Tag Archives: Congress

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Trump takes defeat … and then offers another lie

Donald Trump said repeatedly — countless times, in fact — that his Day One priority would be to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act.

Over and over again on the stump while campaigning for president, the Republican Party nominee said it. It would be his top priority.

From … Day … One!

What, then, did the president say from his desk today in the Oval Office? He said he “never” mentioned repealing and replacing the ACA within the first 64 days of his presidency.

The Liar in Chief cannot tell the truth … about anything!

Good ever-lovin’ grief, man! It’s on the record, Mr. President. You said it. Out loud. In front of your adoring fans and in front of the “enemy of the people” media representatives who were covering your campaign.

The president lost a big fight today. House Speaker Paul Ryan — the president’s wing man in this fight — pulled the repeal-and-replace legislation. The Republican majority in Congress didn’t have the votes to enact it.

Thus, the president’s top priority became toast.

At the very least he ought to be able to recognize and acknowledge what he said while campaigning for the first political office he ever has sought.

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Who works for whom in Washington?

Donald Trump thought he could strong-arm congressional Republicans into doing his bidding.

He wanted them to enact a repeal of the Affordable Care Act. GOP lawmakers — namely the more conservative members of their caucus — weren’t budging. Why? I believe it’s because they knew something that the president doesn’t understand: They work for their constituents; they do not work for the president.

When I heard today that Trumpcare went down in flames, I flashed back to another time, in an another era, when another lawmaker decided to stick it in the ear of his congressional leadership.

I recalled former U.S. Rep. Larry Combest, a Republican from Lubbock, who once defied the speaker of the House of Representatives who wanted Combest to back some legislation that he just couldn’t support.

It occurred in the late 1990s. Combest represented a largely rural West Texas congressional district that ran from southern Amarillo all the way to the Permian Basin.

GOP House Speaker Newt Gingrich was pushing something called Freedom to Farm, a dramatic overhaul of national farm policy. If memory serves, Freedom to Farm would have drastically reduced the amount of subsidies the government gave to farmers and ranchers to help them through difficult years. We get those kinds of seasons in West Texas, as you might know. Drought has this way of inhibiting dryland farmers’ ability to harvest crops; such a lack of moisture also restricts the amount of grain that ranchers use to feed their livestock.

Gingrich pushed Combest hard to back Freedom to Farm. Combest resisted. He finally voted against Freedom to Farm.

Combest was left to remind the speaker that he didn’t work for congressional leaders. He answered to the farmers and ranchers who elected him to Congress. These folks back home would suffer from Freedom to Farm and Combest wasn’t about to let them down.

I applauded Combest at the time, remarking in an editorial — and also in a couple of signed columns — that he showed guts by defying his congressional leadership and standing up for his constituents.

Congressional Republicans today don’t work for the president. They answer to their constituents at home, the folks whose votes upon which these lawmakers depend. They hate the GOP alternative to the ACA and let their congressmen and women know it in no uncertain terms. Democrats hate it, too.

That is how representative democracy works, Mr. President.

Just ask Larry Combest.

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So many lessons to learn from health care failure

Where in this world does one start to sort through the wreckage created by the Republican failure to repeal the Affordable Care Act and replace it with … something else?

Most of know the story by now. Donald J. Trump got elected president and promised to “repeal and replace” the ACA. Congressional Republicans, having retained control of both legislative chambers, finally had a president on their side. Repeal and replacement were slam dunks.

Or so they thought.

Then they cobbled together something that didn’t pass conservative and progressive muster. They couldn’t round up the votes to repeal the ACA, let alone approve something called the American Health Care Act.

Arm-twisting, threats and last-second negotiation resulted in the president’s first major legislative failure. House  Speaker Paul Ryan — a partner with the president on this fiasco — canceled the vote today.

Lessons learned here? Let’s take a peek at some of them.

* Trump bitched today at the White House that he had “no Democrat votes.” Really! He said that out loud to a room full of “enemy of the people” reporters. Well, irony apparently isn’t something that’s on Trump’s radar. President Obama didn’t have a single Republican vote when he got Congress to enact the ACA in 2010; but he damn sure tried to get some GOP support.

* Trump campaigned for the presidency on his record as a take-no-prisoners business mogul. He had no public service experience prior to running for president. His whole adult life had been geared toward personal enrichment. Then he discovered something about politics: It is that politicians have their own constituencies to worry about. If the voters who elect them don’t like what they’re doing, they have this annoying habit of voting them out of office.

Congressional Republicans didn’t like the AHCA because their voters back home didn’t like it. Do you get that, Mr. President? Your Republican colleagues don’t work for you; they work for the citizens in their congressional districts and in their states.

This ain’t reality TV, Mr. President. Politics is practiced by those who know what the hell they’re doing. Just because you’re the president doesn’t mean you get your way whenever you demand something of others.

* The ACA isn’t perfect. I’ll concede that along with anyone with half a brain. But as Speaker Ryan conceded today, it is “the law of the land.” Here’s a thought for the speaker and for the president: Why not try to tinker with the ACA? Fix what’s most egregiously wrong with it. If premiums are costing too much, find a method to cap them. If Americans are having trouble finding medical care within certain networks, find a way to streamline the process.

Throwing out a landmark health insurance overhaul simply because it was the creation of a president from the “other” party isn’t smart. What’s more, the ACA is patterned after a plan adopted in Massachusetts, which at the time was governed by a real Republican, Mitt Romney; you remember him, correct? The ACA in fact has Gov. Romney’s fingerprints all over it.

Ryan said today that “doing big things is hard.” No kidding, Mr. Speaker. Barack Obama learned that lesson, too. Indeed, as Vice President Joe Biden once said, “This is a big f****** deal.”

So … the Affordable Care Act remains on the books. Now the president and Congress can turn their attention to something else.

I just hope there aren’t more screw-ups on the horizon.

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Will the ‘system’ swallow POTUS whole?

This fantasy keeps ricocheting around my noggin. Here’s how it goes.

Donald J. Trump sold himself as a no-nonsense, kick-butt business mogul who brooked no foolishness from anyone. Then he got elected president and learned that “I alone” cannot repair what he said is wrong with the country.

He set out to “repeal and replace” the Affordable Care Act and then ran smack into the buzzsaw otherwise known as the House Freedom Caucus, whose members hate the cooked-up alternative to the ACA. Democrats hate it, too, as much as they hate the president.

If the ACA repeal fails today, does that signal the start of a string of failures for a man who told us over and over that he never seemed to fail at anything?

What, then, happens when he cannot enact tax reform, or get the wall built on our southern border, or institute an infrastructure rebuilding program?

What happens if he can’t “destroy ISIS” all by himself? What happens if he keeps getting stern resistance from those on the far right — who don’t trust him anyway — as well as those on the left who are still steamed that he got elected president in the first place?

My fantasy is that Trump might decide the fight ain’t worth it. He’ll call Vice President Pence into the Oval Office and tell the veep, “Mike, take it away. It’s all  yours, my man. I’m going to take Melania and Barron back to New York and we can vacation to our hearts’ content at Mar-a-Lago and no one will give a crap about how much it costs. Besides, this house in D.C. isn’t nearly as nice as my digs in Florida. I’m outta here.”

Yes, that’s why I call it a fantasy. However, one never knows.

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Congress sees spike in approval rating … what gives?

 

Given my occasional fascination with public opinion polls, I want to share an observation about RealClearPolitics’ average of polls.

It is that public approval of Congress has spiked up about 10 percentage points since Donald J. Trump became president.

Why is that? I think it’s a legitimate question. I might have the answer, although I could be coming at this from deep left field.

It well might be that the public sees the president of the United States as the greater threat to the nation’s stability. RCP’s average of polls puts Congress’s approval rating at more than 22 percent. During the eight years that Barack Obama was president, the RCP poll average usually pegged Congress’s approval in the low teens, occasionally dipping into single digits.

Might it be that the public saw Congress less favorably during President Obama’s time because respondents were concerned about the continual obstruction orchestrated by the Republican Party leadership?

Moreover, might it now be that the RCP polling reflects a public view that Congress can act as a check against the current president’s reckless rhetoric and fickle policy pronouncements?

Just thinking out loud, dear reader.

Your thoughts?

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Get ready for more impeachment talk

Impeaching a president of the United States isn’t for the faint of heart. It requires a stout gut among those who bring it, not to mention the target of such a drastic action.

The bar must be high. It must have a solid basis on which to make such a move.

Where am I going with this? I have this sinking feeling that the current president well might find himself in the crosshairs of those who want to bring such an action against him.

We’re hearing a growing — but still muted — rumbling in D.C. about the prospect of Donald J. Trump facing impeachment by the U.S. House of Representatives. I’m attaching an item from The Hill in which former Labor Secretary Robert Reich — an acknowledged political liberal — has lined out at least four impeachable offense already committed by the president.

Here it is.

Reich says that Trump’s accusation that Barack Obama ordered a wiretap of Trump Tower offices constitutes an impeachable offense, saying the president has recklessly accused his predecessor of committing a felony. He notes that the Constitution prohibits president from taking money from foreign governments; Trump, Reich alleges, has done so by “steering foreign delegations” to hotels he owns. Reich contends that Trump violates the First Amendment’s provision against establishing a state religion by banning travelers from Muslim countries into the United States. Reich also says the First Amendment bans any abridgment of a free press, but Trump has labeled the media the “enemy of the people.”

There’s a fifth potential cause, which Reich has asserted. It involves the possibility that Trump’s campaign colluded with Russian government officials to swing the election in the president’s favor. Reich said such activity, if proven, constitutes “treason.”

Will any of this come to pass? I have no clue.

Think of the politics of it. Trump is a Republican; both congressional chambers are controlled by the GOP. Will the Republican House majority bring articles of impeachment to a vote, no matter how seriousness of whatever charges are considered?

The collusion matter strikes me as the most serious and the most likely to align Republicans along with Democrats in considering whether to impeach the president. I am not suggesting there is, indeed, proof of such collusion.

Remember as well that the GOP-led House managed to impeach a Democratic president, Bill Clinton, in 1998 on three counts relating to his seedy relationship with that White House intern. Conviction in the Senate, though, required a super majority of senators; the GOP fell far short on all three counts. Thus, the president was acquitted.

They based that impeachment on the president’s failure to tell the truth under oath to a federal grand jury that questioned him about the affair. He broke the law, Republicans said. There was your “impeachable offense,” they argued.

My major concern about the Clinton impeachment was whether the president’s offense had a direct impact on his office. It did not. Any of the issues that Secretary Reich lists, however, certainly do have a direct impact on the president’s ability to perform his duties.

The bar for whatever might occur with the current president is set even higher than it was for President Clinton, given that the president and the congressional majorities are of the same party.

You might not believe this, but I do not prefer an impeachment to occur. I do, though, want the unvarnished truth to be revealed about what the president thinks he can do with — and to — the exalted office he occupies.

If the truth is as ugly as some of us fear, then Congress should know how to repair the damage.

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AHCA to replace ACA … at what cost?

Finally, the Republicans who run the legislative branch of government have produced a replacement plan for the Affordable Care Act.

I will need some time to digest all of it. It’s a complicated issue, one that requires a lot more brain wattage that I can generate at the moment.

It’s called the American Health Care Act. It’s supposed to be better than the ACA — and no, I won’t refer to the ACA by its colloquial name that attaches it to the name of the 44th president of the United States.

Complications abound with AHCA.

It removes the government mandates that require citizens to have health insurance; it relies heavily on tax credits to enable Americans to purchase insurance; it doesn’t monkey around with pre-existing conditions; it allows young people to stay on their parents’ health insurance plans.

The big question? Its cost.

How will Congress pay for this new program? We haven’t yet heard that explanation.

President Obama has said he’d welcome changes to the ACA that improve it. Yes, we now have a replacement idea on the table. It took Republicans eight years to come up with this alternative. They yapped and yammered during the two terms of the president’s tenure about how “terrible” the ACA was for health care, while pledging to repeal it once they got one of their own into the White House.

Here we are.

The debate will go forward now on whether the AHCA is better than the ACA.

The bottom line — for me, at least — is whether the 20 million or so Americans who now have insurance will be able to keep it at a cost they can afford.

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At least Trump is beginning to sound ‘presidential’

Donald J. Trump cleared a big hurdle — for him anyway — while he spoke to the nation Tuesday night.

He managed to sound like someone who holds the position he occupies; the president of the United States sounded presidential.

And I give him praise for that. The tone of his voice was measured; he sounded calm; he sounded like a man who well might be starting to grasp the enormous challenges he faces in running a government — and learning that it ain’t a thing like running a business.

However, let’s get past the style and look for a brief moment at the substance of what he said.

He ticked off virtually all the campaign hot-button themes he hit on while running for the presidency. What he has yet to tell us is how in the world he intends to do all the things he has promised to do.

Repeal the Affordable Care Act? Build a “great, great wall across our southern border”? Make our international allies pay for the protection we offer them? Negotiate better trade deals? Do better by our veterans? Find a way to pay for the huge increase in defense spending? Which domestic programs will he cut?

There wasn’t a scintilla of detail in any of it.

I expect it will come. I hope it is soon. I’m on pins and needles waiting to hear how he intends — precisely, specifically — to “make America great again.”

The bar for this president was set pretty low. Sounding presidential shouldn’t be all that difficult for someone who had just won a national election. Until his speech Tuesday night, though, Donald Trump had failed to clear even that low bar. Not even during his inaugural did he sound like a man who had just grasped the reins of power of the greatest nation on the planet. He damn sure doesn’t sound presidential when he fires off early-morning tweets about TV ratings, or late-night comics’ criticism of him.

He managed to sound like a president while standing in front of that joint congressional session.

I want to reiterate this final point: I want Donald Trump to succeed. As it was stated in the film “Apollo 13,” failure is not an option. The consequences of a presidential failure have this way of splashing over all the rest of us.

A friend of mine asked me this morning: What should Trump do to bring the Democrats on board?

Here’s how I responded: He ought to invite the entire congressional leadership team to the White House, sit them all down around a big table and ask this two-part question: What can I do to meet you halfway on these big themes … and what will you do to ensure that we can find common ground?

If the one-time business mogul can grasp the notion that governance requires a partnership between those with different ideological stripes, then I believe success is achievable.

He started Tuesday night at least by sounding like the head of state.

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Great speech; waiting to hear specific solutions

Well what do you know? Donald J. Trump can deliver a speech in a traditional “presidential” fashion.

He did so tonight. He hit a lot of high points, drew a lot of applause — mostly from fellow Republicans, which is no surprise to anyone — and resisted the urge to veer too far off the text written and displayed on the Teleprompter.

I’ll give him props for that.

He walked us through many of the points he sought to make. I had read something in advance of the speech that said it would be uplifting and optimistic.

Hmmm. I didn’t feel much optimism or lifting of spirits. I heard some of the stuff he had said about drugs and crime; about illegal immigration; about the alleged failure of the Affordable Care Act; about how our allies need to pay their “fair share” for us to defend them against our common enemies.

The president didn’t offer any specifics. He didn’t tell us:

How he plans to replace the ACA; how we’re going to afford the huge increase in defense spending; how he hopes to do better for our veterans; how he intends build that “great, great wall along our southern border”; how he plans to pay for massive infrastructure improvements.

I am hoping all of this will come in due course. His friends in Congress will demand it of him, which is their right and obligation under the Constitution’s co-equal branch of government stipulation.

No one expected him to deal with the myriad controversies that have plagued his first month in office. I’m quite sure others will bring all of that to the fore.

As far as speeches go, I hereby acknowledge that Donald J. Trump is able to rise to the occasion, to act very much like the president of the United States. There was none of that stump-speech shouting, which many of us have come to expect from this individual.

And, by golly, there were no disruptions provided by Democrats who are still stung by the very idea that Donald Trump is president of the United States.

But … I’m waiting to hear just how precisely the president plans to make all these grand promises a reality.

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America is still great, Mr. President!

It took only five minutes for Donald J. Trump to toss out the first canard in his speech before a joint session of Congress.

He pledged yet again to “make America great … again.”

I now will stress once more — with emphasis — that United States of America is a great nation. It’s always been a great nation. It will continue to be a great nation.

And we have not slipped under the rung of greatness.

I will not let the president of the United States continue to denigrate our country’s greatness as he has done repeatedly — during the 2016 presidential campaign and since his election.

Mr. President, lose the “make America great again” mantra and tell us, if you would, how you intend to maintain our nation’s greatness.