Mediaboss Marketing

President Trump tweeted out that his former Homeland Security Secretary John F. Kelly is replacing Reince Priebus as White House chief of staff on July 28. (Victoria Walker,Peter Stevenson/The Washington Post)

President Trump is not happy with the way his presidency is going. That much has become clear over the past few weeks. Hes shaken up his personal legal team, completely upended his communications team by installing a guy whos threatening to fire/killstaffers, and now hes ousted his chief of staff, Reince Priebus.

Trump announced Friday afternoon that he is replacing Priebus with retired Gen.John Kelly, currently the homeland security secretary.

Withevery staff move, Trump seems to be moving ever further away from the Republican establishment and building a much more insular team that fits his narrow worldview. Nowhere is this more evident thanin the Priebus-Kelly switch.

Kelly isnt a traditional choice for such a political job. Hes a retired Marine Corps general who has expressed no nuance about the war on terrorism. He has described terrorists as a savage enemyand publicly clashed with former president Barack Obama on whether to close Guantanamo Bay.

Kelly and Trump dont agree on everything. During his confirmation hearing, Kelly distanced himself from Trumps border wall (a physical barrier in and of itself will not do the job) and torture (Absolutely not, he said about whether he would carry out a hypothetical Trump order to bring back waterboarding.) The Senate approved him 88-11, with all Republicans voting for his nomination.

By contrast, Priebus is the very definition of the Republican establishment. He ran the Republican National Committee during the election. Hes buddies with that other Republican establishment figure, House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) theyre both from Wisconsin and has been a GOP operative for years.

Actually, its not much of an overstatement to say that Priebus, along with Vice President Pence, was Trumps connection to Capitol Hill insiders. On Thursday, Ryan defended Priebus: Reince is doing a fantastic job at the White House, and I believe he has the president's confidence.

Smoothing Trumps relationship with the establishment was arguably the reason Trump picked Priebus in the first place. It was an olive branch to the very people he had assailed on the campaign trail, as The Washington Post reported at the time.

No more olive branches, it seems. Sean Spicer, another Republican establishment figure, is out after Trump hired New York financier Anthony Scaramucci as White House communications director.

Trump hasnt completely severed his ties with Congress. Key GOP lawmakers didnt outright criticize the staffing change, and some applauded Kellys promotion.

Secretary Kelly is one of the strongest and most natural leaders Ive ever known, said Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) in a statement.

I congratulate Secretary Kelly on his appointment and look forward to working with him to advance our agenda, said Ryan, after devoting a paragraph to singing Priebuss praises.

Priebuss dismissal is also an admission by the president of how tumultuous these first six-plus months have been. Trump has yet to have a major policy victory. Hes under investigation by a special counsel for potential obstruction of justice. His team cannot get out from under a barrage of Russia-connection revelations. His approval rating is the lowest any modern president has had at this point in his tenure (36 percent, according to the latest Washington Post-ABC News poll). His relationship with Congress is fraught and hasnt been fruitful.

No!! replied Robert David Johnson, a presidential scholar at Brooklyn College, to my email asking whether any other presidency has experienced this much staffing turmoil in its first few months. Bill Clinton had some inexperienced staffers who left their job early on, and Lyndon B. Johnson had a lot of palace intrigue. Its almost as if Trump has managed to combine the two inexperience andlack of knowledge about Washington from Clinton with the palace intrigue of early LBJ, he said.

Trump clearly hasnt liked the results. Hestried to play nice with the Republican Party establishment and appears to have concluded that is what has plagued his presidency.

Read more:
With Priebus out, Trump moves still further away from the Republican establishment - Washington Post

Congressional Republicans on Friday glumly confronted the wreckage of their seven-year quest to abolish the Affordable Care Act, blaming each other and President Trump for the dramatic early-morning collapse of the effort but finding no consensus on a way forward.

Some GOP lawmakers clung to long-shot hopes that some version of the legislation might be revived and that a deal might yet be struck before the fall. But the Senates rejection early Friday of a last-ditch, bare-bones proposal to roll back just a few key planks of the law left GOP leaders with few options for uniting their sharply polarized ranks.

Hours later, House Republicans gathered in the Capitol to take stock of the situation. Some raised the prospect of abandoning their long-standing pledge to repeal and replace the ACA and instead working with Democrats to shore up weak spots in the law known as Obamacare. But Trump signaled little interest in that approach, leaving many lawmakers baffled about how to proceed.

Im not a prophet, said Rep. Tom MacArthur (R-N.J.), who helped push an earlier version of the repeal bill through the House. I dont know what comes next.

Politically, the collapse of the repeal effort is potentially devastating for Republicans. It leaves Trump without a significant policy achievement in the critical first six months of his presidency; it casts a pall over the partys coming drives to pass a budget and overhaul the tax code; and it exposes GOP lawmakers to rising anger from their conservative base.

Substantively, it leaves much work undone. While the ACA has made health insurance accessible to millions of Americans, it has failed to contain rising costs, especially in the individual insurance market, where people without access to employer-provided coverage buy policies. Without federal action and additional cash those marketplaces could become unstable.

Lawmakers in both parties have called for stabilizing the marketplaces. But many Republicans have little appetite for entering negotiations on the issue with Democrats.

I dont think the Democrats have any interest in doing anything productive, said Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.), a vehement critic of the ACA. He added: Republican senators are going to go home. Theyre going to hear from their constituents, and I dont expect the response to be muted.

At the meeting of House Republicans, Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) summed up the mood by citing an old Gordon Lightfoot tune called The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald, about sailors drowning on a sinking ship.

Entering and exiting the meeting, lawmakers offered a variety of ideas for addressing their predicament, and excuses for how they got here.

We just ran out of time. It was an artificial deadline, said Rep. Mark Meadows (R-N.C.), chairman of the hard-right Freedom Caucus. He predicted that Republicans would still get a bill to Trumps desk in September.

Other Republicans called on their colleague to start over and work with Democrats through the regular committee process to craft an ACA overhaul that could win bipartisan support.

A key leader of the GOP repeal effort, Rep. Greg Walden (R-Ore.), said he is willing to take that approach. And Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), the man credited with driving a stake through the heart of the latest GOP health measure, issued a rousing call to bipartisanship.

The vote last night presents the Senate with an opportunity to start fresh, McCain said in a statement. It is now time to return to regular order with input from all of our members Republicans and Democrats and bring a bill to the floor of the Senate for amendment and debate.

Democrats, too, expressed interest in working across the aisle, especially on a plan to make federal cost-sharing subsidies permanent. The subsidies which will total about $7billion this year and $10billion in 2018 reimburse insurers for reducing co-payments and deductibles for certain low-income customers, reducing their out-of-pocket costs.

Trump administration officials have yet to say whether they will continue financing the subsidies past the end of this month.

On Friday, Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) said he spoke with Ryan about that and other potential areas of cooperation.

The insurance industry, hardly our allies, have said the number one thing to stabilize the system and bring premiums down is to make the cost-sharing permanent, Schumer said. That would have a lot of support.

Schumer expressed hope that Fridays health-care vote would prove to be a magic moment that sparked a wave of bipartisanship. But Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) sent early signals that he is skeptical of requests for more federal money to shore up the ACA. After Fridays vote failed, McConnell stood red-faced and dejected on the Senate floor.

Now I think its appropriate to ask, what are their ideas? McConnell challenged Democrats. Itll be interesting to see what they suggest as the way forward. For myself I can say and I bet Im pretty safe in saying for most on this side of the aisle that bailing out insurance companies with no thought of any kind of reform is not something I want to be part of.

Trump, meanwhile, continued to express mainly hostility toward the ACA. On Friday, he unleashed a series of tweets blaming 3 Republicans and 48 Democrats in the Senate who let the American people down by rejecting the latest overhaul proposal.

As I said from the beginning, let ObamaCare implode, then deal. Watch! Trump wrote. He also called for Senate Republicans to abolish the filibuster a venerable Senate procedure designed to protect the minority party that requires contentious matters to receive the votes of at least 60 senators.

As Republicans weighed working with Democrats, they were also struggling to resolve hard feelings toward one another.

Rep. Mo Brooks (R-Ala.), who is running for Senate, placed primary responsibility for the failureof Fridays vote on McConnell. Rep. Charlie Dent (R-Pa.) blamed Trump, saying the president never really laid out core principles and didnt sell them to the American people.

Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa) issued a combative statement criticizing McCain and Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska), who also voted no Friday.

King accused Murkowski of waging a successful write-in reelection campaign in 2010 that was essentially a revolt against GOP primary voters. And he said McCain recently told the Senate he would return and give all of you cause to regret the nice things you said about me. He kept his word.

Earlier this week, McCain, who was recently diagnosed with an aggressive form of brain cancer, flew to Washington and cast a vote that helped his colleagues begin debate on the latest GOP proposal to overhaul Obamacare. On Tuesday, he delivered a stirring address calling for a bipartisan approach to overhauling the 2010 health-care law and criticizing the highly secretive and partisan process that had produced the pending legislation.

The speech set the stage for what was to come.

In the wee hours after midnight Friday, McCain scarred from recent surgery to remove a blood clot that unearthed his cancer rebuffed a last-minute appeal from Vice President Pence on the Senate floor. He emerged from his talks with Pence at 1:29a.m., approached the Senate clerk and gave a thumbs down joining Murkowski and Sen. Susan Collins of Maine as the only Republicans to vote against the legislation.

The measure failed, 51 to 49, with all 48 members of the Democratic caucus voting no.

Stunned gasps and some applause echoed through the chamber. McConnell and his leadership aides stood nearby, grim-faced and despondent.

Maybe this had to happen to actually begin to have a conversation, said Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.), who had tried and failed to broker a bipartisan compromise. The president challenged us to replace, not just repeal. And so once you decide that you want to replace, not just repeal, it becomes more difficult.

On Friday, Sen. Bill Nelson (D-Fla.) said he and Collins were working on a new bipartisan health plan. Sen. Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.), a centrist facing reelection, said he met Wednesday night with 10 other senators and were going to keep talking.

Meanwhile, McCains office announced Friday afternoon that he would fly back to Arizona for radiation and chemotherapy on Monday, but that he would be back in Washington in the fall.

But while talk of bipartisanship was ascendant in the Senate, many House members were angry with their Senate colleagues for letting the repeal effort fail.

Outside Fridays House GOP meeting, Rep. David Schweikert (R-Ariz.) told an old joke shared around the Capitol to illustrate the tensions.

Youre a brand-new member and the guys all pop down next to you and say, See across the hall, thats your opposition. The other side of the Capitol, thats the enemy, Schweikert said. Turns out it could be true.

Juliet Eilperin, Paul Kane and David Weigel contributed to this report.

Read more:
Republican divided on whom to blame for health-care defeat, and what to do next - Washington Post

More than half of Californias 14 House Republicans face potentially tough battles in next years midterm election, and while some of them wavered until the last minute, all of them voted for the House healthcare plan in May.

But in the wee hours of Friday morning, the Senate failed in its apparent last-ditch effort to pass any kind of replacement for Obamacare.

For now, it looks as if congressional leaders are moving on from their healthcare reform efforts, but the Californians vote for a plan that would have taken health insurance from as many as 1 in 3 Californians is sure to be kept alive by the dozens of challengers who have signed up to run against them.

Democrats are plotting to use the healthcare vote as a cudgel against vulnerable Republicans in the same way votes for Obamacare were used to sweep Democrats out of the majority in 2010. And winning at least some of California's GOP seats is crucial to Democratic efforts to win back the House.

The party blasted out news releases Friday saying the representatives "can't turn back time and undo the damaging vote they took to kick 23 million Americans off their health insurance and jack up premiums for millions more. ... [They] own the Republican health care disaster and it will haunt them in 2018."

At the time of the House vote, several of Californias Republican representatives said they were keeping their years-long promise to repeal President Obamas signature law. Others said they were trying to move the process forward with the expectation the Senate would make the bill better.

Now they say they're disappointed the Senate couldn't agree on a way to repeal Obamacare, but none is too concerned about the political effects of voting for the House version, which polls have shown was very unpopular.

Rep. Jeff Denham of Turlock initially said he couldnt back the House bill, but voted for it after getting a commitment from GOP leaders to work on access to healthcare, especially in rural areas. He said Friday he was frustrated the Senate couldnt pass anything.

I expect to see this place work," Denham said. Im certainly disappointed that they werent able to move the ball forward."

Sarah D. Wire

Here's how the Republicans of California voted on the House bill to replace Obamacare.

Here's how the Republicans of California voted on the House bill to replace Obamacare. (Sarah D. Wire)

Hours before the Senate's failed vote, Denham held a campaign fundraiser in Washington for his 50th birthday with top House leaders. Denham has drawn at least eight opponents in a district where hes frequently challenged, but said he wasnt worried about being attacked for his healthcare vote.

Yes, [House Minority Leader] Nancy Pelosi will always target me and we will continue to focus on our district issues, and I think when I do that weve been very successful by a wide margin, Denham said. I certainly dont vote because Nancy Pelosi sends people into my district; I focus on my district.

Denham said he expects to meet with doctors, hospitals and patients during the August recess to talk about other potential healthcare legislation.

He and fellow vulnerable Central Valley Republican Rep. David Valadao of Hanford introduced legislation this week to increase the number of doctor training positions available in areas with high Medicaid populations, something that fits the description of their rural districts, where residents saw some of the biggest benefits from the Medi-Cal expansion under the Affordable Care Act.

Valadao said he was disappointed by the Senate's failure, and believes Republicans still have an obligation to do something about Obamacare.

We do have to have some legislation move forward, he said. Hopefully well get an opportunity to get something done soon.

Prior to the House vote, Rep. Darrell Issa of Vista had said the bill could be improved and he was on the fence about how to vote. Hed barely scraped out a win last year by fewer than 2,000 votes, and more opponents were lining up to challenge him again.

He said he ultimately voted for it because he had faith the Senate would send back a better bill. Issa even nudged Senate leadership twice to consider his idea to offer federal employees healthcare plans to more or all Americans. He said in a statement Friday that hell keep pushing colleagues on that idea.

"Its disappointing, but we cant give up now. Obamacare is still failing and we must bring young adults, families, small business and all Americans relief. We need to keep up the fight," he said.

Rep. Steve Knight of Palmdale, the last Republican congressman in Los Angeles County, said the House had done its part and its still up to the Senate to decide what happens next. Asked about the political ramifications of his vote, he laughed.

Democrats targeted my district way before any vote I made, said Knight, who was among the members expected to be greeted by planned healthcare protests in their hometowns as the House embarked on a monthlong recess Friday. This was a very difficult vote, everybody knows that, but were going to move forward.

Rep. Doug LaMalfa (R-Richvale), whose Northern California seat is not considered to be at risk, said members should confidently explain their positions to voters.

Were here to make hard votes, [we]re here to make votes of conscience. Some guys and gals will complain, Oh, now were out on record with a hard vote you know the guys in the tougher districts but at the end of it, you have a reason that you are supposed to be here, LaMalfa said. If you cant justify your position outside the politics, then why are you here?

Read the original here:
California's House Republicans voted for the Obamacare repeal that seems dead. Here's what they're saying now - Los Angeles Times

With border adjustment gone, Republicans are finally united around tax reform. The price for the consensus, though, is that the ultimate tax reform package is bound to be less ambitious than what the GOP originally envisioned.

"Unfortunately we're not going to have fundamental reform and it will make it hard to get the rates down low," Republican California Rep. Devin Nunes told the Washington Examiner Friday. "There are still opportunities out there, they're going to be hard to achieve, but we're going to try and get there."

Nunes was the original author of legislation, later picked up by Ryan and the House Ways and Means Committee, on which Nunes sits, to throw out the corporate income tax altogether and replace it with a cash-flow tax.

Thursday's joint statement from Republicans didn't include many details, but it did explicitly rule out a cash-flow tax along the lines envisioned by Nunes.

Instead, the statement made clear, congressional Republicans will seek to lower tax rates as much as possible by paying for them by eliminating tax breaks. The tax base will stay the same, but will simply be broader.

The statement was enough to bring business on board.

On Friday, the Business Roundtable, a group of big business CEOs, announced a multimillion-dollar effort to help the tax reform effort through cable TV and radio ads.

Previously, business had been split. Retail groups fought the border adjustment out of fear that it could result in higher taxes for imported goods.

Also on Friday, the Koch network of political nonprofits threw its full weight behind tax reform, after working for months to kill border adjustment. Americans for Prosperity and Freedom Partners, two Koch-affiliated free-market groups, announced that they would hold an event Monday promoting tax reform with Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and White House legislative director Marc Short. The group's volunteers also will make calls throughout the summer to lawmakers to push them to pass tax legislation.

Tim Phillips, the president of Americans for Prosperity, said that his group favors lowering tax rates for all businesses.

Yet, without a border-adjusted cash-flow tax, rates cannot go as low.

In a cash-flow system, companies would no longer have to perform hideously complex accounting to determine what their taxable income was each year. Instead, they would simply tally up money in minus money out a totally different tax base.

And when that tax is based on the destination of sales, using border adjustment, the base is larger than the current U.S. corporate tax base, to the tune of about $1 trillion more in tax revenue a year. With that revenue, House Republicans envisioned lowering the corporate tax rate to 20 percent, down from 35 percent now.

Republicans don't have a stated goal for the corporate tax rate, but several experts told the Washington Examiner that a target in the mid-20s would be a good outcome. Originally, Trump had set a goal of 15 percent.

"I think that's the central debate: How big is the tax reform going to be? How big are the tax reductions going to be?" Office of Management and Budget Director Mick Mulvaney said Friday in an interview with CNBC.

Without border adjustment, "it becomes more complicated," said David Schweikert, a member of the Ways and Means Committee. Without the revenue raised by border adjustment, the target corporate tax would be about 31 percent rather than 25 percent, he suggested.

Opponents who killed border adjustment "have an ethical obligation to step up" and propose ways to replace the lost revenue, he said just off the House floor Friday.

There won't be any easy replacements, however. Any break that lawmakers target for elimination would be fiercely defended by the industry or group that it benefits, the same way that retailers fought border adjustment.

"There's not some easy honey pot of money to go after," said Jon Traub, managing principal of Deloitte's Tax Policy Group and a former staff director of the Ways and Means Committee.

Any money lawmakers are able to raise to dedicate to rate cuts, he said, will involve "hand to hand combat, provision after provision."

But even getting to that outcome will be difficult.

And even harder will be including some of the bolder ideas, advanced by Ryan, meant to spur economic growth. Those include ensuring that reform is permanent, so that businesses can plan along 10- or 20-year timelines, and allowing companies to immediately write off all new investments.

The advantage of the vague joint statement is that "it leaves the experts and the taxwriters significant flexibility," said Jeff Kupfer, an adviser to Beacon Global Strategies and a former Bush Treasury official.

That flexibility, however, could undermine momentum for a comprehensive, permanent rewrite of the tax code.

Especially with their failure to pass legislation to repeal Obamacare, Republicans are "under tremendous pressure to get something done on taxes," said Marc Gerson, chairman of the law firm Miller & Chevalier and a former Ways and Means tax counsel. If they start to struggle to do the hard work of comprehensive tax reform, "you could see a pivot to more of a tax cut or a tax relief package."

That would be a letdown, from the perspective of Ryan and other House Republicans who have said that permanence is the goal.

In that sense, it's noteworthy that Thursday's statement said that Republicans would "place a priority" on permanence, but stopped short of saying that a permanent rewrite of the code would be a do-or-die goal.

Using the legislative process known as reconciliation, Republicans can pass a tax bill without Democrats. But under the procedure, a permanent change to taxes could not add to long-term deficits. Some Republicans would rather cut taxes deeply, even if that meant that the changes to the code would have to be temporary.

The statement also stopped short of endorsing "full expensing," or allowing companies to deduct all new investments from their taxable income in the year they are made. Under the current code, companies must depreciate investments over a course of years, according to a complicated schedule.

Ways and Means Committee Chairman Kevin Brady said Thursday that the goal remained full expensing. But he will face pushback on that priority, even with the new consensus.

Phillips said his group would be advocating rate cuts, as opposed to full expensing, both of which cost revenue. "We do think full expensing is not the right way to go, as it chooses a certain kind of economic activity to reward," Phillips said. He noted that start-ups and established companies make differing levels of new investments.

David Drucker contributed to this article.

Read the original post:
Republican tax reform: Less ambitious, more realistic - Washington Examiner

All eyes were on Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., during the razor-thin skinny repeal vote, with eagle-eyed CSPAN watchers reading the tea leaves of his motions across the Senate floor.

But he wasnt the only star of the show.

Sens. Susan Collins, R-Maine, and Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, had adamantly opposed the bill repeatedly during the past month of debate on the issue.

And their "no" votes came before McCain's now-famous thumbs-down motion, officially sinking the bill.

It would be hard for the trio's home states to be farther apart, but they came together on the vote in a devastating way for the Republican Party at large in the wee hours of Friday morning.

Collins and Murkowski have been outspoken in their opposition to the Medicaid cuts, and Collins has come to the defense of Planned Parenthood as well.

In her statement following the vote, Collins stressed the importance of a bipartisan approach for a solution, writing that rather than engaging in partisan exercises, Republicans and Democrats should work together and address these vert serious problems.

And Murkowski posted a tweet, saying, This isnt about winning. This is about service to our state and service to our country.

McCain had not been as vocal about his opposition in the weeks leading up to the vote, having been away from Washington, D.C., for part of the debate. He underwent surgery to remove a blood clot near his eye on July 14 and doctors subsequently discovered a brain tumor, which was announced on July 19.

He returned to Washington on July 25 to cast the decision-making vote in a procedural motion that allowed Thursday night's debate on health care to continue.

In a statement released following his vote early this morning, McCain said that "from the beginning" he has believed that Obamacare should be repealed and replaced in order to lower costs, improve care and increase competition, he said "the so-called 'skinny repeal' amendment the Senate voted on today would not accomplish those goals.

While there was a round of applause -- largely from the Democrats in the Senate -- after McCain made that fatal vote early this morning, all three GOP senators have earned the ire of President Donald Trump.

This morning, he looped the three with the Democrats on Twitter, writing "3 Republicans and 48 Democrats let the American people down. As I said from the beginning, let ObamaCare implode, then deal. Watch!"

Read more from the original source:
The 3 senators who sank the Republican health care push - ABC News