THIS WEEK IN POLITICAL NEWS -- 3/19/17

THE COURTS RIDE IN ON THEIR WHITE HORSES: The federal court system did some good work this week (and some not so good -- see Must Read of the Week), and it’s nice to start with some good news. First, two federal judges (in Hawaii and Maryland) struck down Trump’s “revised” Muslim travel ban this week, finding that the ban violated the Establishment Clause by being explicitly targeted at Muslims. The Hawaii opinion is clear, powerful, and worth a read (especially starting at page 28). The judge uses the words of Trump and his campaign advisors (hi there, Giuliani!) to show that this was always intended to be a ban of Muslims, period. It mocks the “illogic” of the government’s position that it can’t be a Muslim ban if only 9% of the world’s Muslims are affected: “The notion that one can demonstrate animus toward any group of people only by targeting all of them at once is fundamentally flawed.” And it rejected the argument that the court may only look at the neutral text of the ban itself, without considering the context (ie, the many, many openly anti-Islam statements made about the ban by Trump and other White House officials). “The record before this court . . . includes significant and unrebutted evidence of religious animus driving the promulgation of the Executive Order and its related predecessor.” Good stuff there; go read it! The other court victory worth hailing came late last Friday, when a federal court panel in Texas “ruled that Texas’s Republican-led legislature gerrymandered some of the state’s congressional districts to stunt the growing influence of minority voters.” It’s a great victory, but these two sentences, from the Washington Post, put into stark relief the supremely absurd jurisprudence governing these issues: “All three judges agreed that the legislature packed minorities into some districts and splintered them among others to dilute their power. But the jurists disagreed about whether that was simply partisan gerrymandering, which the Supreme Court has tolerated, or racial discrimination, which is forbidden.” As our parties become more and more racially polarized, the Supreme Court is going to have to figure out a better way of protecting minority voters. Given the any-day-now ascendancy of Gorsuch, however, let’s not hold our breath for that one.

HEALTH CARE UPDATE: This week, the Republican Party continued to hemorrhage from the self-inflicted wound that is their insane Obamacare “replacement” plan, a plan the CBO found would kick 24 million people off their insurance, including 17 million in the first year alone. It would dramatically increase costs for poorer, sicker, and older Americans, and the “savings” in lower premium costs that eventually kick in come from the fact that older people will simply be pushed out from the insurance pools. The CBO score, which came in late Monday, ricocheted like a bullet around Washington. Sens. Ted Cruz, Tom Cotton, and Mike Lee have railed against the bill and said it can’t pass the Senate; Sen. Susan Collins announced Friday  she won’t vote for it in its current form; three House GOPers voted against the bill in committee; and the Freedom Caucus has signaled it will not cave in its opposition. McClatchy tallies 27 House Republicans as leaning no on the bill, and a new poll puts opposition to the bill at 45% to 24% in support. All of this forced Paul Ryan to admit this week that the bill would have to change to pass the House: Those changes appear to be ones that make the bill crueler and even more of an anti-Medicaid cudgel, allowing states to put a work requirement on Medicaid recipients; “convert Medicaid from an entitlement program (which covers anyone who meets certain eligibility requirements) into a block grant (a fixed annual sum that does not rise or fall with the poverty rate);” and block states that have not yet expanded Medicaid from doing so in the future. These changes will only imperil its chances in the Senate even more. Regardless, the GOP has already declared they won’t wait for a revised CBO score before voting. The House plans to vote THIS WEEK on the bill, which (remember) was released TWO weeks ago and which has received no substantial amendments, markups, or revisions of any kind, even after the devastating CBO report. The next two weeks are going to be CRUCIAL in putting pressure on your GOP reps and senators to oppose this bill.

TRUMP’S A LIAR, CONT.: This week, it was made definitive that Trump (obviously) lied about being “wiretapped” by Obama. (House Intelligence Committee chair David Nunes, a Trump stooge, scolded the press even as he admitted there was no evidence for Trump’s lie: “[A]re you going to take the tweets literally? And if you are then clearly the president was wrong.”) So there is no question that this was a lie. But he has not only refused to back down or apologize, he and his minions are digging in their heels, insisting that another conspiracy theory -- that Obama asked the British to surveil Trump for him -- is true. Even after McMaster and Spicer apologized to the British ambassador for the lie (although the White House later denied there as any apology), Trump insisted it was true in a press conference with Angela Merkel. The British are super, super pissed about this. This is honestly a very big deal. But that’s not even the lie I wanted to highlight. Washington Post reporter David Farenthold (who has doggedly pursued Trump’s charitable giving situation for the last 1.5 years) follows up on three key charity-related claims Trump has made post election and finds -- shocker! -- that he has followed through with none of them. First, he promised to donate his presidential salary to charity. When pressed on this claim, Spicer acknowledged that Trump has been accepting the paychecks but intends to donate the salary at the end of the year. Uh huh. Second, the Inauguration Committee had promised to donate all leftover funds to charity, but now refuses to provide any information on how much is left or when and to whom it will be donated. And third, Trump memorably promised to “voluntarily donate all profits from foreign-government payments made to his hotel” to the U.S. treasury. There has been nothing said since then about how this would work, who’s in charge of seeing it happen, and how we will know when and how the donations are being made.

THE BUDGET IS BAD, BUT: The budget Trump released this week is really, really bad. You’ve heard all the reasons it’s terrible -- and they’re true. It is an insane, cruel, unAmerican document that would (once again) hit those who supported him most the hardest. But ultimately, guys, it’s not worth spending that much time on because it’s not going anywhere. Ed Kilgore explains why this budget is not going to happen, ever. First, it’s not really a budget; it has no economic forecasts of the consequences of its cuts or spending, including short-term costs or long-term deficits and debt. Second, Congress has a very hard time cutting discretionary spending. Third, the defense spending hikes violate the “sequester” law that is still on the books. Fourth, he’ll need Democratic votes to boost military spending the way he wants to, and that won’t happen, or at least without giveaways on the non-defense side. “Any way you look at it, OMB’s drastic cuts ain’t happening, and in that respect as in others, the “Trump Budget” isn’t remotely as terrifying as it purports to be. There is a whole separate line of questions that can be asked about why the new administration chose to rattle hobgoblins at all the supporters and beneficiaries of the programs it pretends it is going to kill.”

TO KEEP AN EYE ON: “Former U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara, who was removed from his post by the Trump administration last week, was overseeing an investigation into stock trades made by the president’s health secretary, according to a person familiar with the office.”

Fun Video of the Week: Compare this to this.

Must Read of the Week: This relatively short Slate piece discusses an OUTRAGEOUS and truly shocking case of police misconduct, and the enormous problem of court-created rules that make suing police officers virtually impossible.

THIS WEEK IN POLITICAL NEWS -- 3/12/17

The Repeal and Go F--- Yourself Edition

Note: I am experimenting with sending these out on Sundays instead of Thursday nights, in the interest of actually having time to write them. But I may switch back, so keep watch of your inbox!

REPLACEMENT -- THE FACTS: We finally got a look at the GOP's "repeal and replace" health care bill. It's pretty terrible, though it has a fwe non-terrible features: It keeps Obamacare’s ban on charging sick people more for insurance; the ban on annual and lifetime caps on coverage; the requirement that preventative care and other basic services be provided without copays; a cap on individual’s out-of-pocket expenses; and the permission for children up to 26 to stay on their parents’ health plans. But it changes crucial parts of Obamacare, most importantly slashing the subsidies, replacing the needs-based payments with a flat subsidy and allowing insurers to charge older people up to 5 times more than others. And while Obamacare’s subsidies phase out pretty quickly as a person’s income rises, the Republicans shell out money to families making up to $150,000. So while Obamacare gave more generous subsidies to poorer and older people, and pegged those subsidies to the actual cost of healthcare in a given area (meaning that rural areas with fewer choices tended to get higher subsidies, and as healthcare costs went up, so did subsidies), the GOP bill effectively transfers money from the poor, sick, and old to the rich, healthy, and young. “A 60-year-old earning $20,000 in Lincoln, Neb., currently gets a subsidy of $18,470 to help her buy insurance, with extra subsidies to help her pay deductibles and co-payments, according to calculations made by Kaiser. Under the new legislation, she would get a subsidy of $4,000, and no help with cost sharing.” Jonathan Cohn, on Brian Beutler’s podcast, explained the difference this way: “That’s the idea [of Obamacare]: the tax credits are supposed to be a guarantee, and they will get bigger if either you don’t have a lot of money or if insurance in your area costs a lot. The Republican tax credits are not a guarantee. They are a flat amount. They go up by age, but that’s it.”

Gone also is the individual mandate (which makes those without insurance pay a fine to the government), replaced with a 30% surcharge insurance companies can charge those who have a more than 2-month gap in coverage. (This gets it backward, of course, because with this hefty charge, only the sickest people would have an incentive to pay the charge and sign up for coverage, making the market sicker and more expensive than the existing individual market, which already skews too sick and expensive.) The other big and potentially catastrophic change would be to Medicare, whose funding would be dramatically cut starting in 2020. “Currently, Medicaid costs are shared between states and the federal government, but the funding is open-ended, so the federal government pays its percentage of whatever states spend. Under the proposed bill, the amount of federal funding would be capped on a per-person basis . . . [b]ut that per-capita amount might not grow as fast as Medicaid costs, which could leave states on the hook for an ever-increasing share of the costs of the program.” This will almost certainly lead to a widespread cut in funding and services for Medicaid patients. Most important from a GOP perspective -- and the raison d’etre of its existence -- is that the bill repeals almost all of Obamacare’s taxes -- most importantly, taxes on the rich, as well as taxes on things like medical devices, tanning salons, and -- oh yeah -- insurance executive salaries over half a million dollars. It’s a $600 billion tax cut to the rich. And the bill also drops Obamacare’s mental-health-parity and addiction treatment requirements -- but that’s fine, because we’re not in any kind of addiction crisis right now or anything.  

As a result of all of these changes, Standard & Poor’s estimates that between 6 and 10 million people will lose their insurance. The Brookings Institution estimates that at least 15 million people will lose health insurance. No wonder the GOP wants to rush the bill through before the CBO has a chance to analyze it.

REPLACEMENT -- THE POLITICS: I’ve said it a thousand times: The only thing saving us from the most dire consequences of the Trump/GOP takeover of government is their staggering incompetence. This bill was rolled out on Monday, apparently before the GOP had lined up any support for it among its normal constituents. Heritage Foundation, the Club for Growth, and FreedomWorks are all against it, as are the Koch Brothers. Breitbart has been vocal in opposition, and even Fox News’ Tucker Carlson asked Paul Ryan why he included a massive tax cut for the rich (Ryan’s response: “I’m not concerned about it.”). The AARP, the American Hospitals Association, the American Academy of Family Physicians, the American Academy of Pediatrics and the American Medical Association have all come out against the bill. Even the chief medical officer of Medicaid -- a government employee -- spoke publicly about his opposition. Four Republican senators --  Rob Portman (OH), Shelley Moore Capito (WV), Cory Gardner (CO), and Lisa Murkowski (AK) -- have written to Mitch McConnell saying they cannot support a decimation of Medicaid. (Republicans can only afford to lose two votes in the Senate). On the other hand, the uber-conservative Freedom Caucus opposes the bill because it is too generous and too much like Obamacare; Senator Tom Cotton has said the bill can’t pass the Senate. And the people who will be most hurt by this bill are the same people who voted overwhelmingly for Trump. (Example: Those set to lose $7,500 in subsidies went for Trump 58% to 39%.) All of this is to say that there is a real (relatively good) chance that this bill dies a painful death. But we have to keep pushing our reps and senators on this (I’m looking at you, Colorado residents!).

REPLACEMENT -- THE STUNNING HYPOCRISY AND BULLSHIT: I basically just want to quote this entire Jonathan Chait piece, which you should all read. Here’s a big excerpt:

The national health-care debate began in 2009. Republicans have had eight years since then to draw up and unify around a plan of their own. They have spent this time insisting they could do so easily. For most of the year, in fact, House Republicans have been running a television ad assuring the public they already “have a plan” with wonderful features: “Health insurance that provides more choices and better care, at lower costs. Provides peace of mind to people with preexisting conditions … without disrupting existing coverage.” Eventually they had told the lie so long it became impossible for them to abandon it. And so Republicans have found themselves frantically scrawling out a hopelessly inadequate solution in order to meet a self-imposed deadline driven by their overarching desire to cut taxes for the rich.

Ezra Klein writes, “It is difficult to say what question, or set of questions, would lead to this bill as an answer. Were voters clamoring for a bill that cut taxes on the rich, raised premiums on the old, and cut subsidies for the poor? Will Americans be happy when 15 million people lose their health insurance and many of those remaining face higher deductibles?”

The Republicans have been lying about Obamacare for 7 years. They said it was “shoved down our throats” and passed in the dead of night. In fact, it went through a full year of painstaking, exhausting, nerve-wracking debate and negotiation and compromise and votes. Meanwhile, the GOP passed its replacement bill out of committee at 4:30 in the morning. Seriously. They spent years complaining about Obamacare’s cut to Medicare -- and then they pocketed those cuts in their own bill. They spent years insisting that premiums and deductibles were too high, and then wrote a bill that will cause out-of-pocket costs to soar. They complained that Obamacare delayed many of its provisions to juice its CBO score. But their bill puts off its Medicaid cuts for two years, and the GOP now insists that the CBO is stupid and worthless and doesn’t matter, and they are moving forward with passing the bill before even knowing what the CBO says it will do to the deficit or to the number of insured.

And let’s not forget that this bill violates many key promises Trump made throughout his campaign:

• “I’m not going to cut Medicare or Medicaid.” [May 2015]
• "I am going to take care of everybody. I don’t care if it costs me votes or not. Everybody’s going to be taken care of much better than they’re taken care of now." [Sept. 2015]
• “You will end up with great health care for a fraction of the price and that will take place immediately after we go in. Immediately! Fast! Quick!” [Feb. 2016]
• “You will have the finest health care plan there is. . . . Obamacare is a total disaster and not only are your rates going up by numbers that nobody’s ever believed, but your deductibles are going up. So that unless you get hit by a truck, you will never be able to use it. It's a disastrous plan and it has to be repealed and replaced.” [Oct. 2016]
• “We’re going to have insurance for everybody,” Mr. Trump said. “There was a philosophy in some circles that if you can’t pay for it, you don’t get it. That’s not going to happen with us.” [Jan. 15, 2017]

LIAR IN CHIEF, PART 10,000: How amazing that it was just last Saturday that Trump tweeted out that he had “found out” that Obama had wiretapped Trump’s phones during the election? And then the White House promptly refused to answer any questions, instead calling for a congressional “investigation” into what the president had already asserted was a fact? Yeah, that was insane. Why am I not surprised that there’s been essentially no follow up? It is now just taken as a given that we have a president who serially lies -- about some of the most important and urgent issues conceivable -- in public, with no repercussions or consequences or shame. The House Intelligence Committee is now asking for Trump to turn over his “evidence” about this by tomorrow. That’s obviously never going to happen and also no one will care because nothing matters. The introduction of the dumpster fire GOP “replacement” plan was the biggest gift to Trump he could have ever hoped for, because heaven forbid we concentrate on two things at once.

PUT ON YOUR RADAR: Here’s yet another thing to put in the panic file. House Republicans are advancing a series of bills that would make it dramatically harder for consumers and employees to file lawsuits against corporations and others that have wronged them. “One proposal would limit monetary awards in medical malpractice suits to $250,000 for noneconomic damages, which include pain and suffering,” while another bill “would permit class-action lawsuits to proceed in federal court only if every person in the class had ‘an injury of the same type and scope.’” These are dramatic measures. The idea that, no matter the injury, a plaintiff would face an automatic (and really very low) cap on damages is really outrageous. And the class action bill could make it infinitely harder to pursue bad actors: “It could sharply restrict membership in a class, for example, to women who had been sexually harassed in the same way by the same manager.”

Must Read: One of my all-time favorite writers Richard Lawson (who usually writes about movies and pop culture) wrote a brilliant and insightful and a Hell Yes! column on why Bush nostalgia is so disgusting. Please read it!

Best Video of the Week Ever: I’m sure by now you’ve all seen this glorious 2 minute video of a BBC interview being interrupted by some insanely adorable children. If not, rectify that situation IMMEDIATELY. And then read this play-by-play that makes the video even more hilarious and winning than it already is. (And people say these newsletters are depressing!)

Bonus Video: Kate McKinnon’s Jeff Sessions is my new favorite part of SNL. This week’s is not to be missed.

THIS WEEK IN POLITICAL NEWS -- 3/3/17

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!!