Comcast, one of the most hated companies in America, is at the heart of a new controversy after one small Texas telecom accused it of using sabotage methods to drive the company out of business. Comcast and some of its contractors were recently sued by Telecom Cable owner Anthony Luna, according to Courthouse News, alleging that Comcast cut Telecom’s underground … Continue reading
Airbnb is testing out a feature that would allow reservations to be split among multiple people. So, if you’re booking with rude friends who never pay you back or if you want to book an expensive reservation that may be too much for one credit card t…
WASHINGTON, June 22 (Reuters) – U.S. President Donald Trump will nominate National Football League team owner Woody Johnson as U.S. ambassador to Britain, the White House said on Thursday.
Johnson, a billionaire investor and owner of the New York Jets, will require Senate confirmation to take up the diplomatic post. Johnson’s nomination does not come as a surprise. In January, Trump referred to Johnson as “ambassador” during remarks at a luncheon and said the NFL team owner was “going to St. James.”
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WASHINGTON — Dashcam footage released Thursday by the American Civil Liberties Union shows Minnesota police violently arresting a 22-year-old Asian man after a traffic stop last year.
In the video from July 28, 2016, an officer the ACLU identified as Buffalo Ridge Drug Task Force Agent Joe Joswiak approaches Anthony Promvongsa’s vehicle with his weapon drawn.
Joswiak can be heard shouting a stream of expletives at Promvongsa.
Note: The video below contains violence and explicit language. The traffic stop begins around the 1:35 mark.
“Get the fuck out of the car, motherfucker!” Joswiak yells in the video. “Show me your fucking hands!”
Moments later, Joswiak can be seen opening the driver-side door and attempting to pull Promvongsa from the vehicle, without success. He then begins kneeing and punching Promvongsa, then drags him from the vehicle and throws him to the ground. Promvongsa’s face can be seen hitting the pavement.
The ACLU has called for an investigation into what it called a “brutal attack.” The organization says the officer didn’t give Promvongsa enough time to obey his orders.
“Agent Joswiak’s use of force against Anthony Promvongsa is disturbing and completely unnecessary,” Teresa Nelson, executive director of the ACLU of Minnesota, said in a statement. “Thus far Agent Joswiak has received no punishment for this abhorrent treatment of Anthony. This sends a message that the department condones the officer’s behavior, which it should not.”
In a joint statement on Thursday, the Buffalo Ridge Drug Task Force, Worthington Police Department and the Nobles County Attorney’s Office said the video “is one piece of evidence in a pending criminal case.”
“The video, viewed in a vacuum, shows only a short segment of the incident that is the basis of the criminal charges,” the statement read. “Our agencies ask that the media and the public remain patient as the criminal case progresses accordingly.”
Charges against Promvongsa include two counts of assault with a dangerous weapon (a motor vehicle), one count of fleeing an officer in a motor vehicle, possession of a small amount of marijuana, and driving after revocation, according to police.
This type of violence with community members has to stop.
Anthony Promvongsa
The Minnesota Star Tribune reported Thursday that a criminal complaint alleges Promvongsa provoked a road-rage encounter the day of his arrest. The complaint, the newspaper said, accuses Promvongsa of “several aggressive acts toward the car of an off-duty Worthington police officer, including tailgating, swerving, making hand gestures out the window and closing in at a high rate of speed before stopping just short of the officer’s vehicle.”
That off-duty officer met up with a fellow off-duty officer, at which point Promvongsa allegedly sped between the two officer’s vehicles and yelled out the window that he was “going to get his boys and come back to get them,” the Star Tribune reported, citing the complaint.
Later, Joswiak and Sgt. Tim Gaul reportedly located Promvongsa and successfully pulled him over, but he ignored the officers’ orders, the complaint said, according to the Star Tribune.
“Joswiak delivered several knee strikes to Promvongsa in an attempt to gain control of him but Promvongsa continued to resist getting out of his vehicle,” the complaint states, according to KARE 11 News.
The complaint also states Joswiak threw a single punch before handcuffing the suspect, the Star Tribune reported.
The video released by the ACLU, however, shows Joswiak throwing at least four punches.
In a statement accompanying the ACLU release, Promvongsa said he had “no idea what was going on when I was approached and attacked” by Joswiak.
“I did not even have the opportunity to take off my seatbelt before I was literally blindsided with this unnecessary attack,” he said. “I immediately pulled over for the Worthington squad car and before I knew what was happening I was beat and ripped from my vehicle.”
“I know I am not the first person to have this type of traumatic experience with law enforcement in Worthington,” he added. “This type of violence with community members has to stop. This encounter was demoralizing and has left me scared of future interactions with the police.”
Promvongsa is currently awaiting a trial date.
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The Senate health care bill released Thursday closely mirrors what the House narrowly approved in May. Some analysts called it a tempered version of the House bill ― which President Donald Trump called “mean.” But it nevertheless puts vulnerable seniors smack in its crosshairs, according to advocates for elderly people.
“Actually, the Senate bill is even meaner” than the House bill, Howard Bedlin, vice president for public policy and advocacy for the National Council on Aging, said in a phone interview.
Bedlin cited the Medicaid cuts and per-capita caps that would harm elderly people who rely on the program to pay for their long-term care. The Senate didn’t stop the weakening of the Medicare Trust Fund that will result from the repeal of the payroll tax on wealthy Americans, nor did it change the so-called age tax that would dramatically increase out-of-pocket costs for older Americans in the form of higher premiums.
“Over time, the Senate bill imposes even deeper cuts and caps on Medicaid than the House proposal,” Bedlin said.
Here are a few reasons why the Senate measure is worse for seniors than what the House passed:
Medicare, the health care system for people 65 and older, does not pay for long-term nursing home stays. Most people enter a nursing home as a private-pay patient until they exhaust enough of their assets to qualify for Medicaid. For every $1 Medicaid spends on a poor child, it spends $5 for an elderly person in a nursing home.
Medicaid is the primary support for 65 percent of nursing home residents. It is literally the last resort for affording nursing homes, which easily can cost upward of $80,000 a year.
Under Obamacare, everyone who qualified for Medicaid ― of any age ― was guaranteed to get it. That would change under the GOP’s plan. The House bill would let states decide who gets their health care needs met by Medicaid, and shrinks the total pot by a draconian $880 billion by 2026.
The Senate bill follows that same course ― states would receive a lump sum per year, or a lump sum per enrollee, that would function as caps. But the Senate bill makes even deeper cuts to the program by tying federal spending to a slower growth index. The House measure tied it to medical inflation.
Under the House bill, the federal spending can increase only up to 4.7 percent each year (the Medical Consumer Price Index, plus 1 percent). Under the Senate bill, it can rise up to this same rate until 2025, when the capped growth rate drops forever to 2.4 percent (the Consumer Price Index), explained Bedlin.
The Senate bill also slows the introduction of these Medicaid cuts, pushing the deepest wounds to the elderly into the future. The changes won’t fully kick in for seven years, which of course is long after the next Senate election. But make no mistake, said advocates for the elderly: When these changes to Medicaid fully kick in, they will pack a wallop.
The bipartisan Congressional Budget Office projected 14 million fewer people would receive Medicaid over the next 10 years under the House bill, and the Senate bill may mean an even higher number losing this coverage. The CBO isn’t expected to score the Senate bill until next week, but the number of people who would no longer get Medicaid help is an important one to watch. People aged 85 and over are the ones most likely to need expensive long-term care, and Baby Boomers will be turning 80 at right about the same time the full impact of the Medicaid cuts and caps kick in.
“Because the proposed caps do not adjust for an aging population, the nation’s oldest and most vulnerable seniors will be hit the hardest,” predicted Bedlin.
If Medicaid were to stop paying for nursing homes, there is nothing ― and no one ― else that would. The likely outcome here is that the ranks of family caregivers would swell.
The Senate bill repeals the payroll tax on wealthy Americans ― a tax cut for the rich that is expected to hasten the insolvency of the Medicare Trust Fund by about two years ― moving it from 2028 to 2026.
While the Senate version closely matches what the House measure did in this regard, GOP senators fell short of their promises to protect Medicare benefits for future generations.
“The Senate bill also cuts funding for Medicare which weakens the program’s ability to pay benefits and leaves the door wide open to benefit cuts and Medicare vouchers,” said AARP executive vice president Nancy LeaMond.
Medicare kicks in at age 65. Those who are in their 50s and early 60s are too young to be eligible for Medicare and too old to be considered young and healthy, which makes them less attractive to private insurers. Older people are more prone to illness and require more medical care than younger age groups.
Under the current Affordable Care Act, the most an insurance company can charge an older person for premiums is three times whatever younger people are being charged. Under the GOP House bill, that ceiling jumps from three times to five times, and significantly reduces tax credits that help lower- and modest-income adults pay for coverage. The House bill includes a tax credit that maxes out at $4,000 ― far less than it does under the current law.
The Senate bill closely mirrors the Obamacare subsidies, which are currently available to those who earn between 100 percent and 400 percent of the federal poverty level. Under the Senate bill, starting in 2020 this assistance would be capped for those earning up to 350 percent of poverty level, with adults aged 59 to 64 paying up to 16.2 percent of their income.
The CBO has predicted that older people with lower incomes will likely opt out of buying coverage for themselves because the legislation allows insurers to charge them higher rates than they do now ― and the financial assistance provided doesn’t sufficiently offset that.
Advocates for elderly people commended the Senate for not allowing states to opt out of key protections for patients with preexisting conditions. But they said the devil lives in the details.
Josie Kalipeni, policy director for Caring Across Generations, noted that the Senate measure ”allows states to deny coverage for essential services like ambulance rides or prescription drugs” at the same time it raises costs.
Senate leadership has said it wants to vote on the bill by July 4.
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Amid concerns that the Trump family is mixing business with politics, Ivanka Trump’s company has secured initial trademark approval for a new lingerie line, Bloomberg reports.
The trademark is one of three OK’d since Election Day; the others were for Ivanka-branded loungewear and workout clothes, according to Bloomberg.
Trump’s fashion label already boasts shoes, jewelry, active wear and handbags bearing her name. Recent credits also include new Ivanka Trump spas at her dad’s hotels in Vancouver and Washington, which offer treatments like a $610 couples massage with “the benefits of rest and relaxation.”
Trump isn’t currently involved with the spas, a spokesperson told Bloomberg. She also made superficial efforts to distance herself from her brand before taking up a role as an unpaid White House employee this spring, like separating her personal social media handle from her brand’s accounts and banning the brand from using her likeness in promotions. Even so, ethics experts warn her brand’s endeavors could violate conflict of interest laws.
Throwing more branded apparel into the mix would only put Trump at greater risk for legal repercussions, Jordan Libowitz, a spokesperson for Washington nonprofit Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics, told HuffPost.
“The clear thing she should do is remove all conflict from her portfolio, either by getting out of the clothing business or not working on anything that could affect [her government office],” he said. “Usually people make a choice between government work and private business, and there’s a reason for that.”
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Bay Area Rapid Transit, which operates mass transit in the San Francisco area, reassured riders Thursday that it won’t conduct immigration raids on board its vehicles or target people seeking a job with the agency.
The transit agency’s board passed a resolution that prohibits the use of its funds or resources to enforce federal immigration law. The measure, called the Safe Transit Policy, bans employees from seeking riders’ immigration status, limits the cooperation of employees with federal authorities in conducting immigration checks and arrests, and prevents BART from asking job applicants about their immigration status.
BART joins transit agencies in Chicago and in Portland, Oregon, in reassuring riders that employees won’t enforce immigration laws or lead raids.
The BART resolution was floated in March by board member Lateefah Simon, who campaigned for the position in November on a platform that safe access to transportation is an issue of social and economic justice.
Encountering Immigrations Customs Enforcement can take a physical and emotional toll on people’s health, Alameda Public Defender Raha Jorjani argued in support of the resolution during a hearing Thursday at BART’s Oakland headquarters.
“We’re talking about the health, well-being and civility of families,” Jorjani said. “In the Bay Area, specifically, our office has noticed a distinct rise in the presence and enforcement of ICE operations. There are few spaces left that are safe, and a space that is as important as BART simply must be one of them.”
Those concerns aren’t completely unfounded. In February, rumors spread online that ICE had set up checkpoints throughout the East Bay, including one outside a BART station, though authorities later said those claims were false.
Similar online rumors swirled in Chicago and the greater Portland, Oregon, area earlier this year, and authorities reacted by reassuring riders that transit employees would not enforce immigration laws.
“We do not participate in or support this type of activity,” the Chicago Transit Authority said in a statement in February. “It’s important to us that everyone, no matter who they are, how they identify, or where they’re from feel comfortable and confident riding transit in Chicago: You are welcome here.”
Oregon’s TriMet transit agency announced a no-raid policy the same month.
“We do not support targeting any of our riders or any members of our community. Period,” TriMet said in a statement. “We deeply regret that these fast-spreading rumors have caused concerns about TriMet and the safety of our riders.”
BART’s resolution reaffirms the region’s leadership on progressive immigration policies in the face of President Donald Trump’s vows to boost deportations and enact hard-line immigration policies.
In April, a federal court in San Francisco ruled that the Trump administration cannot withhold federal funds from so-called sanctuary cities ― local jurisdictions, including San Francisco, that limit cooperation with federal authorities in immigration law enforcement.
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Sling TV’s cloud DVR service is now available for iPhone and iPad. The streaming service’s DVR “First Look” option costs an additional $5 per month and gives you 50 hours of DVR storage.
The iOS devices now join the growing list of DVR-supported sys…
Now that the Democrats lost all four of the special House elections (or maybe three given the sketchy trustworthiness of voting machines in Georgia) we now know that Trump’s “disapproval” rating that MSNBC commentators have been flogging for months is politically meaningless. Republican voters hate Democrats far more than they “disapprove” of Trump.
Since 1969, when Kevin Phillips wrote “The Emerging Republican Majority,” we’ve seen the GOP successfully flip the once “solid” Democratic South to Republican, and add the Midwest, Mountain states, and in 2016, even the Rust Belt to construct a national majority.
The Ossoff-Handel race in Georgia’s 6th district, at an estimated $57 million, became the most expensive House election in U.S. history. There was a great deal of media coverage on the money angle but little mention of “Citizens United” and how since 2010 it has skewed elections in favor of Republican candidates, or the fact that Ossoff was outspent by out-of-state right-wing SuperPACs.
The more U.S. elections rely on money the more the Republicans win. That’s the reason why Mitch McConnell (then the Senate Minority Leader) was so gleeful when the Supreme Court handed down its Citizens United ruling that he went over to the courthouse to attended the announcement. Good Ol’ Mitch knows that this alone was enough to cement a Republican advantage. Our new normal became historic levels of political corruption thanks to the Republican majority on the Roberts Court that will stand for generations.
Throw in the 2013 “Shelby” case, which struck down key provisions of the 1965 Voting Rights Act thereby streamlining voter suppression against African Americans, Latinos and other groups, the five Republicans on the Supreme Court further tilted the playing field in the GOP’s favor. Back in the 1950s and 1960s, people literally died fighting for the Voting Rights Act. And with the rise of Trump, Stephen K. Bannon, and the Pepe the Frog brigades the nation has experienced a resurgence of racist violence. Yet the Roberts Court concluded in “Shelby” that the Obama election proved that the United States has become a racial Utopia no longer needing laws and provisions that ensure African-American voting rights.
But the quest for a permanent Republican majority didn’t stop with “Citizens United,” McCutcheon, and “Shelby;” it coincided with the most scientific gerrymandering of congressional districts in U.S. history. Following the 2010 census, Republican state governments drew up highly partisan districts using “Maptitude” software and other computer programs that target social media profiles and other mega-data to draw partisan boundaries for state and federal districts that will probably remain in place for decades.
It’s highly unlikely that after the 2020 census the state governments of Florida, North Carolina, Wisconsin, Ohio, Michigan, and Pennsylvania are going to be under Democratic control. And since Democrats in California, Washington, New York, and Illinois do not have the guts to gerrymander the way the Republicans did in 2011, it’s also unlikely “blue” states will balance it out by engaging in their own partisan gerrymandering. After the structural changes the Republicans have already made to campaign finance, voting rights, and redistricting the only way the Democrats could retake the House of Representatives would be to a have a Democratic sweep in states where the party is in decline.
It could happen. The “Resistance” appears superficially strong. But once you factor in the built-in Republican advantages of money, propaganda, voter suppression and chicanery, as well as control of the Justice Department and the Congress (with all the benefits of incumbency) the Democrats face a steep climb.
Besides, even if the Democrats by some miracle were able to take the state governments of those Midwest and Rust Belt states that went for Trump in 2016, their majorities would be so slender that they would probably be just as gutless and weak as ever. In fact, gutlessness and weakness you might say are intrinsic to the Democratic “brand.”
They’re gutless and weak because they choose to be gutless and weak. The party leadership, ever since the hapless “Democratic Leadership Council” days of Bill Clinton and Joe Lieberman, want to stay on the sweet side of the banks and corporations and have therefore done precious little for labor unions over the past thirty years. And without strong and growing labor unions there is no “Democratic Party.”
We also learned during the Clinton and Obama years that the Democrats would turn against their own base in a heartbeat. Elevating a bunch of women and people of color (who all went to Yale or Harvard) is a good thing but it doesn’t do much to mend the disconnect that Trump exploited between the Democratic leadership and the 70 percent of Americans who don’t have college degrees, let alone from Harvard or Yale.
It’s ironic (if the word has any meaning these days) that at a time when the Democratic party under Clinton and Obama was growing more diverse in terms of gender, race, and ethnicity (which is a good thing) it grew more homogenous in terms of the class background of its leaders.
A Little Recent Midterm History
The party in power usually loses seats in the first midterm election, which makes the first midterm facing any new administration very important. Midterm elections are base elections therefore it’s incumbent upon the party in power to energize its base going into that first midterm. Republicans know this fact; Democrats pretend they don’t.
So in 1994, Bill Clinton took the Democrats into his first midterm by triangulating against the party’s base by wasting “political capital” on passing NAFTA over the vociferous objections of workers, labor unions, environmentalists, and consumer activists; in short, the Democratic base. Clinton’s centrist bullshit going into the 1994 midterms resulted in a 52-seat Democratic loss, ignited the Gingrich Revolution, and ended up creating the Republican majority that impeached his ass.
Things were far different in the 2002 midterms. This time around a Republican administration that didn’t even win the popular vote faced its first midterm. But did George W. Bush triangulate against his party’s base? Hell no. He and Karl Rove (working with the Republican Congress) in October 2002 forced many of the Democratic leaders, including Hillary Clinton, John Kerry, Joe Biden, and Chuck Schumer, to vote in favor of his war against Iraq even while people representing the Democratic base marched in the streets against it. This betrayal on the part of many Democratic leaders showed cowardice on their part and that the Democrats stood for no principles whatsoever even regarding war and peace. The result was an energized Republican base and a dispirited Democratic one. The GOP held on to its majority in both chambers of Congress. (Going into 2018, Trump and Bannon might seek to follow a similar script forcing a split between the leaders and base of their opponents and the Democrats might sheepishly oblige.)
In 2010, Barack Obama faced his first midterm so of course he did all he could to energize his party’s base, right? Not. He appointed Arne Duncan Secretary of Education who continued the teacher bashing Bush policies of “No Child Left Behind” thereby discouraging just about every public school teacher in America (a feminized profession and among the most reliable parts of the Democratic base). Obama also did nothing to help the millions of underwater mortgage holders who got scammed. Instead, he followed the advice of Secretary of Treasury Tim Geithner to use foreclosures as “runway foam” for a safe landing for Wall Street. Obama didn’t jail one Wall Street financial officer even after they ripped off workers’ pensions and brought the whole economy down. He also escalated the war in Afghanistan with 30,000 additional soldiers. The Democratic base limped into 2010 with the predictable result being the “shellacking” of losing 63 House seats that followed. Obama became a lame duck the day John Boehner was sworn in as Speaker of the House.
In 2018, like 2002, there’s a Republican president who lost the popular vote facing his first midterm. We’ll see how Trump and Bannon play this out. One thing is certain: unlike the last two Democratic presidents they’re going to do all they can to fire up their party’s base over the next sixteen months.
This history suggests a kind of Kabuki dance where one party (as if prearranged) purposely stumbles to worsen its chances because its leaders have more in common with their opponents than their own base.
The “Resistance”
We’ve grown far too accustomed to hearing Democrats constantly apologize for their “San Francisco Values” (one of the areas of attack against Jon Ossoff). Instead of standing by their support of government as a force for social good, or their calls for an economy that serves the interests of the vast majority of working people, or their desire for banks and corporations to pay their fair share of taxes, and so on, they turn against (as Ossoff did) a $15-an-hour minimum wage and universal health care.
When was the last time you heard a Republican politician apologize for his or her worldview? Even with a pussy-grabbing con artist as their party’s leader they apologize for nothing.
The “Resistance” has so many structural hurdles to jump. The gerrymandering alone has guaranteed that the Republicans control the House of Representatives probably for the next 50 years. And the Senate is terrible because vast windswept states with more antelope than people, like Wyoming, Idaho, the Dakotas, and Montana, will always have their two senators thumping their bibles and trashing Big Gov’mint. With a little voter suppression in the cities, college towns, and liberal suburbs the Republicans can easily win in states like these and will continue to do so.
George W. Bush and now Trump have shamelessly stacked the federal judiciary with far-right ideologues from the Federalist Society. Good Ol’ Mitch has been working overtime on stacking the federal bench with little media attention. Like the Roberts Court, we’ll see countless lower courts rule in favor of corporations over consumers, environmentalists, and workers. It’s a fait accompli.
All of these neat Republican tricks – flooding the political system with money, partisan gerrymandering, voter suppression, stacking the judiciary – have already restructured the “playing field” of American democracy in favor of oligarchy. By the time Trump, House Speaker Paul Ryan, and Good Ol’ Mitch get done the country is going to be in deep doo-doo.
It’s kind of ironic (if we can use that word anymore) that the GOP has also garnered a marked advantage in Internet savvy and social media propaganda. As we learned in 2016, the Republicans are expert at using firms like Robert Mercer’s Cambridge Analytica and others to target voters through social media and marketing techniques to tailor specialized propaganda directly to voters based on household on-line behavioral data.
The guys who founded a lot of the cool stuff about the Internet like Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg thought they could help humanity in some little way by their efforts. Ha! Instead they’ve turned over a powerful molder of public opinion to oligarchs and plutocrats, authoritarians, white supremacists, and neo-fascists! (Sometimes I think American democracy would be better off if we never moved beyond rotary phones and bulletin boards.)
And it’s foolish to think we can turn to liberal billionaires to save us. As far as “progressive” politics go (although I prefer Tom Steyer over Robert Mercer) there’s not a lot of difference between liberal and conservative billionaires. A billionaire is a billionaire – about as far removed from the lives of the average American worker as a newly discovered life-form on an exoplanet a thousand light-years away.
Today, the Republican Supreme Court is poised to turn the whole nation into a “right to work” country. That means that not only workers, but consumer activists, environmentalists, and civil rights advocates are all going to be pushed back on their heels as corporate power further consolidates. The only thing we can be certain of after Trump signs a budget is ever larger pockets of extreme poverty growing throughout the country and levels of income and wealth inequality worse than we’ve ever experienced as a society. Welcome to the new normal.
Another bummer is that we’re just one mass-casualty attack away from a police state. Although corporate media will never broach the topic virtually all of the terrorism we see today in Europe (and coming soon to a neighborhood near your) is blowback from decades of misguided bipartisan imperial policies.
“But, but Obama got elected . . .” you might say.
Yes. But he was elected before “Citizens United,” “McCutcheon,” and “Shelby;” before the partisan gerrymandering and Kobach’s voter suppression; before the Mercers, fake news, “alternative facts” and Pepe the Frog. And long before anyone in their right mind thought Trump could ever become president.
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WASHINGTON ― Hours after releasing their health care proposal, Senate GOP leaders were trying to tamp down a mutiny within their ranks, with various Republicans criticizing the legislation from different perspectives and for different reasons.
Some GOP senators hate the proposed Medicaid cuts. Some believe the cuts take too long to take effect. Some think the tax credits still need to do more to help people pay for health insurance. And at least one, Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky, said the bill needs to eliminate more of the subsidies.
“It needs to look more like a repeal and less like keeping Obamacare,” Paul told reporters Thursday, after he and Sens. Mike Lee (R-Utah), Ted Cruz (R-Texas), and Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) released a joint statement saying they were “not ready” to support the legislation.
While they all said they were willing to negotiate, opening the bill up for the changes they want could further throw in doubt the votes from the small core of moderate Republican senators, whose backing already is shaky.
This is Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s fundamental problem: The Kentuckian seeks a “just right” Goldilocks compromise that splits the difference between his party’s moderates and conservatives. His problem? He can only lose two votes to pass his bill, given unified opposition from the 48-member Democratic caucus.
Giving in to Cruz’s demands to allow states to opt out of certain Obamacare regulations ― like those that protect the insurance coverage for people with preexisting conditions ― would almost certainly cost him votes from moderates who may already be leaning against the legislation. Caving to moderates who want even milder Medicaid funding cuts endangers the support from those conservatives already concerned that the reductions take seven years to fully kick in.
If McConnell were a few votes closer to the 50 he needs (with Vice President Mike Pence ready to break a tie in the 100-seat chamber, if needed), his current position would be potentially less perilous. But as of now, he appears well short of that striking distance, with at least four conservatives announcing their public disapproval and at least four of the GOP moderate expressing concerns over the Medicaid cuts.
For every change McConnell accepts for conservatives, there’s a chance moderates move further away from supporting the bill. And vice versa.
Still, McConnell is a master arm-twister, and everything could come together quickly for him. It was notable that even as Johnson was saying Thursday he thinks the Senate may consider starting over, he told HuffPost that the bare minimum it would take to get to a “yes” may simply be “proper information.”
Sen. Susan Collins of Maine has looked like one of the most unlikely GOP supporters of the bill from the beginning, and she stressed Thursday her concerns about the formula for how the government calculates how much it gives to states for Medicaid.
“It is lower than the cost of medical inflation and would translate into literally billions of dollars of cuts,” Collins said. “And that would mean states would be faced with unpalatable [choices],” such as restricting eligibility for the program and “allowing rural hospitals to go under.”
That may seem like a serious concern ― and it is. But it’s also one of those fixes that could be made if McConnell and President Donald Trump can get enough other Senate Republicans to agree to the overall bill in principle.
A basic problem McConnell faces is that polls show the push to repeal and replace Obamacare faces problems with much of the public. And the more people learn about the specifics of repeal effort ― which has a fundamental aim of cutting taxes for the rich and significantly reducing the number of people served by Medicaid ― the less likely voters are to be swayed by heated rhetoric that merely slams Obamacare.
Again, though, that is not to say Senate Republicans won’t ultimately go along with their leadership’s bill.
The opposition looks soft, save perhaps for Paul. GOP conference chairman Sen. John Thune of South Dakota said Thursday he didn’t think Paul, despite saying he wanted to work with leadership on the legislation, would ever “be there” in the “yes” camp.
Igor Bobic contributed to this report.
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