Montel Williams/USA Today, self-styled Reagan conservative:
For seven years, House Speaker Paul Ryan and congressional Republicans told us they had “a better way.” Many voters took them at their word. We’re finding now, however, that Republicans had no replacement plan, instead cobbling one together last minute. Most likely, congressional Republicans believed they’d never have to actually repeal Obamacare. I’m betting many of them are praying that enough colleagues oppose the bill so that it simply dies, allowing them to blame Democratic obstruction.
At the end of the day, I don’t want another tax cut at the expense of another father not being able to get his daughter the lifesaving care I was able to provide my daughter. No father should have to choose between back-breaking debt and his child’s life. That is the inevitable result of the Senate proposal.
Republicans need to own the fact they’ve created a monster by lying to the base for the last seven years. They need to come clean. The truth is that they don’t really think this is a good bill. They are afraid of their own voters, to whom they gave a bad idea as a battle cry.
So on the bill, Dean Heller (NV) is a no. a real no. A profile in courage no. And Rs are mad at him. Rand Paul is a probable no (he’s enough of a jerk to do it, to spite his peers). The other conservatives are fake nos. Cruz, e.g., is in it for the attention. Collins and Murkowski? Maybe Murkowski, hard to trust Collins. Flake, Portman? We’ll see but if it fails, it won’t fail by one. None of them have the courage for that.
Huffpost:
What The Senate GOP Health Bill Will Mean For Opioid Treatment
$2 billion in grants isn’t going to solve the opioid crisis.
The draft proposed eliminating most of the taxes the Affordable Care Act imposed on businesses and wealthy Americans, limiting tax credits for middle-income individuals who buy insurance and defunding Planned Parenthood for at least one year. It also called for phasing out the ACA’s Medicaid expansion, which has allowed millions of uninsured people to get coverage. The new bill would also nix the open-ended guarantee of federal funding to states and instead give states pre-determined lump sums per state or per person enrolled. The Republican proposal also makes it easier for states to waive essential benefit requirements for health care services such as mental health and addiction coverage.
Should the bill pass in its current form, funding for opioid and addiction treatment would plummet.
Watch this. West (by God) Virginia’s Shelly Moore Capito with a mom:
Wonkblog/WaPo:
Republicans’ new Obamacare repeal bill has a lot for insurers to like and for hospitals to hate
“Whatever insurers have been doing to lobby paid off,” said Larry Levitt a senior vice president at the Kaiser Family Foundation.
But it also holds major drawbacks, particularly for firms that provide Medicaid coverage. Companies that sell commercial insurance in the marketplaces set up by the Affordable Care Act stand to benefit in the short term, although long-term questions loom over the stability of the marketplace that the bill would set up. Meanwhile, health insurers that provide Medicaid coverage stand to lose if millions of the program's recipients become ineligible.
NBC First Read:
That base isn’t quite there on the House bill (and maybe Senate bill, too): The one potential problem for Republicans on health care, however, is that the 38%-42% isn’t behind the health-care bill that passed the House last month. (And given that the new Senate bill resembles the House legislation, that might apply to that bill as well.) Per the NBC/WSJ poll, just 16% of adults believe that House health care bill is a good idea, versus 48% who say it’s a bad idea. Strikingly, even Republican respondents in the poll are lukewarm about the House bill, with only 34% viewing it positively (and 17% viewing it negatively). By contrast, 73% of Democrats and 48% of independents view it negatively. So compare that 16% who think the House bill is a good idea with the 38% who want Congress and Trump to continue efforts to repeal and replace Obamacare. There is still a lot more GOP enthusiasm about repealing Obamacare than passing the House (or Senate) legislation.
People need to understand this (from the above): The Senate GOP health care bill doesn’t repeal Obamacare; it replaces Medicaid
Steve Schale on GA-06:
Ossoff clearly has a bright future, and would have won in a lot of places last night. But in many ways, his was a candidacy created from whole cloth, and funding and turnout operations alone won't get just anyone across the line - especially somewhere like GA08. Even in this hyper partisan environment, campaigns aren't simply plug and play operations -- they are choices.
When folks ask me what the national and state party should be doing, my answer is simple: Two things, recruit high quality candidates, and register voters. And if Democrats expect to have success in November 2018, that is the work that must be done between now and then.
Rick Wilson/Daily Beast on GA-06:
Name recognition, tribal smell, and motor learning all matter. Jon Ossoff was a newcomer who failed to define himself before it was done to him. It was harder to transform suburban Republican Handel, a known quality, into the concubine of Donald Trump. She may be more conservative than Democrats liked, but she was an ideological Goldilocks for the district...
The media campaign reached a point where the marginal utility of more spending diminished to zero. The Handel campaign and its GOP allies spent heavily as well, and while the ROI of the Democratic campaign fell short, the high cost of defending a safe seat here is something my party can’t replicate at scale. Regardless of the locked-in-stone "this means X about 2018" takes and the absurd bonfire of campaign cash both sides spent, this race came down to the usual fundamentals; candidate quality, ideological fit, and campaign mechanics.
They almost always do.
Dave Wasserman/Cook Political Report on GA-06:
If Democrats were to outperform their "generic" share by eight points across the board in November 2018, they would pick up 80 seats. Of course, that won't happen because Republican incumbents will be tougher to dislodge than special election nominees. But these results fit a pattern that should still worry GOP incumbents everywhere, regardless of Trump's national approval rating and the outcome of the healthcare debate in Congress.
Put another way, Democratic candidates in these elections have won an average of 68 percent of the votes Hillary Clinton won in their districts, while Republican candidates have won an average of 54 percent of Trump's votes. That's an enthusiasm gap that big enough to gravely imperil the Republican majority next November—even if it didn't show up in "the special election to end all special elections."
Read the three above. Ossoff lost in GA-06, not Ann Arbor or Berkeley. A very good showing, and/but could have been better for clear reasons… campaign fundamentals, better recruitment for the district. Not all district level races are ready to be nationalized. We’ll see in 2018.
Reed Galen, GOP campaign veteran:
For the President and the staff alike, the work is difficult enough without having to constantly look over your shoulder to make sure someone isn’t out to get you. Rivalry, disagreement and jockeying are natural to any high-powered and high-stress environment. In the Trump White House, they’re an endemic, daily part of life. Sitting around the table at a senior staff meeting, looking around at your counterparts and knowing that you can have little or no confidence in their trust in and/or loyalty to you and the quixotic cause-of-the-day must be beyond dispiriting. Steve Bannon’s response to a reporter yesterday about the change in press secretary, “Sean got fatter,” is an absolutely unacceptable thing for an Assistant to the President to say about anyone on the record, not least about a fellow staffer. Spicer would be well within his rights to ask Bannon to go 12 rounds on the South Lawn.
Reading the news out of Washington, we see President Trump’s most senior aides spend as much time knifing one another as they do going about their duties. In a Trump organization, the chaos and backbiting are unwritten job descriptions. The president likes his staff to be at odds with one another, he says, because it keeps them on their toes and thinking. As we’ve seen, though, President Trump suffers from a near-debilitating desire to make sure everyone around him knows he’s the boss. Take it from a White House veteran: There’s never any question as to who the President is.
Max Boot/Foreign Policy:
You’d Be Scared if You Were Donald Trump, Too
The president is obsessed with the investigation into his relationship with Russia. He should be.
It appears that Trump and his associates have been trying to cover their tracks because a more recent USA Today scoop reported that “Since President Trump won the Republican nomination, the majority of his companies’ real estate sales are to secretive shell companies that obscure the buyers’ identities.” But, despite these attempts at concealment, Reuters reported “at least 63 individuals with Russian passports or addresses have bought at least $98.4 million worth of property in seven Trump-branded luxury towers in southern Florida.” Eric Trump reportedly bragged in 2014 that Russian investors were funding Trump’s golf courses.
Such reports, partial and incomplete as they are, make a mockery of Trump’s carefully worded non-denial: “I can tell you, speaking for myself, I own nothing in Russia. I have no loans in Russia. I don’t have any deals in Russia.”
One person with whom Trump undoubtedly did have deals was Felix Sater, a Russian-American businessman who has been convicted of assault for stabbing a man in the face with a broken glass and for racketeering because of his involvement in a mafia-linked stock fraud scheme. A criminal turned government informant, Sater was one of the principals of the Bayrock Group, a real estate firm located in Trump Tower that partnered with the Trump Organization to build the Trump SoHo hotel and other properties. According to Bloomberg’s Timothy O’Brien, a veteran Trump chronicler, “a former Bayrock insider, Jody Kriss, claims that he eventually departed from the firm because he became convinced that Bayrock was actually a front for money laundering.”