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Delaware Sen. Chris Coons said he doubts Neil Gorsuch will get the necessary 60 votes in the Senate to be confirmed to the Supreme Court, and that he is bracing for Republicans to go for the so-called nuclear option to push the Trump administrations pick through without any support from Democrats.

I think this is tragic, Coons said on MSNBCs Morning Joe about the nuclear option that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has said he may employ to get Gorsuch on the bench. And on talking to friends on both sides of the aisle, weve got a lot of senators concerned about where were headed. Theres Republicans still very mad at us over the 2013 change to the filibuster rule, were mad at them for shutting down the government, theyre mad at us for Gorsuch, and were not headed in a good direction.

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Gorsuch, who enjoys widespread support from Republican lawmakers, is expected to come up short, as he needs eight Democratic lawmakers to support him in a confirmation vote unless Republicans pursue the nuclear option that would allow Gorsuch to be approved by a simple majority. The Supreme Court pick, who was grilled by Democrats last week during four days of hearings, is unpopular among Democrats who think he is far too conservative for the bench. Senate Minority leader Chuck Schumer has repeatedly signaled that Democrats will vigorously oppose Gorsuchs confirmation.

Coons said Democratic lawmakers are still bitter about obstruction from Republican lawmakers last year to prevent the confirmation of former President Barack Obama's Supreme Court pick, Merrick Garland.

Gorsuch got what Garland didnt, which was a fair hearing, Coons said. He got a full four days of hearings last week. I questioned him vigorously, some would say aggressively. And he is a charming man, hes got a good rsum, hes got strong qualifications in terms of his education, his service on the court, but he would be in some measures the most conservative justice on the Supreme Court.

McConnell has vowed to confirm Gorsuch before the April 8 recess, even if the nominee does not receive the 60 votes.

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Sen. Coons: Republican nuclear option to confirm Gorsuch is 'tragic' - Politico

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The grand Republican plan to repeal and replace ObamaCare was yanked from the House floor Friday, just before it was to be voted on. The reason the bill, called the American Health Care Act, failed so spectacularly is that despite much last-minute whipping from President Trump, the votes simply were not there.

This leads to one overwhelming and unavoidable conclusion: The Republican Party is broken.

In the frictionless world of political science, a healthy political party is supposed to advocate a set of principles and policies, and should they achieve electoral victory, implement them. Then at the next election, voters get the chance to pass judgment on their platform, either confirming their vision or throwing them out in favor of another party with different ideas.

Now, even at the best of times that's not always what happens. Often parties are punished for sheer bad luck, as when a global financial crisis happens to strike during their term.

But Republicans are not even remotely close to the ideal. Instead they have spent the political fuel of social conservatism and hatred of liberals and especially racist resentment of the first black president on vicious cuts to social programs and taxes on the rich. But the GOP also realizes that the true power source of their politics, and the obvious fact that their cuts would brutalize the poor and working class solely to further enrich the fantastically wealthy, are simply too uncomfortable to admit.

That in turn means that ceaseless duplicity, both towards the public and themselves, has become the signature feature of American conservatism. They swore up and down that deleting the welfare state would unleash free-market utopia that would work out better for everyone. Meanwhile, conservative writers made a cottage industry out of ludicrously tendentious historical revisionism insisting that actually, Democrats are the real racists.

This intellectual rot partially explains the party's retreat into denial of other inconvenient facts, like climate change and evolution, as well as their accelerating tendency towards electoral cheating. The story of voter ID laws where Republicans sensed electoral advantage in preventing liberals from voting (especially black ones) and ginned up a quick, obviously false, cover story by insisting that actually, Democrats are the real cheaters, mirrors the story on racism and welfare exactly.

Donald Trump partially cracked open the party's contradictions. Revisionist history of the civil rights movement became simply laughable when he ran on naked bigotry against Muslims and immigrants, attracting a coterie of overt white supremacists and neo-Nazis, and still won traditional Republican constituencies. But he also promised to leave social insurance alone during the Republican primary, and benefited from it. For a time it seemed the party might reorient along more honest lines.

But President Trump is also incurious and disinterested in policy. When Speaker Paul Ryan put forth his libertarian-lite plan to drastically reduce ObamaCare subsidies and gut Medicaid so that the stinking rich can have a big tax cut, Trump halfheartedly swung his weight behind it.

But it is simply a fact that virtually no one wants this sort of policy. What most rank-and-file Republicans hate about ObamaCare is that Obama passed it. Meanwhile, the ultra-conservative faction in the House predictably wanted even more vicious cruelty. When Ryan and Trump tried to buy them off with more poor-mulching goodies, they started hemorrhaging votes from their moderate wing. (And somewhat remarkably, even the most conservative Democrats aren't touching this turd.)

What's more, their revisions were amazingly incompetent, increasing the price of the bill by $186 billion over 10 years without improving coverage in the slightest. And then they made yet more revisions before the final vote without even waiting for a CBO score, desperately trying to pass it on to the Senate (where it was almost certainly doomed). But instead, Republicans just faceplanted right out of the gate.

Now, they have plenty of time to take another bite at the policy apple. But when a party is led by a buffoon with neither interest in nor ability to understand policy details, and has been drip-fed on a diet of increasingly nutty lies for decades, this is what you get.

More here:
The malfunctioning Republican Party - The Week Magazine

President Trump spoke in the Oval Office on Friday. Tom Price, secretary of health and human services is at left, and Vice President Pence is at right.

President Donald Trump ignites a lot of fights, but the biggest defeat in his short time in the White House was the result of a long-running Republican civil war that had already humbled a generation of party leaders before him.

A precedent-flouting president who believes that Washingtons usual rules and consequences of politics do not apply to him, Trump now finds himself shackled by them.

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In stopping the repeal of the Affordable Care Act, the Republican Partys professed priority for the last seven years, the rebellious far right wing of his party out-rebelled Trump, and won a major victory Friday over the party establishment that he now leads.

Like every other Republican leader who has tried to rule a fissured and fractious party, Trump faces a wrenching choice: retrenchment or realignment. Does he cede power to the anti-establishment wing of his party? Or does he seek other pathways to successful governing by throwing away the partisan playbook and courting a coalition with the Democrats he has improbably blamed for his partys shortcomings?

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Your afternoon shot of politics, sent straight from the desk of Joshua Miller.

Its really a problem in our own party, and thats something hell need to deal with moving forward, said Rep. Tom Cole, a moderate Republican from Oklahoma who is part of the center-right Tuesday Group, which stuck with Trump in the health care fight and earned the presidents praise in the hours after the bills defeat.

I think he did a lot he met with dozens and dozens of members and made a lot of accommodations but in the end theres a group of people in this party who just wont say yes, Cole said. At some point I think that means looking beyond our conference. The president is a deal-maker, and Ronald Reagan cut some of his most important deals with Democrats.

Trump is not there yet. So far he is operating from the standard-issue Republican playbook. While he is angry and thirsty for revenge, he seems determined to swallow the loss in hopes of marshaling enough Republican support to pass spending bills, an as-yet unformed tax overhaul and a $1 trillion infrastructure package.

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On Friday evening, a somewhat shellshocked president retreated to the White House residence to grieve and assign blame. He asked his advisers repeatedly: Whose fault was this?

Increasingly, that blame has fallen on Reince Priebus, the White House chief of staff, who coordinated the initial legislative strategy on the health care repeal with Speaker Paul Ryan, his close friend and a fellow Wisconsin native, according to three people briefed on Trumps recent discussions.

Trump, an image-obsessed developer with a lifelong indifference toward the mechanics of governance, made a game effort of negotiating with members of the far-right Freedom Caucus, even if it seemed to some members of that group, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, that he did not have the greatest grasp of health care policy or legislative procedure.

He told one adviser late Friday that his loss a legislative debacle foreshadowed by the intraparty fight that led to the 2013 government shutdown was a minor bump in the road and that the White House would recover.

In an interview with The New York Times on Friday, Trump insisted that the administration was rocking. The problem, he suggested, was divisions among Republicans.

There are a lot of players, a lot of players with a very different mindset, Trump said. You have liberals, even within the Republican Party. You have the conservative players.

But his advisers were more realistic. Trumps chief strategist, Stephen Bannon, according to people familiar with White House discussions, described what happened as a flat-out failure that could inflict serious damage on this presidency even if Bannon believes Congress, not Trump, deserves much of the blame.

Bannon and the presidents more soft-spoken legislative affairs director, Marc Short, pushed Trump hard to insist on a public vote, as a way to identify, shame and pressure no voters who were killing their last, best chance to unravel the health care law.

One Hill Republican aide who was involved in the last-minute negotiations said Bannon and Short were seeking to compile an enemies list. But Ryan repeatedly counseled the president to avoid seeking vengeance at least until he has passed spending bills and a debt-ceiling increase needed to keep the government running.

Trump, bowing to the same power-sharing realities that the besieged Ryan must cope with in leading the fractured Republican majority in the House, decided to back down. But the presidents advisers worry about the hard reality going forward the developer with the tough-guy veneer was steamrollered by various factions in the Republican Congress.

The president and his team lamented outsourcing so much of the early bill drafting to Ryan, and one aide compared their predicament to a developer who has staked everything on obtaining a property without conducting a thorough inspection.

Despite the presidents public displays of unity with the speaker, Trumps team was privately stunned by Ryans inability to master the politics of his own conference, according to two West Wing aides. The president, they said, is still sizing up Ryans abilities, despite Trumps public statements of support.

As the dust settled on the health care debacle, it was clear that Trumps lieutenants in the Republican civil war had been divided on how they thought the health care fight should have been handled, which does not augur well for the political battles to come.

Mutual disgust with the Freedom Caucus seems to be pulling Trump and Ryan together, at least for now just as it briefly united President Barack Obama and John A. Boehner, Ryans long-suffering predecessor, during their doomed effort to reach a grand bargain on a tax overhaul in 2011.

In a meeting before the Republican House conference convened Thursday night, Trumps team met for two hours of negotiations with Freedom Caucus members, leaving them sour and frustrated at the ever-changing list of demands emerging from the groups leader, Rep. Mark Meadows of North Carolina.

Many on Trumps team disengaged from the process even as he dug in.

Gary D. Cohn, Trumps top economic adviser, had originally been tasked with playing a large role in shepherding the legislation from the White House side. But Cohn had grown leery of the bill, and the White House recognized that Cohn, a former president of Goldman Sachs and a liberal Democrat, was not a good messenger to deal with recalcitrant conservatives.

Trumps son-in-law, Jared Kushner, who returned Friday from a family skiing trip to Aspen, Colorado, had said for weeks that he thought supporting the bill was a mistake, according to two people who spoke with him. The president, according to two Republicans close to the White House, expressed annoyance that Kushner, who has described himself as a first-among-equals adviser, was not on site during the consequential week of wrangling. And Tom Price, who left Congress to become Trumps health and human services secretary, was singled out for blame for the bills failure.

Trumps budget director, Mick Mulvaney, took on a bigger role pushing the bill, telling his former colleagues that the president wanted an up-or-down vote on Friday.

Trump had told allies Wednesday night that if he did not push for the bill himself, it would not pass. Several, speaking on the condition of anonymity, expressed astonishment that the president had not come to that realization much earlier.

Until the final week, Trumps team was deeply divided over whether he should fully commit to a hard sell on a bill they viewed as fundamentally flawed, with Vice President Mike Pence pointedly advising the president to label the effort Ryancare, not Trumpcare, according to aides.

Trump brushed aside those concerns in the last few days, and embraced the conventional role as leader of his party. He has one speed when he decides to shift to sales mode, aides said, and he had trouble modulating his tone, issuing cringe-inducing superlatives like wonderful to describe an ungainly bill his aides described as anything but.

After it was all over, the president dutifully blamed the Democrats, a party out of power and largely leaderless, after turning his back on their offers to negotiate on a bipartisan package that would have addressed shortcomings in the Affordable Care Act while preserving its core protections for poor and working-class patients.

Several aides advised him the argument was nonsensical, according to a person with knowledge of the interaction.

For Trumps Republican opponents, here was poetic revenge served cold. As a candidate in 2016, he initially scoffed at signing a Republican loyalty pledge, at times behaving more like an independent invading the Republican host organism than a normal presidential candidate.

As president, Trump has left dozens of critical administration jobs unfilled, rejecting stalwart Republican applicants deemed insufficiently loyal to him and now he is decrying the disloyalty of the 20 to 30 conservative members who outmaneuvered and overpowered him on health care.

We all learned a lot we learned a lot about loyalty, a solemn Trump told reporters late Friday.

The dynamic that led to his defeat is bigger than Trump, despite his tendency to personalize every win or loss. Republicans who gained power by savaging Washington are in full control and cannot agree on a path forward.

We were a 10-year opposition party, Ryan said late Friday. Being against things was easy to do.

Former Speaker Newt Gingrich, a Trump supporter, said Friday, with a chuckle, that he was getting some dj vu right now.

Do you think Donald J. Trump goes home tonight, shrugs and says, This is what winning looks like? Gingrich added. No! But this is where the Republican Party is right now, and its been this way for years.

But Trump put on his best face Saturday morning. ObamaCare will explode and we will all get together and piece together a great healthcare plan for THE PEOPLE, he said on Twitter. Do not worry!

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Trump is caught in battle within Republican Party - The Boston Globe

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The bill failed, but Americans learned just how far Republicans will go to try and destroy President Obama's legacy.

After two days of frantic scrambling, hasty rewriting, and unadorned begging, House Speaker Paul Ryan was forced to pull his Trumpcare bill from the House floor before Friday's scheduled vote, delivering the most devastating blow yet to a struggling president eager to show his supporters that he is cut out for the task of governing. It's an embarrassing loss for a newly-unified Republican government, which ran on a platform promising to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act and then, when their opportunity to do so finally arrived, pulled off the legislative equivalent of blowing a 3-1 lead in the NBA Finals.

The frenetic three weeks that have elapsed since Paul Ryan debuted the bill have, to use a medical term, sucked. Each day seemed to yield another grim estimate of how the bill would gut health care benefits for millions of Americans, followed by a hasty, ill-conceived rebuttal of those estimates from the powers that be, followed by another Paul Ryan tweetstorm of nonsensical technobabble accompanied by a picture of him standing in front of an American flag. Even as the crowds of skeptics grew larger and louder and Brietbart-ier, Republicans doubled down, insisting that their proposal would be the only opportunity to get rid of Obamacare, and that holdouts could fall in line or get wrecked in two years. The result was a poorly-understood Frankenstein's monster of a bill that was literally re-written overnight in a desperate, futile attempt to scrape together the necessary votes. Calling this debacle a goat rodeo would be an insult to the noble men and women of the goat rodeo industry who work hard to organize novelty livestock shows for your entertainment.

Hours before the Republicans' first self-imposed deadline for voting on Trumpcare, word leaked out that if Ryan wanted to cajole his party's unruly extremiststhe bald eagle belt-buckled members of the hyperconservative House Freedom Caucusinto throwing their support behind the bill, he would have to make just a few small tweaks first.

Conservatives are using their considerable leverage on the measurethe Freedom Caucus has demonstrated it has the votes to sink the legislationto extract concessions on the Essential Health Benefits section of the bill, which mandates that insurers offer plans covering 10 services: outpatient care, emergency room visits, hospitalization, maternity and newborn care, mental health and addiction treatment, prescription drugs, rehabilitative services, lab services, preventive care and pediatric services.

I'm genuinely flabbergasted. If things like prescription medicines and preventative care aren't covered, what the fuck is even left to insure anymore? Stop for a minute and think about how ludicrous it is that this gaggle of Ayn Rand-humping rubes were unwilling to support an outrageously irresponsible, universally-loathed health care proposal that would kill people unless they could put their heads to gather and find ingenious ways to ensure that it would kill more people. The Freedom Caucus' insane wish list wouldn't "reform" health care in America. It would destroy it.

The only person not named Donald Trump who comes out of this looking worse than Mark Meadows and his cronies is Paul Ryan, whose astonishing willingness to really consider their demands in a craven attempt to buy votes once again proved that his "repeal and replace" crusade was never about improving health outcomes or promoting "free markets" or finding a #BetterWay. It was about destroying anything and everything remotely related to President Obama, who spent eight years as the primary target of obsessive Republican teeth-gnashing vitriol, regardless of the implications that doing so would have for the lives of their spouses, their children, their families, and the millions of constituents whose interests they so despicably profess to represent.

Don't let the fact that Paul Ryan failed so catastrophically distract you from the fact that in the process, he revealed himself to be an amoral, unfeeling automaton who places political oneupmanship above all else, and who was ready to blame poor people for "choosing" their problems because he was either unwilling or incapable of doing the work of actually finding ways to ensure that Americans have access to the health care they need.

Trumpcare would have made life worse for Americans by just about every evidence-based metric, and it's okay to celebrate the fact that stiff, persistent, and vocal resistance helped ensure that the proposal met an ignominious end before even making it to the House floor. That said, the House Freedom Caucus' demands and the Speaker's reaction to them together revealed just how far the powers that be in charge of this country are willing to go in order to get their way on thiswhatever the consequences for the American people. Although this loss has to sting, Ryan been a dog after a bone about this issue for a solid seven years now, and it seems pretty unlikely that he'll give up on his fondest drunken fratboy dream altogether. The Affordable Care Act remains alive, but as long as the Republicans hold the White House and their legislative majorities, we are very much still in the woods.

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Trumpcare Exposed the Cruel Apathy of the Republican Party - GQ Magazine

Philip Klein unloads on the GOP in the pages of the conservative Washington Examiner, calling Obamacare repeal "the biggest broken promise in political history":

What's so utterly disgraceful, is not just that Republicans failed so miserably, but that they barely tried, raising questions about whether they ever actually wanted to repeal Obamacare in the first place.

Republicans for years have criticized the process that produced Obamacare, and things certainly got ugly. But after having just witnessed this debacle, I think Paul Ryan owes Nancy Pelosi an apology.

One has to admire the commitment that Democrats and Obama had to delivering something they campaigned on and truly believed in. They spent 13 months getting the bill from an initial concept to final passage, and pressed on during many points when everybody was predicting doom. They had public hearings, multiple drafts of different bills, they kept negotiating, even worked into Christmas. They made significant changes at times, but also never lost sight of their key goals. They didn't back down in the face of angry town halls and after losing their filibuster-proof majority, and many members cast votes that they knew risked their political careers. Obama himself was a leader, who consistently made it clear that he was not going to walk away. He did countless rallies, meetings, speeches even a "summit" at the Blair House to try to sell the bill, talking about details, responding to criticisms of the bill to the point that he was mocked by conservatives for talking so much about healthcare.

The contrast between Obama and Democrats on healthcare and what just happened is stunning. House Republicans slapped together a bill in a few weeks (months if we're being generous) behind closed doors with barely any debate. They moved the bill through committees at blazing speed, conducted closed-door negotiations that resulted in relatively minor tweaks to the bill, and within 17 days, Trump decided that he'd had enough, and was ready to walk away if members didn't accept the bill as is...

There was a big debate over the course of the election about how out of step Trump was with the Republican Party on many issues. But if anything, this episode shows that Trump and the GOP are perfect together limited in attention span, all about big talk and identity politics, but uninterested in substance.

Failing to get the votes on one particular bill is one thing. But failing and then walking away on seven years of promises is a pathetic abdication of duty. The Republican Party is a party without a purpose.

Go read the whole thing.

Trump, Ryan, and McConnell's total lack of commitment to repealing Obamcare really does stand in stark contrast to Obama, Pelosi, and Reid's total commitment to passing it in the first place.

On the eve of the House ACA vote in 2010, Obama went to Democrats and implored them to cast a vote many knew would be political suicide.

Sometimes I think about how I got involved in politics. I didnt think of myself as a potential politician when I get out of college. I went to work in neighborhoods, working with Catholic churches in poor neighborhoods in Chicago, trying to figure out how people could get a little bit of help. And I was skeptical about politics and politicians, just like a lot of Americans are skeptical about politics and politicians are right now. Because my working assumption was when push comes to shove, all too often folks in elected office, theyre looking for themselves and not looking out for the folks who put them there; that there are too many compromises; that the special interests have too much power; they just got too much clout; theres too much big money washing around.

And I decided finally to get involved because I realized if I wasnt willing to step up and be true to the things I believe in, then the system wouldnt change. Every single one of you had that same kind of moment at the beginning of your careers. Maybe it was just listening to stories in your neighborhood about what was happening to people whod been laid off of work. Maybe it was your own family experience, somebody got sick and didnt have health care and you said something should change.

Something inspired you to get involved, and something inspired you to be a Democrat instead of running as a Republican. Because somewhere deep in your heart you said to yourself, I believe in an America in which we dont just look out for ourselves, that we dont just tell people youre on your own, that we are proud of our individualism, we are proud of our liberty, but we also have a sense of neighborliness and a sense of community -- (applause) -- and we are willing to look out for one another and help people who are vulnerable and help people who are down on their luck and give them a pathway to success and give them a ladder into the middle class. Thats why you decided to run. (Applause.)

And now a lot of us have been here a while and everybody here has taken their lumps and their bruises. And it turns out people have had to make compromises, and youve been away from families for a long time and youve missed special events for your kids sometimes. And maybe there have been times where you asked yourself, why did I ever get involved in politics in the first place? And maybe things cant change after all. And when you do something courageous, it turns out sometimes you may be attacked. And sometimes the very people you thought you were trying to help may be angry at you and shout at you. And you say to yourself, maybe that thing that I started with has been lost.

But you know what? Every once in a while, every once in a while a moment comes where you have a chance to vindicate all those best hopes that you had about yourself, about this country, where you have a chance to make good on those promises that you made in all those town meetings and all those constituency breakfasts and all that traveling through the district, all those people who you looked in the eye and you said, you know what, youre right, the system is not working for you and Im going to make it a little bit better.

And this is one of those moments. This is one of those times where you can honestly say to yourself, doggone it, this is exactly why I came here. This is why I got into politics. This is why I got into public service. This is why Ive made those sacrifices. Because I believe so deeply in this country and I believe so deeply in this democracy and Im willing to stand up even when its hard, even when its tough.

Every single one of you have made that promise not just to your constituents but to yourself. And this is the time to make true on that promise. We are not bound to win, but we are bound to be true. We are not bound to succeed, but we are bound to let whatever light we have shine. We have been debating health care for decades. It has now been debated for a year. It is in your hands. It is time to pass health care reform for America, and I am confident that you are going to do it tomorrow.

With Obama, Pelosi, and Reid, Democratic voters had representatives who were as committed to their goals as they were. Republican voters should realize today that they are not so lucky.

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"The Republican Party Is a Party Without a Purpose" - Mother Jones