No sense in denying it. Politico won the primetime last night with a breathtaking story about Congressional hypocrisy. The article’s here. The nub of it is that Democrats and Republicans are supposedly, and secretly, trying to exempt lawmakers and their aides from Obamacare. Back in 2009, when the bill was in its infancy, Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) introduced an amendment to effectively require members and staffs to obtain their insurance on the exchanges just like your average Joe whose employer doesn’t provide health benefits. It passed, for reasons which should be politically obvious. Now members want a mulligan.
Ezra Klein burrows into the specifics and lets these supposedly scheming members of Congress off the hook. All that’s happening, he reports, is that members are trying to figure out a way for Congress to continue contributing to employee premiums.
We’re still burrowing down into the specifics ourselves, because we want to give everyone a completely fair shake, without lapsing into credulity. But at first glance, and then after some initial reporting, I think the truth is somewhere in between. Read More
House GOP freshmen lament that they haven’t had more opportunities to vote to repeal Obamacare:
“If you’re a freshman — the guys who’ve been up here the last year, we can go home and say listen, we voted 36 different times to repeal or replace Obamacare. Tell me what the new guys are supposed to say,” he said. “We haven’t had a repeal or replace vote this year.”
Sahil Kapur reports.
As I’ve mentioned a few times, in about six weeks we’re going to roll out a new version of TPMPrime which among other things will have a members version of the site with a different layout and fewer ads. Click after the jump to see some in-progress designs. Read More
Officials tell the AP that Dzhokhar Tsarnaev described the bomb plot but stopped talking after being read his Miranda rights on Monday.
Meanwhile, Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s name had been in the US terrorist database (apparently placed there by the CIA) for some 18 months prior to the attacks.
It turns out that Rand Paul is actually okay with drone strikes against US citizens within the United States as long as the strikes are on bad guys.
Ladies and gentlemen, Paul Kevin Curtis has left the building.
We already mentioned Adam Savader, the former intern to Newt and Mitt who hacked naked pictures of female college students and then tried to extort them to give him more nude pictures. Well, by Savader’s account he was frequently the guy in the Ellis the Elephant suit from the book written by Callista Gingrich!
House GOP leadership just cancelled the vote on pre-existing condition coverage that was designed to put Democrats in a bind. Instead, their own conservatives revolted. Sahil Kapur laid out what was going on earlier today.
Federal officials say the Boston bombs were detonated by remote control.