is the question of whether GOP leaders will try to woo these moderates by getting rid of the GOP bill’s repeal of one of the ACA’s big taxes on the wealthy: the tax on investment income, which hits top earners. According to this useful Vox chart, at least six of the more moderate Republicans want more Medicaid money added. Basic math dictates that as long as the GOP bill cuts taxes enormously on the rich, the way to get that money back is to undo some of those tax cuts. Hence, some moderates want to restore that tax and put some spending back, so the bill doesn’t leave so many uninsured.

But here’s the thing: Even if Republicans do restore the investment tax, it could have a relatively minuscule impact on the overall loss of coverage the GOP bill would produce. Indeed, it might only restore a meager 22 percent of the Medicaid funding, according to one expert I spoke with.

A Tax Policy Center analysis found that more than two-thirds of the Senate bill’s tax cuts would go to earners in the top fifth of the income distribution. One of these tax cuts is accomplished by repealing the 3.8 percent tax on net income investments, which hits those over $200,000. The Senate GOP bill would cut spending on Medicaid by $772 billion over 10 years, leaving 15 million fewer covered by that program (22 million overall would lose coverage). Moderate GOP senators have expressed deep dismay about the Medicaid cuts, and GOP governors in states that have expanded Medicaid are pressuring these senators not to accept these cuts. Thus, some GOP senators have argued for restoring this tax, and one place the resulting revenue could be restored is Medicaid.

But how much would this actually accomplish? Probably not that much.

The Senate GOP bill’s repeal of the tax on investment would result in a loss of $172 billion in revenues over ten years, according to the Congressional Budget Office. Larry Levitt, a senior vice president with the Kaiser Family Foundation, points out to me that if you restored all of that money to Medicaid, that would only restore around 22 percent of the $772 billion in cuts to the program.

“Even if all the revenue from restoring the investment tax went to Medicaid, it would only cover 22 percent of the cuts, leaving 78 percent intact,” Levitt told me. Now, it’s possible that the GOP leadership might try to use those restored revenues to make subsidies for lower-income people on the individual markets more generous. It’s hard to say how that would impact the coverage numbers. We can’t know until we see their new proposal. But the bottom line is that restoring this tax would not put a huge dent in the GOP bill’s coverage loss. Many, many millions would still be losing insurance.

Meanwhile, even if Republicans did restore this tax, a good deal of the GOP bill’s tax cuts for the rich would still remain in place. Howard Gleckman, a senior fellow at the Tax Policy Center, which did the analysis finding that the Senate bill would largely benefit wealthy taxpayers, noted to me that other tax cuts that would stay in the bill, such as repealing the Medicare surtax, would largely benefit the top 20 percent, too.

“Even if Congress retains the net investment tax, a significant share of the tax cuts would still go to high-income households,” Gleckman told me. “This would be better than what they had, but it doesn’t fix the problem.”

Moderate Republicans do indeed have a problem on their hands. They have now conceded the GOP bill’s deeply regressive nature — they have conceded that the bill cuts enormous sums from health-care spending on the poor to finance big tax cuts for the rich. As Brian Beutler notes, by conceding this ground, they have made it harder for themselves to accept a small restoration of that spending via a limited restoration of the taxes on the wealthy, because this “places Republicans in the unenviable position of pinpointing just how many people should lose health care to finance specific tax cuts for the affluent.” In this scenario, the answer would still likely be: enormous numbers of people, numbering in the double-digit millions.

Of course, if this tax on investments is restored, and the money is plowed back into Medicaid or subsidies, or some combination of the two, it’s perfectly plausible that these moderates will claim that their objections went very far in mitigating the bill and the human toll it is likely to produce over time. But if so, when placed in the larger scheme of coverage loss that the GOP bill would engineer, that will basically be a scam.

...

I hope Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski, and Dean Heller don't acquiesce.

[fraurosena]

WSJ fact-checking WH statements on Obamacare on their "Repeal and Replace Obamacare" website:

Decoding the White House spin on Obamacare ‘failures’

Spoiler

As the Senate gears up to vote on the GOP bill to overhaul the Affordable Care Act, the White House is publishing statistics to criticize the current health law. The White House published a “Repeal and Replace Obamacare” website, rife with numbers and graphics, and is posting various statistics through its Twitter account.

We always say numbers are like catnip for fact-checking — and it’s especially so when it comes to health care, a regular topic of interest at Fact Checker. So we looked into the recent spin on health-care figures from the White House. As readers will see, in most instances, the White House used accurate figures but characterized them in misleading ways or out of context.

(At the top of this column, readers can view Fact Checker’s revised version of the White House’s video on Obamacare “failures,” with the necessary context added to each claim made in the video.)

The Facts

“Obamacare Fail #1: Higher Costs: Average premiums are up 105% across the country since 2013”
— White House video

This is a common talking point by President Trump that we’ve fact-checked before, and it’s still misleading.

It’s difficult to make simple comparisons to data from pre-Obamacare plans in 2013. The number of people who qualify for health insurance, and the type of insurance they get, are much different under the ACA than in 2013, before the change. One study found that when adjusting for actuarial value to create an apples-to-apples comparison, individual-market premiums actually dropped after the introduction of the ACA.

In addition, this does not take into account the impact of premium tax credits, which shield 80 percent of people in the marketplace from premium hikes. On average, eight out of 10 marketplace enrollees receive government premium subsidies, and they are protected from a premium increase (and may even see a decrease) if they stay with a low-cost plan.

State-by-state weighted average increases range from as low as single-digit increases to more than 100 percent. For 2017, the average increase in premiums before subsidies was 25 percent, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.

“Obamacare Fail #2: Fewer Choices. 83 Insurers abandoned the Obamacare marketplace this year alone”
— White House video

The White House appears to be referring to the number of issuers who exited states in 2017, compared with 2016. Some states gained issuers, so the net number of issuers who exited states in 2017 is 68.

The number of issuers varies widely between states. In 2014, an average of five insurers participated in each state’s marketplace, ranging from one to 16 companies in a state. The average number for 2017 is 4.3, ranging from one to 15 companies in a state, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation.

It’s important to keep in mind that before the ACA, many rural areas only had one or two carriers. After the exchanges, companies jumped into the market in 2015 and 2016 after the exchanges launched — then left the market after realizing the exchanges weren’t profitable yet. So many states in 2017 are back to the same number of issuers there were in 2014 — which does not necessarily mean there are “fewer choices.”

Interestingly, many insurance companies say they’re actually leaving the market now because of uncertainty caused by the Trump administration and the Republican Congress.

“Obamacare Fail #3: Fewer Covered under Obamacare exchanges. In 2016, 29% of enrollees dropped off Obamacare exchanges, over 3.6 million people”
— White House video

This appears to be a reference to the difference in the number of people who had selected policies in the exchanges as of January 2016 (12.7 million), compared with the number of people enrolled as of Dec. 31 (9.1 million). The White House did not respond to our request for clarification.

There is constant flux in the individual market; people drop out when they get a job with health insurance coverage, or when they become eligible for Medicaid. So the 3.6 million people do not necessarily represent those who are no longer covered, as they may have obtained coverage elsewhere.

The gradual attrition rate over the course of the year is close to the 2015 rate, notes Charles Gaba, who keeps careful track of enrollment figures at ACASignups.net. Moreover, this statistic ignores that more people are covered under the ACA, and the expansion of Medicaid provided insurance to as many as 14 million people.

“Obamacare Fail #4: Less Freedom. In 2015, Americans paid $3 billion in penalties for not purchasing unaffordable health plans that did not meet their needs”
— White House video

The number of Americans who paid a penalty actually decreased by almost 20 percent from 2014 to 2015.

Did they pay penalties because the plans “did not meet their needs” or because they couldn’t afford them? It’s not clear. Those who truly can’t afford insurance can claim a hardship exemption from the penalty. A 2016 Kaiser Family Foundation survey showed that two-thirds of marketplace enrollees were satisfied with their coverage, and 59 percent said it was easy to find a plan that met their needs.

“28 million still uninsured. Nearly 30 million Americans still without health-care insurance coverage. In just the first few months of this year, nearly two million people dropped their Obamacare coverage.”
— White House website

This overlooks the fact that the House GOP plan would boost the number of uninsured by 23 million, and the Senate GOP plan by 22 million, by 2026.

We’ve debunked the 2 million statistic before. It comes from a dubious report issued by Health and Human Services, which found 10.3 million had paid for their first premium in February as of March 15, compared with 12.2 million who had signed up for coverage as of Jan. 31, 2017. (This is similar to the earlier claim about 3.6 million dropping off the exchanges by the end of 2016.)

But the HHS report excludes data from March 15-31, which was usually included in previous versions of the report. Such reports, even ones issued earlier than June 12, included data through March 31. In virtually every state, people signing up for coverage between Jan. 15-31 do not even pay a first premium until March. Gaba estimates that leaves off about 500,000 people. Using enrollment as of Jan. 31 rather than enrollment through Jan. 15 also serves to inflate the purported decline.

“Obamacare is failing the American people: Premiums were supposed to drop, but instead they have soared by nearly $3,000.”
— White House website

Again, this does not include tax credits, which keeps premiums flat or even decreases them for 80 percent of people in the marketplace. And again, this uses data from pre-ACA 2013 through 2017, which are not comparable.

Average insurance premiums in the Obamacare marketplace now are about at the level predicted by the Congressional Budget Office for 2017 when it first evaluated the law in 2009. But premiums have certainly spiked in recent years, as insurance companies grappled with a mix of people in the insurance pools tilted toward people who have chronic illnesses and thus require more care and frequent doctor or hospital visits.

“FACT: when #Obamacare was signed, CBO estimated that 23M would be covered in 2017. They were off by 100%. Only 10.3M people are covered.”
— in a tweet by Trump and the White House

The White House frequently tries to discredit CBO estimates by criticizing their previous estimates, but this is misleading. The CBO was mostly correct on its forecast for the overall number of 23 million people who would gain insurance under Obamacare. The CBO was off in its projection is the makeup of the type of insurance gained in the total 23 million population.

The CBO had originally estimated that the 23 million people would gain insurance through the Obamacare exchanges. But only 10.4 million were participating in the exchanges as of the first half of 2016.

That is only a subset of the number of people who gained insurance. The CBO underestimated the number of people who would gain insurance through Medicaid expansions, due to factors that were unknown at the time. More people than projected signed up for Medicaid — 14.4 million, compared to the projected 10 million. That adds up to 24.8 million total people who gained coverage through Obamacare.

A 2015 study by the Commonwealth Fund concluded, “The CBO’s projections were closer to realized experience than were those of many other prominent forecasters.”

The amount of spinning and outright lies is astounding.

[GreyhoundFan]

"A GOP stunt backfires, and accidentally reveals a truth Republicans want hidden"

Spoiler

With the Republican campaign to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act now set to enter its final, frenzied push, the Indianapolis Star reports that the Indiana GOP attempted a stunt that was supposed to provide Republicans with more ammunition against the law. But the stunt went awry:

The Indiana Republican Party posed a question to Facebook on Monday: “What’s your Obamacare horror story? Let us know.”

The responses were unexpected.

“My sister finally has access to affordable quality care and treatment for her diabetes.”

“My father’s small business was able to insure its employees for the first time ever. #thanksObama”

“Love Obamacare!”

“The only horror in the story is that Republicans might take it away.”…

By 8:30 a.m. Tuesday, the Indiana GOP’s post collected more than 1,500 comments, the vast majority in support of Obamacare.

As David Nather points out, this reveals that the energy in this battle right now is on the side of those who want to save the ACA. But, while the rate of pro-ACA postings should obviously not be taken as a scientific indicator of public opinion, this episode also neatly captures another larger truth about why it is proving so hard for Republicans to repeal the law: It has helped untold numbers of people, and the GOP bill would largely reverse that.

This is admittedly a simple and obvious point, yet the extraordinary lengths to which Republicans are going to obscure this basic reality continue to elude sufficient recognition. If you think about it, pretty much every major lie that President Trump and Republicans are telling right now to get their repeal-and-replace bill passed is designed to cover it up.

The Washington Post and the New York Times have published two excellent pieces that debunk most of the leading GOP lies and distortions of the moment on health care. The Post piece looks at a series of White House claims. They include exaggerated assertions about Obamacare premium hikes (that don’t take into account subsidies that ease costs for lower-income people); and gamed statistics about the number covered by the ACA (that don’t take into account the enormous coverage gains achieved by the Medicaid expansion). Most insultingly of all, the White House is criticizing Obamacare because 29 million Americans currently remain uncovered. The spectacularly dumb argument here is actually that Obamacare is failing because it hasn’t succeeded in achieving universal coverage, so we should embrace a GOP bill that would leave nearly 50 million uncovered in 10 years.

Meanwhile, the New York Times piece looks at a bunch of claims by congressional Republicans. Among them: The dopey, dissembling, nonsensical assertions that the GOP bill somehow keeps the Medicaid expansion and that Medicaid spending actually goes up (the GOP bill phases out the ACA’s federal contributions to the expansion and dramatically cuts Medicaid spending relative to current law, which would leave 15 million fewer covered by that program). And some Republicans are actually blaming Obamacare for the fact that some remain uncovered by the Medicaid expansion in states where GOP governors didn’t opt into it.

All of these lies and distortions, in one way or another, are meant to obscure two basic realities: The ACA, for all its problems, is actually helping millions and millions of people, and the GOP bill would undo much of those gains. This would not be necessary, if Republicans were willing to forthrightly defend their actual policy goals and the principles and priorities underlying them.

Interestingly, moderate Republican Senators are in fact acknowledging the priorities embedded in the GOP plan when they criticize it for trying to roll back the help that the ACA is giving to millions and millions of poor people in order to finance huge tax cuts for the rich. But you don’t see many congressional Republicans who support the bill admitting to its most basic features, or defending them with an argument as to why its projected consequences would be worth the bill’s trade-offs. Instead, these realities are buried under piles of horse manure about “smooth glide paths” and “rescue missions” and “bridges to better health care” and “soft landings” and all the other claims recounted above about how the ACA doesn’t do what it actually does and how GOP bill wouldn’t actually do what it is intended to do.

...

"...smooth glide paths..." That sounds like the lubricant used before giving a colonoscopy, which is appropriate, since the Repugs are trying to screw the American people. Sorry to be crude, but I'm getting more and more upset by their crap.

[candygirl200413]

It also blows my mind because they have in this new bill that congress and their staff will be able to keep their care from the ACA. I wonder why?!

[GreyhoundFan]

"At parades and protests, GOP lawmakers get earful about health care"

Spoiler

EASTPORT, Maine — For the 15th year, Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) spent July 4 marching through this town of 1,331, a short boat ride away from Canada. She walked and waved, next to marching bands and Shriner-driven lobster boats. Her constituents cheered — and then asked whether she would vote against repealing the Affordable Care Act.

“There was only one issue. That’s unusual. It’s usually a wide range of issues,” Collins said in an interview after the parade. “I heard, over and over again, encouragement for my stand against the current version of the Senate and House health-care bills. People were thanking me, over and over again. ‘Thank you, Susan!’ ‘Stay strong, Susan!’ ”

Collins, whose opposition to the Better Care Reconciliation Act helped derail last week’s plans for a quick vote, is being lobbied to smother it and make Congress start over. Republicans, who skipped the usual committee process in the hopes of passing a bill quickly, are spending the Fourth of July recess fending off protesters, low poll numbers and newspaper front pages that warn of shuttered hospitals and 22 million people being shunted off their insurance. It was a bill, Collins said, that she just couldn’t vote for.

“If you took a blank sheet of paper and said, ‘How could we get a bill that would really hammer Maine,’ this would be it,” said Sen. Angus King (I-Maine), who walked ahead of Collins in the parade.

Few Republicans have responded like Collins, who let voters know where to find her. Last month, when Congress broke for the long holiday, just four of the Senate’s 52 Republicans — Collins, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.), Sen. Dean Heller (R-Nev.), and Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) — announced appearances at Fourth of July parades. Just three — Cruz, Sen. Jerry Moran (R-Kan.) and Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.) — said they would hold public town hall meetings. All have criticized the bill; three “no” votes would sink it.

Still, the relative scarceness of the senators — more of them joined a delegation to Afghanistan this week than scheduled town halls — challenged the busy liberal “resistance” movement. Since the repeal debate began, protesters have made direct confrontations with elected officials a central part of their opposition to the Republican bill — copying what worked for tea party activists, who packed Democratic town halls during the lengthy 2009-2010 Affordable Care Act debate.

In the run-up to July 4, activists shared details of Republican appearances on sites created by the progressive group Indivisible (“Red, White, and You”) and the crowd-sourced Town Hall Project. Democratic senators who spoke at a June 28 rally outside the Capitol repeatedly urged activists to make noise wherever they saw Republicans. It was the protesters, they said, who had repeatedly spoiled Republicans’ plans to pass a bill and move on to tax restructuring. A president who had once floated a special session of Congress to repeal the Affordable Care Act had become distracted by feuds with the media. The “resistance,” Democrats said, had not become distracted by anything.

“Thinking back to February recess, it was all we could do to keep up with your energy and follow all the incredible actions you took,” Indivisible organizers wrote in a weekend fundraising message to supporters. “Over June, we were able to [move] methodically to target senators in specific states while also facilitating coordinated actions across the country. And as the delayed bill proves — THIS WORKS!”

Over the weekend, and on July 4, activists had only a few chances to prove it. In Kentucky, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) navigated around an estimated 85 protesters — many organized by Planned Parenthood — to tell Hardin County Republicans that he was still trying to solve the “Rubik’s Cube” called the Better Care Reconciliation Act.

“Obamacare is a disaster,” said McConnell, according to video captured by the Louisville Courier-Journal. “No action is not an option. But what to replace it with is very challenging.”

McConnell did not explain how the Better Care Reconciliation Act might change, and some of the ideas floated to win votes have fallen flat with skeptical lawmakers. The idea of offering subsidies for cheaper plans that did not include the Affordable Care Act’s “essential health benefits,” favored by Cruz as a compromise, did not satisfy Collins.

“If you have a health savings account that is federally funded, that equals the deductible, that can work, but it has to be designed right,” Collins said. “I don’t want to see insurance that’s not really insurance.”

Yet with protesters kept outside, McConnell faced no interruptions or skeptical questions. Cruz faced something else in McAllen, Tex., a city on the Mexican border that had voted heavily for Hillary Clinton last year. Early Tuesday morning, as Cruz grabbed a microphone, protesters behind a short fence waved signs reading “No Transfer of Wealth 4 Our Health” and “No Repeal, No Medicaid Cuts.” Supporters with Cruz gear tried, in vain, to drown them out.

“Isn’t freedom wonderful?” Cruz asked. “In much of the world, if protesters showed up, they would face violent government oppression. In America, we’ve got something different.”

In a follow-up interview with the Texas Tribune, Cruz characterized the protesters as members of “a small group of people on the left who right now are very angry.” Other Republicans used similar language to explain why cutting back on open forums made sense. Some have pivoted to call-in events, where there’s no threat of moments caught on video going viral. Some have cited the shooting of House Majority Whip Steve Scalise (R-La.) to argue that public forums would expose them and local police to unnecessary risks.

“The last thing we’re going to do is give in to a lot of left-wing activists and media,” Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) told a radio interviewer last month. “With these security situations, I don’t know how any member of Congress can do a town hall.”

The senators who did appear at Fourth of July events found ways to minimize the risks. Apart from Cruz, all appeared in fairly remote areas; Murkowski and Collins stopped by island towns far from the states’ population centers.

Heller, the only Republican up for reelection next year in a state President Trump lost, made a horseback appearance in Ely, Nev., the largest town in a rural county that gave Trump a 53.5-point landslide. Reporters who made the trek heard something that has become rare: Well-wishers asking a senator to vote for the Republican bill. (Heller opposed the first version but is being lobbied to vote for a revision.)

“Glad I could help them get away from the east coast and to one of the most beautiful parts of NV,” Heller tweeted at reporters after the Ely parade.

In Maine and Alaska, where Republican senators came out loud and early against the bill, residents applauded their lawmakers. Murkowski, who has criticized the Better Care Reconciliation Act for defunding Planned Parenthood and cutting Medicaid, was deluged by health-care questions as she walked a parade in the small town of Wrangell. Kirk Garbisch, 63, thanked her for being “the voice of reason” and slowing down the bill.

“She’s looking at the issues and not just following party lines,” he said. “There have been so few Republicans who can get in some good reason, rather than blindly following.”

Murkowski was hearing that particular sort of praise again and again. She moved comfortably through a crowd gathered to watch children street-race and lumberjacks saw logs.

“Most people don’t ask ‘for or against,’ ” she said. “They just say, ‘Make sure you’re taking care of our interests.’ In fairness for those that do the ‘for or against,’ everybody is pretty much [saying] they don’t think this is good for us.”

After the parades, there will be few chances for Better Care Reconciliation Act critics to face their senators during the recess. Cassidy’s town halls have passed and mostly focused on flood relief. Cruz’s events in Texas, sponsored by the conservative group Concerned Veterans for America, require attendees to register first.

Activists are encouraging one another to get more ambitious — and creative. Protesters in Colorado got headlines for sitting down at one of Sen. Cory Gardner’s (R-Colo.) offices and refusing to leave. The progressive Action Network urged protesters to wage more sit-ins on Thursday.

In New York, two Long Island activist groups are planning “health-care cook-outs” close to the offices of Rep. Peter T. King (R-N.Y.) and Rep. Lee Zeldin (R-N.Y.), under the motto “We can’t let seniors, children and people with disabilities GET BURNED!” Topher Spiro, the vice president of health policy at the Center for American Progress, urged activists on Twitter to keep organizing, whether or not Republicans would face them.

“Protesting Trumpcare this week is the pinnacle of democracy and patriotism,” he wrote.

Aw, the widdle snowflake Nunes is afraid to speak in public.

[GreyhoundFan]

"Louisiana congressman breaks rule No. 1: Don’t make Holocaust comparisons"

Spoiler

There's never, to say the least, an upside to invoking the Holocaust in the context of any other subject, a lesson that politicians and their staffs learn with disturbing frequency.

The latest to blunder on this front is Louisiana Rep. Clay Higgins (R).

On July 1, he posted a video showing him solemnly touring the Auschwitz death camp run by Nazi Germany in occupied Poland. The video begins near the train tracks at the edge of the camp, before Higgins walks past vast piles of shoes that belonged to victims. Higgins takes viewers through the actual gas chambers, then to the ovens the Nazis used to incinerate their victims. It's difficult to watch.

But then, at perhaps the video's most emotional moment, Higgins abruptly — and by most standards insensitively — changes subjects.

“This is why homeland security must be squared away,” he says, looking directly into the camera. “Why our military must be invincible.”

Suddenly the video starts to feel like a political argument that is out of place and inappropriate at such a solemn site. Higgins seems to be implying that horrible things like this could happen again if the United States doesn't take more proactive security measures.

“It's hard to walk away from the gas chambers and ovens without a very sober feeling of commitment,” Higgins says a minute later. “Unwavering commitment, to make damn sure that the United States of America is protected from the evils of the world.”

The Auschwitz Memorial responded Tuesday, saying Higgins shouldn't have used the memorial as a “stage.”

...

Steven Goldstein, Executive Director of the Anne Frank Center for Mutual Respect, released a statement saying, “Auschwitz is not a television studio.”

"It is the site of genocide and tragedy for the Jewish people that you have disrespected,” Goldstein said. ”Not only must you apologize, but you must also get the sensitivity training appropriate for your continued service in the U.S. Congress."

Higgins's office didn't immediately respond to a request for comment by The Post.

Higgins has made controversial statements before.

Last month, he wrote a Facebook post that offended some readers and constituents, hours after men wielding knives killed seven people and injured dozens more in London. “Hunt them, identify them, and kill them. Kill them all,” Higgins wrote about “radicalized Islamic suspects.”

The Facebook post was derided by critics as inflammatory and hateful, although Higgins said at the time he didn't expect the post to be controversial. He later doubled down on his statement in an interview with The Washington Post, saying, “that’s what happens in war.”

Higgins first rose to prominence as a spokesman for the St. Landry Parish Sheriff's Office in Louisiana. He appeared in numerous crime stoppers videos, in which he addressed viewers directly and bluntly, a shift from the slower-paced, less-emotional videos the department had released before.

Last month, The Washington Post's Peter Holley chronicled Higgins's emergence as a video star:

The impact in and around Opelousas, Louisiana, was almost immediate: Fugitives — moved by Higgins’s fair-minded appeals to their sense of duty — began turning themselves in. Viewers — moved by his stern demeanor, backcountry drawl and made-for-TV one-liners — began sharing his videos, turning Higgins into a viral phenomenon known as “the Cajun John Wayne.”

Two years later, Higgins has a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives, where he is still relying on the primary tools that got him there: unfiltered emotion and unscripted speech.

Higgins's personality and blunt talk, and breaking rules about what should and shouldn't be said, got him as far as Congress. But he's finding out quickly, on the national stage, sometimes there are rules that shouldn't be broken.

Sigh. It's truly amazing how tone-deaf some people are.

[fraurosena]

15 minutes ago, GreyhoundFan said:

"Louisiana congressman breaks rule No. 1: Don’t make Holocaust comparisons"

  Hide contents

There's never, to say the least, an upside to invoking the Holocaust in the context of any other subject, a lesson that politicians and their staffs learn with disturbing frequency.

The latest to blunder on this front is Louisiana Rep. Clay Higgins (R).

On July 1, he posted a video showing him solemnly touring the Auschwitz death camp run by Nazi Germany in occupied Poland. The video begins near the train tracks at the edge of the camp, before Higgins walks past vast piles of shoes that belonged to victims. Higgins takes viewers through the actual gas chambers, then to the ovens the Nazis used to incinerate their victims. It's difficult to watch.

But then, at perhaps the video's most emotional moment, Higgins abruptly — and by most standards insensitively — changes subjects.

“This is why homeland security must be squared away,” he says, looking directly into the camera. “Why our military must be invincible.”

Suddenly the video starts to feel like a political argument that is out of place and inappropriate at such a solemn site. Higgins seems to be implying that horrible things like this could happen again if the United States doesn't take more proactive security measures.

“It's hard to walk away from the gas chambers and ovens without a very sober feeling of commitment,” Higgins says a minute later. “Unwavering commitment, to make damn sure that the United States of America is protected from the evils of the world.”

The Auschwitz Memorial responded Tuesday, saying Higgins shouldn't have used the memorial as a “stage.”

...

Steven Goldstein, Executive Director of the Anne Frank Center for Mutual Respect, released a statement saying, “Auschwitz is not a television studio.”

"It is the site of genocide and tragedy for the Jewish people that you have disrespected,” Goldstein said. ”Not only must you apologize, but you must also get the sensitivity training appropriate for your continued service in the U.S. Congress."

Higgins's office didn't immediately respond to a request for comment by The Post.

Higgins has made controversial statements before.

Last month, he wrote a Facebook post that offended some readers and constituents, hours after men wielding knives killed seven people and injured dozens more in London. “Hunt them, identify them, and kill them. Kill them all,” Higgins wrote about “radicalized Islamic suspects.”

The Facebook post was derided by critics as inflammatory and hateful, although Higgins said at the time he didn't expect the post to be controversial. He later doubled down on his statement in an interview with The Washington Post, saying, “that’s what happens in war.”

Higgins first rose to prominence as a spokesman for the St. Landry Parish Sheriff's Office in Louisiana. He appeared in numerous crime stoppers videos, in which he addressed viewers directly and bluntly, a shift from the slower-paced, less-emotional videos the department had released before.

Last month, The Washington Post's Peter Holley chronicled Higgins's emergence as a video star:

The impact in and around Opelousas, Louisiana, was almost immediate: Fugitives — moved by Higgins’s fair-minded appeals to their sense of duty — began turning themselves in. Viewers — moved by his stern demeanor, backcountry drawl and made-for-TV one-liners — began sharing his videos, turning Higgins into a viral phenomenon known as “the Cajun John Wayne.”

Two years later, Higgins has a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives, where he is still relying on the primary tools that got him there: unfiltered emotion and unscripted speech.

Higgins's personality and blunt talk, and breaking rules about what should and shouldn't be said, got him as far as Congress. But he's finding out quickly, on the national stage, sometimes there are rules that shouldn't be broken.

Sigh. It's truly amazing how tone-deaf some people are.

This complete lack of understanding what he is seeing, what it represents in reality - the horror and atrociousness of it-  is utterly dumbfounding. He views things from only one narcissistic perspective: "What can it do for me?" 

[47of74]

2 hours ago, fraurosena said:

This complete lack of understanding what he is seeing, what it represents in reality - the horror and atrociousness of it-  is utterly dumbfounding. He views things from only one narcissistic perspective: "What can it do for me?" 

(Shoving a fifty in the swear jar).

This fuck stick is only apologizing cause he played catch with some blowback.

And my personal message to Clay:  Dude.  Shut the ever living fuck up and go off and fuck yourself, you fucking fuck.  How dare you politicize this in a fuck head attempt to further your political agenda you son of a bitch.  Because of you I may very goddamn well put Louisiana back on my personal vacation boycott list after it came off when Jindhal left office and Diaper Vitter was told to get lost when he ran for governor.

 

 

[fraurosena]

This is the best explanation by far!

 

[GrumpyGran]

21 hours ago, GreyhoundFan said:

"At parades and protests, GOP lawmakers get earful about health care"

  Reveal hidden contents

EASTPORT, Maine — For the 15th year, Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) spent July 4 marching through this town of 1,331, a short boat ride away from Canada. She walked and waved, next to marching bands and Shriner-driven lobster boats. Her constituents cheered — and then asked whether she would vote against repealing the Affordable Care Act.

“There was only one issue. That’s unusual. It’s usually a wide range of issues,” Collins said in an interview after the parade. “I heard, over and over again, encouragement for my stand against the current version of the Senate and House health-care bills. People were thanking me, over and over again. ‘Thank you, Susan!’ ‘Stay strong, Susan!’ ”

Collins, whose opposition to the Better Care Reconciliation Act helped derail last week’s plans for a quick vote, is being lobbied to smother it and make Congress start over. Republicans, who skipped the usual committee process in the hopes of passing a bill quickly, are spending the Fourth of July recess fending off protesters, low poll numbers and newspaper front pages that warn of shuttered hospitals and 22 million people being shunted off their insurance. It was a bill, Collins said, that she just couldn’t vote for.

“If you took a blank sheet of paper and said, ‘How could we get a bill that would really hammer Maine,’ this would be it,” said Sen. Angus King (I-Maine), who walked ahead of Collins in the parade.

Few Republicans have responded like Collins, who let voters know where to find her. Last month, when Congress broke for the long holiday, just four of the Senate’s 52 Republicans — Collins, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.), Sen. Dean Heller (R-Nev.), and Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) — announced appearances at Fourth of July parades. Just three — Cruz, Sen. Jerry Moran (R-Kan.) and Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.) — said they would hold public town hall meetings. All have criticized the bill; three “no” votes would sink it.

Still, the relative scarceness of the senators — more of them joined a delegation to Afghanistan this week than scheduled town halls — challenged the busy liberal “resistance” movement. Since the repeal debate began, protesters have made direct confrontations with elected officials a central part of their opposition to the Republican bill — copying what worked for tea party activists, who packed Democratic town halls during the lengthy 2009-2010 Affordable Care Act debate.

In the run-up to July 4, activists shared details of Republican appearances on sites created by the progressive group Indivisible (“Red, White, and You”) and the crowd-sourced Town Hall Project. Democratic senators who spoke at a June 28 rally outside the Capitol repeatedly urged activists to make noise wherever they saw Republicans. It was the protesters, they said, who had repeatedly spoiled Republicans’ plans to pass a bill and move on to tax restructuring. A president who had once floated a special session of Congress to repeal the Affordable Care Act had become distracted by feuds with the media. The “resistance,” Democrats said, had not become distracted by anything.

“Thinking back to February recess, it was all we could do to keep up with your energy and follow all the incredible actions you took,” Indivisible organizers wrote in a weekend fundraising message to supporters. “Over June, we were able to [move] methodically to target senators in specific states while also facilitating coordinated actions across the country. And as the delayed bill proves — THIS WORKS!”

Over the weekend, and on July 4, activists had only a few chances to prove it. In Kentucky, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) navigated around an estimated 85 protesters — many organized by Planned Parenthood — to tell Hardin County Republicans that he was still trying to solve the “Rubik’s Cube” called the Better Care Reconciliation Act.

“Obamacare is a disaster,” said McConnell, according to video captured by the Louisville Courier-Journal. “No action is not an option. But what to replace it with is very challenging.”

McConnell did not explain how the Better Care Reconciliation Act might change, and some of the ideas floated to win votes have fallen flat with skeptical lawmakers. The idea of offering subsidies for cheaper plans that did not include the Affordable Care Act’s “essential health benefits,” favored by Cruz as a compromise, did not satisfy Collins.

“If you have a health savings account that is federally funded, that equals the deductible, that can work, but it has to be designed right,” Collins said. “I don’t want to see insurance that’s not really insurance.”

Yet with protesters kept outside, McConnell faced no interruptions or skeptical questions. Cruz faced something else in McAllen, Tex., a city on the Mexican border that had voted heavily for Hillary Clinton last year. Early Tuesday morning, as Cruz grabbed a microphone, protesters behind a short fence waved signs reading “No Transfer of Wealth 4 Our Health” and “No Repeal, No Medicaid Cuts.” Supporters with Cruz gear tried, in vain, to drown them out.

“Isn’t freedom wonderful?” Cruz asked. “In much of the world, if protesters showed up, they would face violent government oppression. In America, we’ve got something different.”

In a follow-up interview with the Texas Tribune, Cruz characterized the protesters as members of “a small group of people on the left who right now are very angry.” Other Republicans used similar language to explain why cutting back on open forums made sense. Some have pivoted to call-in events, where there’s no threat of moments caught on video going viral. Some have cited the shooting of House Majority Whip Steve Scalise (R-La.) to argue that public forums would expose them and local police to unnecessary risks.

“The last thing we’re going to do is give in to a lot of left-wing activists and media,” Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) told a radio interviewer last month. “With these security situations, I don’t know how any member of Congress can do a town hall.”

The senators who did appear at Fourth of July events found ways to minimize the risks. Apart from Cruz, all appeared in fairly remote areas; Murkowski and Collins stopped by island towns far from the states’ population centers.

Heller, the only Republican up for reelection next year in a state President Trump lost, made a horseback appearance in Ely, Nev., the largest town in a rural county that gave Trump a 53.5-point landslide. Reporters who made the trek heard something that has become rare: Well-wishers asking a senator to vote for the Republican bill. (Heller opposed the first version but is being lobbied to vote for a revision.)

“Glad I could help them get away from the east coast and to one of the most beautiful parts of NV,” Heller tweeted at reporters after the Ely parade.

In Maine and Alaska, where Republican senators came out loud and early against the bill, residents applauded their lawmakers. Murkowski, who has criticized the Better Care Reconciliation Act for defunding Planned Parenthood and cutting Medicaid, was deluged by health-care questions as she walked a parade in the small town of Wrangell. Kirk Garbisch, 63, thanked her for being “the voice of reason” and slowing down the bill.

“She’s looking at the issues and not just following party lines,” he said. “There have been so few Republicans who can get in some good reason, rather than blindly following.”

Murkowski was hearing that particular sort of praise again and again. She moved comfortably through a crowd gathered to watch children street-race and lumberjacks saw logs.

“Most people don’t ask ‘for or against,’ ” she said. “They just say, ‘Make sure you’re taking care of our interests.’ In fairness for those that do the ‘for or against,’ everybody is pretty much [saying] they don’t think this is good for us.”

After the parades, there will be few chances for Better Care Reconciliation Act critics to face their senators during the recess. Cassidy’s town halls have passed and mostly focused on flood relief. Cruz’s events in Texas, sponsored by the conservative group Concerned Veterans for America, require attendees to register first.

Activists are encouraging one another to get more ambitious — and creative. Protesters in Colorado got headlines for sitting down at one of Sen. Cory Gardner’s (R-Colo.) offices and refusing to leave. The progressive Action Network urged protesters to wage more sit-ins on Thursday.

In New York, two Long Island activist groups are planning “health-care cook-outs” close to the offices of Rep. Peter T. King (R-N.Y.) and Rep. Lee Zeldin (R-N.Y.), under the motto “We can’t let seniors, children and people with disabilities GET BURNED!” Topher Spiro, the vice president of health policy at the Center for American Progress, urged activists on Twitter to keep organizing, whether or not Republicans would face them.

“Protesting Trumpcare this week is the pinnacle of democracy and patriotism,” he wrote.

Aw, the widdle snowflake Nunes is afraid to speak in public.

Yeah, one of my senators went to Afghanistan and the other one, honestly, I don't know what he really does. But my representative was in town! He just forgot to tell anyone he was coming so no one knew until after the fact.

[GreyhoundFan]

I despise Dave Brat, whose name is so freaking apropos: "Rep. Brat deletes photo of 'Hillary for U.S. Ambassador to Libya' sign"

Spoiler

Washington (CNN)Virginia Rep. Dave Brat has deleted a photo from his Instagram account that pictured the Republican congressman smiling with a constituent holding a sign that read "Hillary for U.S. Ambassador to Libya."

"Sign says it all," the since-deleted post was captioned.

The sign appeared to be mocking the 2016 Democratic presidential candidate and suggesting that she herself be put in danger now.

Clinton was serving secretary of state during the 2012 attack on the American consulate in Benghazi, Libya. US ambassador to Libya Christopher Stevens and three other Americans were killed in the assault. Clinton has faced significant criticism from Republicans who accused her of being personally responsible for security lapses in Benghazi.

A Clinton spokesman did not immediately return a CNN request for comment Monday night. Brat's office also didn't immediately return a request for comment.

Brat told a Richmond television station, WWBT NBC 12, that he did not put the picture up himself and noted that he has some new staffers working for him, adding, "if this can be interpreted in any way as negative in that way -- I apologize for that."

Still, Brat rejected the idea that the sign in any way suggested Clinton be put in danger.

"No, that's -- that's laughable, right?" he told the Richmond-based news station.

In a later post to his Instagram account, Brat said he thought the sign has been misinterpreted.

"Dear Instagram friends, an earlier pic today was being misinterpreted so it has been removed," the post read.

Asked by the news station if the sign bothered him at all, Brat said, "No, I thought the guy was just getting at the Benghazi injustice that everybody knows is a tragedy -- it had to do with all these tapes and stuff," according to the station's write-up of the interview.

The congressman did not offer a clear explanation as to why the sign said Clinton should be ambassador to Libya.

Seriously? He thinks it's misinterpreted. What a jerk.

[GreyhoundFan]

"One reason the GOP health bill is a mess: No one thought Trump would win"

Spoiler

Sen. Patrick J. Toomey offered a simple, remarkable explanation this week for why Republicans have struggled so mightily to find a way to repeal the Affordable Care Act.

“Look, I didn’t expect Donald Trump to win. I think most of my colleagues didn’t, so we didn’t expect to be in this situation,” the Pennsylvania Republican said Wednesday night during a meeting with voters hosted by four ABC affiliates across his state.

Toomey, now playing a critical role in negotiations over the GOP health-care bill, spent most of last year criticizing Trump’s personal behavior and the fights he picked on social media. Toomey did not announce his support for Trump’s candidacy until polls closed in Pennsylvania last Nov. 8, fully aware that no Republican presidential candidate had won his state since 1988 — and assuming that Trump would continue the streak.

Toomey did not participate in detailed Republican planning sessions on the Senate Finance Committee about how to reshape the nation’s health laws if Trump won the election — because no such planning sessions were really ever held.

Every important Republican leader expected Democrat Hillary Clinton to win, and that left Republicans confused and paralyzed about how to proceed when she didn’t.

That in turn led to a rushed initial decision, made in consultation with House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) during the presidential transition, to push for a full repeal of the 2010 health law and then set up a two- to three-year window in which Republicans would pass bills to replace it.

We all know how that has gone so far: The proposal was jettisoned amid a rank-and-file rebellion — and Trump’s conflicting statements about what Congress should do. At one point, Republicans could not even agree on what metaphor to use to describe the process for replacing the law. Ryan referred to “buckets,” while others called for “rescue missions” and some talked about “backpacks.”

That the GOP didn’t think they would take back the White House has informed other policy debates this year. A massive overhaul of the tax code, a Holy Grail of policy for Ryan, remains completely at loggerheads because the speaker’s preference for a controversial tax on imported goods was never litigated within the party last year, ahead of the election.

Similarly, Trump’s call for a $1 trillion infrastructure plan is sitting in neutral because congressional Republicans, long averse to big spending projects, never embraced it or even turned their attention its way.

Perhaps nowhere did the surprise factor of Trump’s victory show its impact more than in the effort to fill top jobs inside the administration. Clinton’s campaign, fully expecting victory, was stocked with hundreds of volunteer advisers who were already angling for sub-Cabinet-level posts in key agencies including the departments of State, Justice and Defense. Many of them were current or former senior staff of congressional Democrats.

But with Republicans, those connections were rare because few believed them to be worth the effort. No more than a handful of senior GOP aides from Capitol Hill boasted connections to the Trump campaign team. And only in recent weeks have some of the smartest and most influential advisers to Senate Republicans been nominated to key positions at Treasury and State.

Trump’s struggles on Capitol Hill reflect more than institutional shock over his victory. Republicans have controlled both the House and Senate now for 2½ years, with little success working out these policy issues.

And Trump’s advisers have not always lent a helping hand in the six months since he was inaugurated. Aides have regularly gone to war over key policy objectives and left Hill Republicans guessing which way the wind was blowing inside the West Wing. Earlier this year, Stephen K. Bannon, Trump’s chief strategist, praised Ryan’s border-tax proposal as “a first step of economic nationalism,” but a few weeks later Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin told House conservatives that Trump opposed the plan.

And Trump’s public musings, sometimes in media interviews and sometimes on Twitter, have also sowed division on policy matters — and scared away top Republican talent from senior administration posts.

But the shock of his victory, and the lack of planning ahead of it, is perhaps the cornerstone of this summer of Republican gridlock.

In December 2015, Republican lawmakers voted easily to repeal the Affordable Care Act. But it was a “messaging” vote, and they knew that then-President Barack Obama would veto the bill. Now, as Toomey likes to say, they’re playing with “live ammo.”

Eight months after Trump’s stunning victory, Republicans are still coming to grips with what they can actually pass and sign into law even with full ownership of all the levers of power.

“Given how difficult it is to get to a consensus, it was hard to force that until there was a need to,” Toomey said Wednesday.

Eight years ago, Democrats had been planning for months for the possibility of full control of Congress and the White House. Leading up to the 2008 elections, the chairmen of the finance and health committees, then-Sens. Max Baucus (D-Mont.) and Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.), held meetings with key health-care industry stakeholders about early thoughts on what would become the Affordable Care Act.

Many policy disputes still had to be litigated throughout 2009 and early 2010, but congressional Democrats and Obama laid out from the outset the process they would pursue to pass the legislation.

Republicans have not had that luxury. They have themselves to blame for not being ready from the outset to handle the health-care issue and others. Now, we know they admit it.

Said Toomey at his town hall on Wednesday: “I think that’s a valid criticism.”

In other words, as we've known all along, they whined for eight years, but did no actual planning or work.

[GreyhoundFan]

Interesting that this happened in Brownbackistan: "A town hall in Kansas shows Republican struggles with health-care bill"

Spoiler

PALCO, Kan. — At his first town hall meeting since coming out against the Senate Republicans’ health-care bill, Sen. Jerry Moran (R-Kan.) wanted to make himself clear.

He didn’t want legislation jammed through on a party-line vote, but he would “not necessarily” vote against it. He’d met people who “tell me they are better off” because the Affordable Care Act was passed, but he knew plenty of people were hurting, too.

“It’s worthy of a national debate that includes legislative hearings,” Moran said after the 90-minute event that brought 150 people to a town of 277. “It needs to be less politics and more policy.”

Moran, the only Republican senator holding unscreened town halls on health care this week, revealed just how much his party is struggling to pass a bill — and even how to talk about it. The people who crowded in and around Palco’s community center aimed to prove that there was no demand for a repeal of the ACA, even in the reddest parts of a deep red state.

That had taken some planning. Moran announced the Palco event with a full week’s notice, and Kansas’s pro-ACA groups mobilized to fill it. Planned Parenthood transported at least 20 people from the Kansas City suburbs, 4½  hours to the east; the city’s chapters of Indivisible did the same. The American Association for Retired People and Alliance for a Healthy Kansas made more calls, driving loyal voters to Palco. The result was a polite but heated round of questions that Moran occasionally chose not to answer.

When a 59-year old veteran named Jeff Zamrzla asked if it was time for “Medicare for all,” Moran waited for applause to die down, then moved on to the topic of Medicaid funding. With a smile and a shrug, he told women in bright pink Planned Parenthood shirts that he wouldn’t have an answer they liked.

“That was a win for Planned Parenthood patients,” said Elise Higgins, 29, the regional director of organizing for Planned Parenthood Great Plains. “He didn’t just talk about defunding.”

Moran did the opposite, largely allowing skeptics of the Republican bill to frame the whole conversation. For all 90 minutes, a woman named Yaneth Poarch, 46, stood behind the senator holding a sign with caricatures of Republican leaders, and the warning “When you lose your health care, remember who took it away.”

Neither security guards nor staff did anything to move her.

The setting made the dissent, and Moran’s careful positioning, verge on surreal. Palco was in Kansas’s rural Republican heartland, miles from Moran’s home town of Plainville. The visitors from eastern Kansas, and the local Democrats from nearby Hays, found themselves next to Moran’s old roommate, some high school friends, and a physician. All of it took place in Rooks County, which gave the president a 73-point landslide over Hillary Clinton last year; Moran beat a token Democratic opponent by 79 points.

Until this year, the voters who cast those ballots had confidently favored repealing the ACA. Like Trump, Moran ran on “full repeal,” claiming to be the first Republican member of Congress to do so.

“Obamacare was rammed through Congress on a purely partisan basis in the face of significant public opposition,” Moran said in 2015 after the new Republican majority in the Senate passed a test vote on repeal. Moran had chaired the party’s 2014 Senate campaign effort, making that majority possible.

On Thursday, Moran took another tone. He did not describe the task facing Republicans as repeal; it was “repair, replace, whatever language people are using.”

Pressed by activists and voters, Moran said that he did not want to cut back Medicaid. “I have concern about people with disabilities, the frail and elderly,” Moran said. “I also know that if we want health care in rural places and across Kansas, Medicare and Medicaid need to compensate for the services they provide.”

After the town hall meeting, Moran told reporters the version of the GOP’s bill that he opposed put too much of Medicaid at risk.

“Medicaid, except for the extension part of Medicaid, is not really a part of fixing the Affordable Care Act,” he said. “So we’ve coupled two things, both of which are very difficult. Kansas is a place that’s treated Medicaid payments very conservative. If there are people receiving those payments who don’t deserve them, deal with that issue.”

In Washington, and at the height of the tea party’s activism in Kansas, it had been easy to find conservatives who could sell Medicaid cuts. None of that came out in Palco. Instead, Moran was stopped several times by disability rights advocates who worried that the GOP’s bill would destroy their lifestyles.

“I am very worried about waivered services,” said Mike Oxford, a 58-year old activist with the disability group ADAPT.

“Well, my concern with Medicaid is in significant part related to people with waivered services — and you’re right,” said Moran.

Oxford, who carried a sign reading “I am Medicaid,” said he was comforted by the answer. “Here in Kansas, that would be the only place they could find money,” he said. “The senator’s right — we’ve been skinned down to zero.”

But despite the thanks from people who wanted him to kill the Senate bill, Moran never ruled out a yes vote. Despite the Kansas Hospital Association’s opposition to the bill, Moran said he had not found any hospitals that benefited from the ACA. Asked after the town hall whether he could vote for a repeal-and-delay plan — favored, in some interviews, by President Trump — Moran didn’t rule it out.

“There’d be skepticism by many Americans because of how long it’s taken,” he said. “Can we come up with something in another year? Maybe, if that happened, there would be a desire on the part of all members of the United States Senate to find a replacement.”

The desire wasn’t there quite yet, he said. “There are senators with genuine concerns about this legislation. More senators then are having town hall meetings,” said Moran, who has two more town halls in western Kansas in coming days.

I can't say that I agree with everything he said, but bravo to him for actually holding a town hall and not restricting it.

[Childless]

10 hours ago, GreyhoundFan said:

"One reason the GOP health bill is a mess: No one thought Trump would win"

  Reveal hidden contents

Sen. Patrick J. Toomey offered a simple, remarkable explanation this week for why Republicans have struggled so mightily to find a way to repeal the Affordable Care Act.

“Look, I didn’t expect Donald Trump to win. I think most of my colleagues didn’t, so we didn’t expect to be in this situation,” the Pennsylvania Republican said Wednesday night during a meeting with voters hosted by four ABC affiliates across his state.

Toomey, now playing a critical role in negotiations over the GOP health-care bill, spent most of last year criticizing Trump’s personal behavior and the fights he picked on social media. Toomey did not announce his support for Trump’s candidacy until polls closed in Pennsylvania last Nov. 8, fully aware that no Republican presidential candidate had won his state since 1988 — and assuming that Trump would continue the streak.

Toomey did not participate in detailed Republican planning sessions on the Senate Finance Committee about how to reshape the nation’s health laws if Trump won the election — because no such planning sessions were really ever held.

Every important Republican leader expected Democrat Hillary Clinton to win, and that left Republicans confused and paralyzed about how to proceed when she didn’t.

That in turn led to a rushed initial decision, made in consultation with House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) during the presidential transition, to push for a full repeal of the 2010 health law and then set up a two- to three-year window in which Republicans would pass bills to replace it.

We all know how that has gone so far: The proposal was jettisoned amid a rank-and-file rebellion — and Trump’s conflicting statements about what Congress should do. At one point, Republicans could not even agree on what metaphor to use to describe the process for replacing the law. Ryan referred to “buckets,” while others called for “rescue missions” and some talked about “backpacks.”

That the GOP didn’t think they would take back the White House has informed other policy debates this year. A massive overhaul of the tax code, a Holy Grail of policy for Ryan, remains completely at loggerheads because the speaker’s preference for a controversial tax on imported goods was never litigated within the party last year, ahead of the election.

Similarly, Trump’s call for a $1 trillion infrastructure plan is sitting in neutral because congressional Republicans, long averse to big spending projects, never embraced it or even turned their attention its way.

Perhaps nowhere did the surprise factor of Trump’s victory show its impact more than in the effort to fill top jobs inside the administration. Clinton’s campaign, fully expecting victory, was stocked with hundreds of volunteer advisers who were already angling for sub-Cabinet-level posts in key agencies including the departments of State, Justice and Defense. Many of them were current or former senior staff of congressional Democrats.

But with Republicans, those connections were rare because few believed them to be worth the effort. No more than a handful of senior GOP aides from Capitol Hill boasted connections to the Trump campaign team. And only in recent weeks have some of the smartest and most influential advisers to Senate Republicans been nominated to key positions at Treasury and State.

Trump’s struggles on Capitol Hill reflect more than institutional shock over his victory. Republicans have controlled both the House and Senate now for 2½ years, with little success working out these policy issues.

And Trump’s advisers have not always lent a helping hand in the six months since he was inaugurated. Aides have regularly gone to war over key policy objectives and left Hill Republicans guessing which way the wind was blowing inside the West Wing. Earlier this year, Stephen K. Bannon, Trump’s chief strategist, praised Ryan’s border-tax proposal as “a first step of economic nationalism,” but a few weeks later Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin told House conservatives that Trump opposed the plan.

And Trump’s public musings, sometimes in media interviews and sometimes on Twitter, have also sowed division on policy matters — and scared away top Republican talent from senior administration posts.

But the shock of his victory, and the lack of planning ahead of it, is perhaps the cornerstone of this summer of Republican gridlock.

In December 2015, Republican lawmakers voted easily to repeal the Affordable Care Act. But it was a “messaging” vote, and they knew that then-President Barack Obama would veto the bill. Now, as Toomey likes to say, they’re playing with “live ammo.”

Eight months after Trump’s stunning victory, Republicans are still coming to grips with what they can actually pass and sign into law even with full ownership of all the levers of power.

“Given how difficult it is to get to a consensus, it was hard to force that until there was a need to,” Toomey said Wednesday.

Eight years ago, Democrats had been planning for months for the possibility of full control of Congress and the White House. Leading up to the 2008 elections, the chairmen of the finance and health committees, then-Sens. Max Baucus (D-Mont.) and Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.), held meetings with key health-care industry stakeholders about early thoughts on what would become the Affordable Care Act.

Many policy disputes still had to be litigated throughout 2009 and early 2010, but congressional Democrats and Obama laid out from the outset the process they would pursue to pass the legislation.

Republicans have not had that luxury. They have themselves to blame for not being ready from the outset to handle the health-care issue and others. Now, we know they admit it.

Said Toomey at his town hall on Wednesday: “I think that’s a valid criticism.”

In other words, as we've known all along, they whined for eight years, but did no actual planning or work.

We all know the Republicans were all whine and no substance.  That's their MO.  They complain a lot so they can win elections, but don't want to put in the actual work to come up with something better.  All that effort might interrupt their tee times and fancy dinners.

[formergothardite]

It is easy to complain about someone else's health care bill, it is much harder to write one. The GOP never planned on doing the hard work and it is so obvious. Some of them at least seem to be aware that if they actually pass this monster of a bill it will doom them, but their bluff has been called. After eight years of claiming they had a better plan, we all see that they have been lying.