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Let the record reflect that on July 12, 2017, at a few minutes after 10a.m. Eastern daylight time, the lights went out on the Republican Party.

Speaker Paul D. Ryan and fellow House Republican leaders had just finished their caucus meeting and were beginning a news conference. The House Republican Conference chair, Cathy McMorris Rodgers (Wash.), was announcing new legislation to combat human trafficking. We made a promise she said. And then the room went dark.

Whoops! Did I step on it? she asked, looking at her feet for an electrical cord. Presently, the lighting rekindled. Now, if we could pay the light bills, she resumed.

The metaphor alert level has just been raised to red.

The latest revelation in the Putin palooza that Donald Trump Jr., along with Jared Kushner and Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort, eagerly met last year with a person promising dirt on Hillary Clinton from the Russian government brings the sprawling scandal to a new level. Surely Republican leaders will move with dispatch to disavow Team Trumps behavior?

But each time President Trump hits a new low a racist outburst, a vulgar tweet, shabby treatment of women commentators invariably state that this one will be the tipping point, the time when Republicans bail on the man who is undermining their party, and conservatism, and American values. Each time, such expectations meet the same fate: Wrong!

And this time, sure enough, the Silence of the Republicans has been profound.

On the Houses first morning back from the July 4 recess, five GOP leaders took turns making statements before the microphones, and there wasnt a single mention of Trump, or of the Russian monster devouring their legislative agenda. Ryan (Wis.) waited to be asked the question, by CNNs Deirdre Walsh, and provided a prepared non-answer.

Ryan, omitting mention of Trump Jr.s Russia meeting, said he would leave it to the professionals investigating the matter to do their jobs.

NBCs Kasie Hunt asked Ryan if he would accept a meeting with a representative of a foreign adversary offering dirt on an opponent.

Im not going to go into hypotheticals, the speaker replied, repeating his mantra about professionals doing their jobs.

But Ryan is a professional hes the most senior Republican in Congress and he isnt doing his job. At least he isnt if his job is to protect his party (hurt by association with Trump), his policy agenda (bottled up because of Trumps troubles) or the institutions of the government he represents.

No doubt Republican leaders and backbenchers alike are afraid not of Trump but of the 25percent or so of Americans who support Trump strongly and who also happen to be many of the people who dominate Republican primaries and show up to vote in midterm election. By the time these voters peel away from Trump, it may be too late to rescue the party, or the country.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell was no braver. On Tuesday, McConnell (R-Ky.) was pressed four times about his confidence in Trump and his thoughts on Trump Jr. Four times, he responded with a variation of the same answer: What I have a lot of confidence in is the Intelligence Committee handling this whole investigation.

In the Senate, only a few Republicans have criticized Trump, among them Sen. John McCain (Ariz.), who observed to the Weekly Standard that another shoe drops from the centipede every few days. In the House, there have been even fewer (although Rep. Lee Zeldin of New York labeled Trump Jr.s meeting with the Russian a big no-no).

Republicans abandoning Trump tend to be those who dont answer to voters. Congressman-cum-MSNBC host Joe Scarborough told Stephen Colbert on Tuesday that he was quitting the GOP over officials refusal to disown Trump. What have you heard from Republican leaders today? Scarborough asked. Nothing. Theres always silence.

Alas, Scarborough didnt object to Trump when it could have done the most good, in the early months of the campaign. His show, Morning Joe, boosted Trumps candidacy with chummy coverage and free airtime in the form of friendly call-in interviews. My colleague Erik Wemple wrote at the time that the show veered from journalism into the friendly confines of a morning social club. After Trump won the New Hampshire primary, the candidate thanked Scarborough and his colleagues, calling them supporters, then believers.

Democratic leaders remarked Wednesday on the silent majority. If the situation were reversed, Rep. Linda T. Snchez (Calif.) said, theyd be screaming to the rafters about the need for prosecutions.

Firing squads, added Rep. Joseph Crowley, the House Democratic Caucus chairman from New York. All were hearing right now is crickets.

Crickets and a centipede that keeps dropping shoes.

Twitter: @Milbank

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The lights go out on the Republican Party - Washington Post

"Morning Joe" co-hosts Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski joined Stephen Colbert on "The Late Show." Scarborough announced that he could no longer support the Republican Party because of its allegiance to President Trump. (Erin Patrick O'Connor/The Washington Post)

Roughlytwo hours before CBS aired Stephen Colbert's interview with Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski on Tuesday's episode of The Late Show, Fox News host Sean Hannity complained to his viewers about Liberal Joe.

Hannity has been using the moniker for a while in an apparent attempt to weaken the former Republican congressman's GOP bona fides. The weight of Scarborough's criticism of President Trump is rooted in the idea that it comes from a member of Trump's own party. Hannity has been trying to destroy that premise by arguing that Scarborough is really just another liberal on MSNBC and that Republicans should not think of him as one of their own.

Scarborough made Hannity's job easier when he told Colbert that he is officially leaving the GOP.

Im not going to be a Republican anymore, the Morning Joe co-host said. Ive got to become an independent.

Scarborough isn't ready to call himself a liberal. I want lower taxes; I want less regulation, he told Colbert, highlighting traditional Republican principles that he maintains.

['Morning Joe' co-host Joe Scarborough is leaving the Republican Party]

Scarborough is, however, forfeiting his status as a top dissenting voice within the president's party. That's a big deal.

Here's an example that illustrates the significance:

On an episode of Morning Joe last August, Scarborough interrupted Brzezinski as she slammed congressional Republicans for refusing to reject their presidential nominee.

Mika, youre a Democrat, he said. Let me say this. Let me say this because it means nothing coming from you. Youre a Democrat.

Excuse me? Brzezinski replied.

It means nothing coming from a Democrat to these Republicans, Scarborough continued. Let me say this to my Republican Party: You are letting Donald Trump destroy the party.

Scarborough won't be able tosay things like that anymore.

His decision seems to cede that theRepublican Party is now the party of Trump. Only a short time ago, Republicanism and Trumpism seemed like different canons. At the Conservative Political Action Conference in February, Trump said that he skipped last year's gathering because I was worried that I would be, at that time, too controversial.

Now, however, Republicanism is Trumpism for many voters and politicians, anyway.

On a surface level, Scarborough's exit from the GOP would appear to upend the fundamental conceit of Morning Joe two strong-willed hosts, one Republican and one Democrat, bantering about the news. But in practical terms, it probably won't altermuch. Scarborough and Brzezinski have been in sync on Trump, and his views on other issues appear unchanged.

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Joexit: Why Scarborough's departure from the Republican Party is significant - Washington Post

Senator Mitch McConnell and fellow Republicans. Photo: Alex Wong/Getty Images

With the latest, and probably final, version of the Republican plan to repeal and replace Obamacare due to emerge Thursday, the party leadership is in the astonishing position of desperately trying to design a workable plan to meet their deadline. I hate to break this one to you guys, but I dont think they have any idea yet how theyre going to do this, a senior Republican aide tells HuffPost.

As the deadline approaches, the endpoint of a coherent bill seems to be moving further out of reach. Senator Ted Cruz has been selling his colleagues on an amendment that would allow insurers to sell unregulated plans with minimal coverage, as long as they also sell regulated plans. That would split the market into two completely different risk pools, one cheap and healthy, and the other sick and expensive, an arrangement insurers call unworkable. Another Republican senator, Mike Rounds of South Dakota, is trying to undo the damage Cruzs plan would do by creating some kind of ratio between the costs of the expensive insurance and the cheap insurance. Such an approach has never been tried, and no health-care experts have emerged to suggest it might work even in theory.

If youre going to rush a secret plan into law, you really need to be working with an off-the-shelf policy. The health-care debate started eight years ago. Republicans have had a long time to whiteboard some ideas. They are trying to reconceptualize the problem almost from scratch over a few days. This is like the Airplane! flight attendant announcing, By the way, is there anyone onboard who knows how to fly a plane?

The attempt to hastily devise a fix for a problem the Republican bill itself creates is symptomatic of the degree to which their plan has lost all touch with its rationale. The putative reason Republicans have given for repealing and replacing Obamacare is that the law is a train wreck, collapsing, and so on. The individual health-care exchanges are supposedly heading into a death spiral of sicker customers, higher premiums, and fleeing insurers. GOP leaders have insisted they are on a rescue mission.

Even if the exchanges were collapsing into a death spiral, it would not justify their plans to slash Medicaid, a program that does not require actuarial balance and is not even theoretically susceptible to a death spiral. And in any case, a mounting body of evidence has found that the exchanges are stable. Financial analysts have said this, insurance actuaries have said it, even the federal government has said it.

Recently, another piece of evidence has underscored the conclusion in even more detail. Cynthia Cox and Larry Levitt have a detailed report on the state of the markets. They conclude that insurers on the whole have found a stable price point. The medical loss ratio, which means the share of premium payments paid out in claims, dropped significantly in the beginning of this year:

Not surprisingly, insurers profit margin shot up:

Facing a brand-new market, insurers initially set their premiums far too low (and much lower than the Congressional Budget Office forecast). It has taken a few years, but they have corrected the error and settled in at a stable level. Republicans have cherry-picked horror stories of skyrocketing premiums, and it is true that 2017 saw premiums rise as part of this price correction. But there is zero reason to expect premiums to need to rise more.

Except, of course, for the fact that the government is run by people who are trying to kill Obamacare. Because of that fact, insurers in many states have fled the market due to political uncertainty. The Trump administration has followed a strategy of threatening to destroy the exchanges through sabotage, and then using the response by insurers to these threats as evidence that the law is collapsing on its own. Trumps Department of Health and Human Services has put out press releases celebrating insurer exits from the marketplaces.

Health-care policy analyst Adrianna McIntyre noticed an interesting fact about these insurer departures. They are disproportionately concentrated in states where the exchange is run by the federal government rather than by the state. The National Academy for State Health Policy finds that state-based exchanges are not seeing their insurers flee the markets.

With federally-facilitated exchanges that use healthcare.gov, the federal government is responsible for most exchange activities, McIntyre tells me. This includes consumer outreach, a function that is hugely important to insurers if the Trump administration decides not to allocate resources toward outreach for the next enrollment period, insurers might reasonably expect that the people who do sign up will be sicker, on average. If your business is dependent on cooperation from people who publicly celebrate every time a firm quits the market, you may have some reservations about staying in the market.

This policy makes perfect sense if your goal is to roll back the welfare state by any means necessary, or to undo as many Obama-era policies as you can. But that isnt what Republicans have promised, and it isnt what the public wants. (What the public wants, by nearly a three-to-one margin, is not to repeal and replace Obamacare but to work with Democrats and fix the law.) So the Republican Congress has to destroy a law that people like, and then replace it with something that replicates its current functions. They are scrambling to solve a problem that has no real answer.

White House aide Stephen Miller is reportedly working with GOP senators on a bill that would drastically reduce the number of legal immigrants.

In the age of Trump, its impossible to say.

The presidents lawyers dont want him taking advice about the Russia investigation from a son-in-law whos already deeply ensnared by it.

It will target three areas, and include some new trash cans.

He apparently doesnt have the funds or flexibility to get to 50 votes.

One version of Trumps (vague) plan would deliver 76 percent of its benefits to the top one percent while raising taxes on some in the middle class.

A photograph of the event is getting some buzz today.

Christopher Wray was pressed on FBI independence and the Russia probe at his Senate confirmation hearing.

They have till Thursday late morning. No pressure!

[Most] accusations fall into the category of we were both drunk, we broke up, and six months later I found myself under a Title IX investigation.

A respected human-rights group says hes been killed. But ISIS calls it fake news. Whos right?

Dana White told reporters that even though Trump is hyped for the fight, hes not coming because it would be a huge hassle.

The progress weve had over the last centuries, more people having a higher standard of living thats going to go in the other direction.

David Wildstein, who was the star witness for the prosecution of former Christie aides, is sentenced to three years probation for the traffic scheme.

The former Goldman Sachs president could soon lead one of the most powerful regulators of Wall Street.

Trump Jr.s emails may or may not be the smoking gun. But what seems clear is that this is only the beginning of what investigators could uncover.

With his upset of Andy Murray, American Sam Querrey has reached the first Grand Slam semifinal of his career.

The belief that the GOP Congress absolutely has to repeal Obamacare or face the wrath of angry base voters is an exaggeration at best.

The development suggests that the entire ice shelf may eventually collapse, leaving glaciers free to drift off of land and raise sea levels.

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Republicans Still Can't Design a Workable Health-Care Plan - New York Magazine

Hundreds of thousands of immigrants could be locked out of the health insurance marketplaces if the Senates new health-care bill becomes law.

Buried among the bills provisions that roll back the Medicaid expansion and lower marketplace subsidies is a shift in eligibility requirements. Rather than all legal immigrants being able to receive tax credits and buy coverage in the marketplace like under the Affordable Care Act, the new bill aside from a few, narrow exceptions allows only permanent residents and people who immigrated for humanitarian reasons to participate.

Many of the newly excluded people on temporary visas would face a dramatic reduction in insurance options. Temporary students and workers are often in roles, such as seasonal farm work, where pay is too low to afford insurance without assistance, according to Labor Department data. Given their ineligibility for Medicaid, the marketplaces were often their only option.

Though some students would have insurance available through their schools, though, and workers especially high-skilled ones through their employers.

This proposal would really attack people at the time they need it most, said Matthew Lopas, a health policy attorney for the National Immigration Law Center, referring to excluded groups such as asylee applicants and torture victims.

Conservatives defend the exclusion, saying it prevents medical tourism where sick people move to the U.S. temporarily to get subsidized medical care but dont stay in the insurance pool while theyre healthy. For people to jump in, file a claim, and jump out, its very destabilizing for the market, said Ed Haislmaier, a research fellow at the conservative Heritage Foundation.

Tom Miller, a fellow at the right-leaning American Enterprise Institute, said the exclusion reflects a view common among Republicans that there should be a difference between benefits available to citizens and noncitizens. Lopas described the exclusion more harshly: The program is based on anti-immigrant sentiment, an idea that some people are more worthy than others.

More than a third of legal immigrants were eligible for tax credits in 2015, many of whom would lose them under the Senate bill. The logical conclusion: Id expect that the rate of insurance among immigrants would fall, said Shelby Gonzales, a policy analyst at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. Its already more common for foreign nationals to be uninsured: 23 percent of non-elderly legal immigrants are uninsured, compared to 10 percent of citizens.

The exclusion isnt just bad for the affected immigrants, its bad for the insurance pool as a whole, according to Lopas. Having a pool with more people, especially more young people which students and temporary workers tend to be makes the insurers expenses more stable and brings down costs for everyone. How much costs may change, however, depends on how many people would have to leave the market, which there isnt much data on.

It remains unclear whether the Senate GOPs bill will pass. Republicans will need almost all of their members to support it, but several senators have already expressed concern or outright opposition.

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Republicans' Obamacare repeal bill would bar some immigrants from buying insurance on the exchanges - Washington Post

House Republicans, already divided on how to handle the federal budget, the debt limit, a rewrite of the tax code and more, have something new to tussle over: their summer vacation.

The decision announced Tuesday by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) to curtail that chambers recess by two weeks from July 28 to Aug. 11 to tackle unfinished business was not immediately embraced by House leaders.

Inside a closed-door meeting of House Republicans on Wednesday morning, Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) indicated that he intended to keep members around only so long as it might take them to act on the health-care bill pending in the Senate.

The case McCarthy made privately, and later publicly to reporters, was simple: The Senate still might have work to do, but the House has done plenty.

The House has passed its version of the health-care legislation, as well as major bills dismantling the Dodd-Frank financial regulation law, scaling back federal regulatory powers and cracking down on illegal immigration. The chamber is also set to clear the annual military authorization bill by weeks end.

(Jenny Starrs/The Washington Post)

We will continue to do our work here, and we hope the Senate continues to do their work as we move forward, he said, waving a chart showing that 226 bills passed by the House this year await Senate action.

McConnell indicated Tuesday that the Senate needed the extra time to process the defense bill and clear a backlog of executive nominations that the House does not constitutionally act on.

But a handful of House Republicans mostly conservative hard-liners are pressing their leaders to keep working through August to tackle major pieces of unfinished business.

Those include the annual budget resolution, which is a key prerequisite for a tax-revamp bill expected to dominate the falls legislative agenda, as well as a necessary increase in the federal debt ceiling.

If we dont have results, then we shouldnt have a recess, said Rep. Mark Meadows (R-N.C.), chairman of the hard-right House Freedom Caucus.

Weve done some good brush-clearing, but weve got major, major timber left to cut, said Rep. Andy Biggs (R-Ariz.), another Freedom Caucus member.

Folks in the real world that have to go to a job every day dont get to take a vacation if their job doesnt get done, said Rep. Rob Wittman (R-Va.), who is lending support to the Freedom Caucuss anti-recess push.

Their push is being met with sighs and eye rolls from some veteran Republican lawmakers, who have heard plenty of calls to cancel recess over the years typically from the minority party and are not eager to give up time spent with family and constituents without a clear legislative payoff.

If theres a chance of coming up with a work product that we could vote on, that would be worth it, said Rep. Joe Barton (R-Tex.), a 32-year House veteran. But if its just being done for optical purposes, it really hurts the families.

Rep. Kevin Brady (R-Tex.), chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, told reporters Tuesday that hed prefer members spend their August honing their sales pitch for the tax bill.

Private talks are underway between GOP leaders on Capitol Hill and key White House players to set the parameters for the tax bill, with an eye toward drafting the complex legislation during the August break.

I think August is a perfect opportunity for us to be listening and engaging with our constituents back home and building support for tax reform, Brady said.

And then there is the health-care bill: Several Freedom Caucus members said Wednesday that they could not comprehend leaving Washington for the summer without finishing the bill, even as it languishes in the Senate with no clear path to passage there.

But the most divisive matters inside the GOP concern federal spending the budget, the yearly appropriations bills and the debt limit, which in recent years have been resolved through negotiations with Democrats.

Senate Democrats can still filibuster spending bills and the debt limit, but conservatives are bristling at the prospect of letting Democrats dictate terms when Republicans control both chambers of Congress and the White House. They say taking action now on the fiscal matters, rather than against fall deadlines, would give the GOP more leverage.

Perhaps no House member has more at stake in the recess debate than Rep. Mo Brooks (R-Ala.), who is standing in an Aug. 15 special election for the Senate seat vacated by Attorney General Jeff Sessions and would prefer to spend next month on the campaign trail not in Washington.

Brooks, an outspoken Freedom Caucus member, did not join his compatriots at the Wednesday news conference, and he made clear in an interview Tuesday that he did not share their views on the virtues of a working summer.

If there are important votes, Im going to be here, he said, but he added that he didnt see the point of spending the recess working on fiscal bills that are unlikely to be resolved ahead of the relevant deadlines.

I wish it wasnt that way, but historically thats the way its been, and I dont see any kind of session in August that going to change when the bills are passed, Brooks said.

Read more at PowerPost

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Summer vacation is one more thing for House Republicans to fight about - Washington Post