The CBO has re-scored the Obamacare repeal bill taking into account the so-called managers amendments.
Reports coming out that the vote on the House GOP’s Obamacare repeal vote will be postponed. Nothing official yet. But it’s looking mighty unrealistic that this is happening today. Here’s the latest from TPM’s Tierney Sneed.
Sen. Pat Roberts (R-KS) quickly apologizes for his crack about mammograms to TPM’s Alice Ollstein.
A few minutes ago, TPM’s Alice Ollstein asked Sen. Pat Roberts (R-KS) if he supports scrapping Obamacare’s 10 essential health benefits (more here on that). Roberts deadpanned: “I sure don’t want my mammogram benefits taken away.”
The very latest from our two reporters on the Hill about where things stand this morning on Obamacare repeal. Could be a very late night.
CNN digs in on what James Comey meant when he told Congress this week that the FBI is investigating whether there was “coordination” between the Trump campaign and Russia.
It would appear that Paul Ryan still lacks the votes to pass the Obamacare repeal and replace bill (that also ends Medicaid as we know it) tomorrow. Reports are he will be putting the squeeze on individual members this evening, but in the meantime a deal of sorts is apparently being worked out to win over recalcitrant conservatives by promising to gut Obamacare’s 10 essential health benefits, the bare minimums insurance plans must cover – not now, but later in the Senate. Alice Ollstein has the details.
It’s been pretty much nonstop since the conventions last year, so I’m off for one week of vacation, hopefully totally off the grid. We will try to keep you up to date with the very latest links in the editors blog to our team’s essential reporting on Obamacare repeal, as well as the latest developments Trump/Russia and the seemingly limitless number of other stories we are tracking.
In the meantime, if you haven’t already, please wish me a good send off by signing up for Prime. It is critical to our whole operation. And we have big things coming this spring.
I’ll see you in a week.
Now that we’ve learned that Breitbart and Infowars have somehow figured into the FBI’s counter-intelligence probe into Russian interference in the 2016 election, I want to return to a topic we discussed late last summer and into the fall. At the time we saw a disconcerting pattern. Trump friends, associates and staffers would go on TV make some wild claim that no one had heard before. Then it would turn out that the only other place the story had appeared was on RT or SputnikNews or even some Russian language propaganda mill.
So there was an FBI wiretap in Trump Tower! Just not placed there by Barack Obama and not targeting Donald Trump. Between 2011 and 2013 the FBI had a court approved warrant to eavesdrop on a Russian organized crime and money laundering operation out of the 63rd floor of Trump Tower.
Here’s one interesting little nugget.