Hasta La Gadget!

WASHINGTON ― White House officials are ratcheting up pressure on House Republicans to vote this week to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act, even though there is no bill, there is no agreement on what that bill should look like, and Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) has signaled no interest in rushing to vote on legislation that will fail.

“I would like to have a vote this week and I think the leadership knows that we’d like to have a vote this week,” White House chief of staff Reince Priebus said Sunday on NBC’s “Meet The Press.”

Mick Mulvaney, budget director for President Donald Trump, said on “Fox News Sunday” that he knows GOP leaders are focused on preventing a government shutdown this week ― the government runs out of money on Saturday ― but he sees no reason why Republicans can’t repeal Obamacare and fund the government at the same time.

“We don’t think there’s any structural reason that the House and the Senate cannot do both things in a week,” Mulvaney said. “We’ve also heard rumors that the House and Senate might stay until Saturday. It would be great to allow things to get done this week.”

The idea that Congress can simply pass both bills this week is not just unrealistic ― let’s just say it will be a success if Republicans avoid a government shutdown ― but it underscores what is driving the White House’s agenda right now: Trump hits his 100-day mark on Saturday, and he just wants to chalk up wins before then. On anything.

The most pressing issue is keeping the government open. Congress has been passing a series of short-term funding bills since October to keep operations running, and they’ve got to pass something before Saturday that either extends the current level of funding or goes bigger and adds in other GOP spending priorities.

That’s where it gets sticky. Trump is pressing Republicans to include money in the bill to build his infamous border wall, and Democrats (and some Republicans) have said they’ll vote against any such proposal. That means, if Republicans moved forward with money for Trump’s wall, it would likely tank the bill and potentially shut down the government.

Ryan and other House GOP leaders insisted in a Saturday call that they will keep the government open, though their strategy for doing so is still murky.

Passing a bill that kills the Affordable Care Act and replaces it with something better, of course, is even more complicated. Ryan’s first stab at passing a replacement bill went down in flames last month, when he had to yank the bill off the floor because it lacked the votes. GOP conservatives and moderates don’t agree on the specifics of what a health care overhaul should look like, and Democrats are unified in opposing any of their efforts.

Given these complexities, Trump may need to lower the bar for what constitutes a major success to something like, say, avoiding a government shutdown during your first 100 days in office.

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Bill O’Reilly may be out of television, but he still has his podcast.

The former Fox News host is launching a new episode of his “No Spin News” podcast, according to a banner on his personal website.

Several news outlets have noted the episode will provide a forum for O’Reilly’s first public comments since he departed Fox News on Wednesday amid allegations that he sexually harassed multiple female colleagues.

O’Reilly said the accusations were “completely unfounded” in a statement last week.

The “No Spin News” podcast, which O’Reilly has recorded for years, is available to premium subscribers of his website.

The website also features promotions for O’Reilly’s upcoming nationwide tour with former Fox colleagues Dennis Miller and Jesse Waters, which will include stops in Baltimore, Tampa and Las Vegas.

The final episode of “The Factor,” which used to bear O’Reilly’s name, aired Friday night on Fox News, with Greg Gutfeld filling in as host.

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After facing widespread backlash for seemingly dismissing the state of Hawaii as “an island in the Pacific” while criticizing a federal judge there, Attorney General Jeff Sessions stood by his comments on Sunday, claiming they were just a joke.

“Nobody has a sense of humor anymore,” Sessions told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos, who asked why the attorney general didn’t just say “the state of Hawaii.”

Last week, Sessions attacked Derrick Watson, a U.S. district judge in Hawaii, for halting Trump’s revised ban on travel and immigration from six majority-Muslim countries. 

“I really am amazed that a judge sitting on an island in the Pacific can issue an order that stops the president of the United States from what appears to be clearly his statutory and constitutional power,” Sessions said on conservative radio host Mark Levin’s show.

Hawaii’s two Democratic senators, Mazie Hirono and Brian Schatz, pilloried Sessions for discriminating against their state and for undermining the judicial branch. Trump and members of his administration have repeatedly attacked judges who have ruled against him.

“The suggestion that being from Hawaii somehow disqualifies Judge Watson from performing his Constitutional duty is dangerous, ignorant, and prejudiced,” Hirono said in a statement Thursday. “I am frankly dumbfounded that our nation’s top lawyer would attack our independent judiciary. But we shouldn’t be surprised. This is just the latest in the Trump Administration’s attacks against the very tenets of our Constitution and democracy.”

Schatz noted that as a senator in 2013, Sessions voted to confirm Watson, who was nominated by former President Barack Obama, and asked Sessions to “have some respect.”

In response, the Department of Justice tried to walk back Sessions’ remarks, saying in a statement that “Hawaii is, in fact, an island in the Pacific ― a beautiful one where the Attorney General’s granddaughter was born.”

“The point, however, is that there is a problem when a flawed opinion by a single judge can block the President’s lawful exercise of authority to keep the entire country safe,” the statement continued.

On Friday, Sessions said that he did not mean to criticize the state and was merely “raising the point of that issue of a single judge taking such a dramatic action and the impact that it could have,” he told CNN.

But he said he did not regret the way in which he said it.

“Well, I don’t know that I said anything that I would want to phrase differently. Uh, no,” he said. “We’re going to defend the president’s order.”

Schatz on Sunday slammed Sessions’ latest attempt to defend himself.

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