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Our current feature story on how things came together last night in the Senate chamber is by our reporter Tierney Sneed who’s been on the Obamacare repeal beat for the last nine months and with TPM for just over two years. Next week Tierney hands off the health care beat to Alice Ollstein and joins our new Investigations Desk as the second member of that team. We have so many great people working at TPM right now that I’m always hesitant to call out individuals. But today I just want to highlight how critical a member of our team Tierney has been on this singularly important beat and how important we know she’ll be with this very different assignment starting next week. Keep an eye out for her byline and if you’re on Twitter follow her on Twitter too.
I was up late last night, like many of you, watching the drama unfold in the Senate chamber. Here’s our Tierney Sneed’s look at how it looked actually inside the chamber as it all happened. Let me share a few thoughts on what now certainly seems like a momentous and perhaps concluding moment. Read More
Please read Tierney Sneed’s account of being in the Senate chamber last night as it became apparent – in slow, excruciating fashion–that John McCain was going to block Obamacare repeal.
Big props to Tierney, Alice Ollstein, Cameron Joseph and the whole TPM team on covering this unprecedented legislative rollercoaster over the last several weeks and months. They work longer and harder and with more good humor than you can possibly know.
Coming off a failure this big, Trump will be looking for people to hurt, things to break. Everybody be safe out there.
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