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Tom Price, Secretary of Health and Human Services Photo: Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post/Getty Images

Republicans have spent eight years assuring the public that they, too, shared the goal of protecting people with preexisting conditions from price discrimination. Sunday, Health and Human Services secretary Tom Price tore down the tattered faade. Asked why insurers called the Republican health-care plan, which allows them to charge higher premiums to the sick than the healthy, unworkable, Price insisted they would just go back to the way things worked before Obamacare. Its really perplexing, especially from the insurance companies, because all they have to do is dust off how they did business before Obamacare, he said on ABC. A single risk pool, which is what theyre objecting to, is exactly the kind of process that was that has been utilized for decades.

Republican policy elites consider such an admission obvious, even banal. To the great mass of the voting public it would come as a shock. I want to keep preexisting conditions. I think we need it. I think its a modern age, promised Donald Trump during his presidential campaign. Mike Pence, delivering what the campaign billed as its seminal health-care address just a week before the election, likewise pledged, We will protect Americans with preexisting conditions so that they are not charged more or denied coverage, just because they have been sick, so long as they have paid their premiums consistently.

There is no mystery why Republicans made this promise. Regulations preventing insurance companies from excluding or charging higher prices to people with expensive medical needs is the single most popular feature of Obamacare. In in the darkest moments of Obamacare, Democrats have highlighted this feature, and Republicans have assured the public they would keep it in place. In January, Mitch McConnell dismissed this charge: We already know their central contention, that Republicans somehow want to go back to the way things were before Obamacare which, of course, everyone knows is untrue. And yet here was Price casually admitting that going back to the way things were before Obamacare was exactly their intention.

What has brought the Republican Party to this point is a public-opinion backlash so overwhelming that the normal rules of politics cease to apply. Americans prefer Obamacare to the GOP alternative by a two-to-one margin. By nearly a three-to-one margin, Americans want the GOP to work with Democrats to repair the Affordable Care Act rather than repealing and replacing it. Even Trump voters are split evenly on this question:

It might seem obvious that Republicans should surrender to public opinion, abandon their loathed plan, and work with Democrats to fix the health-care system. Instead, they seem to be calculating that they have more to lose than to gain by fixing the health-care system, and implicitly conceding that their eight-year crusade to destroy Obamacare has been a lie. There is a logic of sorts to this position: They are on the dark side of the moon, and see their only path as going farther away.

Josh Holmes, a former high-level adviser to McConnell, tells the Washington Post that passing the Senate plan gives his party the best chance in the midterm elections. If you can find me an election cycle where Democrats havent run ads accusing Republicans of throwing the poor and elderly off of health care, Ill buy you a beer, he argues.

It is true that Democrats have spent several decades accusing Republicans of trying to deny health insurance to the poor and sick. That is because Republicans have indeed spent several decades trying to deny health insurance to the poor and sick. As Paul Ryan said earlier this year, he has been dreaming of deep cuts to Medicaid since his kegger days. It is not a popular position by any means. But fanatical hatred of the welfare state does have a constituency among the major institutions of the conservative movement, many of which are well-funded and important to rallying base voters.

Holmess case seems to concede that, if Democrats are going to run against his party by pointing out that they plan to deny insurance to the old and sick, they might as well go ahead and deny insurance to the old and sick.

This is why he wanted a really fast vote.

Riiiight.

Someone broke into Dean Hellers Las Vegas office and left the threatening message.

The press secretary took the presidents picture in a big-boy fire truck.

Sean Duffy (like Donald Trump) wants to blame the threat of filibusters for blocking GOP bills. But the big ones arent subject to filibusters.

No state has gotten more special treatment from the Senate (and the administration) than Murkowskis Alaska. If its not enough, Trumpcares dead.

Nothing better to start off your week than a hellish commute.

If the Pimp of the Nation is serious about the Senate, Dems want to be ready.

Trumps strikes are killing more than 12 civilians per day.

In supporting the blockade of Qatar, the president appears to have fallen for a fraud perpetrated by hackers in the United Arab Emirates.

Tom Price admits that insurance companies will go back to weeding out the sick.

The Trump administration reportedly has its act together on tax reform. Also, its only idea for how to finance tax cuts is blow out the deficit.

Thanks to Trump, many will follow.

The vote has already been delayed by at least a week, and each day its passage becomes less likely.

Made in America week is already shifting the conversation to the Trump familys fondness for overseas manufacturing.

A scorecard on how Trump has advanced Russian interests (whether knowingly or unknowingly), from easing Russian sanctions to the Syrian cease-fire.

The rise and meaning of an ubiquitous term of abuse.

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Republicans Give Away the Game on Trumpcare - New York Magazine

By James Goldgeier By James Goldgeier July 17 at 11:44 AM

President Trump Monday morning tweeted that most politicians would have done what his son, Donald Trump Jr., and other Trump campaign officials did when they met Russians promising secret information on Hillary Clinton.

This is a remarkable claim for a Republican to make. Republicans used to compete with each other over who was tougher on Russia (or, more precisely, the Soviet Union), and to condemn Democrats for their purported softness. Now, Trump sees nothing wrong with his son meeting a person who had been described to him as a Russian government attorney, in order to provide high level and sensitive information that was described as part of Russia and its governments support for Mr. Trump. Heres how dramatically the Republican position has changed.

Being tough on Russia was once the name of the game

During the Cold War, anti-communism was the glue that held the GOP together. In the 1970s and 1980s, Republicans of all stripes took great political advantage in criticizing Democratic presidential candidates, such as George McGovern and Michael Dukakis, as being too weak to stand up for U.S. interests in the face of the threat from Moscow.

Conservative Republicans saw it to their advantage to criticize not just Democrats but members of their own party for showing any signs of appeasement of Moscow.

Most people remember Ronald Reagans victory over Jimmy Carter as the victory of a Republican champion of a strong defense in the face of the Soviet threat after four years of weak Democratic foreign policy leadership. But Reagan had built his political fortunes within his own party by attacking the detente, or lessening of tensions, with Moscow initiated by Republican Presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford and national security adviser/Secretary of State Henry Kissinger as too accommodating of the Soviet Union.

Once in office, however, even Reagan himself was not immune to such critiques. As he prepared to meet with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev for the first time in November 1985, who was out in front leading the charge against him? None other than Newt Gingrich, who called that meeting the most dangerous summit for the West since Adolf Hitler met with Neville Chamberlain in 1938 in Munich.

The battle between realists and neoconservatives dominated the GOP

GOP foreign policy debates were not just over exactly how tough to get with the Soviets. The main battle for the direction of Republican policy over the past four decades has been between realists, who traditionally focus on other states power but are less concerned with their domestic politics, and neoconservatives, who looked for the United States to use its power to promote its ideals.

Neoconservatives applauded Reagans critique of the Nixon/Kissinger policy of detente (an easing of hostilities). When the Soviet Union disappeared in December 1991, the realism of George H.W. Bush, national security adviser Brent Scowcroft, and Secretary of State James Baker was dominant and was quickly attacked by the neoconservatives for not taking enough advantage of the Cold War victory to promote democracy across Central and Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. The realists and neoconservatives continued to argue throughout the 1990s, culminating in the battles in the George W. Bush administration over the war in Iraq.

Today, both realists and neoconservatives are united in their displeasure over U.S. foreign policy in general and Americas Russia policy in particular: simply peruse Scowcroft protege and Council on Foreign Relations President Richard Haasss Twitter feed or his colleague Max Boots commentary. In the face of the intelligence communitys assessments of Russian interference in the 2016 election, the old GOP would have shown outrage. The new GOP seems to be trying to sweep the issue under the rug.

Trump is an outlier, but everyone is following

If Trump were a realist, he would be seeking to deal with Russia from a position of strength, not looking to accommodate Putin from the get-go. If he were a neoconservative, he would be pressing Putin on his abysmal human rights record. Instead, he is praising Putin for being strong and being tough. And it is unimaginable that any other president would have merely accepted Putins denial of election interference and moved on.

So why hasnt the GOP spoken up? Yes, there are occasional remarks by Republican Sens. John McCain and Lindsey O. Graham suggesting Donald Trump is getting hoodwinked by Russian President Vladimir Putin, whose efforts working with the Trump campaign to swing the 2016 presidential race are under daily scrutiny.

For the most part, however, GOP voters and GOP elites have shrugged off behavior that would have led to outrage in the past. Since it is hard to imagine that a Jeb Bush or Ted Cruz or even John Kasich would have been this accommodating of Putin, is the party of Ronald Reagan really prepared to become the party of Trump on foreign policy, especially in Americas relations with Russia?

The New York Times recently noted that some conservatives have admired Putin even before Trumps rise; today, a number of conservatives are cutting Trump slack because they see Putin as a strong leader willing to stand up for traditional values. But that does not explain why many other Republicans, particularly in Congress, have stayed so quiet even as the revelations pile up.

Republicans didnt pay attention to Russia for a long time

Part of the problem for the GOP is that the partys attention was elsewhere for so long. In the 1990s, with Russia weakened and seemingly embracing democracy during the Boris Yeltsin years, the neoconservatives turned their attention to China, Iraq and Iran. Realists, meanwhile, largely lost interest as Russias standing as a great power declined. While the 2008 Russia-Georgia war grabbed some attention, it wasnt really until Russia invaded Ukraine in 2014 that many in the GOP dusted off the old Cold War playbook to attack Obama for not being tough enough. Coupled with the alternative conservative narrative about Putin as a strong leader, the GOPers who want to get tough on Russia face head winds, and theyre out of practice.

For now, Republican leaders like Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and House Speaker Paul D. Ryan are saying as little as possible. Potential 2020 Republican candidates serving in the administration, such as Vice President Pence and U.S. ambassador to the United Nations,Nikki Haley, are doing their best to distance themselves from the swirling controversy. Across the GOP, there is fear of antagonizing Trumps base going into the 2018 midterm elections.

Are Republicans really ready to capitulate to Vladimir Putin, whose No. 1 foreign policy priorities since he became president have been to undermine U.S. power and create opportunities for Russia to flex its muscle? It is hard to imagine they are, but in the era of Trump, they appear to believe that keeping the Party together requires them to do so.

James Goldgeier is Dean of the School of International Service at American University.

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Republicans used to compare talking to Moscow to talking to Hitler. Trump's startling new tweet shows that's changed. - Washington Post

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell misleadingly claims that the Senate's health-care proposal won't lead to cuts in Medicaid. (Meg Kelly,Julio Negron/The Washington Post)

Republicans have made a big change to their health-care plan: Instead of increasing costs for the poor and sick to lower them for the rich and healthy, it would lower costs for the rich and healthy to increase them for the poor and sick.

See the difference? No? Well, you must not be a Republican senator then.

Now, all kidding aside, it is true that the Senate's latest health-care plan would depart from its earlier versions in a few key ways. Where it wouldn't, though, is in its results. Those would be the same as ever: insurance would become much more expensive for the sick, slightly more affordable for the healthy, and appreciably worse for everyone in the form of higher out-of-pocket costs. The other constant, of course, isthat Republicans would userepealing Obamacare as an excuse to eviscerate Medicaid. That doesn't get as much attention sinceit isn't "new" it's been the cornerstone of every Republican plan so far but it should. Those cuts, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, would make 15 million people lose their insurance over the next 10 years.

Indeed, the fact that the Senate would keep all the Medicaid cuts in its new plan that it had in its old one is maybe the most remarkable thing about it. They didn't even try to hide it like they did with their tax cuts for the rich. Republicans, you see, have not only been trying to get rid of Obamacare's rules protecting people with preexisting conditions, but also its taxes on wealthy investors. No surprise there. Tax cuts for thewealthy hasbeen the party'sraison d'trefor 40 years now. But it's also where their Medicaid cuts, which aren't even tangential to all this, come in: those are about offsetting the cost of those tax cuts. The problem, though, is that quite literally taking health-care from the poor to pay for tax cuts for the rich isn't the most popular of ideas. Even a conservative like Senator Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) has said that he wants to "make sure we're not in a situation where we're cutting taxes for the wealthy and at the same time, basically, for lower-income citizens, passing a larger burden on to them." So Republicans decided to get rid of some of their tax cuts for the rich, and use that money to ... expand tax breaks for the rich?

Actually, yes. That, after all, is what health savings accounts are. They let people pay their out-of-pocket medical expenses with pre-tax dollars, which only helps them if they have enough money to be able to put some aside and are in a high enough tax bracket that it's even worth doing so. It's no wonder, then, that households making $100,000 or more make up 58 percent of all HSA accounts and 70 percent of the value of all HSA contributions. Which is to say that the Senate bill would take what's already a tax shelter for the well-off HSA moneycan be invested tax-free and turn it into even more of one by allowing people to use HSAs to pay for their health-care premiums in addition to their health-care expenses. In other words, Republicans would take from the rich with their right hand and give it back with their left.

But there's no legerdemain when it comes to Medicaid. There are just cuts, and more cuts. The Senate bill would start by undoing Obamacare's Medicaid expansion for poor adults, but then go much further than that. The important thing to understand is that right now Medicaid is an open-ended program that grows as need does. But, starting in 2020, the Senate bill would turn it into one that's capped on a per person basis and only grows at a certain rate of inflation; at first that would be by medical inflation (which is actually lower than Medicaid's projected growth), but then, in 2025, it'd be by the even lower overall rate of inflation. The result, according to the CBO, is that Medicaid spending would be 26 percent lower in 2026 than it would otherwise be, and 35 percent lower in 2036.

Republicans, for their part, have responded to this in what can only be called Orwellian fashion. President Trump has argued that these cuts aren't really cuts because Medicaid spending would still grow, just not as much. Vice President Pence has said that reducing Medicaid spending by$772 billion the next decade would "strengthen and secure Medicaid for the neediest in our society." And Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price has outright claimed that "there are no cuts to the Medicaid program" since states would be given "greater flexibility" to find efficiencies. That might be convincing to some Republicans, but not, as the New York Times' Margot Sanger-Katz points out, to the 40 percent of low-incomeadults, 60 percent of kids with disabilities, and 64 percent of nursing home residents who are covered by Medicaid. These are poor and sick people who can't afford any other care. Whether giving less money to Medicaid than we said we would is taking money away from Medicaid and it is is a semantic game that doesn't change the fact that there will be far less money for them.

Health care is complicated, but the Senate bill isn't. The non-Medicaid parts would make things as bad as they were before Obamacare, and the Medicaid parts would make them even worse than that. People are focused on the first half of that because Senate Republicans have come up with new and more far-reaching ways to undermine Obamacare's protections for people with preexisting conditions to the point of meaningless insurers and actuaries agree on that but the second half of it is no better. It would transform Medicaid from a program that makes sure the most vulnerable people in society can get care into one that might let them get care.

Meet the new Republican health-care plan, same as the old Republican health-care plan.

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Republicans' Obamacare repeal is starting to look like Medicaid repeal - Washington Post

Assemblyman Travis Allen (R-Huntington Beach) has hitched his political star to the campaign to repeal the gas tax a package of vehicle fees and fuel taxes that the Legislature passed earlier this year to raise $52 billion over 10 years for transportation projects. The little-known legislator from Orange County launched a citizens initiative to repeal the fuel taxes and fees in May. In June, he announced his candidacy for governor in 2018.

Meanwhile, in Orange County, the California Republican Party has been working intensely to recall first-term state Sen. Josh Newman (D-Fullerton). Whats their argument against him? That he voted for the gas tax.

Other Republican politicians also have jumped on the bandwagon, including former San Diego City Councilman Carl DeMaio, who is pushing the repeal idea on a radio show he hosts.

But dont be fooled. The campaign by Republicans to punish supporters of the gas tax is really just the latest tactic in their war to wipe out with the Democratic supermajority in the state Senate and revive their own declining influence in state government. After all, the gas tax package passed with the votes of 81 legislators only one of whom was a Republican.

If this strategy rings familiar thats because a similar campaign to stop the car tax contributed to the recall of Democratic Gov. Gray Davis in 2003 and boosted the political careers of several Republicans, including Arnold Schwarzenegger. Davis crime, in the eyes of voters, was that he had raised vehicle fees from $70 a year to about $210 to cover a hole in the state budget. The electricity crisis from few years earlier also played a role in the recall campaign, but in the end, the car tax in this car-loving state was a more powerful campaign slogan even than rolling blackouts.

Of course, theres nothing unusual about Republicans seeking to win elections by attacking tax hikes. But it is cynical and destructive for them to make stop the gas tax the centerpiece of their political campaigns in the 2018 election. The package of fuel taxes and fees passed earlier this year represents an overdue investment in the states crumbling infrastructure. Even most Republicans agree that the states transportation system is in sorry shape from years of inadequate construction and maintenance. And thats no wonder, considering that the gasoline tax hasnt been raised in nearly three decades not since a bipartisan deal in 1989 supported by Republican Gov. George Deukmejian as an important investment in the states economic future.

Whats more, Republicans are exaggerating the significance of this relatively minor tax hike in a state that faces much more significant problems. Politicians should be talking about income inequality, affordable housing and the dangers of Trumps anti-immigrant policies to California residents, for starters. Or the congressional healthcare proposal that will force millions of people to lose coverage. Or the constant threat to Californias natural resources its mountains, deserts, oceans, wildlife and air from the environmentally hostile federal government.

Its hard to imagine that the prospect of paying $10 more a month to finally fix the states roads and bridges, which are in observably bad shape, and build public transportation projects for future traffic relief, even ranks on the same outrage scale as these critical California issues.

Will the Republicans gas tax ploy work? Possibly not. The political landscape has changed a lot since 2003, when 35% of California voters were registered Republican and the GOP still wielded some power in Sacramento. Since then, Republican registration has dropped steadily by about 400,000 even as the states population has grown. Now, only about a quarter of the states voters are registered Republican, and the GOP holds not one statewide office. Historically, Republican enclaves such as Orange County and northern San Diego County have turned purple, and in 2018, Republicans are expected to face tough challenges to retain congressional seats.

The reason the party of Ronald Reagan is becoming increasingly irrelevant is because it continues to back the wrong issues and demonize the very people it needs to attract to remain relevant in California.

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Republicans are playing politics with the gas tax again. No wonder they have no power in California - Los Angeles Times

Saul Loeb, AFP/Getty Images

I did not leave the Republican Party. The Republican Party left its senses. The political movement that once stood athwart history resisting bloated government and military adventurism has been reduced to an amalgam of talk-radio resentments. President Donald Trumps Republicans have devolved into a party without a cause, dominated by a leader hopelessly ill-informed about the basics of conservatism, U.S. history and the Constitution.

Americas first Republican president reportedly said, Nearly all men can stand adversity. But if you want to test a mans character, give him power. The current Republican president and the party he controls were granted monopoly power over Washington in November and already find themselves spectacularly failing Abraham Lincolns character exam.

It would take far more than a single column to detail Trumps failures in the months following his bleak inaugural address. But the Republican leaders who have subjugated themselves to the White Houses corrupting influence fell short of Lincolns standard long before their favorite reality-TV star brought his gaudy circus act to Washington.

When I left Congress in 2001, I praised my partys successful efforts to balance the budget for the first time in a generation and keep many of the promises that led to our takeover in 1994. I concluded my last speech on the House floor by foolishly predicting that Republicans would balance budgets and champion a restrained foreign policy for as long as they held power.

I would be proved wrong immediately.

As the new century began, Republicans gained control of the federal government. George W. Bush and the GOP Congress responded by turning a $155 billion surplus into a $1 trillion deficit and doubling the national debt, passing a $7 trillion unfunded entitlement program and promoting a foreign policy so utopian it would have made Woodrow Wilson blush. Voters made Nancy Pelosi speaker of the House in 2006 and Barack Obama president in 2008.

After their well-deserved drubbing, Republicans swore that if voters ever entrusted them with running Washington again, they would prove themselves worthy. Trumps party was given a second chance this year, but it has spent almost every day since then making the majority of Americans regret it.

The GOP president questioned Americas constitutional system of checks and balances. Republican leaders said nothing. He echoed Stalin and Mao by calling the free press the enemy of the people. Republican leaders were silent. And as the commander in chief insulted allies while embracing autocratic thugs, Republicans who spent a decade supporting wars of choice remained quiet. Meanwhile, their budget-busting proposals demonstrate a fiscal recklessness very much in line with the Bush years.

Last weeks Russia revelations show just how shamelessly Republican lawmakers will stand by a longtime Democrat who switched parties after the promotion of a racist theory about Barack Obama gave him standing in Lincolns once-proud party. Neither Lincoln, William Buckley nor Ronald Reagan would recognize this movement.

It is a dying party that I can no longer defend.

Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Jon Meacham has long predicted that the 150-year duopoly of the Republicans and Democrats will end. The signs seem obvious enough. When my Republican Party took control of Congress in 1994, it was the first time the GOP had won the House in a generation. The two parties have been in a state of turmoil ever since.

In 2004, Republican strategist Karl Rove anticipated a majority that would last a generation; two years later, Pelosi became the most liberal House speaker in history. Obama was swept into power by a supposedly unassailable Democratic coalition. In 2010, the Tea Party tide rolled in. Obamas re-election returned the momentum to the Democrats, but Republicans won a historic state-level landslide in 2014. Then last fall, Trump demolished both the Republican and Democratic establishments.

Political historians will one day view Trump as a historical anomaly. But the wreckage of this man will break the Republican Party into pieces and lead to the election of independent thinkers no longer tethered to the tired dogmas of the polarized past. When that day mercifully arrives, the two-party duopoly that has strangled American politics for almost two centuries will finally come to an end. And Washington just may begin to work again.

JoeScarborough, a former Republican congressman from Florida, hosts the MSNBC show Morning Joe.

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Donald Trump is killing the Republican Party - The Denver Post