Over recent days, as I’ve spoken to people in the world who might lead the fight against Paul Ryan’s plan to phaseout Medicare and replace it with private insurance vouchers and one message is quite clear: No one is paying attention. No one is ready. No one has a plan. Half the people are still too shell-shocked to think about anything. The other half are telling themselves something so crazy can’t happen. But wait, at least one person on TV is starting to talk about this.
Just a few moments ago Stephanie Ruhle was interviewing Rep. Steve King (R-IA) on MSNBC about immigration policy and maintaining the “American culture, the American civilization” in the face of immigrants from around world.
Here Ruhle asks King whether America hasn’t always been a country of immigrants.
RUHLE: Couldn’t Native Indians say that? This is a country of immigrants.
KING: Well, I’ll just challenge you. Name a country that’s not a country of immigrants. Every nation is a country of immigrants. These are our values that are here.
If you want to understand Rudy and the Rudy world, look at the never finalized but yet failed nomination of Rudy crony and former NYPD Commissioner Bernie Kerik for Department of Homeland Security in December 2004. Same story. Sleaze, payoffs, law-breaking, lotta mafiosos basically everywhere. And Rudes took it international.
For the last couple months I’ve been telling you how we plan to expand our editorial team and our reporting capacity next year. We’re going to do that. But in the nature of a small independent organization, these are necessarily small, incremental additions. (There’s a reason why this outfit has survived for sixteen years.) But looking over the news yesterday and now this evening, there’s a big part of me that wants to throw caution to the wind and hire like 10 new investigative reporters because it’s becoming blindingly clear to me that we’re entering into a sort of golden age of investigative journalism. Perhaps it’s a dark age for the country but it’s a golden age of investigative journalism: we’ve had a direct impact at 60 mph with a mix of grotesque corruption, the most insidious extremism, wild incompetence and international subversion. It’s almost impossible to keep up. There is so much to look at.
Don’t get me wrong. I don’t throw caution to the wind. But it’s been years since I felt such a palpable need for more feet on the ground, such a profusion of stories that call for rocks to be overturned, documents pulled, questions asked.
A lot of you have been writing in that you’ve contacted members of the House and Senate and they simply refuse to tell you how their bosses will vote on Paul Ryan’s Medicare Phaseout plan. They’ve never heard of it; there’s no bill; the boss doesn’t have a position yet. Yada yada yada. Here’s something that will help. There is a plan. In fact, there’s a bill. And virtually every member of the House at least has voted on it. The Ryan Medicare Phaseout proposal is part of the Ryan budget which has been voted on in the House every year since 2011.
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Jon Cohn, one of the best, probably the best health care policy journalist out there, flags that Trump has flipped on phasing out Medicare. As Jon notes here, back in the spring Trump said he wouldn’t touch Medicare or Social Security. But his new transition website says he’ll support the Ryan Phaseout plan.
Lot goin’ on. So in case you missed the latest episode of my new podcast yesterday, check it out. Josh Green and I talk over information from inside the Clinton and Trump data operations to try to figure out why election day turned out the way it did. Listen here.
Just the prospect of Kris Kobach as attorney general should shake loose any remaining sense that the Trump presidency might differ from the Trump campaign.
A bunch of our readers have been trying to find out where their representatives and senators stand on Paul Ryan’s plan to phase out Medicare and replace it with private insurance and vouchers. Ryan says he wants to push this through in a single bill that also repeals Obamacare. Kellyanne Conway says Ryan may try to move forward with the legislation on inauguration day. That seems dubious. But whenever it happens, Ryan has made clear he wants to do it quickly, like in the first month or two after Trump is sworn in. But virtually all the Reps and Senators are refusing to say where they stand. Sometimes there’s game playing and dodges, others times staffers refuse to say what the Rep and Senators position is. So just as an example. TPM Reader BW just called the office of Rep. Ryan Zinke (R-MT) and was told “There is currently no plan to phase out Medicare. Therefore Zinke does not support any plan to phase out Medicare.”
Here are two paragraphs from a piece just out from The Washington Post you really need to read right now.