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“The Republican Party Is a Party Without a Purpose”

Mother Jones

Philip Klein unloads on the GOP in the pages of the conservative Washington Examiner, calling Obamacare repeal “the biggest broken promise in political history”:

What’s so utterly disgraceful, is not just that Republicans failed so miserably, but that they barely tried, raising questions about whether they ever actually wanted to repeal Obamacare in the first place.

Republicans for years have criticized the process that produced Obamacare, and things certainly got ugly. But after having just witnessed this debacle, I think Paul Ryan owes Nancy Pelosi an apology.

One has to admire the commitment that Democrats and Obama had to delivering something they campaigned on and truly believed in. They spent 13 months getting the bill from an initial concept to final passage, and pressed on during many points when everybody was predicting doom. They had public hearings, multiple drafts of different bills, they kept negotiating, even worked into Christmas. They made significant changes at times, but also never lost sight of their key goals. They didn’t back down in the face of angry town halls and after losing their filibuster-proof majority, and many members cast votes that they knew risked their political careers. Obama himself was a leader, who consistently made it clear that he was not going to walk away. He did countless rallies, meetings, speeches — even a “summit” at the Blair House — to try to sell the bill, talking about details, responding to criticisms of the bill to the point that he was mocked by conservatives for talking so much about healthcare.

The contrast between Obama and Democrats on healthcare and what just happened is stunning. House Republicans slapped together a bill in a few weeks (months if we’re being generous) behind closed doors with barely any debate. They moved the bill through committees at blazing speed, conducted closed-door negotiations that resulted in relatively minor tweaks to the bill, and within 17 days, Trump decided that he’d had enough, and was ready to walk away if members didn’t accept the bill as is…

There was a big debate over the course of the election about how out of step Trump was with the Republican Party on many issues. But if anything, this episode shows that Trump and the GOP are perfect together — limited in attention span, all about big talk and identity politics, but uninterested in substance.

Failing to get the votes on one particular bill is one thing. But failing and then walking away on seven years of promises is a pathetic abdication of duty. The Republican Party is a party without a purpose.

Go read the whole thing.

Trump, Ryan, and McConnell’s total lack of commitment to repealing Obamcare really does stand in stark contrast to Obama, Pelosi, and Reid’s total commitment to passing it in the first place.

On the eve of the House ACA vote in 2010, Obama went to Democrats and implored them to cast a vote many knew would be political suicide.

Sometimes I think about how I got involved in politics. I didn’t think of myself as a potential politician when I get out of college. I went to work in neighborhoods, working with Catholic churches in poor neighborhoods in Chicago, trying to figure out how people could get a little bit of help. And I was skeptical about politics and politicians, just like a lot of Americans are skeptical about politics and politicians are right now. Because my working assumption was when push comes to shove, all too often folks in elected office, they’re looking for themselves and not looking out for the folks who put them there; that there are too many compromises; that the special interests have too much power; they just got too much clout; there’s too much big money washing around.

And I decided finally to get involved because I realized if I wasn’t willing to step up and be true to the things I believe in, then the system wouldn’t change. Every single one of you had that same kind of moment at the beginning of your careers. Maybe it was just listening to stories in your neighborhood about what was happening to people who’d been laid off of work. Maybe it was your own family experience, somebody got sick and didn’t have health care and you said something should change.

Something inspired you to get involved, and something inspired you to be a Democrat instead of running as a Republican. Because somewhere deep in your heart you said to yourself, I believe in an America in which we don’t just look out for ourselves, that we don’t just tell people you’re on your own, that we are proud of our individualism, we are proud of our liberty, but we also have a sense of neighborliness and a sense of community — (applause) — and we are willing to look out for one another and help people who are vulnerable and help people who are down on their luck and give them a pathway to success and give them a ladder into the middle class. That’s why you decided to run. (Applause.)

And now a lot of us have been here a while and everybody here has taken their lumps and their bruises. And it turns out people have had to make compromises, and you’ve been away from families for a long time and you’ve missed special events for your kids sometimes. And maybe there have been times where you asked yourself, why did I ever get involved in politics in the first place? And maybe things can’t change after all. And when you do something courageous, it turns out sometimes you may be attacked. And sometimes the very people you thought you were trying to help may be angry at you and shout at you. And you say to yourself, maybe that thing that I started with has been lost.

But you know what? Every once in a while, every once in a while a moment comes where you have a chance to vindicate all those best hopes that you had about yourself, about this country, where you have a chance to make good on those promises that you made in all those town meetings and all those constituency breakfasts and all that traveling through the district, all those people who you looked in the eye and you said, you know what, you’re right, the system is not working for you and I’m going to make it a little bit better.

And this is one of those moments. This is one of those times where you can honestly say to yourself, doggone it, this is exactly why I came here. This is why I got into politics. This is why I got into public service. This is why I’ve made those sacrifices. Because I believe so deeply in this country and I believe so deeply in this democracy and I’m willing to stand up even when it’s hard, even when it’s tough.

Every single one of you have made that promise not just to your constituents but to yourself. And this is the time to make true on that promise. We are not bound to win, but we are bound to be true. We are not bound to succeed, but we are bound to let whatever light we have shine. We have been debating health care for decades. It has now been debated for a year. It is in your hands. It is time to pass health care reform for America, and I am confident that you are going to do it tomorrow.

With Obama, Pelosi, and Reid, Democratic voters had representatives who were as committed to their goals as they were. Republican voters should realize today that they are not so lucky.

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“The Republican Party Is a Party Without a Purpose”

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Republicans Pull Bill to Repeal and Replace Obamacare

Mother Jones

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In a stunning defeat to House Speaker Paul Ryan and President Donald Trump, Republicans on Friday pulled from the House floor their bill to repeal and replace the Obamacare, abruptly cancelling a vote that was scheduled for Friday afternoon.

The GOP plan was originally scheduled for a vote on Thursday but was postponed amid doubts about whether it could pass. The vote was rescheduled for Friday, but apparently Republicans were still unable to cobble together enough support. Trump reportedly warned House Republicans that if they failed to pass the health care legislation, he was prepared to move on and keep Obamacare in place.

This is a breaking news post. We will update when more information becomes available.

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Republicans Pull Bill to Repeal and Replace Obamacare

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This Climate Denying Lawmaker Has Proposed a Bill to Protect Climate Deniers

Mother Jones

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A Maine lawmaker has introduced a bill that will safeguard political speech—with a special focus on climate change deniers.

Republican Rep. Lawrence Lockman, who told the Associated Press that whether or not human activity is causing global warming is an open question, proposed legislation that would ban the state from prosecuting people for their “climate change policy preferences.” The measure prohibits the state from discriminating against climate change deniers with respect to employment and hiring, and bars any state agencies or departments from refusing to purchase goods and services, or awarding grants and contracts, on the basis of a person’s opinion regarding climate change.

According to NASA, 97 percent of scientists acknowledge that our planet is getting warmer due to human activity.

The bill is in response the lawsuit filed by a group of state attorneys general, including Maine’s Janet Mills, against Exxon Mobil in 2016. The suit alleges that the oil giant misled the public about global warming and should pay a financial penalty.

Lockman told the Associated Press that the bill wasn’t just for climate deniers, because it would protect the free speech of others as well. “I don’t want to see a Republican attorney general issuing subpoenas for the records of progressive or liberal think tanks or public policy groups to chill their free speech,” he said.

But Democratic lawmakers do not seem convinced. Lois Galgay Reckitt, a Democrat in the state legislature, said that the entire Democratic caucus would oppose the bill, as would some Republicans.

“The issue for me is I’m a scientist and I live near the ocean,” she said to the Associated Press. “It’s absolutely clear to me that climate change is happening and it worries me. I will fight this tooth and nail.”

A public hearing is scheduled for April 6.

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This Climate Denying Lawmaker Has Proposed a Bill to Protect Climate Deniers

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Is Trump’s Popularity Sinking? Here’s the Poll to Look At.

Mother Jones

This Gallup poll has been making the rounds today:

I’ve deleted the rest of this post. It was a comparison of job approval ratings of Republican presidents among Republicans. But I screwed it up. There’s actually nothing interesting to report on that score. Trump’s job approval ratings are about the same as Reagan, Bush Sr., and Bush Jr.

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Is Trump’s Popularity Sinking? Here’s the Poll to Look At.

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Fiscal Conservatives Should Love National Health Care

Mother Jones

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David Frum is a conservative, but he grew up in Canada and lacks an American conservative’s instinctive revulsion toward national health care. Today he writes that maybe American conservatives should put aside their revulsion too. After all, the debacle over the Republican health care plan suggests that the public is unwilling to see health coverage withdrawn from millions of people. Democrats seem to have finally won the battle over ensuring health coverage for all, and that means Republicans can’t control costs by simply denying health care to anyone who can’t afford it. They have to figure out other ways to bring down costs:

Republicans have had too many competing goals in health-care reform. They have wanted to lower costs (to free fiscal room for tax cuts and military spending), but also to avoid tangling with entrenched health-care interests….What that money has bought is a huge and costly health sector….“Patient-centered medicine” sought to transform the user of health-care services as the system’s decisive cost-controller. Confronted with the full cost of medicine, the patient would consume care more prudently—or forgo it altogether.

That hope is listing badly. When and if it finally sinks, Republicans may notice something else. The other advanced countries with universal coverage manage to buy significantly better outcomes at the expense of 11 or 12 percent of GDP instead of America’s 16 percent. That extra increment of GDP could pay for a lot of military spending and a lot of tax cuts. Once politics has eliminated coverage reduction as a means of forcing economy, other possibilities open before a center-right party—and indeed have opened for center-right parties across the rest of the English-speaking world. Perversely, the effort to keep government out of health care has empowered health care to consume more and more government dollars. Where government has been deployed more effectively than in the United States, health care has consumed less.

I dissent in part and agree in part. For starters, it’s true that the United States has by far the biggest health care bill of any country in the world:

However, our costs are high because we pay more for everything: doctors, nurses, pharmaceuticals, hospital stays, etc. Politically, it’s impossible to adopt a system that would suddenly cut everyone’s pay by a third. If America were to adopt national health care, our per capita costs would almost certainly start out right where they are now: far higher than any other country in the world.

In the long run, however, Frum is right. It’s ironic, but it turns out that central governments are a lot better at keeping a lid on health care costs than the private sector. The reason is taxes. National health care is paid for out of tax revenue, and the public pressure to keep taxes low is so strong that it universally translates into strong government pressure to keep health care costs low. By contrast, the private sector is so splintered that no corporation has the leverage to demand significantly lower costs. Besides, if health care costs go up, corporations can make up for it by keeping cash salaries low. This is part of the reason that median incomes have grown so slowly over the past 15 years. Corporations simply don’t care enough about high health care costs to really do anything about it.

Over the course of a few decades, then, our costs would probably converge on the rest of the world if we adopted universal health care. Contra Frum, this wouldn’t open any headroom for lower taxes or higher military spending—government spending would still go up even if overall health care spending slowed down—but it would make the country a better, safer, more efficient place. What’s not to like?

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Fiscal Conservatives Should Love National Health Care

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Is Obamacare Already Dead?

Mother Jones

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Paul Ryan and President Trump have been insisting for months that Obamacare is collapsing, failing, imploding, spiraling quickly into death. This is ridiculous, of course. It’s covering more than 20 million people at a lower cost than originally projected, and by any fair appraisal it’s been hugely successful.

But that’s not to say it has no problems. The Obamacare insurance pool is skewed toward the old and sick, and this has made it hard for insurers to turn a profit. Several smallish insurers have already left the market, and there are hundreds of counties in the US with only one insurer left on the exchanges. This is probably not fatal—CBO says the Obamacare market is stable—and it’s a problem that could be addressed fairly easily and inexpensively. Still, it does put the Obamacare market in modestly perilous shape.

But what now? Even if the godawful Republican repeal effort fails, there’s every reason to think that Congress will try again. What’s more, it’s clear that they’ll do everything they can to undermine Obamacare along the way. In a few months, insurance companies have to decide whether they want to participate in the exchange market in 2018, and I wonder what they’ll decide? The uncertainty is sky high now, and that means they have little incentive to continue. Remember, most insurers swallowed big losses early on in hopes of building a stable, profitable market later. But what’s the point of absorbing losses if it looks like—at best—years and years of chaos ahead?

It may be that 2018 is safe. The exchanges are pretty close to profitable now, and it’s probably worth it for most insurers to stay on board for at least another year to see what happens. Still, I wonder. Merely by upending everything and making it clear just how dedicated they are to cutting taxes on the rich and cutting health coverage for the poor, have Republicans already managed to effectively repeal Obamacare without passing a single page of legislation?

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Is Obamacare Already Dead?

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The Short, Happy Valley of Obamacare

Mother Jones

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Back in the past, about 17 percent of Americans went without health insurance. In the future, according to the CBO, about 17 percent of Americans will go without health insurance if AHCA, the Republican health care bill, passes. In between is the short, happy valley of Obamacare, when we got that number down to about 10 percent:

The CDC has precise numbers for the present if you’re interested. The Obamacare smile in the chart above is just approximate. Bottom line: if AHCA passes, not only will all the good work of Obamacare be wiped out, but uninsurance rates will actually be higher than they used to be when we had no legislation at all. I’m not quite sure how Republicans managed to pull that off, but it’s an impressive feat of callousness and greed.

Are you interested in additional detail about exactly which groups will be less insured under AHCA? The answer is: all of them. Here’s the absolutely appalling CBO estimate:

Poor people will have less insurance. Working-class people will have less insurance. Middle-class people will have less insurance. The young will have less insurance. The middle-aged will have less insurance. The old will have less insurance. Everybody will have less insurance. Except for the rich, of course, who will also get an $882 billion tax cut.1

This is what Paul Ryan calls “encouraging.” I’m not sure how he looks at himself in the mirror every morning.

1In fairness, they have to share this tax cut with big corporations.

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The Short, Happy Valley of Obamacare

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On Health Care, Republicans Are Caught Between a Rock and a Hard Place

Mother Jones

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The New York Times reports that the Koch brothers are about to unleash the hounds. They. Have. Had. Enough:

Saying their patience is at an end, conservative activist groups backed by the billionaire Koch brothers and other powerful interests on the right are mobilizing to pressure Republicans to fulfill their promise to swiftly repeal the Affordable Care Act.

….The sudden caution of the Republican Party leadership, as it grapples with the enormously complicated challenge of replacing the Affordable Care Act, has baffled conservatives who have been fighting the health law for years. In the House, Republicans have voted dozens of times to dismantle the law, and it has been a primary issue in congressional races since 2010. Repealing the law, many conservative lawmakers believe, is the one clear mandate they have from voters.

….The repeal effort by the conservative groups is intended to sway members of Congress who may be hesitating because of public pressure back home. That pressure, conservatives said, is no reason to renege.

Talk about clueless. Sure, constituent pressure is having an effect, but it’s nowhere near the biggest issue here. The biggest issue is that after voting to dismantle Obamacare dozens of times when they knew it was just a symbolic protest vote, Republicans suddenly have to think about what will happen if they dismantle it in real life. Answer: they now have to admit that they can’t dismantle the whole thing. They never fessed up to that before, so it’s no wonder the base is confused, but the House and Senate leadership have always known it. They can only dismantle the parts related to the budget because Democrats can filibuster the rest. And if Republicans dismantle only half the law, it will probably destroy the individual insurance market.

Oops. That would be bad, even by Republican standards. Plus there’s the fact that millions of people would lose coverage, which is bad by centrist voter standards, even if Republicans don’t really care about it. In other words, the GOP leadership is finally having to face up to the fact that repealing and replacing Obamacare is a tough nut to crack. Centrists will abandon them if they cause chaos, but hardliners will abandon them if they spend too much money. That’s why they’ve agreed to modify their current plan to exclude subsidies for the well-off:

The concession on tax credits is a middle ground between what conservatives were demanding and what leadership wanted. Freedom Caucus Chairman Mark Meadows (R-N.C.) and RSC Chairman Mark Walker (R-N.C.) in recent weeks came out against the GOP plan to replace Obamacare tax subsides with advanceable health care tax credits.

They preferred a tax deduction that would not allow those who don’t pay taxes to receive a check in the mail, calling such “advanceable” credits a “new entitlement.” At the crux of their concerns is the price tag, which they worry would increase the deficit.

A tax deduction, of course, would be useless to the poor and working poor, the very people who need help the most. But the Freedom Caucus doesn’t care about that. Luckily for them, their leadership understands just what a political disaster that would be.

In any case, the Freedom Caucus is right about one thing: advanceable tax credits are a new entitlement. Or, more accurately, a continuation of an old entitlement. There’s really not much difference between Obamacare’s subsidies, which are paid directly to insurance companies, and Ryancare’s tax credits, which are paid to the taxpayer, who then pays the insurance company.

As for the deficit, well, Ryan’s plan will only increase the deficit if Republicans also repeal all of Obamacare’s taxes and then decline to pass any new ones. Which they will. So that’s a legitimate complaint too.

As usual, it all comes down to money. That’s really the only thing that matters.

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On Health Care, Republicans Are Caught Between a Rock and a Hard Place

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The House GOP Just Finally Revealed Their Secret Bill to Repeal Obamacare

Mother Jones

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On Monday evening, the House Ways and Means Committee and the Energy and Commerce Committee unveiled Republicans’ bill proposing to repeal and replace Obamacare. Until today, top Republicans opted to keep the bill “under lock and key” somewhere in the basement of Congress. You can read the full draft here and here (it is split). It includes proposals to eliminate mandatory health insurance for all Americans, defund Planned Parenthood, and more.

Mere moments after it was released, Rep. Justin Amash (R-Mich.) attacked the bill from the right by calling it “Obamacare 2.0.”

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The House GOP Just Finally Revealed Their Secret Bill to Repeal Obamacare

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4 Republican Senators Just Rebelled Against the House Plan to Repeal Obamacare

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After a week of keeping their bill under guard by Capitol Police, House Republicans introduced their plan to repeal Obamacare late Monday afternoon. But a band of four Republican senators had already begun revolting in public—even before the language of the new measure had seen the light of day. They sent a letter to their caucus leader Monday afternoon saying that they couldn’t support the latest leaked version of the House plans because it doesn’t protect people who gained Medicaid under Obamacare.

One of the Affordable Care Act’s most effective ways of lowering the number of people who lack health insurance has been a provision that allows those who earn 138 percent or less of the federal poverty level to enroll in Medicaid. The Supreme Court added a level of uncertainty to this implementation by allowing states to decide whether or not they want to opt into that program, but 31 states have accepted Medicaid expansion to date, granting government-covered insurance to about 11 million additional people.

Republican Sens. Rob Portman (Ohio), Shelley Moore Capito (West Virginia), Cory Gardner (Colorado), and Lisa Murkowski (Alaska) sent a letter to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell on Monday voicing their concerns. “While we support efforts to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act and make structural reforms to the Medicaid program,” the letter says, “we are concerned that the February 10th draft proposal from the House of Representatives does not provide stability and certainty for individuals and families in Medicaid expansion programs or the necessary flexibility for states.”

The four senators all hail from states that have accepted Medicaid expansion, and they made that necessary prerequisite for any plan they’d be willing to consider. “We will not support a plan that does not include stability for Medicaid expansion populations or flexibility for states,” the letter explains.

This early warning spells serious trouble for Republican hopes of repealing Obamacare. Republicans plan to pass their repeal bill through a budget reconciliation process in which only a simple majority is necessary, so they don’t have to worry about a Democratic filibuster. But with just 52 Republican senators (and few possible Democratic defections), Republicans probably can’t pass a bill without these four senators. At the same time, the GOP leadership is having to fend off the Freedom Caucus in the House, as this group of tea-party-supported legislators threaten to withhold support because the bill doesn’t go far enough in ditching policies—such as the government offsetting the cost for low-income individuals to buy health insurance—implemented by the ACA. While the four renegade senators sent their letter to McConnell, Sen. Rand Paul was complaining on Twitter that the House proposal wasn’t conservative enough.

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4 Republican Senators Just Rebelled Against the House Plan to Repeal Obamacare

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