Am I the only registered Democrat to have mixed feelings over the defeat of Republican efforts to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act? What happens now, I suspect, is that the Republicans and Trump administration will attempt to undermine the ACA through inattention from Health and Human Services (headed by an avaricious physician), lack of enforcement of the mandate from the Internal Revenue Service, and worst of all, an end to subsidies that allowed the insurance companies to offer lower-cost premiums on the exchanges. Republicans will blame Democrats and vice-versa. That’s better than denying coverage outright to millions, but it’s worse that what is going on now.
Anthony Scaramucci, like his boss, thinks the DOJ and FBI are his personal attacks squads and defenders, as Allegra Kirkland explains here. Neither of them have the most basic understanding or respect for the rule of law.
I’ve learned – we’ve all learned – that Obamacare repeal is actually never over. But that was some pretty high drama.
We’ve been slogging through the evening toward what was seeming like an inevitable passage of a godforsaken Obamacare repeal bill that not even most Senate Republicans liked or wanted to see become law. But in the last several minutes things have ground to a halt on the Senate floor, and it is increasingly looking plausibly like Mitch McConnell lacks the votes to pass the so-called skinny repeal bill. TPM’s Tierney Sneed is in the Senate chamber and from her vantage point things look amiss. It’s easy to read way too much into minor things, but at the moment Senate business has stalled. McConnell and Vice President Mike Pence and other key Republicans are all on the Senate floor, and the presumed no votes are being worked hard, Tierney reports. Among the possible no votes is John McCain. Pence has been talking to McCain for 20 minutes, Tierney reports. Stay tuned …
Late Update: As of 1:25 a.m. ET, voting has begun on the skinny repeal bill.
It’s been quite a day. And it’s ending with White House Communications Director/Majordomo Anthony Scaramucci’s maybe literally insane interview with The New Yorker’s Ryan Lizza. But this morning he gave what was no doubt a less profanity-laced but in its own way no less wild and crazy live interview on CNN. Here’s my annotated edition of that interview. Pay particular note to the “buddies of mine” Scaramucci’s calling at the FBI to put the scare on his “knee-knocker” enemies in the White House. Read More
Four GOP senators demand some kind of assurance from the House that if the Senate passes “skinny repeal” of Obamacare, the bill will go to conference – and not simply be passed by the House.
The problem, one of many, actually, is there’s no formal mechanism for the House to assure the Senate that it won’t pass a bill the Senate just passed! This isn’t how it works!
Three senators with the capacity and perhaps the propensity to blow up the Senate GOP’s march toward passing a so-called skinny repeal of Obamacare are about to hold a hastily arranged press conference on the Hill. John McCain, Lindsey Graham and Ron Johnson. Stay tuned …
Senate GOP’s Obamacare repeal hijinks have become even more ridiculous. No, really. Here’s the very latest.
Over recent months I’ve been telling you about various changes we’re making at TPM, expanding our team with the changes made possible with our membership program, setting up our new Investigations Desk and a bunch more. What I wanted with the Investigations Desk was to add a stable of new reporters who could dramatically increase our ability to break news on investigative stories like the Trump/Russia probe in addition to the critical reporting we already do on legislative and policy stories on Capitol Hill. A good example of the latter is what we’re doing right now on the on-going Trumpcare trainwreck. So I was excited on several levels when I saw this new story just out from iDesk reporter Sam Thielman and Editor Catherine Thompson. I was pumped to see this particular story but also to see our larger plans coming to fruition.
You know that for some time I’ve been focused on this ‘peace plan’ meeting from back in February where Trump business partner Felix Sater and Trump lawyer Michael Cohen met with a Ukrainian parliamentarian who had a ‘peace plan’ which would essentially give Russia everything it wanted in the Ukraine and also had a dossier of paper documents which he needed hand delivered to Mike Flynn. Cohen did hand deliver that dossier to Flynn at the White House. But we’ve never learned what was in it or what happened to it. Sam found there’s a significant additional backstory that had heretofore gone unreported. Artemenko, the Ukrainian lawmaker pitched his peace plan and dossier while he and Sater were already working on putting together a business deal to refurbish all Ukraine’s Soviet-era nuclear power plants and begin exporting energy to neighboring countries in Eastern Europe. Said Sater: “We were working on a business deal for about five months, and he kept telling me about the peace deal, and as the Trump administration won, that’s when I delivered it [the peace deal] to them.” Check out our full story.
This morning there is news that there will – for now – be no change in the US military’s policy toward transgender service members. The news comes in the form of a letter shared with members of the press from Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Joseph Dunford.
You can see the letter here. Read More