We’ve now updated the Ethics Office Meltdown vote list with a new category – Dodgers: Reps who earlier refused to say how they voted and are now sending out press releases saying they’re glad the terrible rule change is being yanked.
When House Republicans met in a closed door caucus meeting Monday night to vote on reining in the Office of Congressional Ethics, aggrieved members of the House stood up to recount stories of being victimized by the out-of-control oversight office. In the aftermath of the ethics vote debacle, the spokesman for one member of Congress, Rep. Duncan Hunter (R-CA), discussed his boss’s victimization with the local paper, The San Diego Union-Tribune.
Hunter, who inherited his seat from his father and voted in favor of gutting the oversight office, was victimized when the Office questioned tens of thousands of dollars worth of campaign spending. Spokesman Joe Kasper noted one particularly egregious case of investigative overreach in which the Office questioned Hunter’s use of $600 of campaign funds for airline tickets for the family rabbit.
The AMA, which has been rather comically pro-Trump to date, came out today and told Republicans that they shouldn’t repeal Obamacare without a clear replacement. Notably, even two of the most conservative health care economists at AEI, came out yesterday and said that ‘repeal and delay’ would be a disaster. The truth is that “repeal and delay” is the policy equivalent of taking off from JFK to Heathrow with 2,000 miles worth of gas and saying you’re going to figure it out en route. No one who knows anything about health care economics, even people who are staunch free marketeers and hate Obamacare, think that makes any sense.
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In what may be an important shift, the overall impression that Republicans on the Hill are giving today is that they’re beginning to grapple at long last with some of the myriad political and policy downsides of Obamacare repeal. It’s still early, and we need more evidence of a real shift before we draw any firm conclusions. But this reporting from Lauren Fox suggests that one of the immediate consequences of growing GOP wariness may be a push from some members to ensure that some sort of replacement plan is passed at the same time as repeal.
A story out in The Wall Street Journal this evening reports that President-Elect Trump and his advisors plan to “restructure and pare back the nation’s top spy agency”, the CIA because they believe it and the “Office of the Director of National Intelligence [have] become bloated and politicized.” Trump plans “to restructure the Central Intelligence Agency, cutting back on staffing at its Virginia headquarters and pushing more people out into field posts around the world.” It’s not clear to me whether that latter aim means favoring and expanding the number of operatives versus analysts or pushing analysts out into offices around the world. They may not know themselves.
The fact that Republicans and the incoming Republican President are spending so much time insisting that Obamacare is the most horriblest, biggest failure ever is quite telling. Who do they need to convince?
Jim Woolsey is far, far from wearing a white hat in the foreign policy and national security world in my book. But this is interesting.
James Woolsey has resigned from Trump transition. Sources say he was cut out of intel talks w/ Trump & Flynn, grew uncomfortable. Story TK
— Philip Rucker (@PhilipRucker) January 5, 2017
There are now three Republican Senators who have expressed serious reservations about the GOP’s “repeal and delay” plan for repealing Obamacare: Sens. Collins, Cotton and Paul. In a normal world, this should be no surprise. Virtually If all three defected (a very big if), ObamaCare repeal would be dead in its tracks until Republicans decided on a replacement.
Why does Rep. Keith Ellison want to be chair of the DNC? I spent forty minutes talking to him about just that. Here’s Episode 11 of The Josh Marshall Show. I talk to Ellison about why he wants to head the DNC, what he’ll do if he gets the job and why he’d be best for the position.
Normally, the full version of The Josh Marshall Show is for Prime subscribers only. But given the newsworthiness of the DNC race, we’re making the full version available to all. Click here to listen.