Tag Archives: GOP

medical news, national news, political news

ACA repeal foes keep adding up

For those who might be keeping score on the Who Hates the ACA Repeal Bill the Most list, I’ll offer a quick review.

The list of medical and related professional organizations that oppose the Republicans’ plan to repeal the Affordable Care Act and replace it with God-knows-what is growing.

They include the American Medical Association, the insurance industry, the assorted medical specialist groups within the AMA umbrella, every single state Medicaid agency (yes, all 50 of them oppose the GOP repeal/replace option), political think tanks covering virtually the entire political spectrum.

Who favors the bill about to be decided next week in a U.S. Senate vote? As near as I can tell, the list comprises just two key groups: the Republican Senate caucus and the president of the United States, Donald John Trump Sr.

They are intent on tossing millions of Americans off the list of the insured; they want to all but eliminate Medicaid subsidies for those Americans who rely on them to afford health insurance … and some other things, too.

To what end? They want, according to U.S. Sen. Chuck Grassley, the Iowa Republican and a key Senate heavyweight, to fulfill a campaign promise. Grassley said recently he could think of “10 reasons” why the Senate shouldn’t even consider this legislation, but they’re pushing ahead because of pressure from the Trump base of supporters who want to get rid of anything with Barack Obama’s name on it.

So, who do these folks represent? The various and sundry — and powerful — interest groups that oppose repealing/replacing the ACA, not to mention the vast majority of the American public? Or do they represent only the shrinking minority of voters within their own party?

I don’t need to remind these folks — but I will anyway — that they govern a nation comprising millions of Americans who would prefer the federal government to amend and repair the ACA to make it better. There is no compelling need to toss the entire legislation into the crapper.

medical news, national news

Who needs that CBO ‘score’ on health care bill, right, GOP?

The Republican rush to repeal the Affordable Care Act might proceed without a key element that GOP congressmen and women would need to make this critical judgment.

The Congressional Budget Office won’t be able to provide its full analysis of the impact the replacement legislation will have on the future of Americans’ health care insurance.

You see, Congress is facing a Sept. 30 deadline to get this deal done with a simple majority of 50 Senate votes. After that date, the rule rolls back to a 60-vote supermajority requirement. So, there you have it: Senate Republicans don’t want to wait for a “score” that they usually rely on to help them decide matters of this importance.

As Politico reports: The Congressional Budget Office will only have a bare-bones assessment of the latest GOP bill ready before Sept. 30, the deadline for Senate Republicans to pass health care legislation on a party-line vote.

Is it any wonder, then, that some Senate Republican leaders — such as John McCain of Arizona — are critical of the process that is rushing this vote forward?

Read the Politico story here.

The ACA is Barack Obama’s signature domestic legislative achievement. Republicans want to wipe it out, toss it aside. They aren’t interested in repairing it, improving it, making it work better for Americans.

In normal times, the complete CBO analysis was thought to be the standard for lawmakers to follow. The CBO is known to be a completely non-partisan, unbiased source to determine the financial impact of legislation. Its previous analyses of efforts to repeal and replace the ACA have told us that 20 million Americans would lose health insurance under terms of the replacement legislation. Are ACA repeal/replace proponents afraid of what the CBO is going to tell us about what they’ve got in mind this time around?

This latest health care insurance bill comes from Sens. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and Bill Cassidy of Louisiana. Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky already opposes it. Sen. Susan Collins of Maine is teetering against it. Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska is said to be leaning toward a “no” vote. McCain already is on record opposing this fast-track process.

Is this what we’re getting? Half-baked decision-making based on matters that have little to do with the facts?

International news, national news

Is POTUS getting it, finally?

Pity the president of the United States’s “base” of supporters. Well, actually, I don’t.

They’re suffering acute apoplexy because Donald J. Trump is beginning to show the faint signs of understanding something about the high office he occupies. It is that he even though he didn’t win a popular vote plurality in 2016, he won enough Electoral College votes to become elected and, therefore, he has to deal with the wishes and needs of those who voted against him.

Immigration is the issue of the day.

Trump is sounding like someone who wants to strike a deal with congressional Democrats and moderate congressional Republicans that would give so-called “Dreamers” a path to citizenship and/or permanent immigrant status. The Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals order issued by President Barack Obama has been rescinded. Trump, though, says he wants to strike some sort of deal to protect the DACA residents, to keep them in the only country they’ve ever known.

You see, about 800,000 of these U.S. residents came here as children — some of the infants and toddlers — when their parents sneaked into the country illegally. The Trump “base” considers these folks “criminals.” Well, their parents broke U.S. immigration law. But does that mean we punish the children for the sins of their parents? Let’s get real here.

The president still wants to build that wall along our southern border. We’ll have to see how that struggle plays out with the aforementioned Democrats and moderate Republicans in Congress. In my mind, the wall is a non-starter. Mexico won’t pay for it. American taxpayers shouldn’t have to pay for something the president said would be financed by another government.

What’s more, the wall won’t make this country any safer from terrorists, and assorted criminals who want to come into this country to do grievous harm.

I don’t feel a single bit of sympathy for the Trumpkins who just can’t stand the thought of their guy working to fulfill the interests of the rest of the nation he now governs.

medical news

ACA is actually doing what it’s supposed to do

Let’s talk about health insurance, OK?

The highly partisan agency, the U.S. Census Bureau, has come up with some data that illustrate the difficulty the Republicans in Congress — and the pseudo-Republican in the White House — have had difficulty in repealing the Affordable Care Act.

The Census Bureau reports that the rolls of uninsured Americans has continued to decline since the enactment of the ACA. It’s now down to 8.8 percent this past year, down 0.3 percent from 2015.

Prior to implementation of the ACA, the uninsured rate stood at 13.3 percent, according to the Census Bureau.

Oh, by the way, I’m joking about the Census Bureau being full of partisan hacks.

The news isn’t all good for the ACA. A Gallup Poll indicates an increase in uninsured Americans stemming largely from the uncertainty over the ACA’s future.

Mend it, don’t end it.

I remain committed to the notion, though, that the ACA can be fine-tuned, improved, tweaked and tinkered with. It need not be scrapped, tossed onto the scrap heap, which is what congressional Republicans and Donald J. Trump want to do.

Need I remind readers of this blog that Medicare’s enactment in 1965 was followed by the a round of tinkering? President Lyndon Johnson managed to persuade his fellow Democrats and his many Republican allies on Capitol Hill to improve the landmark health insurance program. The program works well for elderly Americans.

Why in the name of compromise and cooperation can’t we find that formula today? What is stopping congressional Republicans who control Capitol Hill from working hand-in-glove with Democrats to improve the ACA? President Barack Obama implored both sides on Capitol Hill to improve it if they were so inclined; he said he was all in on any effort to make the ACA work better for more Americans.

Republicans were having none of it. “We gotta repeal it!” they bellowed. Well, they had their chance after Trump got elected president. The president failed to deliver the goods. GOP leaders in Congress failed as well. The ACA remains the law. It figures to stay that way for the foreseeable future — if not longer.

Republicans say they intend to keep yapping about repealing the ACA and replacing it with something else. The voices are growing a bit more muted in sticking to that mantra.

That’s fine with me. Repeal isn’t the only answer. Surely there’s a way to make the ACA work for even more Americans.

national news

GOP about to ‘eat its young’?

The late Texas state Sen. Teel Bivins of Amarillo used to joke that congressional and legislative reapportionment every decade was an opportunity for the Republican Party “to eat its young.”

His humor, I guess, was aimed at how Republicans — and I’ll presume Democrats, too — would redraw boundaries to make their own members vulnerable to political challenge.

I never quite understood Bivins’s example, but we might be about to witness a political war taking shape among Republicans that will produce some intraparty casualties. Stephen K. Bannon, the former White House chief strategist, has said the party is about to go to war with itself.

There will be the Bannon wing — comprising uber-nationalists/isolationists — against the “establishment wing” of the GOP.

He told “60 Minutes” that the Bannonites and the establishment types are going to fight tooth and nail for the attention and affection of the president of the United States. Bannon believes that the Republican majority in Congress is disserving Donald J. Trump. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and House Speaker Paul Ryan do not want Trump’s “populist message” to succeed, according to Bannon, who intends to fight for that message.

Bannon no longer draws a government salary, but he’s stands atop a formidable forum as editor in chief of Breitbart News, the media company from which he entered the White House at the start of the Trump administration. Bannon is a frightening dude, given his company’s occasional rants promoting anti-Semitic and white nationalist views.

I’m not particularly concerned about the outcome of this internecine battle. I don’t support the president’s agenda. Nor do I want Bannon anywhere near the center of power. The president chose well when he asked John Kelly to be White House chief of staff; indeed, Kelly is the reason that Bannon no longer advises the president from within the West Wing’s walls. That doesn’t mean Bannon has disappeared.

I’m quite sure that if the fight erupts within the party that the president’s ability to govern will suffer, given any evidence within the administration — starting with the man at the top — of any political skill or knowledge.

As for the Republican tendency to “eat its young” … bon appetit.

national news

So many ‘un’s to characterize this president

Donald J. Trump is a man characterized by many descriptions using the prefix “un.”

He’s unpredictable, unconventional, unpresidential, unaware, uncontrollable, unbridled, unhinged (at times). There’s probably a lot more that I can’t think of at the moment. But you get the idea.

It remains to be seen just how this fellow is going to govern.

The president recently stuck a shiv in the back of his “fellow Republican” colleagues in Congress by agreeing to a deal offered by the dreaded Democratic opposition. It came from House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer.

“Nancy and Chuck,” as Trump referred to them.

They tossed out a 90-day extension to keep the government running. It included some money for Hurricane Harvey relief. Trump took the deal and then plunged the Republican majority in both congressional chambers into near panic.

The extension and the debt ceiling increase now becomes an issue leading into the 2018 mid-term election, which is something the GOP did not want to occur.

Is this the art of the deal?

This isn’t how you cut the “best deal possible,” as Trump kept telling the nation while he campaigned for the presidency. But it’s the deal he struck. Jaws dropped all over Washington, D.C. Some chatter has wondered whether Trump is adopting former President Clinton’s strategy of “triangulation,” that positioned the president between diehards within both parties.

I don’t believe Trump knows enough about politics to employ such a brainy strategy. After all, both House Speaker Paul Ryan and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell — two savvy Republicans — say the president is “new” to this political game.

Let’s add unseasoned to the list of descriptions, shall we?

It looks for all the world as though we’re headed into a brave new world blunderbuss politics as executed by the man who sits in the Oval Office.

national news

Politicians ‘play politics’? Shocking, simply shocking!

U.S. House Speaker Paul Ryan is incensed that congressional Democrats worked out a debt-limit deal with Donald J. Trump. He accused them of “playing politics” with the suffering of Americans living on the Texas Gulf Coast, who are trying to recover from Hurricane Harvey’s savage assault.

Why, I never …

The speaker needs to look inward just a bit to understand that Republicans have perfected the art of “playing politics.” They do it quite well, too. Indeed, the practice of kicking issues around like the proverbial political football is a bipartisan endeavor.

Allow me, though, to look briefly at two examples of GOP politics-playing.

In 2011, a tornado tore through Joplin, Mo. Republicans decided to hold money for relief in that community hostage to finding ways to pay for it. They wanted to cut money from other budget line items to finance the Joplin aid package. At the time, it was virtually unheard of for members of Congress to balk at rushing to the side of Americans in desperate trouble.

In this case, led by then-House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, the GOP did that. Playing politics? You bet!

Example No. 2: U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia died in 2016. President Obama nominated an eminently qualified jurist to replace him, U.S. District Judge Merrick Garland. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell declared only hours after Scalia’s death that Obama wouldn’t be allowed to fill this seat. The Senate would wait for the election to occur and then give that opportunity to the next president.

It was a huge gamble at the time. It paid off, though, for Republicans when Donald Trump was elected president. McConnell and Senate Republicans, though, managed to thwart a sitting president’s constitutional authority to nominate a federal jurist purely for political gain.

Did the Senate GOP leader play pure partisan politics with that issue? Uhh, yeah. Just a tad.

So, spare me the righteous indignation, Mr. Speaker, about Democrats “playing politics” with the debt ceiling. Your guy in the Oval Office — the self-proclaimed “greatest dealmaker ” in the history of Planet Earth — caved to Democrats’ demands.

Is he playing politics, too? Hmmm?

national news, political news

What do we make of this strange new alliance?

Donald J. Trump might have validated what some of us think about him: The president is a Republican In Name Only.

I’m shaking my noggin in disbelief at what happened in the White House today.

The president said in a room with congressional leaders of both parties. There was Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and House Speaker Paul Ryan; also there was Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi.

What does Trump do? In the presence of his fellow Republicans, McConnell and Ryan? He sides with Schumer and Pelosi, two of those dreaded Democrats in accepting a plan to fund the government for three months and providing immediate federal relief for Hurricane Harvey victims along the Texas and Louisiana Gulf Coast.

McConnell and Ryan were furious; Schumer and Pelosi were gleeful.

What does this mean for Trump’s ability to govern? Beats me, man.

Read the story from The Hill here.

I am a bit baffled, though, on why Trump accepted the Democrats’ shorter-term debt limit while Republicans had pitched a longer-term deal.

My own Democratic-leaning preference tells me the president is open to negotiate with the “other side,” which many hard-core GOP leaders have been unable or unwilling to do. That’s not a bad thing, in my humble view.

I’m left to wonder whether Donald Trump has just inflicted a potentially mortal wound in his already-tenuous relationship with leaders of his own party. I also wonder if he is able to mend the wound in time for the 2018 mid-term election.

Meanwhile, Donald Trump has become big-time pals with “Nancy and Chuck.”

International news, national news

Let the ‘children’ stay in U.S.

DACA is on the table now for the president of the United States.

Donald Trump should do the right thing and leave it alone. He shouldn’t axe it. He shouldn’t send U.S. residents back to somewhere they’ve never known.

DACA stands for Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals.

There’s news that Trump is preparing to make a decision on DACA and on whether he’s going to order the expulsion of undocumented immigrants. Don’t do it, Mr. President. It’s not the right thing to do.

DACA covers those who came to this country as children of undocumented immigrants. They were in some cases infants and toddlers. They grew up in the United States. They were educated here. Many of them have grown into responsible adults and have been hired to do important work.

Do we now toss them out because of something their parents did and committed an illegal act over which these children had zero control?

The president is trying to shore up his Republican Party base and a decision to toss out the DACA residents would surely please the 30-percent base of Americans who still endorse Trump’s agenda.

Trump campaigned for the presidency pledging to toss aside DACA. He calls it “amnesty” for illegal immigrants. It is no such thing. DACA gives these individuals a path to citizenship or to achieve legal immigrant status. That’s it.

Maybe he should ask his secretary of energy, Rick Perry, the former governor of Texas who has supported allowing these residents to remain in the United States. Indeed, Perry knows the impact that these individuals have on a state’s economy and the value they bring to society as responsible adults. Perry’s support of DACA echoes the belief of another former Texas governor, former President George W. Bush.

There’s also another political calculation that Trump needs to ponder. He continues to poll miserably among Hispanic Americans. To be candid, I don’t give a damn if he finds a way to please that demographic group. If he does take that into account and he scraps the notion of tossing out these U.S. residents — these de facto Americans — he’ll do far more than please a voting demographic he needs while angering the “base” that’s been with him all along.

The president would be doing the right thing.

education news, national news

Sociology prof gets canned over thoughtless remark

The beauty and the curse of social media is that messages transmitted go out instantly around the world and no matter how quickly you take them down, they’re out there forever.

Isn’t that right, Kenneth Storey, you careless tweeter?

Storey was fired from his job as a sociology professor at the University of Tampa (Fla.) for suggesting via Twitter that Hurricane Harvey devastated Texas because the state votes so routinely for Republicans.

You hear occasionally from certain clergy that God punishes people because of, oh, government policies on gays; they suggest that the Almighty gets angry over changes in society’s moral values. I routinely dismiss such malarkey.

Kenneth Storey’s snarky commentary goes beyond the pale, too. Millions of Texans are suffering at this very moment. Their grief transcends any hint of partisan politics.

Storey issued an apology. He wrote that he “never meant to wish ill will upon any group.”

Never meant? Well, too bad, Hoss. You did. You got exactly what you deserved.