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White House blames Democrats for Trumpcare's collapse MSNBC Democrats have effectively no role in the federal policymaking process in the case of this health care bill, they couldn't even filibuster which is controlled by a Republican House, Republican Senate, and Republican White House. And yet, Trump ... White House's Sanders slams Democrats, pledges health care action at off-camera briefingPolitico Sarah Huckabee Sanders: Democrats are responsible for health care failuresSalon Huckabee Sanders: Democrats Responsible for Health Reform FailureWashington Free Beacon TPM -Common Dreams all 100 news articles »

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White House blames Democrats for Trumpcare's collapse - MSNBC

The Tuesday Group and New Democrats met on Tuesday, bringing together moderate members of both parties to talk about areas that may be ripe for bipartisanship.

We talked about budget, we talked about health care, we talked about tax reform all with the intent of finding ways where there might be common ground, New Democrats Chairman Jim Himes told Roll Call.

The Connecticut Democrat said this is the second meeting the groups have held together this Congress and that it was coincidentally timed after the GOPs partisan approach to health has stalled in the Senate. Himes said he was hopeful but not optimistic that failure will lead to bipartisan action on health care.

Health care is such a freighted religious issue for people that I dont think a failure on the Senate side leads to next week kumbayas and bipartisan action. I think its much more likely on infrastructure, potentially on tax reform. But you got to start somewhere.

Himes criticized President Donald Trump for trying to label Democrats as obstructionists when Republicans were the ones who decided to take a partisan approach to health care.

Republicans in Congress set health care up to move through reconciliation, he said. That is telling us to go pound sand in advance. That is not a good way to get us on board.

The Tuesday Group/New Democrats lunch exemplifies how legislation should be produced, Himes said, noting, Resilient legislation is bipartisan.

Tuesday Group Co-Chairman Charlie Dent, who wasn't at the lunch because he was at an appropriations markup, said earlier in the day he didn't think the Senate's repeal only, partisan approach was a good approach, and suggested a bipartisan approach was the way to go.

"I think that probably wouldn't be a very wise strategy here...we're going to have to fix what's broken here," the Pennsylvania Republican said about the repeal only strategy.

A handful of New Democrats members last week unveiled a set of policy proposals aimed at stabilizing health insurance markets.

Himes said the New Democrats shared the proposals, which he noted are designed to be bipartisan, with the Tuesday Group members during their meeting.

Kellie Mejdrich contributed to this story.

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New Democrats, Tuesday Group Meet to Pursue Common Ground - Roll Call

July 18, 2017, 12:37 p.m.

House Democrats are willing to come to the table on healthcare if Republicans abandon their attempt to do it alone, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco)said in a letter to Speaker Paul Ryan (D-Wis.) on Tuesday.

"Democrats extend the hand of friendship if Republicans will set aside repeal, abandon cuts to Medicaid, and abandon huge tax breaks for the wealthy," Pelosi states.

With the GOP healthcare bill seemingly dead in the Senate, and senatorsunwilling to consider a straight repeal of the Affordable Care Act, many on Capitol Hill are wondering what will happen next to President Obama's signature healthcare law that Republicans have pledged to kill for nearly a decade.

The overture from Pelosi doesn't include many details on what she thinks the next moves should be, exceptthat they should begin before Congress leaves for its August recess.

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Nancy Pelosi: Democrats are willing to work with Republicans on healthcare fixes - Los Angeles Times

Amid the collapse of a signature piece of Republicanhealth care legislation and continued revelations about the Trump teams ties to Russia, House Democrats have turned their spotlight on proposals to revamp ethics, campaign finance and voting rights laws.

Were fighting back against the lack of accountability that we see in the Trump administration and from special interests, said Maryland Rep.John Sarbanes, who chairs his partys Democracy Reform Task Force.

The president said he was going to do it, he said he was going to drain the swamp, that he was going to bring accountability to Washington hes done absolutely the opposite, Sarbanes said. He suffers and his administration appears to suffer from ethical blindness when it comes to recognizing conflicts of interest rules and basic ethical standards.

House Minority LeaderNancy Pelosiand Sarbanes told reporters during a Tuesday news conference that their party was developing a series of legislative proposals they dubbed the By the People Project that would include updates to the nations ethics and elections systems.

Some of the measures, such as one to encourage small-dollar campaign donations and another to require additional public disclosures of political spending, have already been introduced.

Those bills are unlikely to move in the GOP-controlled Congress but will provide messaging for Democrats over the August recess and on the campaign trail into next year. Lawmakers are crafting other parts of the agenda, such as the overhaul of ethics laws. Sarbanes said they will work with colleagues on the committees of jurisdiction.

This has got to be an important part of the Democratic message as we move forward, hesaid.

The proposals are the latest in congressional Democratsmonths-long resistance effortaimed at putting a focus on President Donald Trumps potential conflicts of interest and ethical woes.

Their goal is two-fold: weaken the White Houses agenda by pointing to the presidents persistent controversies over his business ties and the Russia probe and to try to link Republicans in Congress to those matters.

Members of the minority party have already used their limited procedural tools, such as resolutions of inquiry, to attempt to force the Trump administration to release documents related to the Russia probe as well as the presidents personal tax returns. Republicans have voted down those measures.

Democrats on the Hill have also offered unsuccessful amendments to the annual appropriations bills, and they have penned numerous letters to ethics officials asking for clarifications of the rules.

Outside government watchdogs have also buoyed the effort. Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Government, or CREW, brought a lawsuit in the first days of the Trump administration, alleging that the president was in violation of the Constitutions Emoluments Clause by maintaining ownership of his hotels where foreign dignitaries sometimes stay.

CREW this week announced that it would make public the guest lists of Trumps private Florida club, Mar-a-Lago, after a judge ruled that the administration must provide the list to the group.

House Democrats also blasted the administrationsAdvisory Commission on Election Integrity.

Rep.Pramila Jayapalof Washington called it a sham commission intended to make it harder for Americans to vote. She noted alettersent Tuesday from Maryland Rep.Elijah E. Cummingsand other Democrats calling on Vice President Mike Pence to ask for the resignation of Kris Kobach, theKansas secretary of state who serves as vice chairman of the commission, and to rescind Kobachs request for voter information.

Though Democrats say they believe the commission aims to suppress votes especially in minority districts, supporters of the election commission, including the conservative-leaning Public Interest Legal Foundation, argue that the effort would help rid election systems of fraud and voting irregularities.

Meanwhile, a collection of campaign finance and liberal groups, including Common Cause and Every Voice, held a demonstration on Tuesday outside the Justice Department calling for an investigation of possible election law violations.

Common Cause last week filed complaints with the Justice Department and the Federal Election Commission alleging thatthe presidents son Donald Trump Jr. illegally solicited a political contribution from a foreign national by meeting with a Russian operative reportedly to obtain information damaging to Hillary Clinton's campaign.

Our nation is under attack from Russia and our leaders are making excuses and defending the attacker, said Karen Hobert Flynn, president of Common Cause. Its time for the people to hold these politicians accountable.

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House Democrats Focus on Ethics, Political Money - Roll Call

Thenew Washington Post-ABC News poll is bad for President Trump, but one number is raising some eyebrows when it comes to Democrats.

It asked whether people thought the Democratic Party stands for something or just stands against Trump, and people chose the latter by a 52-to-37 margin. So thatis a majority of registered voters who think the opposition party isn't defined by anything except opposition that the Democratic Party has no real message.

This isn't out of nowhere. Rep. Joseph Crowley (N.Y.), the fourth-ranking Democrat in the House, seemed to confirm the majority's belief in an Associated Press story that just happened to popthe same morning the Post-ABC poll did. That message is being worked on, the congressman said. We're doing everything we can to simplify it, but at the same time provide the meat behind it as well. So that's coming together now.

Thenthere are those special-election losses especially that backbreaker in Georgia, in which there was some Bernie Sanders-related consternation about whether Jon Ossoff was progressive enough.

It's a bit of a mess. And it's a mess that's complicated by the fact that Democrats are really good at being disorganized and also don't really have a leader to speak of at the moment. But here's what else we can say: It probably doesn't matter.

Republicans ran for years on a message of Obama is bad and undo what Obama did and it worked out pretty well for them in the 2010 and 2014 midterms. Charlie Cook had this prescient quote in Rolling Stone in March 2010, when Republicans were actually in a pretty similar spot to where Democrats are right now and people were wonderingwhat the message was:

Does the Republican Party lack a clear leader? Absolutely. Do they lack a positive message? Of course. Do their demographics suck? Yeah, Cook said. But in a midterm election, none of that matters. Because midterm elections are a referendum on the party in power. And to throw one side out, you've got to throw the other side back in.

You could literally write that first part about Democrats word for word.

Republicans would eventually settle upon aContract with America-esque plan, labeled the Pledge to America, in September 2010.It was a minor story at the time, and was quickly forgotten even after Republicans took the House that year.

Fast-forward to the 2014 election cycle, and Democrats had grown fond of labeling the GOP obstructionistsand the Party of No opposing President Barack Obama out of spite, they argued. They seized upon then-Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell's (R-Ky.) statement that his top political goal was to make Obama a one-term president. And it was a message that seemed to take; a July 2013 CBS News poll asked whether Republicans' opposition to Obama was driven more by policy disagreements or to stop Democrats from gaining a political advantage. People said the GOP was more about stopping Obama than policy by a 64-to-28 margin. For Democrats, it was a pretty even split.

Did the GOP wind up with a hugely novel platform ahead of the 2014 election in which they wiped the floor with the Democrats? Of course not. Did the GOP ever settle on an Obamacare replacement to run on proactively? Nope, and when they finally won control of Congress and the presidency in November 2016, they still didn't have their alternative ironed out. This was the thing they ran on for seven years, and they never had to figure out what they were running on besides repeal.

So why does this keep coming up? Part of the reason is that people within the party truly care about policy and about its direction. And there will always be thosepushing for the party to move more in the direction of Sanders (I-Vt.) or perhaps to moderate on certain things to try to appeal to rural voters.

There are also politicians who see a chance to make a name for themselves this way. It just sounds good to say, Our party needs to stand for something! Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker (R) was big on telling the GOP it couldn't just be the Party of No. Bobby Jindal was going to be the ideas candidate in a party that apparently had none. And then the GOP nominated Donald Trump, the guy who was the most in-your-face, anti-Obama candidate on the debate stage the guy who lacked any real coherent ideology or ideas of his own.

The point is that we've been here before. Do Democrats need to figure out who they are and what they stand for? Many in the party would say yes. And from a good-government standpoint, it's nice to tell people where you stand and what your priorities are. But Democrats probably don't need to be anything more than the anti-Trump party right now not really. The 2018 election will largely be a referendum on Trump, and right now Americans say they prefer a Democratic Congress to a Republican one by between 5 and 10 points.

That's pretty decent shape to be in for a party with no ethos.

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A majority says the Democratic Party stands for nothing except the only thing that matters in 2018 - Washington Post