United States Congress of Fail (Part 3)

[GrumpyGran]

17 minutes ago, fraurosena said:

Good grief.

 

Wait, are they saying we have voted to impose sanctions in the hopes that it will improve relations with Russia? How would that even work? Maybe I'm not reading this correctly. Maybe I'm drunk, even though it's Sunday morning. Maybe I should be!

[GreyhoundFan]

"In GOP’s repeal failure, Democrats find a potential game plan"

Spoiler

Outnumbered but emboldened, progressive Democrats who watched Republicans fail to unwind the Affordable Care Act are thinking harder about passing major expansions of health-care coverage. For many younger activists and legislators, the push to undo the ACA with just 51 Senate votes is less a cautionary tale than a model of how to bring about universal coverage.

The ambitious idea, discussed on the congressional backbenches and among activists, is not embraced by Democratic leaders. In the hours after the repeal push stalled, Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) suggested that Republicans “sit down and trade ideas” with Democrats. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) suggested that Republicans fully fund subsidies for current ACA exchange plans — money that President Trump frequently threatens to cut off.

But for many younger Democrats and activists, the Republicans’ near miss on repeal demonstrated boldness from which a future left-wing majority could learn. Democrats passed the ACA through regular order, with a fleeting, fractious Senate supermajority. Republicans proved that major health-care policy changes can be pushed nearly to the finish line in the reconciliation process, with just 50 supportive senators and a vice president ready to break a tie.

Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.), a freshman who favors universal Medicare coverage, said that Republicans have rewritten the playbook. “When we do have a Democratic president, and when we do have a Democratic majority, I’d support getting this through with 51 votes in the Senate,” said Khanna of a universal coverage, single-payer plan. “That will diminish the role of lobbyists and special interests in trying to get a few senators to block something that everyone in this country will want.”

Democrats who endured previous efforts to expand health insurance had rarely considered a reconciliation strategy. In 2009, the Obama administration and Democrats in the House and Senate included veterans of the failed 1993-1994 health-care push, who remembered the insurance industry’s effectiveness in sinking their bills.

The 2009 approach brought insurers on board; it adopted the mandate for individuals to obtain health insurance, an idea cooked up in conservative policy circles, and went into affect slowly to avoid piling up costs.

“How much time and effort did they spend in trying to make the ACA bipartisan?” asked Rep. Ruben Gallego (D-Ariz.), a rising Democratic star elected in 2014. “It’s never going to happen. Our bills shouldn’t be about getting the most amount of Republicans on board; they should be about insuring the biggest number of people.”

When Democrats lost control of the House in 2010, it taught party activists that there was little to gain from compromise. This year, the ACA policy that proved most in­trac­table was not the mandate — a “skinny bill” to repeal it got 49 Senate vote — but instead the expansion of Medicaid, which up to nine Republican senators refused to roll back.

To progressives, this was proof that they’d been right to demand more in 2009 — from a public option to a Medicare buy-in for younger people to single-payer health care itself. Adam Green, the co-founder of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, recalled that Democrats had ridiculed the “professional left” for supporting a public option in reconciliation. In conversations since the start of the repeal debate, they’ve come to agree with him.

“In 2009, what we consistently got from Democratic senators was: Hey, reconciliation was a procedural can of worms. We don’t want to go there,” said Green. “Republicans have made very clear that you can go there and push your ideas into law. But our ideas will be more popular. It’s pretty clear that the center of gravity has shifted.”

This week, as the Senate debated then waylaid the repeal bills, the PCCC held all-day training sessions for 2018 Democratic candidates in a hotel near the Capitol. Many swing-district hopefuls either said they embraced single-payer health care or described it as an obvious goal to work toward.

“The image I have in my head is that everyone who wants to see a doctor can see one, without going to the ER or going bankrupt,” said Rick Neal, an international aid worker who was exploring a run against Rep. Steve Stivers (R-Ohio). “Health care doesn’t fit in this free market fantasy that people have, because people will do anything to see a doctor. The high premiums we’re seeing right now are an indication of market failure.”

Andy Kim, a former National Security Council staffer now running against Rep. Tom MacArthur (R-N.J.), described the ideal process for passing a bill in now-common progressive terms — starting with what voters want, not what might win over Republicans.

“The way you start something that’s bipartisan is by starting with the American people,” he said. “Bipartisanship starts with them.”

Democrats have not yet formed a consensus on how to approach health care again. On Thursday, as the repeal effort headed for the cliff, Sen. Steve Daines (R-Mont.) needled Democratic senators — 10 of whom face reelection next year in states Trump won — by introducing the text of a single-payer bill sponsored by Rep. John Conyers Jr. (D-Mich.). For the first time, most House Democrats have co-sponsored Conyers’s bill; 43 members of the Senate minority, including Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), voted “present,” while five voted “no” on the Daines amendment.

Sanders did so because he intends — barring yet another jolt of life in the repeal campaign — to release a “Medicare for All” bill before the Senate’s August recess. The bill will be designed to reframe single-payer, which enjoys tentative support in public polls, as cost-effective and sensible.

If Sanders’s bill gets a favorable CBO score, it would become a starting point for Democrats in future health-care debates. Even some progressive Democrats worry about the story getting ahead of the storytellers.

“The reconciliation rules may allow you to squeeze through something, but it doesn’t allow you to do lawmaking the way it’s supposed to be done,” said Sen. Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii), who was endorsed by the PCCC. “When it comes to repeal, reconciliation is the tool that they’ve used; there’s every reason to think we’d use reconciliation to undo it. But it’s not a path we should go down with enthusiasm.”

Rep. John Yarmuth (D-Ky.), who would chair the House Budget Committee if Democrats won control of Congress, was similarly cautious about reconciliation. In an interview with The Post and the New York Times, taped for C-SPAN’s “Newsmakers,” Yarmuth said that he supports universal Medicare and could see it becoming law “in five to 10 years,” as employers realized that they would gain flexibility if they were taxed slightly higher but could save on insurance costs. But he would not copy the process Republicans had tried to use for repeal.

“It’s not good for the country, whether you’re Democrat or Republican, when you pass a bill with only partisan votes,” said Yarmuth.

Conyers, meanwhile, was trying to make universal health insurance the party’s default position. On Friday, as most House members left town for their recess, Conyers joined Khanna at an event to launch a pledge for 2018 Democrats. Raising his right hand, the Capitol peering over his shoulder, Conyers said he would “stand up for ‘Medicare for All.’ ”

“We’re seeing a crumbling of the Republican legislative program,” said Conyers. “We may not be in the minority much longer.”

Sadly, thanks to gerrymandering, the Repugs will likely still have the upper hand come 2018.

[AmazonGrace]

Susan Collins: 

 

[GreyhoundFan]

This is a great op-ed from the NYT: "The Empty Majority"

Spoiler

When we think about the ebb and flow of majorities in American politics, we like to imagine that there is a clear link between politics and policy – between gaining power and having an agenda to implement, between winning votes and responding to substantive challenges, between F.D.R’s majorities and his New Deal or Reagan’s victories and his Reaganomics.

The present-day Republican Party makes a mockery of this conceit. It is a majority party that behaves like it’s in the political wilderness, an election-winning machine that has no idea what to do with national power.

It has the tics of an opposition party, the raw wounds of a beaten coalition, the dated ideas of a bankrupt force. Its attempts to pass a health care bill aren’t just painful to watch; they have the same unheimlich quality as a calf born with two heads, the feeling of watching something that the laws of politics or nature should not permit to exist.

And yet it does: The same feckless G.O.P. that exists in a constant state of low-grade civil war controls not only Congress and the White House, but most statehouses and state legislatures as well. All of the contemporary Republican Party’s critics — left-wing and centrist and conservative — keep saying that the G.O.P. is broken and adrift, and years of government shutdowns and Obamacare debacles and everything about the Trump era keep proving us correct.

Yet Republican power endures, and while it’s politically vulnerable, there’s no reason to be sure it can’t survive the 2018 midterms and indeed the entire reign of Donald Trump.

This strange endurance is a central fact of our present politics. We have an empty majority, a party that can rule but cannot govern. And whether you’re a conservative who wants to reform the G.O.P. or a liberal who wants to crush it, you need to wrestle with why Republicans keep getting returned to office even though it’s clear that debacles like what we’ve been watching on health care are what they’re likely to produce.

One possibility is that this is a temporary situation, a transitional moment — that the Republican majority seems uncanny because it is a walking corpse, that Americans vote for Republican politicians out of a Reagan-forged habit that just takes a long time to fully break.

This theory lies behind the plausible comparison, which I’ve cited before, between Donald Trump and Jimmy Carter. Carter inherited an aging, cracking left-of-center coalition that had been given a jolt of life by Watergate and his own outsider persona. Like Trump, he enjoyed congressional majorities; like Trump (so far) he got nothing done, and his era’s empty majority was the last phase in the old Democratic coalition’s long decline.

I find this analogy compelling but history does not repeat itself so neatly. If Trump’s distinctive populism seems “disjunctive,” in the lingo of political scientists — straddling the long Reagan era and a new politics waiting to be born — so too did George W. Bush’s “compassionate conservatism.” When Bush’s presidency ran aground and Barack Obama was elected, everyone assumed that was the end of Reaganism, with Bush’s Carter-esque second term giving way to liberalism’s 1980.

But then it wasn’t, and instead here we are almost a decade later having the same kind of conversation. And one lesson of that decade, of every election when Barack Obama wasn’t on the ballot, is that a party that’s terrible at governing can still win elections if the other party is even worse at politics.

Which the Democrats, amazingly, have been. Or to be less judgmental, let’s say that there’s been a strange cycle at work, where Republican incompetence helps liberalism consolidate its hold on highly educated America … but that consolidation, in turn, breeds liberal insularity and overconfidence (in big data and election science, in demographic inevitability, in the wisdom of declaring certain policy debates closed) and helps Republican support persist as a kind of protest vote, an attempt to limit liberalism’s hegemony by keeping legislative power in the other party’s hands.

How might this strange loop be broken? A big enough crisis under Trump would probably make the empty majority an ex-majority temporarily. But even the Iraq War and the financial crisis didn’t prevent U.S. politics from reverting to a Republican advantage.

An engaged and visionary Republican president might be able to escape the loop, by pouring new ideas into his party’s empty vessel — as Trump did, in his demagogic way, during the 2016 campaign. But Trump is no visionary, and in his shadow no new-model conservatism is likely to develop, no future leader likely to ascend.

So that leaves the Democrats as the only people with the power to put an end to the current spectacle of Republican incompetence and folly.

All they need to do is persuade Americans that they have more to fear from conservative hackwork than from a liberalism in command of politics as well as culture.

That’s all. Simple. Place your bets.

 

[onekidanddone]

The one about Venezuela is quite creepy. Painting the "Opposition" as evil when they are fighting against an authoritarian regime. 

 

[GreyhoundFan]

"House Republicans have spent 378 hours on votes to undercut Obamacare that went nowhere"

Spoiler

After one of the recent failed Senate votes to overhaul Obamacare, a reader posed a question: How much time has Congress spent actually trying to throw out the law, without success? It’s a good question, and one for which we can probably never have a concrete answer.

For example, what counts as an effort to undercut Obamacare? Should we count measures that were eventually signed into law by President Obama? Do we count amendments to other bills? Do we count bills that never came to a vote? Is it possible to figure out precise numbers on how much time a measure spent in committee or being debated on the floor of the House or Senate?

As it turns out, you can figure out precisely how much time a bill spent in debate on the floor of the House, thanks to data at Congress.gov. So, setting aside those bills that were signed into law, we estimate that, between 2011 (when Republicans took control of the body) and this year, the House spent about 377.6 hours debating and passing anti-Obamacare bills that never became law.

How much time is that? It’s nearly 16 solid 24-hour days. If you assume Congress actually only works 12-hour days — a generous assumption — that’s a full month of time spent on an effort that went nowhere. It’s like they added in an extra August recess over that six-year period.

The peak of time spent came in early 2012, though for much of the early part of that year, the House was considering and passing bills that tweaked the law in some way. (Much of the data from this period came from this 2014 article by our Ed O’Keefe.) Then there were the votes in late 2013 that forced the government into a shutdown when Republicans refused to pass a budget that didn’t slice up the health-care law. And, of course, the American Health Care Act push earlier this year that, so far, hasn’t become law.

...

Again: This is solely House votes on bills and amendments that were approved by the body. It excludes, for example, committee work. The bills above were submitted to committee 82 times, with 30 actions resulting. It’s very hard to say how many hours that took. It also excludes the debate in the Senate. There was less time spent on such legislation in that chamber, given that it flipped to the Republicans only in 2015. But the time spent in the Senate also isn’t broken out by minute in Congress.gov’s data, the way the data are for the House.

It’s a valid question to ask whether this is a bad thing. Is it bad for legislators to debate and pass bills even if they don’t become law? I suspect that the point of the reader who emailed was that a lot of time had been burned on a fruitless enterprise — and one that, until Jan. 20 of this year, was obviously fruitless, given the president. These days, of course, passing a law to repeal Obamacare might actually be something that could take effect.

If only Republicans in the House had proposals that could pass the Senate.

They couldn't have done something productive, they had to spend so much time screwing over the American public.

[GreyhoundFan]

"Who saved Obamacare from the GOP? The American people."

Spoiler

Constituent power is a wondrous thing in a representative democracy. After the election in November, political prognosticators speculated that President Barack Obama’s signature legislative achievement, the Affordable Care Act, was probably as good as dead. Some thought President Trump might even sign a “Trumpcare” bill on his first day. But on Friday, more than six months into Trump’s presidency, Senate Republicans announced that their attempt to repeal Obamacare had collapsed.

The defeat was months in the making. In December, we released a Google Doc titled “Indivisible: A Practical Guide for Resisting the Trump Agenda.” As former congressional staffers, we witnessed the rise of the tea party and saw the power of local, defensive congressional advocacy. After Trump’s election, we recommended that progressives implement the same strategies and tactics — minus the racism and violence. To our surprise, the Google Doc went viral, and today there are locally led Indivisible groups in every single congressional district in the country, full of members applying their constituent power.

Trumpcare was the victim of constituent power, which is based on a simple principle of American democracy: Members of Congress need their constituents to get reelected, which requires at least appearing to represent the constituent interests. When a sufficiently large group of constituents repeatedly demonstrate local opposition to a piece of legislation, it’s awfully tough for members of Congress from those precincts to support it. That’s constituent power in action.

Make no mistake: The leaders of our new, unified, conservative federal government were desperate to enact Trumpcare. But the combined political might of the president of the United States, the speaker of the House of Representatives and the Senate majority leader was no match for one simple thing: people showing up.

And show up they did, because constituent power is locally applied power. From town halls to “die-ins” to sit-ins to mailing protest potatoes, constituents took action not in Washington but in their home states. Since before Trump was even inaugurated, and in the months following, these local leaders relentlessly opposed Trumpcare at every local congressional office, town hall and rally at home.

While this local pressure may have surprised some, its power couldn’t have surprised Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.). McConnell, who has worked in politics since the Johnson administration, is an arch conservative and a brilliant legislator. Tasked with getting Trumpcare through the Senate, he allowed no public hearings and repeatedly attempted to move the legislation forward without divulging its details, even to his fellow Republican senators. Remarked one Senate Republican this month: “It’s an insane process.” But there was method in the madness. McConnell knew that a traditionally methodical and open Senate process would allow public pressure to build and that the only strategy with a chance of success was secrecy and speed — to try to hide from and outpace the people.

And yet, all his secretive machinations were not enough.

There were many twists and turns on the road to his defeat. Two weeks ago, a sufficient number of Republican senators announced their opposition to Trumpcare to kill the bill. While the bill was temporarily dead, McConnell announced that he’d move forward on a new vote to repeal the Affordable Care Act without a replacement. But Republican senators came out against that effort within hours. In response, McConnell committed to voting on yet another Trumpcare iteration. Last week’s defeat of that effort marks yet another “death” of this zombie bill.

Why the false starts and failures? Across the country, local advocates have fought against Trumpcare using the only tool they have: constituent power. In Maine, Indivisible groups coordinated statewide visits to each of Sen. Susan Collins’s seven regional offices. In Alaska, they traveled to far-flung rural offices of Sen. Lisa Murkowski to share their health-care stories. In Arizona, crowds of Indivisibles gathered under the blistering sun with umbrellas outside Sen. John McCain’s offices chanting, “Keep us covered!” And when it looked as though Trumpcare was on its last legs last week, Indivisible groups in nearly every state held more than 170 events on a single day at their local congressional offices to make clear that the opposition to Trumpcare is here to stay.

One of the striking things about the past several months was the breadth and depth of coordinated action across the progressive ecosystem. Indivisible groups cheered on or linked arms with activists from National ADAPT, Planned Parenthood, MoveOn, Ultraviolet, Center for Popular Democracy and Credo Mobile, among others. The common feature of these organizations’ work over the past several months was simple: constituent power, relentlessly applied.

This pressure made the bill and McConnell’s political calculus unworkable, leaving senators across the ideological spectrum to sink the bill together. Thus, zombie Trumpcare is dead, again. We don’t know whether McConnell will attempt to resurrect it or move on to other Republican priorities. We do know that Republicans have been promising to repeal the ACA for more than seven years, and it isn’t gone yet.

And that leaves us with a couple of more lessons from the early Trump era: We know that when constituents across the country rise up and apply their power, they change what is politically possible nationwide. Our task now is to build and sustain that leadership and power because we also know that if we stand together, indivisible, we will win.

Excellent points from the founders of Indivisible.

[GrumpyGran]

14 hours ago, GreyhoundFan said:

This is a great op-ed from the NYT: "The Empty Majority"

  Reveal hidden contents

When we think about the ebb and flow of majorities in American politics, we like to imagine that there is a clear link between politics and policy – between gaining power and having an agenda to implement, between winning votes and responding to substantive challenges, between F.D.R’s majorities and his New Deal or Reagan’s victories and his Reaganomics.

The present-day Republican Party makes a mockery of this conceit. It is a majority party that behaves like it’s in the political wilderness, an election-winning machine that has no idea what to do with national power.

It has the tics of an opposition party, the raw wounds of a beaten coalition, the dated ideas of a bankrupt force. Its attempts to pass a health care bill aren’t just painful to watch; they have the same unheimlich quality as a calf born with two heads, the feeling of watching something that the laws of politics or nature should not permit to exist.

And yet it does: The same feckless G.O.P. that exists in a constant state of low-grade civil war controls not only Congress and the White House, but most statehouses and state legislatures as well. All of the contemporary Republican Party’s critics — left-wing and centrist and conservative — keep saying that the G.O.P. is broken and adrift, and years of government shutdowns and Obamacare debacles and everything about the Trump era keep proving us correct.

Yet Republican power endures, and while it’s politically vulnerable, there’s no reason to be sure it can’t survive the 2018 midterms and indeed the entire reign of Donald Trump.

This strange endurance is a central fact of our present politics. We have an empty majority, a party that can rule but cannot govern. And whether you’re a conservative who wants to reform the G.O.P. or a liberal who wants to crush it, you need to wrestle with why Republicans keep getting returned to office even though it’s clear that debacles like what we’ve been watching on health care are what they’re likely to produce.

One possibility is that this is a temporary situation, a transitional moment — that the Republican majority seems uncanny because it is a walking corpse, that Americans vote for Republican politicians out of a Reagan-forged habit that just takes a long time to fully break.

This theory lies behind the plausible comparison, which I’ve cited before, between Donald Trump and Jimmy Carter. Carter inherited an aging, cracking left-of-center coalition that had been given a jolt of life by Watergate and his own outsider persona. Like Trump, he enjoyed congressional majorities; like Trump (so far) he got nothing done, and his era’s empty majority was the last phase in the old Democratic coalition’s long decline.

I find this analogy compelling but history does not repeat itself so neatly. If Trump’s distinctive populism seems “disjunctive,” in the lingo of political scientists — straddling the long Reagan era and a new politics waiting to be born — so too did George W. Bush’s “compassionate conservatism.” When Bush’s presidency ran aground and Barack Obama was elected, everyone assumed that was the end of Reaganism, with Bush’s Carter-esque second term giving way to liberalism’s 1980.

But then it wasn’t, and instead here we are almost a decade later having the same kind of conversation. And one lesson of that decade, of every election when Barack Obama wasn’t on the ballot, is that a party that’s terrible at governing can still win elections if the other party is even worse at politics.

Which the Democrats, amazingly, have been. Or to be less judgmental, let’s say that there’s been a strange cycle at work, where Republican incompetence helps liberalism consolidate its hold on highly educated America … but that consolidation, in turn, breeds liberal insularity and overconfidence (in big data and election science, in demographic inevitability, in the wisdom of declaring certain policy debates closed) and helps Republican support persist as a kind of protest vote, an attempt to limit liberalism’s hegemony by keeping legislative power in the other party’s hands.

How might this strange loop be broken? A big enough crisis under Trump would probably make the empty majority an ex-majority temporarily. But even the Iraq War and the financial crisis didn’t prevent U.S. politics from reverting to a Republican advantage.

An engaged and visionary Republican president might be able to escape the loop, by pouring new ideas into his party’s empty vessel — as Trump did, in his demagogic way, during the 2016 campaign. But Trump is no visionary, and in his shadow no new-model conservatism is likely to develop, no future leader likely to ascend.

So that leaves the Democrats as the only people with the power to put an end to the current spectacle of Republican incompetence and folly.

All they need to do is persuade Americans that they have more to fear from conservative hackwork than from a liberalism in command of politics as well as culture.

That’s all. Simple. Place your bets.

 

For me it all comes back to money. We know the rich continue to get richer. There are two kinds of people. Those who understand that money is a tool we use to accomplish things. Hopefully only necessary and compassionate things. For the others, money is a drug. I've been around people who had lots more money than me and there always seemed to be a low-level anxiety there. A fear that they never have enough, that they'll lose what they have. Republicans feed these people and the people in turn will give as much as is needed to keep their friends in power. In turn those who don't have enough are told that the Republicans will help them too. Except they don't because the rich don't want anyone else to have access to their money.

The Dems need to figure out a way to make these people who are struggling understand that Republicans lie to them. There is no get-rich-quick plan, there aren't thousands of jobs that require no training just waiting as soon as we give those businesses more tax breaks.

And we also need to address the issue of voter suppression and possible interference. Republicans know they are in trouble and I fully believe this Kobach scheme is just a way to figure how to steal votes.

[GreyhoundFan]

9 minutes ago, GrumpyGran said:

The Dems need to figure out a way to make these people who are struggling understand that Republicans lie to them. There is no get-rich-quick plan, there aren't thousands of jobs that require no training just waiting as soon as we give those businesses more tax breaks.

I believe a part of the issue is that some whites, especially those who are lower on the socioeconomic scale, are loath to support a party that pushes for equality for minorities. They fault minorities for taking their jobs, or taking resources they felt were theirs, or some such nonsense.

[Childless]

3 minutes ago, GreyhoundFan said:

I believe a part of the issue is that some whites, especially those who are lower on the socioeconomic scale, are loath to support a party that pushes for equality for minorities. They fault minorities for taking their jobs, or taking resources they felt were theirs, or some such nonsense.

They also think their skin color makes them better than those of minority races.  So a party that insists they are equal is not a party they would join.

[GreyhoundFan]

Sigh: "It’s not impossible: Four ways Republicans could still take action on Obamacare"

Spoiler

Senate Republicans waved the white flag last week on their months-long effort to repeal the Affordable Care Act. But by the looks of his Twitter account, President Trump really wants Congress to keep trying.

...

There are a few ways Congress could restart its efforts to repeal the ACA, or Obamacare, but most would exact a serious cost on Republicans' agenda, their popularity and the health insurance markets.

...

But since the president wants to know, here are four ways Obamacare repeal could rise from the dead, ranked from least to most likely.

4. The Trump administration lets parts of Obamacare collapse.

Thus forcing formerly reluctant Republicans back to the negotiating table. Trump could do this two ways, both of which he hinted at in tweets recently:

...

Let's take these threats one by one.

Trump could stop issuing federal government payments to insurance companies. Insurers rely on these payments to make up for lower-income people, who pay less for health insurance under Obamacare.

But: Most health-policy experts agree that if these subsidies are taken away without a change in how much lower-income people pay for their health insurance, insurance markets would implode, forcing insurance companies to leave Obamacare exchanges, thus causing Obamacare itself to implode.

...

This option is basically a giant game of chicken with Republicans in Congress, and the health-insurance market is the one that could take the fallout.

Another option is that Trump could stop paying subsidies for members of Congress and most of their staff. Obamacare shifted Congress off its federal government health plan and onto the Obamacare exchanges. It looked politically dense for members of Congress to pass an unpopular law they were exempt from. But lawmakers aren't entirely on their own. Just like employees in the private sector get contributions from their employers to buy health insurance, the federal government pays for portions of members of Congress' health insurance on the exchanges.

But: Getting rid of those subsidies isn't all that unpopular with some Republicans. Some conservatives have pushed bills to end these federal contributions for themselves and their staff. So, this may not be a threat that has much leverage.

3. Republicans push off tax reform.

Republicans had been rushing to pass a health-care bill because they're running up against a legislative deadline to do so and avoid a Democratic filibuster. (To pass an Obamacare repeal with just 51 votes instead of 60, they have to pass it while they're debating the budget.)

This fall, Republicans need to start planning for next year's budget, which is due Oct. 1. They had hoped to use that budget process to pass tax reform — again under a budget rule that lets them duck Democrats' wrath in the Senate. Now, Republicans will have to decide: Do they want to do tax reform, or health care?

“Until health care is off the budget tracks,” said Sarah Binder, a procedural expert at the Brookings Institution, “a tax reconciliation bill is stuck in the rail yard.”

But: There isn't the political will to keep pushing health care. Key conservatives — even huge proponents of getting something, anything, done on health care — now say it's time for Republicans to cut their losses and move on to something else.

“Quarantine it,” said Josh Holmes, a GOP strategist and former chief of staff to Senate Majority Leader McConnell (R-Ky.) who coined the “repeal and replace” mantra in 2010. “You can let it destroy your entire agenda and your entire party as a result of inaction by continuing to dwell on something that, frankly, they’ve proven unable to do.”

2. Senators who were a “no” become a “yes.”

Depending on what plan Republicans would put up, they would need from three to six Republicans to change their minds.

But: For this to work, something drastic would have to change in the legislation. The Senate's repeal/replace bill lost six Republican votes last week, from conservatives and moderates.

...

Another option: a senator who was a “no” isn't present for voting. Then, the Senate doesn't just need a majority out of 100 senators; they'd need a majority out of 99, writes Stan Collender, a budget policy expert with Forbes.

Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) is back home in Arizona in treatment for a particularly brutal type of brain cancer. His office says he “plans to return to Washington at the conclusion of the August recess.”

1. Republicans start working with Democrats to make tweaks to Obamacare.

Surprise! The most likely option to revive Obamacare repeal isn't to repeal it at all.

Republicans tried for months on their own, couldn't do it, and now some key GOP lawmakers are advocating for the opposite approach. Democrats, meanwhile, have signaled they're open to renegotiating parts of Obamacare (so long as the intent isn't to repeal it). House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) sent a letter Friday to Republican leaders extending “the hand of friendship” on reforming health care, specifically stabilizing the health-insurance markets so more insurance companies join the exchanges and finding ways to lower premiums for middle-class families.

There's a growing consensus among GOP members of Congress that working within the confines of Obamacare may be the only way to fix what they see as wrong with the law:

“What have we to lose by trying to work together to find those solutions?” McCain said days before he helped end Republicans' last best chance to repeal Obamacare. “We’re not getting much done apart.”

"[Bipartisan debate is] how we get the best legislation,” Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) said Sunday on NBC's “Meet the Press.”

But: Talking about compromise and actually finding compromise on something as polarized as health care are two very different things. Which is why Congress's most likely option to revive a health-care bill still is far from a sure thing.

 

[GreyhoundFan]

Interesting article in Politico Magazine by Jeff Flake (an excerpt from his new book): "My Party Is in Denial About Donald Trump: We created him, and now we're rationalizing him. When will it stop?"

Spoiler

Who could blame the people who felt abandoned and ignored by the major parties for reaching in despair for a candidate who offered oversimplified answers to infinitely complex questions and managed to entertain them in the process? With hindsight, it is clear that we all but ensured the rise of Donald Trump.

I will let the liberals answer for their own sins in this regard. (There are many.) But we conservatives mocked Barack Obama’s failure to deliver on his pledge to change the tone in Washington even as we worked to assist with that failure. It was we conservatives who, upon Obama’s election, stated that our No. 1 priority was not advancing a conservative policy agenda but making Obama a one-term president—the corollary to this binary thinking being that his failure would be our success and the fortunes of the citizenry would presumably be sorted out in the meantime. It was we conservatives who were largely silent when the most egregious and sustained attacks on Obama’s legitimacy were leveled by marginal figures who would later be embraced and legitimized by far too many of us. It was we conservatives who rightly and robustly asserted our constitutional prerogatives as a co-equal branch of government when a Democrat was in the White House but who, despite solemn vows to do the same in the event of a Trump presidency, have maintained an unnerving silence as instability has ensued. To carry on in the spring of 2017 as if what was happening was anything approaching normalcy required a determined suspension of critical faculties. And tremendous powers of denial.

I’ve been sympathetic to this impulse to denial, as one doesn’t ever want to believe that the government of the United States has been made dysfunctional at the highest levels, especially by the actions of one’s own party. Michael Gerson, a con­servative columnist and former senior adviser to President George W. Bush, wrote, four months into the new presidency, “The conservative mind, in some very visible cases, has become diseased,” and conservative institutions “with the blessings of a president … have abandoned the normal constraints of reason and compassion.”

For a conservative, that’s an awfully bitter pill to swallow. So as I layered in my defense mechanisms, I even found myself saying things like, “If I took the time to respond to every presiden­tial tweet, there would be little time for anything else.” Given the volume and velocity of tweets from both the Trump campaign and then the White House, this was certainly true. But it was also a monumental dodge. It would be like Noah saying, “If I spent all my time obsessing about the coming flood, there would be little time for anything else.” At a certain point, if one is being honest, the flood becomes the thing that is most worthy of attention. At a certain point, it might be time to build an ark.

Under our Constitution, there simply are not that many people who are in a position to do something about an executive branch in chaos. As the first branch of government (Article I), the Congress was designed expressly to assert itself at just such moments. It is what we talk about when we talk about “checks and balances.” Too often, we observe the unfolding drama along with the rest of the country, passively, all but saying, “Someone should do something!” without seeming to realize that that someone is us. And so, that unnerving silence in the face of an erratic executive branch is an abdication, and those in positions of leadership bear particular responsibility.

There was a time when the leadership of the Congress from both parties felt an institutional loyalty that would frequently create bonds across party lines in defense of congressional prerogatives in a unified front against the White House, regardless of the president’s party. We do not have to go very far back to identify these exemplars—the Bob Doles and Howard Bakers and Richard Lugars of the Senate. Vigorous partisans, yes, but even more important, principled constitutional conservatives whose primary interest was in governing and making America truly great.

But then the period of collapse and dysfunction set in, amplified by the internet and our growing sense of alienation from each other, and we lost our way and began to rationalize away our principles in the process. But where does such capitulation take us? If by 2017 the conservative bargain was to go along for the very bumpy ride because with congressional hegemony and the White House we had the numbers to achieve some long-held policy goals—even as we put at risk our institutions and our values—then it was a very real question whether any such policy victories wouldn’t be Pyrrhic ones. If this was our Faustian bargain, then it was not worth it. If ultimately our principles were so malleable as to no longer be principles, then what was the point of political victories in the first place?

Meanwhile, the strange specter of an American president’s seeming affection for strongmen and authoritarians created such a cognitive dissonance among my generation of conservatives—who had come of age under existential threat from the Soviet Union—that it was almost impossible to believe. Even as our own government was documenting a con­certed attack against our democratic processes by an enemy foreign power, our own White House was rejecting the authority of its own intelligence agencies, disclaiming their findings as a Democratic ruse and a hoax. Conduct that would have had conservatives up in arms had it been exhibited by our political opponents now had us dumbstruck.

It was then that I was compelled back to Senator Goldwater’s book, to a chapter entitled “The Soviet Menace.” Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, this part of Goldwater’s critique had seemed particularly anachronistic. The lesson here is that nothing is gone forever, especially when it comes to the devouring ambition of despotic men. As Goldwater wrote in that chapter:

Our forebears knew that “keeping a Republic” meant, above all, keeping it safe from foreign transgressors; they knew that a people cannot live and work freely, and develop national institutions conducive to freedom, except in peace and with independence.

So, where should Republicans go from here? First, we shouldn’t hesitate to speak out if the president “plays to the base” in ways that damage the Republican Party’s ability to grow and speak to a larger audience. Second, Republicans need to take the long view when it comes to issues like free trade: Populist and protectionist policies might play well in the short term, but they handicap the country in the long term. Third, Republicans need to stand up for institutions and prerogatives, like the Senate filibuster, that have served us well for more than two centuries.

We have taken our “institutions conducive to freedom,” as Goldwater put it, for granted as we have engaged in one of the more reckless periods of politics in our history. In 2017, we seem to have lost our appreciation for just how hard won and vulnerable those institutions are.

 

[AmazonGrace]

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/31/books/jeff-flake-conscience-of-conservative-trump.html?mwrsm=Twitter

 

Review of said book. 

[GreyhoundFan]

"GOP leaders say it’s time for Senate to move on from health care"

Spoiler

Senate Republican leaders signaled Monday that they intend to move on from health care to other legislative priorities, even as President Trump continued to pressure lawmakers to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act.

The discord comes amid uncertainty in the insurance industry and on Capitol Hill about what will come next after last week’s dramatic collapse of the GOP’s effort to scrap the seven-year-old landmark law. Trump on Monday threatened to end subsidies to insurers and also took aim at coverage for members of ­Congress.

But the White House insistence appears to have done little to convince congressional GOP leaders to keep trying. One after another on Monday, top GOP senators said that with no evidence of a plan that could get 50 votes, they were looking for other victories.

“We’ve had our vote, and we’re moving on to tax reform,” said Sen. John Thune (S.D.), one of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s top lieutenants, speaking of the next big GOP legislative priority.

Sen. Roy Blunt (Mo.), another member of the Republican Senate leadership, put it this way: “I think it’s time to move on to something else. Come back to health care when we’ve had more time to get beyond the moment we’re in — see if we can’t put some wins on the board.”

McConnell did not address health care in his remarks opening Senate business on Monday afternoon. His top deputy, Sen. John Cornyn (Tex.), brushed back comments White House budget director Mick Mulvaney made on CNN on Sunday urging Republicans not to vote on anything else until voting on health care again.

“I don’t think [Mulvaney’s] got much experience in the Senate, as I recall,” said Cornyn as he made his way into the Senate chamber. “And he’s got a big job. He ought to do that job and let us do our job.”

Mulvaney was echoing what Trump tweeted Saturday: “Unless the Republican Senators are total quitters, Repeal & Replace is not dead! Demand another vote before voting on any other bill!”

On Monday, Trump tweeted: “If Obamacare is hurting people, & it is, why shouldn’t it hurt the insurance companies & why should Congress not be paying what public pays?” He was referencing subsidies that members of Congress receive to help offset their coverage costs purchased through the District’s exchanges, as required under the Affordable Care Act.

Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) said Monday that based on a conversation he had with Trump, the president is considering taking executive action on health care, Reuters reported. A Paul spokesman did not immediately respond to a request for comment, and it was not clear what such an action could be. Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price indicated over the weekend that he was considering using his regulatory authority to waive the Affordable Care Act’s mandate that all Americans buy coverage or pay a tax.

Some rank-and-file Republican lawmakers have used the collapse of repeal-and-replace to offer new fixes and improvements to health care, but there was no sign their leaders were engaged. On Monday, Price met with fellow physician Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.), who has proposed restructuring how federal money is distributed under the Affordable Care Act. Separately, a bipartisan group of 43 House members released details of their own plan.

“We had a productive meeting. All involved want a path forward,” said Cassidy in a statement after his White House meeting, also attended by several governors. In addition to turning over federal funds to the states, Cassidy and Sens. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) and Dean Heller (R-Nev.) have proposed repealing key mandates and a tax under the law.

But there are no signs that plan will be put to a vote any time soon. It has not been scored by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office. It’s unclear how many Republicans would vote for it. And McConnell is working on confirming Trump’s nominees this week.

A growing number of Republican lawmakers have raised the prospect of working with Democrats on health care. The collection of centrist House Republicans and Democrats unveiled a proposal Monday calling for revisions they said would help stabilize the individual insurance ­market.

Rep. Tom Reed (R-N.Y.), a co-chair of the centrist Republican and Democratic “Problem Solvers Caucus,” which released the plan, said he and his colleagues have been working on a draft for about three weeks, as they saw “the writing on the wall” that the Senate bill was likely to fail.

House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) did not champion the plan. AshLee Strong, his press secretary, said in an email: “While the speaker appreciates members coming together to promote ideas, he remains focused on repealing and replacing Obamacare.”

Strong did not respond to a follow-up question about how that ought to happen. The House passed a sweeping rewrite of the Affordable Care Act this year, with only Republicans voting for it.

The Senate tried to pass its own version but was unable to reach an accord, even on a more modest bill that was meant to keep the talks alive in both chambers. That bill was rejected Friday when Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) joined two other Republicans to sink the legislation in a tension-filled vote that happened while most of the country was asleep.

In their outline, Reed and his colleagues said federal cost-sharing subsidies should be placed under congressional oversight and that mandatory funding should be assured. Now such disbursements are up to the Trump administration, which has been paying them monthly but has threatened to withhold them.

Top Democrats and Republicans warned against that.

“Right now, as insurers prepare to lock in their rates and plans for 2018, the Trump administration is dangling a massive sword of Damocles over the heads of millions of Americans — threatening to end payments the administration is supposed to make that would lower deductibles and out-of-pocket costs for so many Americans,” said Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) on the Senate floor.

Thune said he was “hopeful” the administration would keep making the payments.

After Friday’s vote, some Democrats have felt more empowered to talk about changes to the Affordable Care Act. The centrist House lawmakers want to repeal the 2.3 percent tax on medical device manufacturers and loosen the employer mandate under the Affordable Care Act. The law says companies with 50 or more full-time employees must offer coverage. They want to raise the threshold to 500.

They also said they want to create a state stability fund to reduce premiums and spur more innovation at the state level.

Getting health-care legislation backed only by Republicans to Trump’s desk by the end of August is all but impossible, even if they suddenly put aside their disagreements. The House is in recess until September. The Senate is scheduled to be in session the first two weeks of August.

The prospects of a bipartisan deal were just as doubtful, amid fierce partisanship that has gripped the Capitol in the Trump era, which has shown no signs of abating. Even those pushing for one were tempering expectations.

“We’re not stupid,” Reed said. “Those partisan swords — they’re going to be out there.”

I hope the repeal and replace crap is dead, but I just feel like it keeps coming back to a half-life.

[GreyhoundFan]

Yeah, the title sums it up: "Trump is clueless about health care. Republicans are worse."

Spoiler

It's hard not to laugh about the fact that President Trump thought it was going to be “so easy” to give people “great health care at a tiny fraction of the price.”

But as clueless as he was to believe that health insurance only costs $1 a month for 21-year-olds, it's not like the rest of the Republican Party was much better. They never moved beyond merely having a plan to have a plan to replace Obamacare. They just weren't as memorably vague about it as Trump was when he promised to come up with “something terrific.”

Now, for seven years, Republicans have attacked Obamacare with the same solemnity and frequency that they typically reserve for praising Ronald Reagan. They held symbolic votes against it. Then they held some more. They challenged it in court. Then they did it again over a typo. They shut the government down over it. And, now that he's in office, Trump has even threatened to withhold some of the law's subsidies in a not-so-veiled attempt to make the whole thing “implode.”

Throughout it all, though, Republicans haven't been able to agree on what they want to do, only what they don't. Which, of course, is anything like Obamacare's alleged “big government takeover” of health care. The only problem with that is that Obamacare is not, in fact, a big government takeover. The opposite, actually. It's just about the most market-friendly way to cover poor and sick people. Indeed, the conservative Heritage Foundation supported something a lot like it back in 1989. As did former Republican presidential candidate Bob Dole in 1993. And former Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney in 2006. So by vilifying their old plan as unconstitutional socialism, Republicans haven't left themselves a lot of leeway to come up with a new one.

Well, other than just going back to the way things were before Obamacare. That's what most Republicans really want. They think insurance companies should be able to once again discriminate against people with preexisting conditions and sell plans that are only useful as long as you don't need to use them. Or, as they call it, allowing state-based innovation and a free market in health care! Not to mention that they don't think the government should be expanding Medicaid or otherwise giving people money to help buy insurance.

The only thing they would change about the pre-Obamacare status quo would be having more people in the kind of high-deductible plans that would force them to pay even more of their costs out-of-pocket, the idea being that this would turn price-insensitive patients into bargain-hunting consumers of health care — an idea, coincidentally, that researchers Zarek Brot-Goldberg, Amitabh Chandra, Benjamin Handel and Jonathan Kolstad found hasn't held up when it's actually been put into practice.

Republicans, in other words, have tied themselves in a Gordian knot. The only thing less popular than letting insurance companies charge sick people more is making people pay more out-of-pocket — especially when you've criticized Obamacare's “soaring deductibles” and promised to lower them, like Trump has. So Republicans have defended their plan the best way they can: by trying to prevent people from finding out about it. According to Vox's Sarah Kliff, Republicans have held a combined two hearings in the House and Senate about repealing Obamacare compared to the 44 Democrats did about Obamacare itself back in 2009. It's no surprise that they didn't wait to get the final budget scores for their bills, either. After all, how many times can you listen to experts tell you that your plan would lead to 22 million fewer people having health insurance?

But maybe the Republicans' best trick was convincing themselves that their plan wasn't really their plan. House Republicans, you see, passed a bill that Trump himself said was “mean” under the assumption that the Senate would make it better. At which point Senate Republicans tried to pass a bill they scribbled down at lunch that Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) called a “fraud” and a “disaster,” under the assumption that the conference committee would make it better. Which is to say that Republicans could only talk themselves into voting for their plans as long as they could talk themselves into believing that they still had a secret one up their sleeves.

Republicans, then, haven't been able to come up with a conservative alternative to Obamacare, because Obamacare is the conservative alternative. And they won't be able to unless they're willing to make the case that the government shouldn't help the poor and sick get covered — or just lie about their plan. In the meantime, though, you can bet that they think they're getting closer and closer.

Republican health-care policy is like tomorrow. It's always a day away.

 

[GreyhoundFan]

Another good one from Jennifer Rubin: "President who? The GOP learns to ignore Trump."

Spoiler

On Sunday, President Trump tweeted, “Don’t give up Republican Senators, the World is watching: Repeal & Replace…and go to 51 votes (nuke option), get Cross State Lines & more.” Monday morning he seemed to be threatening Congress and insurers: “If ObamaCare is hurting people, & it is, why shouldn’t it hurt the insurance companies & why should Congress not be paying what public pays?” Office of Management and Budget Director Mick Mulvaney proclaimed on Sunday that no further votes should be taken before health care was addressed. Trump’s effort to cajole the GOP back to arguing with one another over repealing Obamacare fell on entirely deaf ears.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) advised that no less than 10 Republicans had contacted him to see about working on health care in a bipartisan fashion. Politico reported:

Sen. Chuck Schumer said Monday he has heard from 10 of his Republican colleagues in response to his call for a bipartisan approach to health care legislation.

“No one thought Obamacare was perfect — it needs a lot of improvements,” Schumer (D-N.Y.) said after an unrelated news conference at Albany Medical Center. “We’re willing to work in a bipartisan way to do it. What we objected to was just pulling the rug out from it and taking away the good things that it did: Medicaid coverage for people with parents in nursing homes, for opioid treatment, for kids with disabilities, pre-existing conditions.”

That number goes beyond the usual list of moderates, suggesting that the GOP as a whole is moving on. That impression was reinforced when Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) tweeted and spoke on the Senate floor on Monday about appointments, not health care.

Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah), chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, politely rebuked the president and Mulvaney. “There’s just too much animosity and we’re too divided on healthcare,” he said in an interview with Reuters. “I think we ought to acknowledge that we can come back to healthcare afterwards but we need to move ahead on tax reform.” The idea of ending the cost-sharing subsidies did not sound like something Hatch would allow. “I’m for helping the poor, always have been,” he said. “And I don’t think they should be bereft of healthcare.” Conservative stalwarts Sens. John Thune (R-S.D.) and Roy Blunt (R-Mo.) chimed in as well. (Politico quotes Thune as saying, “Until somebody shows us a way to get that elusive 50th vote, I think it’s over,” and Blunt as offering, “I think it’s time to move on to something else. Come back to health care when we’ve had more time to get beyond the moment we’re in and see if we can’t put some wins on the board.”)

That’s as stark and dramatic a rejection of the White House’s priorities on a signature domestic policy issue as mainstream GOP lawmakers have delivered. It’s not hard to figure out why Republicans are rebuffing Trump. He approval ratings are sliding downhill; the Republican health-care bills are hugely unpopular; and their big donors/business community backers are already launching a public campaign to advance tax reform. Trump can tweet all he likes, but he is fast becoming irrelevant to the GOP agenda.

We hope this continues a positive trend that began with passage of Russia sanctions legislation and public support of the attorney general. If this keeps up, Congress can proceed to ignore lots of things Trump wants — ridiculous domestic budget cuts, funding the wall (which remains unpopular with voters), throwing transgender personnel out of the military, etc.

The big political question that has transfixed the country — when, if ever, will Republicans break with Trump? — remains open. But before they are willing to break with him on issues such as conflicts of interest, the Russia scandal and the emoluments clause, they will need to be convinced he is of no utility to them and, in fact, is a burden. Watching more Republicans, many of whom cannot be written off as weak-kneed RINOs, effectively roll their eyes at the White House’s pronouncements gives one a sliver of hope that the process is beginning.

This is a glimmer of hope. I'm truly surprised at Orrin Hatch.

[GrumpyGran]

2 hours ago, GreyhoundFan said:

Another good one from Jennifer Rubin: "President who? The GOP learns to ignore Trump."

  Hide contents

On Sunday, President Trump tweeted, “Don’t give up Republican Senators, the World is watching: Repeal & Replace…and go to 51 votes (nuke option), get Cross State Lines & more.” Monday morning he seemed to be threatening Congress and insurers: “If ObamaCare is hurting people, & it is, why shouldn’t it hurt the insurance companies & why should Congress not be paying what public pays?” Office of Management and Budget Director Mick Mulvaney proclaimed on Sunday that no further votes should be taken before health care was addressed. Trump’s effort to cajole the GOP back to arguing with one another over repealing Obamacare fell on entirely deaf ears.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) advised that no less than 10 Republicans had contacted him to see about working on health care in a bipartisan fashion. Politico reported:

Sen. Chuck Schumer said Monday he has heard from 10 of his Republican colleagues in response to his call for a bipartisan approach to health care legislation.

“No one thought Obamacare was perfect — it needs a lot of improvements,” Schumer (D-N.Y.) said after an unrelated news conference at Albany Medical Center. “We’re willing to work in a bipartisan way to do it. What we objected to was just pulling the rug out from it and taking away the good things that it did: Medicaid coverage for people with parents in nursing homes, for opioid treatment, for kids with disabilities, pre-existing conditions.”

That number goes beyond the usual list of moderates, suggesting that the GOP as a whole is moving on. That impression was reinforced when Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) tweeted and spoke on the Senate floor on Monday about appointments, not health care.

Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah), chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, politely rebuked the president and Mulvaney. “There’s just too much animosity and we’re too divided on healthcare,” he said in an interview with Reuters. “I think we ought to acknowledge that we can come back to healthcare afterwards but we need to move ahead on tax reform.” The idea of ending the cost-sharing subsidies did not sound like something Hatch would allow. “I’m for helping the poor, always have been,” he said. “And I don’t think they should be bereft of healthcare.” Conservative stalwarts Sens. John Thune (R-S.D.) and Roy Blunt (R-Mo.) chimed in as well. (Politico quotes Thune as saying, “Until somebody shows us a way to get that elusive 50th vote, I think it’s over,” and Blunt as offering, “I think it’s time to move on to something else. Come back to health care when we’ve had more time to get beyond the moment we’re in and see if we can’t put some wins on the board.”)

That’s as stark and dramatic a rejection of the White House’s priorities on a signature domestic policy issue as mainstream GOP lawmakers have delivered. It’s not hard to figure out why Republicans are rebuffing Trump. He approval ratings are sliding downhill; the Republican health-care bills are hugely unpopular; and their big donors/business community backers are already launching a public campaign to advance tax reform. Trump can tweet all he likes, but he is fast becoming irrelevant to the GOP agenda.

We hope this continues a positive trend that began with passage of Russia sanctions legislation and public support of the attorney general. If this keeps up, Congress can proceed to ignore lots of things Trump wants — ridiculous domestic budget cuts, funding the wall (which remains unpopular with voters), throwing transgender personnel out of the military, etc.

The big political question that has transfixed the country — when, if ever, will Republicans break with Trump? — remains open. But before they are willing to break with him on issues such as conflicts of interest, the Russia scandal and the emoluments clause, they will need to be convinced he is of no utility to them and, in fact, is a burden. Watching more Republicans, many of whom cannot be written off as weak-kneed RINOs, effectively roll their eyes at the White House’s pronouncements gives one a sliver of hope that the process is beginning.

This is a glimmer of hope. I'm truly surprised at Orrin Hatch.

Soon, I think. As I've said before, the more time they give the Trumphumpers to get over it, the more likely they can maintain their majority in 2018. They really need to move now and make him disappear.

[candygirl200413]

Saw this morning on Velshi and Rhule this morning:

MSNBC hosts spit fire at GOPer claiming Ivanka would be ‘great senator’ because ‘she’s got the full package’

Quote

Rep. Lee Zeldin (R-NY) on Tuesday struggled to list the qualifications of Ivanka Trump after he proclaimed that she would make a great U.S. senator.

During an interview on MSNBC, Zeldin asserted that newly-appointed White House Chief of State John Kelly would not diminish Ivanka Trump’s role in the administration.

“I’ve had an opportunity to spend some quality time with Ivanka and a little bit of time with Jared [Kushner] as well,” Zeldin explained. “I am super impressed with Ivanka Trump. She brings a tremendous amount of intellect and class. She cares about certain issues — child care tax credits, paid family leave.”

MSNBC host Stephanie Ruhle interrupted: “Can I just say one thing? As much as I appreciate you talking about fine manners and class. As a professional woman and a mother, it’s tough for me to stomach someone looking at me and talking about the great class, when you have the most senior woman in the White House saying nothing when her father says vicious things about a news anchor.”

“That statement is just tough to swallow,” Ruhle said.

Well, yeah” Zeldin stuttered. “Ivanka obviously loves her father.”

“I love mine too,” Ruhle shot back.

“Ivanka Trump, she is super smart,” Zeldin insisted. “She is highly capable in her own right. She could be a great United States senator.”

“What are her credentials?” Ruhle wondered.

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“She’s got the full package,” the congressman declared.

“What are her credentials to be a United States senator?” Ruhle repeated.

Zeldin pinned Ivanka Trump’s Senate qualifications to the fact that she is a businesswoman who wants lower taxes.

“She makes all of her products overseas,” Ruhle observed.

Co-host Ali Velshi agreed: “She does not make a single product in America. Does that not move you at all?”

Zeldin then argued that the interview was unfair.

“All of the sudden, it’s one question after another, trying to get me to beat up on Ivanka Trump,” he griped. “How is she qualified for United States senator? Making our tax code more competitive.”

“As a businesswoman, she has a tremendous amount of experience. As a great mom, as a great wife,” Zeldin continued. “She has a great education. She has great ideas on important issues that help families.”

 

It's crazy though because I know quite a few woman my age who think of her as being such a great role model

[GrumpyGran]

2 hours ago, candygirl200413 said:

Saw this morning on Velshi and Rhule this morning:

MSNBC hosts spit fire at GOPer claiming Ivanka would be ‘great senator’ because ‘she’s got the full package’

It's crazy though because I know quite a few woman my age who think of her as being such a great role model

Whaaaaaa? How is this guy in Congress? She's "super smart" and he's "super impressed?" And she's got the "whole package?" What, did she punt a folded love note to him in science class last Thursday and then blow kisses to him at the pep rally on Friday?

[onekidanddone]

48 minutes ago, GrumpyGran said:

Whaaaaaa? How is this guy in Congress? She's "super smart" and he's "super impressed?" And she's got the "whole package?" What, did she punt a folded love note to him in science class last Thursday and then blow kisses to him at the pep rally on Friday?

Who the ever loving Rufes are these people? I can't answer a single question. Not one simple binary question. Just the repetitive buzz words.  Kind of like Duggars ...ohhhh I'm super excited ..she's the full package ..she's super smart...a great wife.

In other words he has nothing of value to recommend her candidacy but a bunch of ass kissing Trump worship.

[Childless]

9 hours ago, candygirl200413 said:

Saw this morning on Velshi and Rhule this morning:

MSNBC hosts spit fire at GOPer claiming Ivanka would be ‘great senator’ because ‘she’s got the full package’

It's crazy though because I know quite a few woman my age who think of her as being such a great role model

And the hosts didn't even bring up the fact that she is being sued for stealing designs.  Maybe she is qualified to be a senator.  She's a thief just like the rest of the GOPers in office.

[GreyhoundFan]

"Can this marriage be saved? Relationship between Trump, Senate GOP hits new skids."

Spoiler

The relationship between President Trump and Senate Republicans has deteriorated so sharply in recent days that some are openly defying his directives, bringing long-simmering tensions to a boil as the GOP labors to reorient its stalled legislative agenda.

Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.), head of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, announced Tuesday that he would work with his Democratic colleagues to “stabilize and strengthen” the individual insurance market under the Affordable Care Act, which the president has badgered the Senate to keep trying to repeal. Alexander also urged the White House to keep up payments to insurers that help low-income consumers afford plans, which Trump has threatened to cut off.

Several Republican senators have sought to distance themselves from the president, who has belittled them as looking like “fools” and tried to strong-arm their agenda and browbeat them into changing a venerated rule to make it easier to ram through legislation along party lines.

Some are describing the dynamic in cold, transactional terms, speaking of Trump as more of a supporting actor than the marquee leader of the Republican Party. If he can help advance their plans, then great, they say. If not, so be it.

“We work for the American people. We don’t work for the president,” Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.) said. He added, “We should do what’s good for the administration as long as that does not in any way, shape or form make it harder on the American people.”

The friction underscores the challenge Republicans face headed into the fall. As they seek to move beyond a failed health-care effort in pursuit of an elusive, first big legislative win, the same infighting that has plagued them all year threatens to stall their push to rewrite the nation’s tax laws, which Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said Tuesday he wants to do beginning in September and finish by year’s end.

While some Republicans try to tune out what they see as distracting and sometimes destructive rhetoric and action from Trump, they recognize that they cannot fully disavow him without also dashing their hopes of implementing the conservative policies they championed in the campaign.

For many Republican senators, the challenge is trying to walk an increasingly fine line.

As public opinion polls show a decline in Trump’s approval rating, some Republican senators have sought to address difficult questions about what the president’s diminishing popularity means for his mandate by insisting that congressional Republicans, not Trump, are the ones driving the GOP agenda.

“Ever since we’ve been here, we’ve really been following our lead,” said Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.). After ticking through major Republican initiatives so far, he added, “Almost every bit of this has been 100 percent internal to Congress.”

Senate GOP leaders have openly flouted Trump’s attempts to steer them back to repealing and replacing the ACA, an endeavor that collapsed in failure last week. On Tuesday, McConnell laid out the rest of the Senate’s plans before adjourning for the summer recess. Health care was not among them.

Instead, Alexander signaled he would go around the president. He and Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.) announced they would hold fall hearings to shore up the individual health insurance markets. It was the most concrete sign yet of bipartisan work in the Senate on strengthening the existing health-care law, and it followed a proposal offered Monday by a bipartisan group of 43 House members.

Trump, who installed John F. Kelly as his new chief of staff a day earlier, on Tuesday was noticeably tame toward fellow Republicans on Twitter. But White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders blamed the GOP-controlled Congress for the lack of major accomplishments this year.

“I think what’s hurting the legislative agenda is Congress’s inability to get things passed,” she said Tuesday.

Trump had spent the preceding few days in an antagonistic posture.

He used his favorite social media platform to push Senate Republicans to end the 60-vote threshold for most legislation, writing: “Republicans in the Senate will NEVER win if they don’t go to a 51 vote majority NOW. They look like fools and are just wasting time.” He also demanded they vote again on health care, despite an inability to round up enough votes for a far narrower bill than they had long promised.

By Tuesday, it was wearing thin on Capitol Hill.

Sen. Orrin G. Hatch (R-Utah) said that if the rules were changed as Trump wants, “it would be the end of the Republican Party. And it would be the end of the Senate.” Trump’s repeated insistence “doesn’t help,” Hatch said. “But he just doesn’t understand that.”

McConnell was able to muster only 49 votes for his health-care bill. Under special rules he was using, it would have passed with 50 — and a tiebreaking vote by Vice President Pence. Ending the 60-vote threshold as Trump has demanded would not have changed the outcome — a point McConnell was quick to bring up Tuesday.

“It’s pretty obvious that our problem on health care was not the Democrats. We didn’t have 50 Republicans,” he told reporters. He added, more forcefully, “There are not the votes in the Senate, as I’ve said repeatedly to the president and to all of you, to change the rules of the Senate.”

The concerns about the 45th president extend beyond arguments over how the Senate conducts its business, to his discipline, strategy and core values. Such concerns often are expressed in private, but one Republican senator, Jeff Flake of Arizona, has laid them out in lacerating fashion in his recently published book, “Conscience of a Conservative.”

“In the tweeting life of our president, strategy is difficult to detect,” Flake writes. “Influencing the news cycles seems to be the principal goal; achieving short-term tactical advantage, you bet. But ultimately, it’s all noise and no signal. . . . We have quite enough volatile actors to deal with internationally as it is without becoming one of them.”

Flake argues that the “Faustian bargain” that conservatives made in embracing Trump has “put at risk our institutions and our values” and that “the strange specter of an American president’s seeming affection for strongmen and authoritarians . . . is almost impossible to believe.”

Asked about a Washington Post report that Trump dictated his eldest son’s misleading statement about meeting with a Russian lawyer, Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) replied: “I don’t know if it’s true or not. But the statement was misleading. And when you have a misleading statement, it just continues to breed distrust, so that means the investigation continues.”

Trump’s criticism of Attorney General Jeff Sessions, a former senator, has also irked Republicans in the chamber. The president’s threats against GOP senators during the health-care debate, including Sens. Dean Heller (R-Nev.) and Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska), also rubbed many the wrong way.

Some said Tuesday they were hopeful that Trump’s staff shake-up would produce better results.

“I’m very pleased that [former communications director Anthony] Scaramucci is gone and that General Kelly, I believe, will bring a sense of order and discipline that is needed,” said Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine).

Sanders said Tuesday that Kelly has “spoken to a number of members of Congress,” a sign that relations could improve.

Graham, who has been one of the most outspoken Republican critics of Trump, laid out his thinking on the president. Increasingly, his colleagues are sounding more like him in their willingness to offer curt assessments.

“I ran out of adjectives, and I voted for a guy I never met,” Graham said. “What was that guy’s name? Evan?”

Evan McMullin, reporters reminded him, mentioning the independent 2016 candidate’s full name.

“President Trump won. I respect his victory. I want to help him with health care and do other things that I think we can do together like cut taxes,” Graham said. “I’ll push back against ideas I think are bad for the country, like changing the rules of the Senate. And that’s the way I’m going to engage the president.”

Dear Sen. Tim Scott, if you really work for "the American people", stop pushing and voting for legislation that hurts millions of"'the  American people".

[GreyhoundFan]

More proof the Repugs only care about big businesses and lobbyists: "In Trump era, lobbyists boldly take credit for writing a bill to protect their industry"

Spoiler

For two years, lobbyists for doctors and their insurers met regularly around a conference table a few blocks from the Capitol to draft an overhaul of the nation’s medical malpractice laws. The resulting legislation proposed strict limits on damages for some plaintiffs and sharply lower fees for their attorneys.

Last month, with no public hearings and few modifications, the House voted to approve the measure — outraging victims’ rights advocates, who accused lawmakers of acting in secret to slam the courtroom door on people who have been grievously injured by doctors.

It isn’t unusual for industry stakeholders to draft legislation. But in this case, lobbyists were able to rapidly shepherd their bill to House passage with minimal input from the public or even members of Congress. Lobbyists then crowed about the achievement, boasting that the House-passed measure was nearly identical to one they provided to the House Judiciary Committee and that Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa) introduced on Feb. 24.

“There wasn’t a dramatic change in how we wrote it,” said Mike Stinson, a lobbyist for the Physician Insurers Association of America. But, he added, “there are always some tweaks.”

With Republicans in full control of Washington for the first time in 10 years, lobbyists for business and conservative causes are pushing aggressively for changes in laws and regulations long resisted by Democrats. After just six months, they have scored dozens of victories. In February, Trump signed a measure, championed by the National Rifle Association, that rolled back Obama-era rules making it harder for people with mental illnesses to buy guns. In April, Trump signed a bill, backed by large Internet providers, that killed rules blocking the companies from selling consumers’ browsing histories to third parties.

Leaders of a coalition of doctors and their insurers say their odds of overhauling the nation’s medical malpractice laws have also greatly improved. Trump’s health secretary, Tom Price, is a former congressman and orthopedic surgeon who has long complained that frivolous lawsuits are driving up the cost of health care. And GOP leaders in both the House and Senate have cast medical malpractice reform as a key part of their strategy for making health care more affordable.

Since passing the House, the measure has stalled in the Senate, traditionally more hostile territory. However, doctors and their insurers held out hope that last month’s collapse of a broader GOP campaign to overhaul the Affordable Care Act would persuade Senate leaders to look to the medical malpractice bill as a surer path to victory.

The failed Senate bill to rewrite the ACA was also drafted without public hearings. Norman J. Ornstein, a nonpartisan ethics scholar with the right-leaning American Enterprise Institute, said Republican lawmakers are becoming increasingly willing to act with little or no public debate. At the same time, Ornstein said, lobbyists are becoming increasingly vocal about claiming credit for their political victories.

“This is a reflection of the new Trump, in-your-face era,” said Ornstein, who has written numerous books on Congress. “The way it’s supposed to work is you meet with outside groups that would be affected by it. You hold hearings, but you write the bills.”

Legal experts, former members of Congress and former Hill staffers say it is rare for a bill to move through a chamber virtually unchanged — and rarer still for a bill as complicated as tort reform to proceed with no public hearings, where victims’ rights groups, trial lawyers and others would have had a chance to weigh in.

Democrats said the speed and secrecy of the process favors special interests.

“Large business groups are writing these bills,” said Rep. Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.). “This has got to stop.”

King, the lead sponsor of the medical malpractice bill, acknowledged that the industry provided a draft of the bill and helped craft the final version. But he said his “very talented staff” also played an important role.

As for the lack of hearings, King said Congress has scrutinized the medical malpractice system on dozens of occasions.

“I hear their complaints,” King said of critics. But, he added: “I just don’t want to have to ride that horse again. Let’s get ’er done.”

Some Republicans have long backed tort reform as a way to drive down medical costs. The measure that passed the House would make it more difficult for people to sue doctors and, in some cases, to collect large awards. The bill would set a federal cap of $250,000 for ­non-economic damages, which offer compensation for such things as pain and suffering, permanent disfigurement or other serious disabilities that may not interfere with the ability to work.

The bill would force states to set caps, or submit to having the federal standard imposed on them — even in states where supreme courts have ruled caps on non-economic damages unconstitutional.

“Some of these state supreme court rulings are bad rulings,” King said, adding that his staff made changes to the legislation that added “important nuances” to address the rights of states.

Stinson, the lobbyist for the Physician Insurers Association of America, a trade association for medical malpractice insurers, said the coalition presented the measure to the House Judiciary Committee shortly after Trump’s inauguration. Weeks later, King introduced his bill.

Just four days later, on Feb. 28, the Judiciary Committee passed the measure.

And on June 28, the measure passed the House 218 to 210, with 19 Republicans and 191 Democrats voting no.

“We still had a few things we were tinkering with, but with this opportunity, obviously we couldn’t delay anymore,” Stinson said.

Added Katie Orrico, the coalition’s vice chair and lobbyist for the American Association of Neurological Surgeons and the Congress of Neurological Surgeons: “Ultimately, they ran with it. It moved fast.”

In the days and weeks before the House vote, at least three members of the coalition took public credit for their role in drafting the legislation. On May 11, Brian Atchinson, chief executive of the group Stinson represents, said in a webinar that the bill was something his team had “in fact, helped Hill staff draft.”

And in a June 23 newsletter to members, the Doctors Company — the nation’s largest physician-owned medical malpractice insurer — said its group and other members of the coalition “worked to draft new federal medical liability legislation.”

Stanley Brand, a Washington-based lobbyist who served as general counsel to longtime Democratic House speaker Thomas P. “Tip” O’Neill Jr., said such public pronouncements by lobbyists are relatively new.

“Look, when I worked for Tip O’Neill, the definition of a good lobbyist was like a German U-boat — they only come up at night for air,” Brand said. “They didn’t speak publicly about the role they played in a bill.”

Members of the medical malpractice coalition defended their actions.

“I don’t think any of us would want to live in a society where all laws are imposed by regulators, a judge, a congress, a president,” said Richard E. Anderson, chairman and chief executive of the Doctors Company. “We want to live in a society where the laws meet the needs of those they are meant to govern. Ideally, it should be a collaborative process in the context of the overall national interest.”

Stinson, who served for more than a decade as a Republican staffer on the Hill, said those who criticize the role of lobbyists don’t understand how Washington works.

“Staff and members can’t be fully versed on every single issue that is coming up,” he said. “Interest groups approach them, and say here is a problem that needs to be resolved, here’s the legislation that we think can take care of it. That’s often how it happens.”

You couldn't make this up.

[JMarie]

On ‎8‎/‎1‎/‎2017 at 8:24 PM, candygirl200413 said:

She brings a tremendous amount of intellect and class. She cares about certain issues

Martha Stewart has intellect and class, but that doesn't mean I want her to be a senator.

 

Here's someone I would like to see win (and against Mitch McConnell!)

 

[GreyhoundFan]

Interesting op-ed from George Will: "The GOP has become the party of the grotesque"

Spoiler

BIRMINGHAM, Ala.

Southern Gothic is a literary genre and, occasionally, a political style that, like the genre, blends strangeness and irony. Consider the current primary campaign to pick the Republican nominee for the U.S. Senate seat vacated by Jeff Sessions. It illuminates, however, not a regional peculiarity but a national perversity, that of the Republican Party.

In 1986, Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III — the name belongs in a steamy bodice-ripper, beach-read novel about Confederate cavalry — was nominated for a federal judgeship. Democrats blocked him because they considered him racially “insensitive.” In 1996, he got even by getting elected to the Senate. Twenty years later, he was the first senator to endorse Donald Trump, who carried Alabama by 27.7 points. Sessions, the most beloved Alabaman who is not a football coach, became attorney general for Trump, who soon began denouncing Sessions as “beleaguered,” which Sessions was because Trump was ridiculing him as “weak” because he followed Justice Department policy in recusing himself from the investigation of Russian involvement in Trump’s election.

On Aug. 15, Alabama’s bewildered and conflicted Republicans will begin picking a Senate nominee. (If no one achieves 50 percent, there will be a Sept. 26 runoff between the top two.) Of the nine candidates, only three matter — Luther Strange, Roy Moore and Rep. Mo Brooks.

Strange was Alabama’s attorney general until he was appointed by then-Gov. Robert Bentley to Sessions’s seat. Bentley subsequently resigned in the wake of several scandals that Strange’s office was investigating — or so Strange’s successor as attorney general suggests — when Bentley appointed him. The state Ethics Commission, which had scheduled an Aug. 2 hearing into charges of campaign finance violations by Strange, recently postponed the hearing until Aug. 16, the day after the first round of voting.

Twice Moore has been removed as chief justice of the state Supreme Court. In 2003, removal was for defiance of the U.S. Supreme Court regarding religious displays in government buildings. Reelected, he was suspended last year for defiance of the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision regarding same-sex marriages.

Yet Brooks is the focus of ferocious attacks on behalf of Strange, who ignores Moore. The attacks are financed by a Washington-based political action committee aligned with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.). This Washington Republican establishment strenuously tried but fortunately failed to defeat now-Sens. Marco Rubio and Ben Sasse, of Florida and Nebraska, respectively, in their 2010 and 2014 primaries. (The Rubio opponent the PAC favored is now a Democratic congressman.) The attacks stress some anti-Trump statements Brooks made while chairman of Ted Cruz’s 2016 presidential campaign in Alabama. For example, Brooks criticized Trump’s “serial adultery,” about which Trump has boasted. The PAC identifies Brooks, a conservative stalwart of the House Freedom Caucus, as an ally of Nancy Pelosi and Elizabeth Warren. Another ad uses Brooks’s support for Congress replacing the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force with an updated one, and his opposition to interventions in Libya and Syria, to suggest that Brooks supports the Islamic State.

Brooks contributed financially to Trump’s general-election effort and has named his campaign bus the “Drain the Swamp Express.” He says he supports Trump’s “agenda,” including potentially its most consequential item — ending Senate filibuster rules that enable 41 senators to stymie 59. Strange sides with McConnell against Trump in supporting current rules. Yet the PAC’s theme is that Brooks’s support of Trump is insufficiently ardent. Such ardor is becoming the party’s sovereign litmus test.

In one recent poll, the three candidates are polling in the 20s. Moore is leading; the PAC’s attacks are driving some Brooks voters to Moore. Among voters who say they are familiar with all three, Strange is third. A runoff seems certain, and if Moore (sometimes called “the Ayatollah of Alabama”) is in it and wins, a Democrat could win the Dec. 12 general election.

“Anything that comes out of the South,” said writer Flannery O’Connor, a sometime exemplar of Southern Gothic, “is going to be called grotesque by the Northern reader, unless it is grotesque, in which case it is going to be called realistic.” But, realistically, Alabama’s primary says more about Republicans than about this region. A Michigan poll shows rocker-cum-rapper Kid Rock a strong potential Republican Senate candidate against incumbent Debbie Stabenow. Rock says Democrats are “shattin’ in their pantaloons” because if he runs it will be “game on mthrfkers.”

Is this Northern Gothic? No, it is Republican Gothic, the grotesque becoming normal in a national party whose dishonest and, one hopes, futile assault on Brooks is shredding the remnants of its dignity.

I don't agree with everything, but he is so right that the Repugs have shed the last of their dignity.