Josh Marshall
Play ‘GOP Health Care Slaughterhouse’ with Your Own Rep 
Here’s my latest hobby: looking at just how many constituents House Republicans, especially the so called “moderates,” want to strip of their health care coverage. Congressional Republicans are currently in hard negotiations and a game of chicken for how to pay for their big tax cut, which seems to be getting bigger by the day. They want to pay for it by taking away people’s health care coverage. But just how that gets done is the key. As Nicole Lafond pointed out this week, moderate House Republicans are saying they may not be willing to support $880 billion of cuts to Medicaid. But they might be willing to cut one of the major provisions of Obamacare, the so-called Medicaid expansion system, which pays 90% of the cost for states to substantially expand their Medicaid coverage to more people. This is a big part of how Obamacare dramatically reduced the number of people without coverage. It’s not just about the exchanges and the subsidies.
Read MoreA newly released AJC poll shows support for Donald Trump falling to 43% in Georgia; disapproval 55%.
According to Punchbowl, Sen. Ron Johnson just announced he won’t support the reconciliation bill being written by House Republicans. He says there have to be $5 trillion in cuts to get his vote. And forget about the July 4th deadline. For perspective, the House Freedom Caucus was demanding either $1.5 or $2 trillion.
This is part of what we mean when we say that public opinion matters. If Trump were at 55% support or even 50% there is zero chance Johnson would be doing this. But they see him as currently weak and on the rocks. So someone like Johnson is happy to say, “You’re weak. So I’ll come forward and inflate my cred with hard right-wingers at your expense.”
I’ve gotten a range of responses to yesterday’s post (“Trump’s Already Lost“) on Trump’s gambit and whether he’s already lost. There were a few specific questions, however, that came up again and again, that I wanted to answer.
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Trump’s Already Lost
There are a number of you who simply don’t agree with me about the role of public opinion in the battle against Trumpism, which I sketched out in yesterday’s Backchannel and in other posts over recent months. And that’s great. Because, among other reasons, you keep me on my toes. And TPM isn’t a community that has any one point of view, in any case. But I note this because I have to again whack this same hornets nest today. So apologies in advance, probably mostly to myself. But this time it’s not with an argument, not some proposition I want to convince you of. It’s more a personal interpretation, my perception of events.
Quite simply, I think Trump’s already lost.
Read MoreAmazon quickly scraps idea of listing costs from tariffs on product listings after White House attacks the idea.
Yes, Public Opinion Still Matters … Even More Than Before
As I noted over the weekend, the arrival of Trump’s 100th day in office (April 30th), has been greeted by a raft of terrible polls. Most of the premium pollsters have fielded a poll to coincide with the 100 days milestone. The results range from approval in the low 40s to the very high 30s. Two put Trump’s approval number at 39%. His disapproval ranges from the mid to the high 50s. In response, there has been a predictable chorus that polls, or public opinion itself, simply doesn’t matter anymore. That’s either because Trump won’t face the electorate again, or because there won’t be elections again, or that there won’t be fair elections if they’re held, etc. The overarching argument is that public opinion doesn’t matter anymore because we’re no longer in the “normal” political space we’re used to.
This is categorically false, a basic misunderstanding of what politics even is.
Read MoreNew ABC/WaPo poll shows a similar story to AP-NORC poll: Trump dipping below 40% approval for the first time in his second administration. 39% approve, 55% disapprove. A CNN/SSRS poll shows him with 41% approval and 59% disapproval. In that poll, 22% strongly approve and 45% strongly disapprove.
I said yesterday that I thought we likely weren’t far away from the first national poll which showed Donald Trump’s approval number dipping into the 30s. And here we are: AP-NORC 39% approve, 59% disapprove.
I’ve said repeatedly that we are in the midst of a lengthy national struggle and that it is fundamentally over public opinion. To understand where we are, where we’re going and what the future possibilities are, everything must be seen through that prism. But I noticed a conversation yesterday that prompts me to be more specific.
Read MoreGovernment Executive: “The Veterans Affairs Department is requiring all employees working on its plans to slash tens of thousands of workers from its rolls to sign non-disclosure agreements, an unusual move that has prevented supervisors from sharing basic information with staff.”