Greg Sargent/WaPo:
In the battle over Obamacare’s future, Trump just blinked. Bigly.
Ever since the GOP repeal-and-replace bill crashed, President Trump has confidently vowed that it’s only a matter of time until Democrats come groveling to him on their knees, begging for a deal that will save them from the collapse of the Affordable Care Act. In other words, Trump and Republicans needn’t take any steps to shore up the ACA’s exchanges, because they have all the leverage in the battle over its future — indeed, they have suggested, the ACA’s implosion is inevitable, ongoing, and already nearly complete.
But Trump just blinked. And in so doing, he inadvertently revealed that despite the bluster coming from him and Republicans, the politics of the battle over the ACA’s future tilt against them.
WaPo:
Poll: Narrow support for Trump’s strike in Syria
Trump’s action does not appear to have boosted confidence in his leadership, with about one-quarter each saying it makes them “more confident” or “less confident”; a plurality say it doesn’t make a difference.
Americans are broadly pessimistic about the strike’s potential to deter Syria’s chemical weapons use and express concern about the impact on U.S.-Russian relations.
James Hohmann/WaPo:
Reflexive partisanship drives polling lurch on Syria strikes
Jill D Lawrence/USA Today:
Putin's mission is already accomplished
He got the president he wanted. It's working out better for Russia and China than for us.
The darkest clouds, the ones that have some Democrats wondering why Congress should even be considering Trump policies and personnel appointments right now, are the multiple investigations of Team Trump’s contacts and possible collusion with Russia in a successful attempt to take down Hillary Clinton and put Trump in the White House.
Secretary of State Rex Tillerson is heading to Moscow on Wednesday for a visit that will be awkward, at the least. The attack on our election process has turned Congress hostile to Russia, making it hard for Trump to cozy up as much as he seems to want. The attack on the Syrian airbase, even with a forewarning to Russians to evacuate, was a setback for the Trump-Putin bromance and a U.S.-Russia reset.
But Putin got the president he wanted. The rest is just noise.
Francis Wilkinson/Bloomberg:
Trump Knocks the Air Out of Republicans
The vacuum is the dominant feature so far of the Trump era.
"Given disagreements among Republicans, they need political cover from the president and the White House to build chamber majorities, and Trump couldn't deliver," said congressional scholar Sarah Binder of George Washington University and the Brookings Institution, in an email interview. "That's given rise to what appear to be competing House, Senate and White House/Treasury efforts to craft a tax plan. This could well prove another instance in which Congress can't fill the vacuum without Trump's leadership."
People in Washington are accustomed to seizing all the power they can grab. Yet Trump's odd force field seems to render power inaccessible, even to those Republicans who expected to be running the world.
David M Drucker/WashExaminer:
McConnell warns low Trump approval ratings imperil GOP majority
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is warning his party that President Trump's low approval ratings could erase the GOP's structural political advantages heading into 2018.
The Republicans are defending fewer Senate seats in the midterm, in generally friendlier territory, than the Democrats. Nearly a dozen Democrats are running for re-election in states President Trump won in November.
McConnell said in an interview with the Washington Examiner that this crucial GOP edge wouldn't amount to much if voters are unhappy with Trump next year and decide to elect more Democrats to check his power.
Bloomberg:
United Continental Holdings Inc. fell as outrage on social media over a passenger’s forcible removal from a flight spread across the globe.
The stock dropped 3.3 percent to $69.17 at 9:46 a.m. Tuesday in New York, marking the biggest decline on a Bloomberg index of U.S. airlines.
Officers pulled a passenger from a flight Sunday evening after he refused to give up his seat, dragging him down the aisle as travelers yelled at them to stop. Recordings of the incident posted on social media sent people into a rage.
By Tuesday in China, the incident was a focus of social media and government editorial. The hashtag #UnitedForcesPassengerOffPlane was the top trending item on Sina Weibo, the equivalent of Twitter, with more than 270 million views. The man who was removed appeared to be of Asian descent.
GQ:
Why Do Airlines Overbook Flights, Anyway? The Awful United Airlines Debacle, Explained
If you're mad about this now, just wait until you find out that what United did was pretty much by the book.
Overbooking flights, of course, is perfectly legal, and planes do it all the time. It's a numbers game! Their extremely well-compensated consultants and data teams can predict with confidence that there will be a certain number of no-shows on every flight, and have determined that it will cost the airline more to book the correct number and eat the cost of the empty seats than it will be to book a few extra seats and, in the unlikely event that they indeed oversell, find someone who will take few hundred bucks to wait for the next flight.
The Department of Transportation has very specific rules in place for what happens to paying customers when a flight is overbooked. First, for any flight with more than 30 seats, airlines have to see if anyone will give up their seat voluntarily, as any traveler who has silently weighed the pluses and minuses of making some money in exchange for spending another three hours in the airport terminal can attest. (Side note: When I was a kid, my parents would purposely buy flights they knew would probably be overbooked and then sprint to the gate like Jennifer Lawrence in The Hunger Games when the calls for volunteers went out. I don't know if we paid for a single flight between 1995 and 1998.)
Federal regulations don't set parameters for the amount of this compensation, which is why airlines start with a lowball offer and work their way up from there
Atlantic:
How Much Space Does Trump Have for Bipartisanship?
Two historians debate whether the president has an opportunity to pivot to the center, or whether Washington’s polarization precludes that.
Paul Krugman/NY Times;
Publicity Stunts Aren’t Policy
In other words, showy actions that win a news cycle or two are no substitute for actual, coherent policies. Indeed, their main lasting effect can be to squander a government’s credibility. Which brings us to last week’s missile strike on Syria.
The attack instantly transformed news coverage of the Trump administration. Suddenly stories about infighting and dysfunction were replaced with screaming headlines about the president’s toughness and footage of Tomahawk launches.
But outside its effect on the news cycle, how much did the strike actually accomplish? A few hours after the attack, Syrian warplanes were taking off from the same airfield, and airstrikes resumed on the town where use of poison gas provoked Mr. Trump into action. No doubt the Assad forces took some real losses, but there’s no reason to believe that a one-time action will have any effect on the course of Syria’s civil war.