Tag Archives: Obamacare

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Trump’s big mouth threatens to swallow him

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That dreaded 100-day “deadline” looms for Donald John Trump. We’re about one week away from it.

Will it produce a winning report card for the president? Will those of us in the peanut gallery be able to call the new president’s start a rousing success, which Trump himself has done already?

I do not believe so.

Does the 100-day mark matter? Perhaps it shouldn’t count as much as it does. President Franklin D. Roosevelt set up this artificial barrier when he took office in 1933 and it’s been held as sort of the benchmark for early presidential success ever since.

But it’s early in any new president’s term. Donald Trump is no different.

Except for one little thing.

All along the way en route to his winning the election, the Republican candidate for president kept telling us about all the things he would accomplish in those first 100 days.

* Affordable Care Act? Repealed and replaced.

* Tax reform? Enacted.

* Draining the swamp of corruption? He’d institute a new government ethic.

What’s happened? The ACA remains. Tax reform hasn’t even been introduced. The swamp is still full.

The president can count precious few legislative triumphs. In fact, I can’t think of any. Can you? He’s signed a lot of executive orders. I particularly like the one that banned government officials from becoming lobbyists immediately after leaving public service.

Sure, he launched that missile strike against Syria after that horrendous chemical weapons attack. I give the president kudos for that action. But he’s got North Korea sounding more threatening than ever; Trump said he dispatched the “great armada” led by the USS Carl Vinson, but the carrier-led strike group to date is nowhere near the Korean Peninsula.

Donald Trump’s very own big mouth has victimized him.

Just maybe once the president gets past this 100-day hurdle, he will decide to tone down his constant boastfulness and learn finally — finally! — that governance requires much more than shooting off one’s big mouth.

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Time for a town hall meeting, Rep. Thornberry? Hmmm?

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Welcome home, Mac Thornberry.

I know you’re a big shot in the U.S. House of Representatives, chairing the House Armed Services Committee and all of that.

You and I have some shared history here in the Texas Panhandle. You took office the same week I reported for duty at the Amarillo Globe-News in January 1995. In a way, we kind of “grew up together.”

But you’ve disappointed me at times. We differ on public policy matters. That’s OK with me. We have maintained a friendly relationship, which I sincerely appreciate.

What I cannot yet fathom is why you are forgoing town hall meetings with your constituents during this Easter/Passover break Congress is taking. Surely you know about the unease among many Americans about what Congress might do with the Affordable Care Act, the law you GOP lawmakers and other critics blithely call “Obamacare.”

Y’all tried to scrap it and replace it with something else. It didn’t work. The effort failed.

But you aren’t planning any town hall meetings. You met with business leaders in Amarillo and, I presume, in Wichita Falls. I understand you talked about the government’s rules and regulations that affect business operations; I also am quite certain you heard a lot of agreement from those constituents over your own belief that the feds are too hard on private enterprise.

Others out there aren’t entirely in sync with what you want to do. They dislike efforts to repeal and replace the ACA. Indeed, many of your colleagues — including your fellow Republicans — have gotten a gutful of gripes from constituents. I applaud them for taking the heat.

I do not applaud members of Congress who decline to face their constituents and to answer their questions and deal with their anxiety.

You need not to be reminded, Mac, that you work for us. We are your bosses. Not the speaker. Not the House majority leader. Not the president. It’s us, sir.

Talk to us. Listen to us.

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Trump at war … with conservatives in GOP!

Conservative Republicans should have known what they were getting when they stood firmly behind their party’s presidential nominee in 2016.

They were backing a guy who didn’t understand them, didn’t understand how to legislate, didn’t grasp the degree to which they would run through brick walls to get their way.

So, when Donald Trump hooked up with congressional GOP leaders — comprising a few moderates here and there along with some notable conservatives — on a cobbled-together health care overhaul, the Freedom Caucus bolted.

The caucus opposed the American Health Care Act. It spoke as one. The president couldn’t deliver.

Don’t get me wrong. I don’t think the Affordable Care Act should be repealed. It does kind of make me chuckle, too, to see the president get his head handed to him by a group of zealots who want the ACA tossed into the crapper.

But now the president has all but declared war against the Freedom Caucus. I believe this open warfare might doom whatever passes for Trump’s legislative agenda for, oh, the foreseeable future.

Trump is a RINO to many conservatives anyway. RINO, of course, means Republican In Name Only and it’s not altogether clear what precisely informs any public policy that pops into the president’s noggin.

The biggest surprise to me was that conservatives would stand with this candidate to begin with, given his bizarre personal marital history, his acknowledged groping of women, the manner in which he spoke to — and about — his more conservative GOP primary opponents. Whenever I hear Trump talk openly about matters important to social conservatives, one word keeps popping into my head: panderer.

Thus, I shouldn’t be surprised that the president would stake his agenda on cooperation with anyone other than the Freedom Caucus.

He’s not one of them. They certainly do not follow his lead.

The battle, therefore, is joined.

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Health care overhaul? Kaput! Tax reform? That’s next!

Let’s see if we can figure this one out together.

Donald J. Trump and congressional Republicans botched a plan to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act, a law that took about a year of tough negotiation and dickering to enact in the first place.

Trump and his pals in Congress tried to do it in the span of 17 days. They failed to muster enough support from, oh, just about any faction within the GOP. TEA Party, Freedom Caucus, party moderates all hated the American Health Care Act, which the Republican congressional leadership pulled out of its backside in the dead of night.

ACA repeal and replace? Gone. Finished. As House Speaker Paul Ryan said, “(The Affordable Care Act) is the law of the land for the foreseeable future.”

What, then, do Trump and the Trumpkins — the gang that cannot legislate its way out of a wet paper bag — want to do now?

Tax reform. Tax reform!

ACA repeal and replacement was complicated enough. Indeed, the president admitted he didn’t realize it could be so complicated. No kidding, Mr. President.

I’ve got your “complicated” right here, though. If you’re going to take on the big stuff, you’ve decided to go after the biggest of them all: reforming the federal tax code.

Presidents of both parties have been saying for decades that the tax system is too complicated, too cumbersome, too this and too that. What have any of them accomplished? Damn little!

The tax system is a monstrous entity that requires careful study, analysis, expertise and patience to repair. Does anyone really think that the president of the United States — based on what we’ve just witnessed — is capable of learning the nuts and bolts of tax policy? Does he really and truly even give a crap about it?

And what about the speaker of the House, who presides over the congressional chamber where all tax policy must originate. How well do you think Paul Ryan did in engineering the House’s role in the cluster fudge that resulted in the ACA replacement meltdown late this past week?

Good luck, gentlemen. You will need all of it you can find if you have any chance of succeeding in this monumental effort.

national news, political news

Wheeler-dealer has been revealed as a fraud

A big part of what has gotten Donald J. Trump into so much trouble during the past few days has been his own big mouth and penchant for braggadocio.

He boasted many times while winning his campaign for the presidency that he would cut the “best” deals ever. He would renegotiate international trade deals; he would persuade companies to bring jobs back to this country; he would force Mexico to pay for “the wall” across our countries’ shared border … oh, and he would “repeal and replace” Obamacare on “Day One” of his presidency.

What about that last thing, repealing the Affordable Care Act and replacing it with something better?

He didn’t deliver the goods. Not only did he not make good on that grand campaign promise, he revealed himself to be a fraud, a sucker.

None of this would matter nearly as much were it not for the undeniable fact that Trump bragged so openly — repeatedly and loudly — about how he would transfer his legendary business acumen into running a multitrillion-dollar government operation.

No president can force other politicians to do his bidding. No president can perform a single-handed midcourse correction of the federal government.

He told us at the Republican National Convention that “I, alone” can fix the things that need fixing. Mr. President, good governance — something that is foreign to you — inherently is a team sport. It requires a partnership between two of the three branches of government: the executive and legislative branches. That’s how the founders set it up and that’s how it is intended to function. What’s more, if either of those two branches screw it up, we have the third branch of government — the federal court system — to determine whether they violate the U.S. Constitution.

Can the 70-year-old president who prior to taking office had zero direct experience with government change his ways? Can this guy ever learn how to govern?

I refer to a part of Maureen Dowd’s brilliant column in today’s New York Times. She refers to how Trump likens his ascent to power to when Ronald Reagan became president in 1981. There is an essential difference between the 45th president and President Reagan.

It is that Ronald Reagan “knew what he didn’t know.” So he sought to hire the best minds he could find to teach him. Donald Trump has yet to acknowledge that he knows nothing about the job he now occupies.

Deal maker? Big-time negotiator? The president is a fake.

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Back and forth, the political fortunes keep changing

First, it was Democrats who were smiling smugly at Republicans for nominating a TV celebrity/carnival barker/real estate mogul as their presidential nominee.

Then the Republicans had the next laugh as Donald J. Trump actually got elected over the Democrats’ presidential heiress apparent, Hillary Rodham Clinton.

One party is up. The other is down. Then the roles flipped.

What in the world then happened? The “up” party — which now controls Congress and the White House — produced a health care overhaul plan that couldn’t get enough support within its own ranks, let alone from the folks on the “other side of the aisle.”

That’s right, Republicans drove their repeal of the Affordable Care Act straight over the cliff.

Who led the suicide mission? Was it the carnival barker/president? Was it the speaker of the House of Representatives, the so-called “policy wonk”? Both of them appear ready to throw the other one under the proverbial bus.

This much appears certain: The party that sought to govern has been revealed to comprise a bunch of folks who cannot hit their backside with both hands.

As Frank Bruni writes in today’s New York Times: “For the entirety of his campaign, Donald Trump crowed about his peerless ability to make deals, one of which, he assured us, was going to be a replacement for Obamacare that would cut costs without leaving any Americans in the lurch. Last week proved that there was no such swap, that he hadn’t done an iota of work to devise one and that he was spectacularly unprepared to shepherd such legislation through Congress.”

Bruni skewers Trump.

These change of fortunes are giving me a case of vertigo. I can barely remain upright while watching the new Big Men On Campus make a mess of what they promised — repeatedly and with maximum boastfulness — to do once they acquired the keys to the White House.

I won’t take much, if any, of this to the bank just yet. The fickle winds of political fate have this way of changing course in an instant.

Still, Republicans across the land drooled at the prospect of a Trump presidency to go along with GOP control of Capitol Hill. I must wonder today if they regret seeing their wish come true.

national news, political news

Trump is no Obama as a negotiator

Donald J. Trump’s reputation as a first-class “dealmaker” is now in shambles. It’s been trampled by his own ego and his own petulance.

The deal to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act became a victim of the president’s inability and unwillingness to even talk to Democrats. Let’s forget for a moment that the replacement bill couldn’t get enough Republican votes in the House to approve it. It was cobbled together virtually overnight, in secret, by Republican congressional leaders who handed it to a president who didn’t know — or care — about the details it contained.

How did the ACA come into being?

Its author, President Barack Obama, sought out congressional Republican leaders. One of them happened to be now-Speaker Paul Ryan, who at the time was chairman of the House Budget Committee. He sought out Sen. Mitch McConnell, who would become majority leader in the upper chamber. He talked to Republicans and implored them to come up with a better plan than the one he and his administration had assembled.

The GOP didn’t budge. The president then was left to rely on his Democratic colleagues in the House and Senate to approve the ACA. They did. Republicans howled about having the bill “shoved down our throats.”

What happened this past week bears little resemblance to what happened in 2010. What the current president and the current speaker sought to do was foist a bill on the public that didn’t have the support of most members within their own political party.

There. That’s my take on it.

Do not believe the baloney that Donald Trump is a master “dealmaker.” He’s nothing of the kind. The president has been schooled by politicians who don’t like being bullied.

Trump told us that “I, alone” can repair the things he said need to be fixed. No sir. You alone cannot.

***

I want to share with you a hilariously astute column by one of the best columnists in America. The New York Times’ Maureen Dowd has peeled the bark off the president, someone she says she knows quite well.

Dowd speaks a blunt, brutal truth in her “letter” to the president of the United States.

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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.

medical news

ACA just might survive GOP in-fighting

The Affordable Care Act has been called as good as dead, a goner, a “miserable failure.”

The Republican majority in Congress fought it tooth and nail for the past seven years. Then a Republican got elected president in 2016 and the GOP became downright giddy at the prospect of repealing the ACA, President Barack Obama’s chief domestic achievement.

Then it happened.

The Republicans cobbled together something called the American Health Care Act. Then they sent it to the Congressional Budget Office for some “scoring.” The CBO then delivered some numbers the GOP didn’t want to hear: 24 million Americans would lose health insurance, the CBO declared.

The GOP’s response? The CBO doesn’t know what it’s talking about, congressional leaders said.

But isn’t the CBO the gold standard for determining these matters?

Now the TEA Party wing of the GOP is rebelling against the AHCA. It’s “Obamacare Light,” they say. They hate the AHCA. Of course, they hate the ACA even more, which is no surprise, given that a Democratic president happened to be its founding father.

Oh, and Democrats? They’re unified against any effort to repeal the ACA and replace it with something that relies heavily on “tax credits” for Americans to buy insurance; Democrats call it code for “tax relief for the wealthiest Americans.”

Which brings me to this point: If the Republican Party’s congressional elders cannot come up with an alternative to the ACA that all its members can endorse, can this party actually govern?

medical news

CBO numbers are in: not good for AHCA

Donald Trump promised that no one would lose their health insurance under a re-crafted plan to replace the Affordable Care Act.

The Congressional Budget Office’s verdict? Wrong, Mr. President!

There goes a major campaign promise.

As predicted, the Trump administration dismisses the CBO report, which is supposed to be the gold standard in determining the fiscal viability of sweeping, landmark public policies.

The CBO projects that 24 million more Americans will lose their health insurance by 2026 under the American Health Care Act. Not good, right?

Health and Human Services Secretary Dr. Tom Price — a leading critic of the Affordable Care Act — says the CBO report is incomplete and inaccurate. Well, of course he would say that.

As the New York Times has reported: “The much-anticipated judgment by Capitol Hill’s official scorekeeper did not back up President Trump’s promise of providing health care for everyone and was likely to fuel the concerns of moderate Republicans. Next year, it said, the number of uninsured Americans would be 14 million higher than expected under current law.”

The president has said “no one” would lose their health insurance. If it were anyone else, I would stand and applaud such a declaration. The problem, though, with this president is that I cannot trust that his word is true, that he’s actually speaking from his heart.

I just do not know any longer when or whether he’s telling the truth.

Therefore, I shall rely on the analyses of others, such as the CBO.

***

One more point …

The White House doesn’t want the AHCA to be nicknamed Trumpcare, much the way the ACA was given the name of President Barack Obama, who signed the ACA into law in 2010 and has become identified as the former president’s signature piece of domestic legislation.

Well, too bad. Trumpcare it is!

The Republican leadership in Congress has crafted it. The president has signed on to it.

Let’s hang the president’s name on it.