THIS WEEK IN POLITICAL NEWS -- 9/17/17

The Basically Just One Topic Edition

I know the last two weeks' TWIPNs have been short and late. Once again, the week just got away from me. But really, who needs the additional heartache anyway, right? (Wow, this hits way too close to home.)

TRUMPCARE'S DEATH RATTLE REQUIRES IMMEDIATE ATTENTION: After late July’s unbelievable win for the Forces of Good against those seeking to strip millions of health care access, I had thought we were basically done with trying to repeal Obamacare. That feeling was reinforced earlier this month, when Trump tweeted his apparent view that the GOP should move on to tax cuts and forget about Obamacare. In short, I got complacent. But in the last 48 hours, a new repeal effort seems to be gaining speed -- and we must mobilize, once again, to kill this final, last-ditch effort. The new bill, called Graham-Cassidy, is just as bad (if not worse) than the earlier repeal bills. The bill “essentially turns control of the health-care markets over to the states. Rather than funding Medicaid and subsidies directly, that money would be put into a block grant that a state could use to develop any health-care system it wants. It also allows states to opt out of many ACA regulations. . . . Medicaid expansion and subsidy funding would be cut sharply compared to current spending, going to zero in a decade.” The bill eliminates the individual and employer mandate; eliminates all current subsidies, allowing states to continue them or not as they see fit; permits insurers to refuse to cover certain medical treatments (ie, effectively permits discrimination based on health status); allows insurers to charge older customers far more; would fund Medicaid on a per capita basis (just like the original Trumpcare/senate bill), rather than ACA’s open-ended funding; and allows states to cut or redefine what constitute “essential health benefits” that must be covered (permitting the sale of junk insurance and creating a backdoor to annual and lifetime caps).

So the bill is substantively terrible. Now for the politics: The GOP has exactly two weeks (until the end of September) to pass this with a 51-vote margin, when the current budget resolution expires. After that, they’d have to pass a new budget resolution or get 60 votes -- both unlikely events. But the bill has similar (and potentially graver) political challenges as the old repeal bills because of the slashes to Medicaid and the concomitant loss of coverage for millions of Americans. In addition, as Vox points out, the bill “will have clear state-by-state winners and losers in a way that other bills did not. This is because its block-grant formula redistributes the Obamacare funding from states that expanded Medicaid to states that did not.” For example, Alaska, Arizona, and West Virginia -- to name just three states with crucial GOP senators -- would likely lose hundreds of millions of dollars, though Cassidy is trying to change the numbers to get these senators on board. McConnell has pledged a vote if 50 of his 52 members support the bill. What’s scary to me is that 49 Republicans have already come out and voted for a similarly cruel and ridiculous bill, so they face little downside to voting again. And this time, McCain is less likely to be the saving figure, given his Best Bud status with Graham. So that could get them to 50 right there. Andy Slavitt reports that the bill’s funding is being shifted around to move money from blue states to red states, especially Arizona (to get McCain).

MoveOn’s Ben Wikler explains more about the actual process ahead of us. Here are the highlights. First, the GOP conference meets tomorrow (so that’s a good time to CALL). Then they go home for a recess on Wednesday through Monday, which means you should look for (or plan your own) protests and JOIN THEM. The Senate can only vote if the CBO gives a score to the bill, but the GOP is now asking the CBO to score only the cost and not the coverage (ie, how many people lose access); Dems will fight against this. If the bill is going to come to a vote, there are exactly three days for a possible vote: September 27-29 (the 30th is Yom Kippur). Wikler also notes that McCain has said that he won’t vote without hearings, so Sen. Johnson has scheduled a show-hearing (wrong committee, no real warning). And then the bill will come for a vote with ZERO hours of debate (Wilker explains how that works here -- the bottom line is that Graham-Cassidy will be simply an amendment on the AHCA, the original House bill that the Senate took up months ago and used up all debate on).  

Folks, we need CALL CALL CALL. I know it’s hard to mobilize on this right now when there is so much going on that merits our attention and concern (and our hiding under the covers with our fingers in our ears), but we have TWO WEEKS to kill this bill. If you live in Colorado, Ohio, Arizona, West Virginia, Nevada or Alaska, CALL YOUR SENATOR. If you live in any other state represented by a Republican, CALL YOUR SENATOR. We have beaten this effort many times in the past few months; we need to do it one more time in the next two weeks. Let’s do this.

THIS COULD BE THE WAY FORWARD FOR DEMS: I want to highlight this article by Brian Beutler, in which he argues that the policy agenda that will move the Dems back to majority status should be tackling the concentrate of corporate power (ie, antitrust reform). It sounds dry. But it is in many ways the defining issue of our time. (Josh Barro made a similar though less-well-thought-out point in June.)

Buetler outlines how the Consumer Finance Protection Board, Elizabeth Warren’s brainchild, was born and has thrived over the last few years, and advocates for a similar effort to address monopolies. First, we must move away from evaluating mergers only on the “consumer welfare” metric (i.e., will consumers pay more) and instead focus on many other important factors, like whether upstream competition is blocked, whether workers will have the ability to move between jobs, whether private user data will be protected, etc. As Roosevelt Institute’s Marshall Steinbaum says, “What we need is, rather than a consumer-welfare standard, a competitive marketplace standard.” “But the critical piece, according to Steinbaum, Khan, and others, will be whether Democrats advocate a reversal of the government’s basic presumption that mergers are permissible, and instead require companies to show that their mergers will benefit the economy across these metrics before a merger can be approved.” Lefty scholars are now drafting antitrust white papers and bills for the Democrats to introduce and discuss. “By the time Democrats set about selecting their next presidential nominee, a seriousness about antitrust reform—not empty platitudes, but detailed commitments—will be a litmus test.” Of course, this could force the Dems into direct conflict with their biggest donors, including the tech giants. Read the article to learn more about this issue and the politics surrounding it. I think it needs to be a central component of how the Democratic party moves forward. We need this issue to give people a reason to vote FOR Dems, and not just against the GOP. (Josh Barro has an interesting column about how the anti-monopoly drive will probably fail against Big Tech because the monopolistic tendencies of firms like Google and Facebook are popular. He advises focusing on pharma, hospitals, and telecom companies.)

Endorsements:

• At the risk of stepping into a possible minefield, I highly, highly recommend this Emily Yoffe article about the disturbing problems with campus adjudications of sexual assault, problems that were in large part caused by well-intentioned Obama-era reforms. We need to take sexual assault seriously. And we also need to avoid a mob mentality that confirms guilty without process and that gets swept up in its own momentum and bureaucracy. This article is a convincing argument that current rules are deeply damaging -- and that the current administration’s determination to rethink those rules is sorely needed. (If you think Yoffe gets it wrong, I’d love to hear from you.)
• This Lindy West piece about Ivanka Trump (even though it’s 10 days old).
• I did not see the end of this recipe review coming.
• This interview Hillary Clinton gave to Pod Save America. Her thoughts on Bernie’s freedom to propose wild new programs, while she felt obligated to defend and build on Obama’s record, were really interesting and something I had not thought of before. She also comes off as warm, intelligent, and pissed as hell. It’s nice.

THIS WEEK IN POLITICAL NEWS -- 9/10/17

I Was Too Tired on Thursday Edition

KILLING THE DREAM: On Tuesday, racist elf Jeff Sessions announced (with irrepressible glee) that the Trump administration was ending the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, aka “DACA,” under which 800,000 undocumented Americans who had been brought to the US by their parents, had clean criminal records, and were going to school or serving in the military were given work permits (after paying a fee) and allowed to come out of the shadows without fear of deportation. Sessions’ speech, unsurprisingly, was chock full of racist-tinged lies about these young people and about the program. The announcement was spurred by a fake deadline imposed by a group of right-wing state Attorneys General who had threatened to sue the Administration if it did not cancel DACA.

Trump had, of course, campaigned as an anti-immigrant hardliner, but he has never been clear on his stance about DACA. Before he was a candidate, he berated Republicans for opposing the Dream Act (which would have enacted the same protections by law), and up through last week he was saying that he “loved” the Dreamers and that no one should be worried. And then, too afraid to face the cameras himself, he sent Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III out to announce the end of the program -- but also that the end would not come immediately but rather in 6 months, ostensibly to give Congress the time to pass a Dream Act itself. This was supposedly necessary because Trump’s rule of law concerns about the reach of the DACA executive order. (Yeah, sure, whatever.)

Regardless, for the vast majority of Dreamers, the 6-month delay is basically meaningless, as Greg Sergent explains:

[T]hose whose DACA status is set to expire during the next six months can renew their status, which lasts two years. But . . . those whose status expires after the six-month cutoff cannot renew it. (DACA status lasts two years from the date of implementation, and recipients have been renewing their status after expiration. Because people have been signing up on varying dates over time, their two-year statuses have been expiring in rolling intervals over time, too.) The group whose status expires in the next six months can renew one more time for two more years. But those whose status expires after the six-month deadline cannot. When their status expires, their work permits and protections from deportation are gone.

And about 75% of DACA beneficiaries fall into that second category. “In other words, what the Trump administration is doing isn’t punting on DACA for six months. It’s slowly winding down DACA, in anticipation of ending it entirely. It’s saying that Congress should act, but acting as if it won’t.”

Trump’s announcement decision faced widespread backlash. Voters overwhelmingly oppose deporting these young people. Lindsey Graham and other Republicans signaled a desire to pass something legislatively to protect these young people, for whom America is the only country they’ve ever known. After just a few hours of cable news outrage, Trump (unsurprisingly) immediately backtracked, tweeting that if Congress fails to fix the problem in six months, Trump will “revisit” the issue -- not only undercutting the only leverage he had on Congress, but also misleading Americans about the fact that the government is no longer accepting DACA applications. He then insisted that Dreamers have “nothing to worry about.” This is insane -- and dangerously misleading. “These statements put DREAMers in danger of losing their protections (or applying under false premises) because of misunderstandings. And it lulls Congress into feeling a false sense of security; if there are no changes to DACA between September 5 and March 5, there’s no problem waiting to pass a bill to protect DACA recipients until March 4.”

In the meantime, 15 states have sued the administration over its repeal announcement. While I think the legal arguments are a bit shaky, Dan Hemel puts together the strongest legal case as to why Trump’s announcement violates the Administrative Procedure Act’s requirement that executive action be a process of “reasoned decisionmaking.”

RANT ABOUT THAT STUPID DEBT CEILING DEAL: The press is losing its collective mind over the deal Trump cut with Schumer and Pelosi earlier this week to raise the debt ceiling for three months and pass aid for Hurricane Harvey victims. (I should say, it wasn’t so much a deal as a somewhat strange total capitulation from Trump to the Dems’ first proposal.) No, this does not show that Trump is a “moderate,” or that he’s upending the 2-party system. Jesus Christ people. Nor is this some giant win for the Democrats. Or rather, it’s a win only if we think that every time the GOP leadership is thwarted, it’s automatically a win for us. But that’s a dumb way to think. What we got was another three months to put leverage on the GOP and the White House to pass our priorities (ie, the Dream Act, among other things) when the debt ceiling comes up again. But the GOP also knows that Dems will never actually use the debt ceiling as a hostage device, because (a) we railed against the Republicans for doing that under Obama and (b) it is a crazy dangerous tactic and we are not insane people (and Trump is a chaos president who knows nothing and understands less and is thus the opposite of the person we’d want to negotiate something this dangerous with). So I don’t see really how this gains us that much more leverage -- given that we are unlikely to (and should not) be willing to use it. The only real upside (besides the fact that the debt ceiling did not actually run out and that Harvey aid was funded) is that Paul Ryan is getting the shit kicked out of him on the right, and that’s hilarious. Otherwise, let’s not get excited about Trump being some independent deal maker. He is and will always be a racist, know-nothing buffoon slipping steadily into senility whose only constant attribute is his vast, unfathomable narcissism. /rant

NO END TO THE IDIOCY -- PERSONNEL UPDATE: Here’s a roundup of recent news about how Trump’s hires are faring. He promised to “hire top people . . . people with heart . . . people who are truly, truly capable.” And boy does he deliver!

• Washington Post: “The Environmental Protection Agency has taken the unusual step of putting a political operative in charge of vetting the hundreds of millions of dollars in grants the EPA distributes annually, assigning final funding decisions to a former Trump campaign aide with little environmental policy experience. In this role, John Konkus reviews every award the agency gives out, along with every grant solicitation before it is issued. According to both career and political employees, Konkus has told staff that he is on the lookout for “the double C-word” — climate change — and repeatedly has instructed grant officers to eliminate references to the subject in solicitations.”
• Eric S. Dreiband, nominee to head the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division, has shown a “head-spinning turnarounds on civil rights,” the Boston Glob reports, going from civil rights enforcer at the EEOC to fighting against those regulations as a corporate hired gun. At the EEOC under Bush, Dreiband sued Abercrombie for discrimination, forcing the company to pay $40 million for discriminating against minorities and women job applicants. A few years later, now in the private sector, he represented Abercrombie, defending the company’s policy of refusing to hire a Muslim woman with a headscarf for the front of the store. Vanita Gupta, the head of the Civil Rights Division under Obama, “called him one of the ‘go-to lawyers for corporate America in their efforts in defending themselves against civil rights claims.’”

• CIA director Mike Pompeo appears to be pulling the agency back from its prior efforts to diversify its workforce, Foreign Policy reports. “During his first eight months at the CIA, Pompeo has expressed little interest in attending diversity-related events, including those designed to honor the work of those at the agency, and also to recruit from minority communities at universities and other locations. One source familiar with the matter noted that Pompeo stated he should be called upon to attend a diversity event only as a last resort and preferred other senior leaders to go in his place.” There is particular concern about withdrawing from efforts to boost LGBT enrollment and to encourage and protect Muslim agents. “According to four sources familiar with the matter, Pompeo, who attends weekly Bible studies held in government buildings, referenced God and Christianity repeatedly in his first all-hands speech and in a recent trip report while traveling overseas. According to a profile by the Washington Post’s Greg Miller, Pompeo is working on starting a chaplaincy for the CIA campus like the military has.”
• Trump has now announced nominations for 42 of the 93 United States Attorney positions in the country. All but ONE of his nominees are men, and the vast majority are white.
• After the Trump Foundation illegally donated money to her state attorney general race, now Pam Bondi is joining the Trump Administration. So fun!

THIS SHIT MAKES ME SO EFFING FURIOUS: On Thursday, the credit reporting company Equifax announced that hundreds of thousands millions of people’s private information was compromised in a security breach dated in July 29. Now Bloomberg reports that, in the days immediately following the company’s discovery of the break, three top executives -- including the CFO -- sold $1.3 million worth of company stock, all before the public had any idea what had happened. “Regulatory filings show that three days later, Chief Financial Officer John Gamble sold shares worth $946,374 and Joseph Loughran, president of U.S. information solutions, exercised options to dispose of stock worth $584,099. Rodolfo Ploder, president of workforce solutions, sold $250,458 of stock on Aug. 2. None of the filings lists the transactions as being part of 10b5-1 pre-scheduled trading plans.” Bloomberg does not say whether this is a crime. It has to be a crime, right? This MUST be the definition of criminal behavior by corporate CEOs, right? PLEASE SAY I’M RIGHT AND THAT THESE PEOPLE WILL END UP IN PRISON. Of course, since they’re rich and (presumably) white and corporate, they’ll probably be totally fine and suffer zero consequences and leave Equifax with enormous multi-million-dollar payouts. Because that’s the world we live in now.

P.S. I wrote this part originally on Wednesday or Thursday. Since then I’ve seen basically no stories about this, or even really about the Equifax breach. What is going on? Are we all just so exhausted by these repeated breaches that at this point, we’ve learned to expect little better?

GOOD NEWS: “In a stark repudiation of the Trump administration, lawmakers on Thursday passed a spending bill that overturned the president’s steep proposed cuts to foreign aid and diplomacy. Folded into the bill are management amendments that straitjacket some of Secretary of State Rex Tillerson’s efforts to redesign the State Department. The Senate Appropriations Committee approved $51 billion for the State Department, foreign operations, and related programs in its 2018 appropriations bill — almost $11 billion above President Trump’s request.”

Endorsements:

• Fun video of the week: Stephen Colbert’s Alter Egos -- Trump World.
• You really MUST read this New Yorker article about the unbelievably horrific way this standout Muslim NYPD officer was treated -- by the NYPD. It is shocking.
• This piece on the New York wealthy. Key excerpt:
• When we evaluate people’s moral worth on the basis of where and how they live and work, we reinforce the idea that what matters is what people do, not what they have. With every such judgment, we reproduce a system in which being astronomically wealthy is acceptable as long as wealthy people are morally good. . . . Instead, we should talk not about the moral worth of individuals but about the moral worth of particular social arrangements. Is the society we want one in which it is acceptable for some people to have tens of millions or billions of dollars as long as they are hardworking, generous, not materialistic and down to earth? Or should there be some other moral rubric, that would strive for a society in which such high levels of inequality were morally unacceptable, regardless of how nice or moderate its beneficiaries are?
• Trump’s inability to talk about anything like a normal human is really, really astounding. Also, check out Milania in this video. She seems also to not have, you know, that whole human thing down yet.
• More evidence: How is this not one of the weirdest photos of all time?? It’s like the whole family has this vague sense of how humans behave but can never get it quite right. WHAT IS GOING ON??
• Off Topic: This hilarious thread on MJ’s “Remember the Time” video (yes, the video is 25 years old).