Tag Archives: house-republicans

Climate science opponent Lamar Smith will retire from Congress.

by SonjaCraig Posted on November 2, 2017

Poor dumb turtles and fish, always chomping on the ubiquitous plastic in the water by accident — or so the story went, until a handful of recent studies suggested sea creatures may actually be choosing to eat plastic.

In one of these experiments, researchers took single grains of sand and particles of microplastic — both around the same size and shape — and dropped them onto coral polyps. The tiny creatures responded to the plastic the same way they would to a tasty piece of food, stuffing the bits of trash into their mouths like so many Snickers Minis.

“Plastics may be inherently tasty,” Austin Allen, a study coauthor and marine science doctoral student at Duke University, told the Washington Post.

Coral polyps rely on chemical sensors — taste buds, essentially — to determine whether something is edible or not. And they were repeatedly chosing to swallow plastic during the study. Only once in 10 trials did a polyp make the same mistake with sand. In fact, the cleaner and fresher and more plastic-y the plastic was, the more readily the coral gulped it down.

While the long-term effects of the plastic-saturation of the planet are still unknown, this research suggests that accidentally tasty microplastics could pose an extra hazard to already beleaguered corals around the world.

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Climate science opponent Lamar Smith will retire from Congress.

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Obamacare Is Doing Well, But Trump and Ryan Can Change That If They Want

by HassanD97urycmei Posted on April 11, 2017

Mother Jones

Today brings a couple of pieces of tentative good news for Obamacare. First there’s this:

The Trump administration says it is willing to continue paying subsidies to health insurance companies under the Affordable Care Act even though House Republicans say the payments are illegal because Congress never authorized them….The Affordable Care Act requires insurers to reduce deductibles and other out-of-pocket costs for certain low-income consumers. The “cost-sharing” subsidies, which total $7 billion a year, compensate insurers for these discounts.

….House Republicans sued the Obama administration, saying that the spending — in the absence of an appropriations law — was unconstitutional. A Federal District Court judge agreed and ordered a halt to the payments, but suspended her order to allow the government to appeal.

This is a huge deal. CSR payments are critical for insurance companies, and the Trump administration could have decided to stop defending the law and let House Republicans kill the payments by default. That could still happen, but it sounds like it won’t happen this year, at least. This was the single biggest bit of uncertainty facing insurance companies this year, and this announcement should ease a lot of their short-term concerns.

So with this temporarily out of the way, how does the overall Obamacare market look? According to Standard & Poors, profit levels for insurers are still too low, but they’re improving and the market seems to be in pretty good shape:

The U.S. ACA individual market shows signs of improvement, as most insurers’ 2016 results were better than 2015 results….2016 results and the market enrollment so far in 2017 show that the ACA individual market is not in a “death spiral.”

….We believe the continued pricing correction and network design changes, along with regulatory fine-tuning of ACA rules, will result in closer to break-even underwriting results, on average, for the individual market this year….As insurers continue to adjust their products and pricing, we expect some premium rate increase in 2018 as well. If it remains business as usual, we expect 2018 premiums to increase at a far lower clip than in 2017.

S&P’s biggest worry is Congress futzing around with things: “Every time something new (and potentially disruptive) is thrown into the works, it impedes the individual market’s path to stability.”

Two things are pretty clear. First, contrary to what folks like Donald Trump and Paul Ryan say, the Obamacare market is not on the verge of collapse. It’s working pretty well and is likely to get better in the future. But second, Trump and Ryan certainly have the power to put Obamacare on the verge of collapse if that’s what they want to do. Now we just have to wait to find out what they want to do.

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Obamacare Is Doing Well, But Trump and Ryan Can Change That If They Want

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Republicans Haven’t Canceled Their Ethics Office Hit Job, Just Delayed It

by Arnold57Slilbdja Posted on January 3, 2017

Mother Jones

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According to the Washington Post, House Republicans have backed off their plan to gut their ethics committee:

House Republicans scrapped plans to weaken an independent ethics watchdog on Tuesday after a backlash from President-elect Donald Trump, as a new period of Republican-led governance started taking shape on a tumultuous note.

The House GOP moved to withdraw changes made the day before to official rules that would rein in the Office of congressional Ethics. Instead, the House will study changes to the office with an August deadline.

Trump took to Twitter to slam House Republicans for voting behind closed doors Monday night to weaken the independent ethics office. The vote defied House GOP leaders and complicated Trump’s “drain the swamp” campaign mantra.

Oh please. The backlash was in full swing last night, long before Trump’s tweet. And anyway, Trump didn’t object to Republicans gutting the ethics office. He just thought they should do it later, when fewer people might notice. And that’s what they’re doing. They’ll “study changes” and then gut the office in August, when everyone is on vacation.

Can we please stop pretending that everything in the country is happening as a direct result of Trump’s tweets? For God’s sake.

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Republicans Haven’t Canceled Their Ethics Office Hit Job, Just Delayed It

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The Attorney General Just Gave the GOP in Congress a Nervous Breakdown

by Edgardo67D Posted on July 12, 2016

Mother Jones

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Attorney General Loretta Lynch frustrated House Republicans Tuesday when she repeatedly said that when it came to the decision about prosecuting Hillary Clinton over her mishandling of classified information on a private email server, she deferred to the FBI and career Justice Department prosecutors and wouldn’t share her own opinion on whether Clinton broke the law.

Lynch’s testimony before the House Judiciary Committee comes a day after House Republicans formally asked the Department of Justice and the FBI to investigate whether Clinton had lied to Congress last fall when she said she did not have classified information on her server. Last week, FBI Director James Comey testified before the House Oversight Committee about his recommendation to the DOJ to not prosecute Clinton in the matter.

House Republicans asked Lynch if she thought Clinton had broken the law when she set up a private home email system and passed classified information through it during her tenure as secretary of state. Instead, the attorney general repeatedly said her role was to take advice from the career prosecutors and the FBI before making a decision about pursuing charges. Rep. Dave Trott (R-Mich.), said his staff counted more than 70 times during Tuesday’s hearing that Lynch said she couldn’t answer or avoided a direct response to questions.

“Your refusal to answer questions regarding one of the most important investigations of someone who seeks to serve in the highest office in this land is an abdication of your responsibility,” Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.) said about halfway through the hearing. “This is a very important issue of whether or not the Justice Department is going to uphold the rule of law in this country, and I hope that with the questions that will be forthcoming now, you will be more forthcoming with answers.”

Rep. Trent Franks (R-Ariz.) asked just one question before giving up, noting that other members of the committee “have summarily failed, as I just did, to get you to answer even the most reasonable and relevant question.”

The tone of the dynamic between Lynch and the Republicans was captured during questioning from Rep. Doug Collins (R-Ga.). He said he missed former Attorney General Eric Holder because “at least when he came here he gave us answers.” Then Collins tried to get Lynch to discuss speeding violations:

At the end of the hearing, Lynch said the DOJ had “provided unprecedented access into the thinking of the investigative team in this case. I have provided access into the process by which the department was resolving this matter, things we rarely do.”

Republicans repeatedly brought up Lynch’s June 27 meeting with former President Bill Clinton at a Phoenix, Arizona, airport that occurred just days before the FBI announced its findings and the DOJ formally moved to close the case. Lynch said the meeting led her to state publicly that she’d act on the FBI recommendations regardless of what they were, something she says she was already planning to do.

Lynch said Tuesday that she “felt it was important to do in order to make it clear to the American people that my role in this matter had been decided before I had a conversation with the former president, the conversation did not have any impact on it, and, in fact, as with every case, the team of experienced prosecutors and investigators who reviewed this diligently, thoroughly, and at great length had gone to great lengths and come up with a thorough, concise, and exhaustive recommendation, which I then accepted.”

Lynch compared the frustration of those who wanted charges against Clinton to the “frustration of people who may have a situation where they’re the victim of a crime and they’re not able to bring a case,” but she said it does not change the facts of Clinton’s case that the FBI and DOJ prosecutors determined didn’t merit criminal charges.

Democrats focused their time asking Lynch about gun violence, police killings of African Americans, the government’s surveillance of Black Lives Matter activists, immigration, and prisoner transport problems. But several also blasted their Republican colleagues’ use of the hearing to continue to talk about Clinton’s emails.

“Rome is burning, there’s blood on the street of many American cities, and we are beating this email horse to death,” said Rep. Cedric Richmond (D-La.), before he asked a series of questions about police killings of African Americans and asked for an investigation into the Baton Rouge Police Department.

Rep. John Ratcliffe (R-Texas) said he would pose a series of questions about how the decision not to prosecute was made when Comey appears before the House Homeland Security Committee next week.

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The Attorney General Just Gave the GOP in Congress a Nervous Breakdown

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Paul Ryan Wants to Increase the Medicare Eligibility Age to 67

by StaceyDowling61 Posted on June 22, 2016

Mother Jones

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Republicans announce a lot of health care plans. All of them are essentially the same, “a familiar hodgepodge of tax credits, health savings accounts, high-risk pools, block granting of Medicaid, tort reform, and interstate purchase of health plans.” Today, after months of cogitating, House Republicans have finally agreed on yet another a health care plan. It’s not a hodgepodge, however, it’s a “backpack.” Beyond that, however, it should sound pretty familiar:

In place of President Barack Obama’s health law, House Republicans propose providing Americans with refundable tax credits….catastrophic insurance….health-savings accounts….plans offered in other states….fee-for-service insurance through a newly created Medicare insurance exchange not a voucher! not a voucher! absolutely positively not a voucher! -ed.….pay taxes on the value of whatever health insurance employers provide.

Hmmm. There’s no mention of high-risk pools or tort reform or Medicaid block grants. What the hell is going on here? Who was responsible for—oh, wait. Maybe the Wall Street Journal just did a crappy job of describing it. Let’s check in with the Washington Post:

The GOP plan floats a variety of proposals….refundable tax credit….health savings accounts….“high-risk pools”….Medicaid funds would be handed to the states either as block grants or as per-capita allotments.

Now we’re talking. Every single buzzword is there except for tort reform. But maybe I should check in with Reuters:

The Republican proposal would gradually increase the Medicare eligibility age, which currently is 65, to match that of the Social Security pension plan, which is 67 for people born in 1960 or later….The Republican plan includes medical liability reform that would put a cap on non-economic damages awarded in lawsuits, a measure aimed at cutting overall healthcare costs.

Tort reform is there after all! And as an extra added bonus, the Medicare eligibility age goes up to 67! Hallelujah!

How could this possibly have taken more than five minutes to write? It’s identical to every health care plan ever proposed by Republicans. There is, of course, no funding mechanism, possibly because Republicans know perfectly well that it will do nothing and therefore require no funding. But here’s my favorite bit of well-hidden snark from the Washington Post account:

The most significant omission from the Republican health-care plan, though, is to what degree it will maintain — or, more likely, reduce — insurance coverage for Americans….Asked about the plan’s effect on coverage, a Republican leadership aide said Monday, “You’re getting to the dynamic effect of the plan and we can’t answer that until the committees start to legislate.”

But there is a significant clue in the GOP plan that it anticipates a surge in the ranks of the uninsured. Before the Affordable Care Act, the federal government’s primary mechanism for compensating health providers for delivering care to the uninsured was through “disproportionate share hospital” payments, or DSH, which are allocated to facilities that treated large numbers of the uninsured.

Under Obamacare, DSH payments were set to be phased out because coverage rates were expected to increase dramatically….The Republican plan would repeal those cuts entirely.

Bottom line: this is just the usual conservative mush. It would accomplish nothing. It would insure no one. It would wipe out all the gains of Obamacare. Millions of people would have their current health care ripped away from them, all so that Republicans can repeal the 3.8 percent tax on high-earner investment income that funds Obamacare.

And just for good measure, it will also raise the Medicare eligibility age to 67. Because apparently, the old hodgepodge just wasn’t quite Scrooge-like enough.

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Paul Ryan Wants to Increase the Medicare Eligibility Age to 67

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