Head’s Up: Unless everything goes crazy next week, I may take the week off. We’ll see. Just be warned.
QUICK HITS ON THE TRUMP/RUSSIA/OBSTRUCTION/IMPEACHMENT STORY: I don’t want to spend the whole newsletter on this, so here’s a brief update on developments. (And yes, I saw the Kushner story but I don’t think it’s that big -- the FBI things that Kushner has relevant information but has not identified him as a “target”, i.e., a criminal suspect.)
- Nut Job: On Friday, the Times reported another bombshell story: that, in that fateful Oval Office discussion with Russian officials, Trump told them he had fired Comey because he was a “nut job” and because Trump “faced great pressure because of Russia. That’s taken off.” Again, this is not a smoke situation. This is additional clear evidence of the fire itself: a sitting president firing an FBI director in the middle of his 10-year term to shut down an FBI investigation into the president and his associates.
- Something to Note about Comey: Comey has said that he will testify before an open session of Congress sometime after Memorial Day. Brian Beutler and former DOJ spokesman Matt Miller made a really interesting point about that testimony on Beutler’s podcast, Primary Concerns, this week. Comey will be meeting with Robert Mueller first, to make sure he’s not giving out information that Mueller wants private for his investigation. Miller explained how we should interpret the testimony: “If Mueller is only focused on 2016 collusion, financial crimes, whatever else, then he may have no problem with Comey going up and testifying and talking about all of his interactions with Trump. But if Mueller sits down with Comey . . . and Mueller asks him not to testify and Mueller decides he doesn’t want to turn those memos over to Congress, I think that’s a pretty clear sign that Mueller’s interested in looking at obstruction of justice, and he doesn’t want Trump to know what’s in those memos and he doesn’t want White House staffers to know what’s in those memos, because he wants to put them all in front of a grand jury and ask them what they saw, and not have the benefit of knowing what Comey’s side of the story is.” Beutler pointed out the “irony” “that the less explosive Comey’s public testimony is . . . the worse the news is for Trump.” (The whole episode is an interesting and insightful discussion that I recommend!)
- Coates and Rogers: The Washington Post turned up more “fire” evidence on Monday that shows what seems pretty clearly a crime by Trump, even if there was no collusion with the Russians in interfering in the election. Sometime after March 20, when Comey confirmed under oath that the FBI was investigating links between Russian attempts to interfere in the election and the Trump campaign, Trump himself approached the director of national intelligence, Daniel Coats, and the director of the National Security Agency, Adm. Michael S. Rogers, “urging them to publicly deny the existence of any evidence of collusion during the 2016 election. Coats and Rogers refused to comply with the requests, which they both deemed to be inappropriate.” And once again, there are receipts: “Trump’s conversation with Rogers was documented contemporaneously in an internal memo written by a senior NSA official.” An intelligence source says that Trump was asking these officials -- who he appointed -- to lie to the American public: ‘“The problem wasn’t so much asking them to issue statements, it was asking them to issue false statements about an ongoing investigation,’ a former senior intelligence official said of the request to Coats.” This is yet more direct evidence of the president attempting to interfere directly in an ongoing FBI investigation, by getting high-ranking intelligence officials to lie about what was going on and potentially strongarm the FBI into shutting down their work. THIS IS INSANE. (This is hardly the first time we’ve seen Trump do this. Recall that he successfully got the chairs of the House and Senate intelligence committees, along with other officials, to call the press and (falsely) push back on stories about Trump/Russia connections -- a story that, in any other era, would have been a huge scandal.)
- Spies: The Times reported that, last summer, American spies intercepted conversations between Russian spies in which the Russians talked about recruiting and/or influencing Trump people, specifically Manafort and Flynn.
- Brennan testimony: John Brennan, who led the CIA until early this year, testified before Congress on Tuesday about the CIA’s increasing alarm over the last year of suspicious contacts between Russian governmental officials and Trump associates. When he left his post in January, he said, “I had unresolved questions in my mind as to whether or not the Russians had been successful in getting U.S. persons involved in the campaign or not to work on their behalf.” Unsurprisingly but incredibly dispiritingly (at this stage, given what we know), Republicans in the House continued to try to run interference for Trump rather than, you know, actually get to the bottom of what happened. Renowned idiot Trey Gowdy tried to lock Brennan into a statement that there was “no evidence” of collusion between Trump folks and the Russians, and “beclown[ed] himself,” as Brian Buetler puts it, by prompting Brennan to give “the most detailed account yet of why the FBI is investigating the Trump campaign in the first place.”
- More Flynn: “A senior lawmaker said on Monday that Mr. Flynn misled Pentagon investigators about how he was paid for the Moscow trip. He also failed to disclose the source of that income on a security form he was required to complete before joining the White House, according to congressional investigators.”
- Sessions: “Attorney General Jeff Sessions did not disclose meetings he had last year with Russian officials when he applied for his security clearance, the Justice Department told CNN Wednesday. . . . The new information from the Justice Department is the latest example of Sessions failing to disclose contacts he had with Russian officials. He has come under withering criticism from Democrats following revelations that he did not disclose the same contacts with Kislyak during his Senate confirmation hearings earlier this year.” That means that Jared Kushner, Mike Flynn, and Jeff Sessions all hid meetings with Russians on their security clearance applications. Which is a weird thing.
GOOD NEWS: SUPREME COURT HANDS VOTING RIGHTS ADVOCATES A MAJOR WIN: With one of the strangest majority coalitions in memory -- Kagan wrote the opinion, and JUSTICE THOMAS provided the fifth vote, with Kennedy, Roberts, and Alito in dissent -- the Supreme Court on Monday held two of North Carolina’s districts constitute unconstitutional racial gerrymandering. The state defended the maps in part by saying they were meant to disadvantage Democrats, not black people. What made the case interesting is how the Court would treat partisan gerrymandering, which has traditionally been held to be constitutionally, where race is so closely linked to party, especially in the South. Kagan’s opinion does not address this question head on, but election scholar Rick Hasen thinks there are some major “bombshells” buried in the footnotes, which suggest that “the sorting of voters on the grounds of their race remains suspect even if race is meant to function as a proxy for other (including political) characteristics.” He continues: “Holy cow this is a big deal. It means that race and party are not really discrete categories and that discriminating on the basis of party in places of conjoined polarization is equivalent, at least sometimes, to making race the predominant factor in redistricting. This will lead to many more successful racial gerrymandering cases in the American South and elsewhere.” (Not all experts agree with this analysis.) Note that the Court faces an explicit partisan gerrymander case coming out of Wisconsin, among other cases percolating in the lower courts.
GOOD NEWS: APPEALS COURT BLOCKS TRAVEL BAN 2.0: Today, the Fourth Circuit upheld the nationwide injunction against Trump’s second attempt at the travel ban. The majority opinion, written by Chief Justice Gregory, is 83 pages, so I haven’t read it yet, but it’s opening paragraph is fist-pump worthy, so I’m pasting it here:
The question for this Court, distilled to its essential form, is whether the Constitution, as the Supreme Court declared in Ex parte Milligan, 71 U.S. (4 Wall.) 2, 120 (1866), remains “a law for rulers and people, equally in war and in peace.” And if so, whether it protects Plaintiffs’ right to challenge an Executive Order that in text speaks with vague words of national security, but in context drips with religious intolerance, animus, and discrimination. Surely the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment yet stands as an untiring sentinel for the protection of one of our most cherished founding principles—that government shall not establish any religious orthodoxy, or favor or disfavor one religion over another. Congress granted the President broad power to deny entry to aliens, but that power is not absolute. It cannot go unchecked when, as here, the President wields it through an executive edict that stands to cause irreparable harm to individuals across this nation. Therefore, for the reasons that follow, we affirm in substantial part the district court’s issuance of a nationwide preliminary injunction as to Section 2(c) of the challenged Executive Order.
BOOM. Now, the White House has indicated it will appeal to the Supreme Court. But I don’t quite understand how the issue isn’t moot. The order was by its terms temporary, meant to give the administration 90 days to “conduct a worldwide review” to figure out what new security measures were needed. The order was signed 80 days ago. I was thinking that they wanted/needed to appeal to challenge constraints on the President’s authority under the immigration laws, but the majority opinion only found in favor of the plaintiffs on the Constitutional question (ie, religious discrimination); it did not address the question of whether the order violated the Immigration and Nationality Act. Is there any way the Supreme Court rejects the appeal as moot? (Orion, I’m looking at you for an answer here.) (Everyone else, meet Orion!)
SHOCKER -- AHCA REMAINS TERRIBLE AND CRUEL: Yesterday, the CBO made it official: Trumpcare 2.0, which the House passed a few weeks ago, is an almost cartoonishly evil bill that will result in millions of Americans getting kicked off health insurance so that rich people can get a gigantic tax break. The CBO reported that 14 million will lose their health insurance NEXT YEAR. “In 2026, an estimated 51 million people under age 65 would be uninsured, compared with 28 million who would lack insurance that year under current law.” The CBO also found that premiums would rise by 20% next year, though after that, they start to lower as the old and sick are kicked out of the insurance pools. Sarah Kliff explains that the bill “would hit the poor and elderly especially hard; a low-income 64-year-old Obamacare enrollee would see her premiums rise between 700 and 800 percent.” The report also inflicts a fatal blow to the GOP’s claim that the new bill protects those with preexisting conditions. The CBO unequivocally states that, in states that apply for the waivers from community rating and essential health benefit rules, the sick will be priced out of the insurance market:
People who are less healthy (including those with preexisting or newly acquired medical conditions) would ultimately be unable to purchase comprehensive nongroup health insurance at premiums comparable to those under current law, if they could purchase it at all — despite the additional funding that would be available under H.R. 1628 to help reduce premiums. As a result, the nongroup markets in those states would become unstable for people with higher-than-average expected health care costs.
The CBO’s charts show that the only “winners” under this plan are young, healthy, wealthy people: For example, a 21-year-old earning $68,000 (but also not in employer coverage, so a freelancer or something) would see his premium slashed from $5,000 to $1250. So bully for all 122 people who fit this category! Kliff: “There isn't any magic to how the Republican bill cuts premiums. There is not a secret plan in here to lower the price of doctor visits or get people to use less health care. There is a plan to make health insurance so expensive for people who are sick and people who are old that they can no longer afford it.”
Also, Chait reminds us that employer-based coverage (what most Americans have) is not immune from drastic effects of this bill: “The Republican plan would give states a waiver from Obamacare’s insurance regulations, which require that plans cover essential benefits and prevent them from putting lifetime caps on a person’s costs. And employers who shop for insurance can select a plan from any state. That means if even a single state takes the waivers, then every employer buying insurance could purchase plans that subject their employees to the kinds of price discrimination that Republicans want to impose on the individual market.”
You guys, there is a very, very real chance that the Senate could pass something similar to this bill. At the very least, Republican Senators are not pushing back on the drastic Medicaid cuts in the House bill, which account for most of the coverage losses. The Senate is writing their own bill in secret, with no hearings and no input from actuaries or other experts. That means that we must exert all our pressure on them -- and NOW, during this week’s recess. This is our chance to scare the Republicans into backing down. The Russia/Obstruction story is important, but we will win on issues that make a difference in people’s lives, and health care is at the top of that list. Flood your senator’s office will calls, letters, faxes, and SHOW UP to their district offices.
TRUMP REALLY, REALLY LOVES DICTATORS AND TELLING THEM OUR SECRETS: This week, the Philippines circulated a transcript of a call last month between Trump and the Philippines’ murderous president Duterte, which was published by The Intercept. In the call, Trump praised Duterte’s work on the “drug problem,” which has involved the “extrajudicial killing” (also known as murder) of more than 7,000 people. Trump offered unequivocal and fulsome praise: “I just wanted to congratulate you because I am hearing of the unbelievable job on the drug problem. Many countries have the problem, we have a problem, but what a great job you are doing and I just wanted to call and tell you that.” Holy shit, you guys. Trump slobbered all over this dictator: “You are a good man,” “Keep up the good work,” “You are doing an amazing job.” He practically begged him to come visit him in the Oval Office. Trump also seemed to reveal the location of two American nuclear submarines near North Korea, information that we usually, you know, like to keep to ourselves. Trump’s fawning praise of Duterte, Putin, Turkey’s Erdogan, even Kim Jong Un stands in sharp contrast to his scolding of our allies today during a NATO meeting, including threatening to end car imports from the “very, very bad” Germany. This. Is. Not. Normal.
Chart of the Week: A striking visualization of AHCA’s decimation of every ounce of progress we’ve made on reducing the numbers of uninsured.
Denver Shout-out: Denver has thought of a smart approach to try to prevent deportations of immigrants convicted of low-level offenses: “The city’s solution? Simply take a bunch of those relatively petty offenses and reduce the maximum penalty to less than 365 days. Just like that, the move takes the crimes (and their perpetrators) off the radar of immigration authorities.”
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