GOP REVEALS SORT OF HAS OBAMACARE REPLACEMENT: This week, the House Republican leadership apparently released (sort of) an Obamacare replacement. I say “apparently,” because the bill is being hidden from the public -- and from Congress. A draft of the bill was supposedly ready for House Republicans to review on Thursday, with strict conditions: “The briefings would be secretive. Members wouldn’t actually receive copies of the legislation. The copies would remain locked in an undisclosed room for members to look at — but not take home.” They weren’t kidding: Even Senator Rand Paul, a Republican, was denied entry to the basement room where the bill was available for review (apparently because he’s a senator). This is definitely the behavior of a caucus confident in its health care solutions. The secrecy is the main strategy here. As Susan Collins said, “It looks like unfortunately, based on the delays, we may be marking this up and voting on it before we have a [CBO] score.” “Unfortunately,” Chait noted. “But it’s not like the House Republicans have any control over things like when they schedule their votes on major social legislation.” The little we do know about the draft, though, is scary, both from a policy perspective and a political perspective. While overall I think the politics here favor those fighting to preserve Obamacare, Kevin Drum publishes the Kaiser analysis of the draft it has seen, and the chart reveals why this could be so politically tricky for Dems:
As Drum writes: “Politically, you can see the attractiveness of the Republican plan. One of Obamacare's major failings is that its subsidies phase out too soon. The poor get Medicaid and the near-poor get generally decent subsidies, but the working class gets very little and the middle class is left out entirely. The Republican plan provides bigger subsidies for working and middle-class families, and does it by cutting subsidies for the poor. In other words, it helps two groups who vote at high rates, and who often vote Republican. It hurts a group that doesn't vote much, and votes Democratic when it does. It's immoral on almost every level, but it's political genius.” I had no before realized how few subsidies are provided to lower and middle class non-senior citizens. Seems to me there’s clear room for expanded subsidies here (in the made-up world where Clinton won the election and we were entering a fight about expanding and improving Obamacare).
THE RUSSIA NET WIDENS: I can’t believe that Russia has remained at the top of the news each week, but here we are. While I hesitate to revive a baseless guilty-by-associate Red Baiting instinct in our politics, the repeated drip of newly discovered (undisclosed) meetings and ties between Trump associates and Russian officials demands a clear-eyed, full-throated investigation. That drip continued this week: First, Rachel Maddow on Monday presented a lengthy discussion of the really unprecedented ties between top-level Russian officials and our newly-installed Secretary of Commerce, Wilbur Ross, who served as Vice Chairman of the Bank of Cyprus, favored by Russian oligarchs for money laundering. Then the bombshell, reported Wednesday night: Jeff Sessions met privately with the Russian ambassador twice during the campaign, and then affirmatively lied about it in his confirmation testimony before Congress. Al Franken asked Sessions: “[I]if there is any evidence that anyone affiliated with the Trump campaign communicated with the Russian government in the course of this campaign, what will you do?” to which Sessions responded: “Senator Franken, I'm not aware of any of those activities. I have been called a surrogate at a time or two in that campaign and I didn't have — did not have communications with the Russians.” Democrats raised hell on Thursday, and Sessions eventually agreed that he would recuse himself from all investigations involving the 2016 campaign, a promise that should have been obvious from Day 1, given Sessions’ role as a prominent campaign surrogate. And then the Times reported that Jared Kushner also met with the Russian ambassador in December at Trump Tower, along with now-fired Michael Flynn (one of the meetings the White House originally lied about). And Carter Page, a wacko bird who was Trump’s chief foreign policy advisor during the campaign, and J.D. Gordon, another advisor, also met with the Russian ambassador at the GOP convention. Manafort, Flynn, Sessions, Page, Gordon, Kushner Of course, we still have no idea what was discussed during these numerous meetings (although the timing is suspicious, coming right as Obama was announcing sanctions, Trump was praising Putin, and Russian-backed hacks were leaking DNC emails), but if the meetings were innocuous, why lie about them? And yet, the GOP continues to resist efforts to actually dig into this, apparently unconcerned with whether our elections are totally vulnerable to fraud (let alone being concerned about officials lying under oath). If only the FBI were taking this seriously -- and cooperating with Congress. (Perhaps the most mysterious and in many ways most damning part of this is Trumpworld’s continued denial that Russia wanted Trump to win the election -- despite the the nation’s intelligence agencies coming to that exact conclusion. “I don’t have any idea, Tucker,” Sessions -- the head of the DOJ, which includes the FBI -- told Tucker Carlson last night when asked if he thought Russia was trying to boost Trump. “You’d have to ask them.” “I think it’s ridiculous,” Trump declared of the intelligence conclusion in December. “I don’t believe it . . . No, I don’t believe it at all.”)
CABINET OF LIARS: Jeff Sessions can take solace in the fact that he is hardly alone among Trump’s cabinet in blatantly lying to Congress during his confirmation hearing. Steve Mnuchin, nominee for Treasury Secretary, flatly denied that his bank “robo-signed” mortgage documents. That’s a lie. HHS Secretary Tom Price said that he had not benefitted from any sweetheart deals when trading stocks. That was a lie. EPA head Scott Pruitt told Congress in a written questionnaire that he never used private email to conduct official business in Oklahoma (where he was AG). That was a lie. Betsy DeVos, Education Secretary, declared that she played no role in her family’s foundation. That was a lie. The pattern, of course, reaches its apex at the top, in a president who is constitutionally incapable of telling the truth. This reached a new level this week, when the White House literally bragged about how Trump lied to reporters on Tuesday about his supposed eagerness to sign bipartisan immigration reform legislation – only for the White House on Wednesday to gleefully crow that it was all a set-up, a “misdirection” to insert an element of surprise into Tuesday’s speech. What kind of sociopaths boast that the President lied straight to reporters’ faces, all in the interest of a plot twist??
BECAUSE WE LIVE IN THE TWILIGHT ZONE: The Indiana Start reports tonight that Mike Pence, who used to be governor of Indiana before becoming Trump’s chief lackey, “routinely used a private email account to conduct public business as governor of Indiana, at times discussing sensitive matters and homeland security issues.” The paper further reports that Pence’s personal account was hacked last summer. Here’s what Pence said to Meet the Press last year about Clinton: ““What’s evident from all of the revelations over the last several weeks is that Hillary Clinton operated in such a way to keep her emails, and particularly her interactions while Secretary of State with the Clinton Foundation, out of the public reach, out of public accountability. And with regard to classified information she either knew or should have known that she was placing classified information in a way that exposed it to being hacked and being made available in the public domain even to enemies of this country.”
THE BUCK STOPS SOMEWHERE ELSE: Before Trump cynically sought to bathe himself in the glory of a fallen Navy SEAL during his joint session address on Tuesday, just hours earlier he was distancing himself from the raid in Yemen that took the SEAL’s life (along with the lives of a dozen children and numerous other civilians). Speaking on Fox and Friends, Trump said of the disastrous raid: “This was a mission that was started before I got here. This was something they wanted to do. They came to see me, they explained what they wanted to do ― the generals ― who are very respected, my generals are the most respected that we’ve had in many decades, I believe. And they lost Ryan." The despicableness of this statement – that he had nothing to do with the planning, and he has his own generals, that the the generals “lost” the Navy SEAL – is so extreme and profound, I am surprised Trump didn’t combust into a flaming pile of excrement right on the spot. At the speech, he again insulated himself from the decision-making by quoting Defense Secretary Mattis to insist that the raid had produced useful intelligence. However, multiple Pentagon sources told NBC news that they’ve seen no evidence that the raid yielded anything particularly important.
Awful, Dispiriting, Disgusting News of the Week: A 22-year-old DREAMer, brought to America at the age of 7, was detained by ICE moments after speaking at a pro-immigration rally and is now being fast-tracked for deportation. “Daniela Vargas, who came to the U.S. from Argentina when she was 7 years old, previously had a work permit and deportation reprieve under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, or DACA. Her DACA status expired last November, and because she was saving money for the renewal — which costs $495 — her new application wasn’t received until Feb. 10.” Read her heartbreaking statement here.
Must Read of the Week: Charles Pierce on regretful Trump voters: “You all had the same choices we all had. You saddled the rest of us with misrule and disaster. Own it. I empathize, but I will not sympathize.”
Fun Video of the Week: Jon Stewart returns!!
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