Dan Drezner/WaPo:
Fewer than a hundred days into the Trump administration, there are two, actually three, competing narratives about how the government is being run. The first narrative is the Trump administration’s claim that things are running so, so smoothly. A brief glance at the poll numberssuggests that not many people are buying this, so we can discard it quickly.
The second narrative, made by the Wall Street Journal’s editorial board among many others, is that America’s system of checks and balances turns out to be working pretty well. President Trump’s more egregious moves have been checked by federal courts and even by the court of public opinion at times...
There’s a lot to this argument. But if I may, I’d like to proffer just a sampling of the news stories that have broken in the past 24 hours to suggest a third and more troubling narrative: the president and his acolytes are beclowning the American state.
Michael Gerson/WaPo:
Trump’s failing presidency has the GOP in a free fall
This is a pretty bad combination: empty, easily distracted, vindictive, shallow, impatient, incompetent and morally small. This is not the profile of a governing party....
It is now dawning on Republicans what they have done to themselves. They thought they could somehow get away with Trump. That he could be contained. That the adults could provide guidance. That the economy might come to the rescue. That the damage could be limited.
Instead, they are seeing a downward spiral of incompetence and public contempt — a collapse that is yet to reach a floor. A presidency is failing. A party unable to govern is becoming unfit to govern.
And what, in the short term, can be done about it? Nothing. Nothing at all.
The Hill:
A former top official in the CIA and Defense Department describes the Trump White House as a "runaway train," saying "criminal liability" from the 2016 presidential election could extend "all the way to the top."
"The image I have in my head of the White House is a runaway train," Jeremy Bash, a former CIA and Defense Department chief of staff in the Obama administration, said in an interview with MSNBC anchor Brian Williams Thursday night, after former national security adviser Michael Flynn offered to testify in ongoing Russia probes in exchange for immunity.
He added that Justice Department officials would have to weigh whether Flynn's testimony would warrant protection from prosecution.
Jonathan Chait/New York Magazine:
House Republicans to Trump: Steal All You Want
In the above exchange, Chaffetz offers the following defenses:
1. Trump is already rich.
2. Trump enriching himself or his family in office does not affect the average American.
3. Chaffetz doesn’t think he ran with the purpose of getting richer.
4. The voters already knew he had entanglements.
The logic outlined by Chaffetz leaves no possibility for Trump to engage in corruption. What if Trump asks Congress to build a highway to make it easier for customers to access one of his hotels? What if foreign countries are giving Trump’s family preferred stock in return for favorable foreign-policy decisions? Reasons one–four supply sufficient reasons for the chairman of the House Oversight Committee to neither know nor care.
James C. Capretta/RCP:
The GOP Should Regroup and Approach Democrats on Health Care
At this point, it will be difficult to get any congressional Democrats to cooperate on health care. They sense, correctly, that Republicans may not be able to agree on a workable plan, so the most likely scenario at this point is a continuation of the ACA status quo, with perhaps minor changes.
That calculus will only change if the GOP gets its act together and comes forward with a revised and more viable plan. Such a plan need not be endorsed by all Republicans, or even passed in the House or Senate. It just needs to be a credible starting point that would make it clear to Democrats that the GOP has a plan that might actually pass and would work.
To produce such a plan, Republicans need to adjust their thinking. To begin with, the party should accept as a premise that everyone in the United States should be enrolled in health insurance that pays for major medical expenses. A plan that results in an increase of 15, 20, or 25 million uninsured Americans is not acceptable and would result in a political backlash. The goal should be to produce a plan that covers even more people than the ACA, within a framework of a functioning market that relies less on federal control than the ACA. To get there, the AHCA will need to be changed in many different ways, including the following:
Some pretty good suggestions follow.
Ed Yong/Atlantic:
The Transparency Bills That Would Gut the EPA
Two proposed laws would sever the agency from scientific experts, and scientific expertise—all under the guise of honesty and openness
“They’re trying to put a positive spin on it, and for obvious reasons: You’re not going to put on a piece of paper that you’re not interested in pursuing sound science,” says Gina McCarthy, the outgoing EPA administrator. “They’re really designed to prevent us from getting the information we need to protect public health.”
It’s not clear whether the bills are meant to disempower the EPA, but it is notable that they represent a politically safe way of doing so. The agency not only protects the environment; it also protects people from the environment by enforcing longstanding laws like the Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act. And such protections are popular with Americans on both sides of the political spectrum. “It would be unpopular to attack these laws directly, but you can go after the way the EPA administers those laws,” says Yogin Kothari from the Center for Science and Democracy at the Union of Concerned Scientists.
“The result of each bill will be the same—worse science at EPA and less public health protections for American citizens,” says Eddie Bernice Johnson, ranking Democrat member of the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology. “If these bills become law, the ultimate result will be more sick Americans and more dead Americans.”
Gene Sperling and Chris Jennings/Atlantic:
Six Ways to Tell If Trump Is Sabotaging Obamacare
The president appears to be rooting for the Affordable Care Act to fail. Here’s a guide to determine whether he’s laying the groundwork.
Democrats and most health-care experts agree with the Congressional Budget Office and S&P that the ACA is mostly stable—and as The New York Time’s Margot Sanger-Katz recently put it, “Obamacare is not on the verge of ‘explosion.’” Yet as The Washington Post’s Greg Sargent wrote Tuesday, some Republicans—beyond Trump—are worried about the optics of helping the ACA succeed. Concerned that any good governance would be a “concession that the law can be made to work if Republican officials want to participate in making that happen,” they are considering actions that would actually undermine the narrative that “the law is not inherently or inevitably destined to implode.”
Here are six non-legislative markers to watch to judge whether Trump is doing everything in his power to ensure that what Paul Ryan recently called the “the law of the land” will work as well as possible, or whether he chooses the cynical and even vindictive path of putting the health care of millions at risk to sabotage the ACA.
Francis Wilkinson/Bloomberg:
The Costs of Southern Gun Culture
It's difficult to do a comprehensive cost-benefit analysis of American gun culture. It fuels a multibillion-dollar industry employing around 142,000, and it kills more than 30,000 and injures an additional 70,000 annually.
A new study by researchers at Stanford University tries to come to grips with one of the less frequently mentioned costs of gun culture -- the hospitalization expenses resulting from firearm injuries.
The study tracked a total of 267,265 patients who were admitted to a hospital for firearm-related injuries from 2006 through 2014. Costs for initial inpatient hospitalization were about $730 million annually, or a total of $6.6 billion in constant 2014 dollars. Much of that expense landed on the public in the form of Medicaid, Medicare or unreimbursed expenses that the health-care system disperses among consumers.
Yet even that is only a partial accounting.
Rich Lowry/Politico:
The Crisis of Trumpism
If things continue to go badly, it’s easy to see Trump turning to the New York Democrats in his White House. This would entail less emphasis on trade and immigration and fights with the mainstream media, and more emphasis on a nonideological economic boosterism. The loose antecedent for this scenario is Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, who swept into office in California as a drain-the-swamp reformer after winning a populist crusade, and then recalibrated to accommodate the system after suffering politically damaging setbacks.
The range of possible outcomes of the Trump presidency is still wide. Unexpectedly, one of them is that his most die-hard populist supporters will eventually be able to say that Trumpism, like socialism, hasn’t failed, it’s just never been tried.
Sarah Kliff/Vox:
What Republicans legislators are missing: a new health care plan.
Let's be clear: There are plenty of things Republican legislators want to do. There are plenty of things Democratic legislators want to do too. But there is a whole lot of space between setting a legislative goal and achieving it.
Crucially, legislators have not offered up a health care bill that could do better than the American Health Care Act, which Ryan had to pull from a floor vote at the last minute because it couldn't garner enough support.
This is going to be really, really hard — perhaps impossible.