Mediaboss Marketing

Get ready for another big congressional fight over Obamacare.

The flashpoint this time is a key funding stream for the program one that subsidizes insurers so they can offer low-income consumers plans with reduced out-of-pocket expenses.

President Donald Trumpsuggested in a WednesdayWall Street Journalinterview that he and other Republicans mightcut off the funds.Now Democrats are saying theyll fight this by demanding that Congress include the money as part of a spending bill that is supposed to keep the government running past April.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) will be pushing hard for it as part of the negotiations, a senior Democratic leadership aide told The Huffington Post.

An aide to House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said that the issue is her top priority in the negotiations.

The politics of the emerging conflict are complicated and unpredictable, and one possible outcome is an impasse that prevents the spending bill from passing. In other words, another government shutdown over Obamacare could be in the offing.

But the stakes in the fight are higher than normal, because withholding the money could throw insurance markets into disarray potentially unraveling insurance coverage for millions of people. In the Journal interview, Trump said he hoped that would motivate Democrats to negotiate with him over repeal.

Democrats, predictably, are having none of it. They say they are happy to talk about modifying the health care law but only if Republicans agree to leave the bulk of the coverage expansion in place, and only if Trump stops trying to sabotage the law.

The payments in question so-called cost-sharing reductions, or CSRs reimburse insurers for providing more generous coverage to consumers with incomes below 250 percent of the poverty line. Thats $61,500 for a family of four.

The 2010 Affordable Care Act instructs the federal government to make these payments, but it does not actually appropriate the money. The Obama administration paid the money anyway, saying it had legal authority to do so. House Republicans then launched alawsuitover the payments.

Last year, a federal district court ruled the payments unconstitutional but alsostayed the decision, assuming the Obama administration would appeal which it did.

As long as the decision is stayed, the federal government can continue to pay the money.But the Trump administration hasnt indicated whether it will keep the Obama administration appeal going. Thats rattled insurers, who are busy calculating rates for next year and, in some cases, deciding whether to keep offering exchange coverage at all.

If the money were to vanish, insurers couldnt simply stop offering the plans with the reduced cost-sharing.Instead, theyd be required by law to keep offering them and to account for the extra expense by raising premiums for everyone.

Doing so would likely mean raising premiums for the typical plan by 19 percent, according to an analysis by the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation. Realistically, many of the insurers still recovering from losses they incurred in the Affordable Care Acts early years and uncertain about the programs future would drop out altogether.

An increasingly vocal chorus of interest groups, including everybody from the American Medical Association to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, have been calling on the president and Congress to address the issue ideally, with a permanent solution. One way to do that would be to appropriate the money for the next few years, or maybe indefinitely.

The coming spending bill would be an obvious place to try that, because, unlike most of the bills that go through the House these days, it will probably end up passing with a combination of Democratic and Republican votes over the objections of the most conservative members.

Lawmakers wouldnt even have to find offsetting revenue or spending cuts, because the official budget baseline, from the Congressional Budget Office, anticipates the money (roughly $7 to $8 billion for next year) being spent.

Key House Republicans have already said they would like the money to keep flowing, their objections to Obamacare notwithstanding.

I will do everything I can to make sure the cost-sharing reduction payments get made, especially this year, where they were promised by the federal government under the contracts, Rep. Greg Walden (R-Ore.), chairman of the Energy and Commerce Committee, told Bloomberg News last month. Thats an obligation not only to insurers but also to the people who took on those plans. We cannot leave them high and dry.

But that was before Trump made his statements about withholding the subsidies and its not clear what House Republicans will do if Trump decides to oppose the funding strongly.

We continue to work with the Trump administration to evaluate the options in front of us, AshLee Strong, spokeswoman for House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), said on Thursday.

CORRECTION: Chuck Schumer is the Senate minority leader, not the majority leader.

Visit link:
Democrats Say They Will Fight Trump Over Health Insurance Subsidies - Huffington Post

Democrats are savoring a moral victory despite coming up short in the special election to represent the 4th Congressional District of Kansas. A district that five months ago gave Donald Trump a 27-point blowout gave Republican Ron Estes a merely respectable 7-percentage point margin over Democrat James Thompson.

The president tweeted this morning: Great win in Kansas last night for Ron Estes, easily winning the Congressional race against the Dems, who spent heavily & predicted victory! Almost none of that was true: Democrats spent next to nothing to help Thompson, and it was Republicans who raced in at the last minute with emergency cash for Estes. The question now is whether Thompsons surprisingly strong showing in one of the most reliably Republican districts in the country means anything for the elections yet to come.

Story Continued Below

With Trumps presidential approval languishing in the upper 30s to low 40s, Democrats are certainly hoping that his misfortunes are building a blue wave for 2018. There are over 100 Republicans sitting in districts that wouldn't have been heavily GOP enough to overcome the D swing we saw in KS tonight, Democratic data specialist Tom Bonier observed on Twitter.

But it is far from certain that were going to see a 20-point swing toward the Democrats in every precinct in every state across the country, whether its for the upcoming special House elections for what were Republican-held seats in Georgia, Montana and South Carolina, or in the 2018 midterm elections.

Two big questions remain. Was this race just another fluky special election that will not be easily replicated? And did Thompson in defeat give Democrats a road map for a winning strategy in 2018?

Special elections are often low-turnout affairs marked by local quirks, which can lead to aberrations in voting patterns. And the biggest quirk in Kansas was the Republican deadweight of its governor, Sam Brownback.

Brownbacks deep tax cuts had led to unpopular spending cuts in education, driving his approval down to a rock bottom 27 percent. Estes was tied to Brownbacks administration as state treasurer, and Thompson whose internal polling showed Trump retaining majority approval in the district mainly trained his fire on Brownback. In fact, Thompson credited Trump and his last-minute robocall endorsement with dragging Estes over the finish line: I probably shouldn't say this, but Mr. Estes didn't beat us. It took the president of the United States.

Still, its difficult to fully separate whats happening in Washington from a congressional election, and whats happening is a Republican meltdown. And that may be sapping enthusiasm among GOP voters nationwide.

Before last night, there was some evidence of depleted Republican energy in other special elections. As the New York Times Nate Cohn reported last week, Republicans suffered a 5-point turnout drop in a Delaware state legislative race. And in the early vote for Georgias 6th Congressional District, he wrote, [Democratic] turnout is running about twice as high as it did at this point in 2014, while Republican turnout is about half what it was. These are hopeful signs for Democrats, but they are only wisps of data.

Whether it was the troubles of Trump, Brownback or a combination of the twoor just the usual pattern of special electionsRepublican turnout plummeted on Tuesday. Based on the unofficial results, Estes suffered a 62 percent drop in votes compared to the Republican candidate in 2016, while Thompsons Democratic decline was only 32 percent.

Another Brownback wont be hovering over the next round of special congressional elections. Georgias Republican governor, Nathan Deal, is riding high with 63 percent approval, and Montanas Democratic governor, Steve Bullock, has a solid 59 percent. South Carolinas governor, Henry McMaster, has barely begun his tenure.

Without the aid of a gubernatorial albatross, and with uncertainty over how much Republican voters have soured on Trump, Democrats will need a potent national message that resonates in red America. And in the wake of Bernie Sanders improbable campaign, many progressives are pushing Democrats to adopt his populist platform and style to paint those working-class conservative districts blue. Did Thompsons valiant effort make that case?

Sanders acolytes saw a kindred spirit in Thompson, but he stopped short of embracing the entirety of the Vermont senators platform. For example, he said of Bernies signature health care proposal, I like the idea of single payer, [but] I don't see it getting accomplished in our current political environment.

But he campaigned with Sanders, credited him giving him the inspiration to run and relentlessly used Sanders frame of fighting for the working class. Thompson was also unabashedly liberal on combating climate change, protecting LGBT rights and providing undocumented immigrants with pathways to citizenship, though he mixed in support for the right to bear arms.

[Thompson] felt he had already won reported The Huffington Post, because he had shown that Democrats could make a Republican district competitive by running on an unapologetically progressive platform. True enough. Thompsons gun-toting progressive populism was a marked improvement over last Novembers blowout. But Michael Dukakis was an improvement over Walter Mondale; it didnt mean Democrats should run as diminutive technocrats.

The hypothesis that a progressive economic populism can fully flip a white working-class district from red to blue remains unproven, especially when confronting a competing right-wing populism that intertwines protectionism with promises of deportation and environmental deregulation. In fact, Thompsons populist pitch hit a wall similar to the one Hillary Clintons pragmatist campaign did. The only part of the Kansas district that Thompson won outright was urban Wichita; he failed to make a significant dent in the surrounding rural areas.

Meanwhile, the Democratic hope in Georgias 6th Congressional District, the buttoned-down Jon Ossoff, is running a campaign thats more pointedly anti-Trump and more ideologically moderate than the one we saw from Thompson. A recent ad shows Ossoff silently tweeting that we should fix Obamacare, NOT repeal it as well as cut wasteful spending and, instead of pining for the jobs of the past, attract more high-tech jobs. He ends by tweeting, Ill stand up to Donald Trump he should act like a president.

Georgia 6th does not resemble Kansas 4th in the slightest. The district is not economically hard hit. It includes affluent Atlanta suburbs and more than half the voters are college graduates. Trump barely edged Clinton there in November. A pitchfork populism would not be the right fit for the district. A poll from Atlantas 11Alive News found Ossoffs current lead is based on young, educated and affluent voters who like his talk of high-tech jobs and economic development.

But just as Thompsons strategy cant be easily adopted by Ossoff, Ossoffs upscale centrist message doesnt provide much guidance to Montana Democrat Rob Quist. An Ossoff upset wouldnt mean the country-singing Berniecrat should ditch his cowboy hat and tack rightward to win his statewide special election next month. The Big Sky state has a long history of Democrats successfully running as prairie populists, including Sen. Jon Tester, as well as the current governor, Bullock, and his predecessor, Brian Schweitzer. Quist is sensibly following their well-worn path. Ossoffs performance also cant tell Quist whether or not he should focus on skewering Trumps conduct in office, since Trump won Montana by 20 points and likely still holds majority support.

Such is the Democratic challenge in building a blue wave. As the Clinton campaign learned the hard way, what works in the college-educated suburbs is not what works in the working-class manufacturing hubs and farm towns. The close Kansas contest may give Democrats a morale boost, but they have yet to solve the biggest political puzzle of all: a message that transcends Americas entrenched political, economic and cultural divides.

Bill Scher is a contributing editor to Politico Magazine, and co-host of the Bloggingheads.tv show The DMZ.

Continue reading here:
What Kansas Didn't Do for Democrats - POLITICO Magazine

WINCHESTER, Va. - If Mudcat Saunders were running things, he would never have approached bringing his beloved Democratic Party together by uninviting one faction of the divided party.

"Well, that would not have been my tactics. If your party is divided, well how do you bring it together if you don't invite all sides?" he asks, confounded by the decision.

But that is exactly what they did to Saunders, a legendary Democratic operative with a deep Southern drawl, a commanding presence, and a fierce loyalty to his party, despite its sharp turn left beginning along the fringes with Al Gore.

Saunders is the Democrats' outspoken liaison between rural voters and progressive candidates who helps them soften their message to longtime Democrats who still like God and guns and find themselves in a church pew every Sunday. He was unceremoniously uninvited to the very event that was supposed to bring rural and progressive Democrats together ahead of the governor's race this year.

He said: "Like I said, not exactly the way I would have approached it. I think every voice needs to be heard. We are losing rural Democrat support and I think we really need that for this governor's race in order to win."

In short, Democrats believe that because of their populous numbers in the urban suburbs in Northern Virginia, they don't need rural voters. And they aren't showing any willingness to petition, engage with them, or win them over.

The party's beef with Saunders involves his unwillingness to vote for Hillary Clinton last year. It doesn't help that he was pretty outspoken about it.

"They don't have to. And this is why we are the minority party," said Dane Strother, a Washington, D.C.-based Democratic strategist with deep Southern roots. "If we remain uninterested in the rural vote we will remain the minority party."

Virginia Democrats are in the midst of a civil war that is only getting worse since the election of Donald J. Trump. Virginia did not go for Trump, but its rural voters, a decent amount of them Democrats, voted decisively for Trump over their party's nominee.

That civil war has escalated as the Democratic primary race for governor moves front and center. Candidates Ralph Northam, an Eastern Shore native, and Tom Perriello, who once represented the Fifth Congressional District, both come from rural Virginia.

Mudcat supports Northam. He said: "Perriello used to be pro-life, now he's not. Perriello used to be pro-gun, now he is not. He is running away from the moderate Democrats and right into the arms of the left of the party and it's disappointing."

Earlier this month, Sen. Bernie Sanders, the de facto leader of the Democratic Party's progressive wing since he effectively harnessed the energy of the party's far left during last year's primary contest with Clinton, endorsed the former congressman in the governor's race.

The former Blue Dog-like Democrat came into the House majority one cycle after the wave of moderate Democrats swept Republicans into the minority.

Northam is the current lieutenant governor of Virginia, a position elected separately from the governor's office. He is moderate, populist, and liked by the state's Democratic Party. He also voted for George W. Bush for president - twice.

One of these guys will soon be the Democratic nominee for governor in Virginia, said Strother: "It is one of only two states, New Jersey is the other, that hold governor's races this year, I think this contest in a purple state will show us the direction my party is going. Will they go full progressive? Will they include blue-collar and working-class rural Democrats in a message that they can rally around? I sure hope so, or we are in a world of hurt."

Strother said the decision in Roanoke to disinvite Mudcat from the recent conference on recruiting rural voters and addressing cultural challenges was a "stupid" one: "This is a defining race for us. We have to have a developed, authentic message that reaches these voters and stop alienating them or we will remain in the wilderness."

Here in the Shenandoah Valley, those exact types of voters are turned off by progressive politics in the state, which has gone blue three presidential elections in a row. Those numbers for Democrats have softened in those cycles, not hardened.

The story to watch first is: Where do Democrats go in their primary race this summer? Do they continue to push out moderate voices like Mudcat? Do they find a way to bring them in with a message that appeals to all? Or do they march leftward? And, if so, does that march keep them in the wilderness, or do they find victory in the fall?

It is certainly the race to watch. Why? Well, because the Democrats need the Mudcats of this world in their party - not just here but across the country - and they need to let them have a voice. If not, they risk remaining the minority party up and down the ballot.

Salena Zito is a CNN political analyst, and a staff reporter and columnist for the Washington Examiner. For more information, visit http://www.creators.com.

Published: April 12, 2017 10:44 AM EDT The Philadelphia Inquirer

We recently asked you to support our journalism. The response, in a word, is heartening. You have encouraged us in our mission to provide quality news and watchdog journalism. Some of you have even followed through with subscriptions, which is especially gratifying. Our role as an independent, fact-based news organization has never been clearer. And our promise to you is that we will always strive to provide indispensable journalism to our community. Subscriptions are available for home delivery of the print edition and for a digital replica viewable on your mobile device or computer. Subscriptions start as low as 25 per day. We're thankful for your support in every way.

The rest is here:
Virginia's progressive Democrats push moderates aside - Philly.com

Reporter: Dems Trying To Cuss Their Way Back to Power

Democrats seem to be taking a page from President Trumps often-earthy language and are letting loose four-letter words in public speeches and interviews, notes McClatchys Alex Roarty. So much for the old maxim that politicians campaign in poetry but govern in prose. Democratic Chairman Tom Perez has charged that Republicans dont give a s about people. And New York Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand said that if Democrats cant help people, we should go the f home. Perez, in fact, has repeated his foul-mouthed criticism of Republicans in interviews and statements since, making it something of a catchphrase. Apparently, last years surge in [voter] anger has left many Democrats racing to catch up, hoping to prove they feel the same visceral disgust. Conservative take: New York AGs Enviro Activist Pal

Billionaire environmental activist Tom Steyer appears to be the new owner of the New York State Attorney Generals office, charges Drew Johnson at The Hill, asking what it took to make AG Eric Schneiderman a pawn in his plan to vilify ExxonMobil and ramp up global warming hysteria. Apparently, he says, it was the prospect of campaign contributions, since public records show the AG launched a climate change investigation targeting ExxonMobil while he was urging Steyer to help fund a possible gubernatorial run. And as the probe expanded, Steyer began pouring money into rallies supporting Schneiderman and his fellow AGs through his political action committee, NextGen Climate Action. In other words, Steyers fingerprints are all over the ExxonMobil investigations.

From the right: Did Assad Just Use Saddams WMDs?

Eliminating Saddam Husseins stockpile of weapons of mass destruction was a major justification for the 2003 US invasion of Iraq, recalls Mark Hemingway at The Weekly Standard, but they were nowhere to be found. A popular theory at the time proposed by, among others, James Clapper, who went on to become Barack Obamas director of national intelligence is that they were smuggled into Syria. Indeed, Clapper cited a heavy flow of traffic from Iraq into Syria just before the invasion. So it might be time to reassess whether the intelligence that Iraq had WMD was as faulty as we thought. Especially since we now know that the Obama administration was knowingly spreading falsehoods about removing chemical weapons from Syria. From the left: All-Out Resistance Wont Stop Trump

Ever since Trumps election, observes John Judis at The New Republica, the consensus view on the left has been to demand full-on resistance to everything this president does. They argue that its not merely a moral imperative: Its also the smartest way for Democrats to stage a comeback, citing how Mitch McConnell and the GOP opposed President Barack Obama. But, Judis notes, McConnell was too crafty for total resistance and Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and the Democrats should be, too. GOP opposition was actually quite selective, focusing mainly on health care and the stimulus, because McConnell knew that total obstruction was a dead end. To regain voters trust as the party that cares about ordinary Americans, they shouldnt follow the path of all-out resistance but of the smartest resistance.

Liberal take: The Millennial Lefts Rude Awakening

The millennial left has had to deal with some uncomfortable truths since Trumps election, notes Erin Gloria Ryan at The Daily Beast. But one of the more unmooring is that when it comes to issues like immigration and foreign relations, many of the actions that President Obama took, and many of the actions that President Hillary Clinton would have taken, are not necessarily in line with what they think those candidates values are. Many on the left were disturbed by Trump ordering an airstrike against Syria. But then Clinton supported the attack. And the similarity in their stances presents an important truth that people who consider themselves left-leaning should consider: that what young people on the left think their leaders are isnt necessarily in line with reality.

Compiled by Eric Fettmann

More:
Democrats' foul-mouthed strategy and other comments - New York Post

DNC chair will speak at SC Democrats' fundraising dinner The State (blog) The head of the Democratic National Committee will give the keynote address at S.C. Democrats' annual fundraising dinner. DNC chairman Tom Perez will speak at the April 28 Blue Palmetto Dinner in Columbia. The dinner will be at the Medallion ...

Original post:
DNC chair will speak at SC Democrats' fundraising dinner - The State (blog)