Tag Archives: Senate GOP

medical news

Work with Dems to fix ACA? Wow, what a concept!

Am I hearing things or did I actually hear U.S. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell say he might be willing to work with Senate Democrats to improve the Affordable Care Act?

Yep, I think I heard the Kentucky Republican say such a thing.

What a friggin’ concept, Mr. Majority Leader. Who’da thunk it?

Senate Republicans cannot muster enough votes among themselves to repeal the ACA and replace it with the abomination they cobbled together. Donald J. Trump called the House of Representatives’ version of ACA replacement the greatest thing since pockets on shirts, then the president called it “mean.” He wanted the Senate GOP to come up with a bill with “heart.”

It didn’t. The Congressional Budget Office — that non-partisan agency — issued its “score” on the Senate bill and found out that 22 million Americans would lose their health insurance over the next decade. That’s pretty mean, too, right? Yes.

GOP moderates hate the Senate bill, as do GOP conservatives, although for different reasons. Senate Republicans can afford to lose only two of their votes; at last count, about 10 or 12 of them dislike the bill that’s on the table.

What’s the alternative? McConnell is signaling that the ACA might stand, but that his Republican caucus can work with Democrats to tweak and tinker with what they dislike about the ACA.

My memory now reminds me that President Barack Obama said on numerous occasions during his time in office something like this: I have no deep pride of authorship of the ACA. If Republicans can find a way to improve it, to make it better, then I’m all in!

Didn’t the former president say something like that? Yes, I believe he did.

So, here we are. After all the futile votes to repeal the ACA in the GOP-controlled Congress, all the declarations that the ACA was ruining the lives of Americans and that it is failing, the Republicans in both congressional chambers cannot agree on a plan to replace it.

So, let’s fix what’s wrong with it.

Time to get busy, ladies and gents.

medical news, political news

Who’s telling the truth, GOP or Democratic Senate leader?

I am certain today that I heard two diametrically opposed statements come from the mouths of the U.S. Senate’s top partisan leaders.

The Senate was going to vote this week on a plan to replace the Affordable Care Act; then Senate Republicans said “no.” There won’t be a vote just yet. They balked because they don’t have the votes to approve it. They might not get the votes, either.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, the Kentucky Republican, said categorically that Democrats “aren’t interested” in working with Republicans to craft a new health care insurance bill.

There. We have that statement.

Less than an hour later, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, the New York Democrat, told reporters that Democrats “want to work” with Republicans.

OK. Who’s telling the truth? McConnell said Democrats aren’t interested. Schumer said the exact opposite.

I guess it depends on the partisan bias of those who heard the statements. McConnell said it in front of fellow Republicans; Schumer made his declaration in front of fellow Democrats.

I tend to believe Schumer. I would be my hope that Democrats would be willing to huddle with their GOP “friends” in the hope of finding some common ground with regard to what McConnell called a “complicated” piece of legislation.

The Senate will take up this matter after the Fourth of July recess.

As Lyndon Johnson would say, “Let us reason together.”

medical news, national news, political news

CBO verdict is in: health care bill is ‘mean’

The Congressional Budget Office doesn’t use language such as “mean” to assess its analysis of legislation, but that’s what one can surmise of its latest analysis of a key Senate bill.

The CBO today turned in its “score” of the Senate Republican-passed health care legislation and it has told us:

* 22 million more Americans are going to be uninsured.

* The budget deficit will be cut more than $300 billion over the next decade, but that’s because of cuts in Medicaid spending for those Americans with financial need.

* There will be lower premiums, but there also will be less coverage.

It’s still a “mean” overhaul

Donald J. Trump said he wanted a less “mean” health care insurance plan than what the House of Representatives approved. The CBO score suggests that the Senate version of health care overhaul doesn’t make the grade.

Is the GOP plan in trouble? That depends on who’s doing the talking. Since this blog gives me a voice to speak out, I’ll suggest that Senate Republicans on the fence or leaning against the overhaul well might be inclined to vote “no” on this new plan if it comes to a vote later this week.

The president promised he wouldn’t touch Medicaid, that Americans who rely on Medicaid will continue to rely on it once he repealed and replaced the Affordable Care Act with something else.

It looks to me as though this promise won’t be kept.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has his work cut out for him as he looks for the votes to approve this bill.

medical news, national news, political news

Get set for next fight over health care overhaul

Congressional Republicans kept their vow to vote — no matter what — on repealing the Affordable Care Act.

It was a squeaker, 217 “yes” votes to 213 “no” votes. Every congressional Democrat voted “no,” which gives the minority a faint claim of bipartisanship, as some moderate Republicans joined them in voting against the Trumpcare health bill.

I want to make only a couple of observations about this effort.

First, Republicans yapped and yammered that Democrats shoved the ACA down the GOP’s throats in 2010. The GOP response was to do precisely the same thing to Democrats. Payback is a bitch, right?

The GOP throat-shoving, though, took on a little different tone than what the Democrats did in 2010. President Obama tried to get Republicans to sign on, but was unsuccessful. Donald J. Trump didn’t make that effort; neither did House Speaker Paul Ryan. Oh, no. They relied on their healthy Republican majority to win the day — barely, it turns out — in a now-or-never vote on the House floor.

Second, the initial effort to repeal the ACA and replace it with the American Health Care Act, ran into a Congressional Budget Office “score” that told a grim story of 24 million Americans losing their health insurance under the new plan.

This time the GOP didn’t bother to wait for the CBO to “score” this latest rendition of the replacement bill. Republicans forged ahead anyway. Damn the scoring! Who needs to know how this is going to affect Americans?

Oh, and the polls around the country indicate a growing base of support for the ACA. Hmm. Imagine that. The House of Representatives isn’t exactly representing its constituents.

The AHCA now heads to the Senate, where it faces an even steeper climb than it had in the House. The GOP majority in the upper chamber is pretty skimpy and the Republicans cannot afford to lose any support among their ranks. The initial signs don’t look good for final approval in the Senate.

House Republicans sought to win over reluctant conservatives by sweetening the pie for them; then they assuaged some moderate GOP concerns by tossing in some money to pay for those with pre-existing medical conditions.

What say you, senators?

Now it falls on the Senate to decide what to do with this legislation that doesn’t yet have any analysis on how much it will cost and how many Americans might lose their insurance.

Meanwhile, House Republicans are back-slapping each other like crazy. They said they’d cast that vote to repeal President Obama’s signature domestic achievement.

They got the job done. Now they can go home for their 11-day recess. I would bet real American money they’re going to run into a good bit anger among the home folks.

national news, political news, Uncategorized

Response to Trump … it’s about what we should expect

Donald J. Trump’s supporters are pushing back on the intense criticism coming from the portion of the country — most of which voted against him in 2016 — of the man’s presidency.

I feel the need to flash back for a moment to 2009.

Let’s remember what a leading Senate Republican said at the time about the previous president of the United States, Barack H. Obama.

Mitch McConnell then was the minority leader in the Senate and I presume he was speaking on behalf of the GOP Senate caucus when he made a straightforward and ominous declaration.

He said his “No. 1 priority” as the Senate GOP leader was to “make Barack Obama a one-term president.”

Yep. That’s what he said. He laid down his marker early in the Obama administration. He didn’t stress enactment of landmark legislation, or working with the president to rescue the economy — which was collapsing when Obama took office. He didn’t propose any reforms of his own or suggest ways Republicans and Democrats could find common ground.

He said he intended to make Obama a one-term president. That translated into “obstruct everything he intends to do.”

Hmmm. It didn’t quite work out that way. Obama got re-elected in 2012 and finished his time in the White House with soaring approval ratings in every single leading public opinion poll.

Is it right and proper for Democrats now to follow the Republicans’ lead? Mostly “no.”

I’ve noted here before that I don’t wish for the president to fail. A presidential failure means the country fails and we all pay the price for that.

However, as the new president seeks to form a government — and he still has quite a way to go — my hope is that Democrats can find some common ground with the Republican president whenever possible.

The problem, though, is that Donald Trump has begun harping about the media being the “enemy of the people” while continuing to boast about his Electoral College victory. Enough, already!

Some positive proposals ought to be formulated and presented for Congress to ponder.

Until then, my Republican friends ought to just swallow the swill they offered eight years ago when Barack Obama was elected … with, I feel compelled to note, a far more robust majority than his successor earned.

education news

DeVos gets a job for which she is unqualified

Betsy DeVos is going to assume her new job in the federal government with one of two outlooks.

The first one suggests that with a 50-50 vote in the U.S. Senate to confirm her — and with the vice president of the United States casting the tie-breaking vote — DeVos is assuming the education secretary job with virtually no mandate to do anything.

Half the Senate opposes her. The president who nominated her got nearly 3 million fewer votes than his 2016 election opponent — while winning enough electoral votes to become president. The vice president cast the first in history tie-breaking vote to confirm a Cabinet nominee.

Mandate, shmandate!

Or, she’ll thumb her nose at those of us who opposed her confirmation and say, “Hey, winning by an inch is as good as winning by a country mile.  So … get over it!”

I suspect she’ll adopt the latter point of view.

Senate Democrats gave it their best shot, trying to talk for 24 hours straight on the Senate floor seeking to persuade one more Republican to follow the lead of GOP Sens. Lisa Murkowski and Susan Collins, who voted against DeVos’s nomination.

Betsy DeVos has zero qualifications to lead the nation’s public education system.

She gave a lot of money to Republican politicians, which I guess is qualification enough.

Sad, man. Sad.

legal news, national news, political news

What about a ‘consensus candidate’ for high court, GOP?

Americans are going to get a good look — probably fairly soon — at just how duplicitous many of our politicians can be.

Let’s consider the vacancy on the U.S. Supreme Court.

Justice Antonin Scalia died suddenly early this year while vacationing in Texas. President Obama then had to find someone to nominate to replace the longtime conservative icon. He found a centrist in Federal Judge Merrick Garland.

Republicans said before Garland got the nod that they would block anyone the president nominated. No hearing. No testimony. No vote. Nothing, man.

Throughout the president’s two terms in office, GOP senators had insisted that the Democratic president nominate “consensus” jurists to the nation’s highest court. He managed to get two justices confirmed: Sonja Sotomayor and Elena Kagan.

Garland was confirmable — had he been given the chance to make his case. Except for one thing: Confirming a centrist such as Garland would change the political balance of power on the Supreme Court, which held a slim conservative majority with Scalia.

A Republican now has been elected president. Will the new man, Donald J. Trump, nominate a “consensus” jurist for the high court? Will he find someone who splits the difference between liberals and conservatives?

Something tells me he’s going to tack to the far right as a sop to those who stood by him on the campaign trail.

Consensus? Who needs consensus when you and your political party control the White House and the Senate.

The upcoming Supreme Court appointment process is going to get ugly. Real ugly.

legal news, national news, political news

U.S. Supreme Court: a victim of collateral damage

Elections have consequences … as the saying goes.

Nowhere are those consequences more significant, arguably, than on our judicial system. Which brings me to the point. The U.S. Supreme Court has suffered what I would call “collateral damage” from the election of Donald J. Trump as president of the United States.

A nearly perfect jurist, Merrick Garland, waited in the wings for nine months after President Obama nominated him to replace the late Justice Antonin Scalia. Sadly, Garland’s political fate was sealed about an hour after Scalia’s death when Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell declared that the Senate would refuse to act on anyone Obama would choose for the nation’s highest court.

It was a shameful, reprehensible display of political gamesmanship and yet McConnell and his fellow Senate Republicans had the temerity to accuse the president of playing politics.

McConnell took a huge gamble — and it paid off with Trump’s election this past month as president. Now the new president, a Republican, will get to nominate someone.

The New York Times editorialized Sunday that whoever joins the court will be sitting in a “stolen seat.” The Times, though, offers a pie-in-the-sky suggestion for Trump: He ought to renominate Garland, a brilliant centrist who Republicans once called a “consensus candidate” when he was being considered for the Supreme Court back in 2010.

That won’t happen.

Trump, though, could pick another centrist when the time comes for him to make his selection, the Times suggested. Frankly, I’m not at all confident he’ll do that, either. Indeed, with Trump one is hard-pressed to be able to gauge the ideology tilt of whomever he’ll select, given the president-elect’s own lack of ideological identity.

Scalia was a conservative icon and a man revered by the far right within the Republican Party. His death has put the conservatives’ slim majority on the court in jeopardy. But, hey, it happens from time to time.

President Obama sought to fulfill his constitutional duty by appointing someone to the nation’s highest court. The Senate — led by McConnell and his fellow Republican obstructionists — failed miserably in fulfilling their own duty by giving a highly qualified court nominee the full hearing he deserved.

Now we will get to see just how consequential the 2016 presidential election is on our nation’s triple-tiered system of government.

Will the new president administer some kind of conservative “litmus test” to whomever he chooses? Or will he look for someone who — like Judge Merrick Garland — has exhibited the kind of judicial temperament needed on the highest court in America?

I fear the worst.

national news, political news

McCain enters the fray with threat of a crisis

WASHINGTON, DC - MARCH 26: U.S. Sen. John McCain (C) (R-AZ) speaks during a press conference on the recent bombings by Saudi Arabia in Yemen March 26, 2015 in Washington, DC. During his remarks Graham said, "The Mideast is on fire, and it is every person for themselves." (Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images)

John McCain must be unable to stand the sight and sound of another Republican blowing a once-great political party to smithereens.

The Arizona senator has this apparent need to get into the action himself by making an absurd — and frankly, frightening — assertion about how he and his GOP colleagues are going to handle the next president’s appointments to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Donald J. Trump’s presidential candidacy is imploding, paving the way for Hillary Rodham Clinton’s election in three weeks as the first female president of the United States.

What, then, does McCain do? He declares that U.S. Senate Republicans will make it their mission in life to block every single appointment Clinton might make to the Supreme Court.

That’s it. None will make it through the sausage-grinder of the confirmation process if Sen. McCain has his way. He’s actually one-upping the ridiculously political posture that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell struck when he said that President Obama’s next pick would be stalled because, according to McConnell, he’s a “lame duck” and that the vacancy created by the death of Justice Antonin Scalia needed to be filled by the next president.

Do you remember how McConnell weighed in within an hour of he world learning that Scalia had died?

Hell, that’s not good enough for McCain. He and his fellow Senate Republicans are going to block them all!

I’ve long expressed admiration for McCain. I’ve saluted his service to the country — notably his heroic actions as a prisoner of war in Vietnam. However, my old pal Jon Talton, who knows Arizona politics better than anyone I’ve ever met, put the senator’s public life into an interesting perspective in a recent blog post. Here it is:

http://www.roguecolumnist.com/rogue_columnist/2016/10/a-looming-constitutional-crisis.html

As Talton wrote: “From ‘moderate’ ‘independent’ McCain, we have warnings of what’s to come. This puts him in the Kook camp that would make Hillary’s election automatically illegitimate. Four years of scorched earth and worse.”

I’ll let Talton’s assessment of McCain’s career stand on its own. He knows more about it than I do.

The idea that McCain would quadruple-down on efforts to block the next President Clinton’s appointment authority to fill potential vacancies on the nation’s highest court creates the threat of a serious constitutional crisis. It could be far worse than, say, Watergate — which was pretty damn frightening.

I continue to hold out hope that President Obama’s pick to replace Scalia — U.S. District Judge Merrick Garland — would get a hearing in the lame-duck session of Congress once the election is over. Senate Republicans might lose control of the upper chamber as Trump’s candidacy goes down in flames. Garland — as solid and mainstream a nominee as you can imagine — might prove to be as suitable a court pick as they could hope for.

Now we have Sen. McCain declaring that no one Clinton would select will be able to pass Senate GOP muster. No one!

Obstruction, anyone? There you have it — in the starkest terms possible.

legal news, national news, political news

Oh, and then there’s Merrick Garland

garlandmerrick_031716hj3

Merrick Garland has kind of slipped off the media radar.

You’ll recall this fellow. He is the chief judge of the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals who’s been nominated to a seat on the U.S. Supreme Court. President Obama selected him to replace the late Justice Antonin Scalia.

I’ve got an idea for the probable next president of the United States to consider: In case the U.S. Senate continues to obstruct Garland’s appointment, don’t toss his nomination over once you take the oath of office.

I’m talking to you, Hillary Rodham Clinton.

Garland’s nomination ran into a buzzsaw when Obama selected him. Senate Republicans, led by Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, declared within hours of Scalia’s death that no Obama appointment would get confirmed. They wanted to wait for the next president to take office.

They accused the president — and this just slays me — of “playing politics” with the appointment by demanding a Senate hearing and a vote on Garland’s nomination.

Kettle, meet pot.

Garland is an eminently qualified jurist. He’s been left — to borrow a phrase — to “twist in the wind” while the Senate dawdles and blocks the president from fulfilling his constitutional duties.

I’m going to suggest that Clinton will win the presidency when the votes are tallied this fall.

If that’s the case, then the Senate GOP leadership might yell “Uncle!” and have the hearing and vote it should have had all along.

But if not, then it would seem appropriate for the president-elect to carry this nomination forward. By everyone’s reckoning, Garland is a judicial moderate, a thoughtful man who was confirmed to the lower court with overwhelming Republican support.

Sure, the next president has the chance to pick someone of her choosing.

But if the Democratic candidate for the highest office is going to talk about fair and humane treatment of people, it would seem quite fair and humane to move Merrick Garland’s nomination forward for the next Senate to consider.