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Will travel ban be Republicans's first big break with Trump? Sacramento Bee Republicans confront their first big test about whether to break with their party's new president following the Supreme Court's decision to allow Donald Trump's contentious travel ban against citizens from six Muslim-majority nations to take effect ... The Note: Can Republicans stanch the bleeding on health bill?ABC News 16-1436 Trump v. International Refugee Assistance Project (06/26/2017) - Supreme Court of the United StatesSupreme Court of the United States Executive Order Protecting The Nation From Foreign Terrorist Entry Into The United StatesThe White House Whitehouse.gov -The Economic Times all 1,287 news articles »

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Will travel ban be Republicans's first big break with Trump? - Sacramento Bee

House Speaker Paul Ryan said Monday that Americans are rejecting the Democrats' knee-jerk opposition to President Trump and boldly predicted that Americans would reward Republicans in 2018 for following through on a healthcare agenda that, for now, is deeply unpopular.

In an impromptu interview to discuss the Republicans' four special election victories, including last week's crucial win in Georgia's 6th Congressional District, Ryan said the liberal strategy for dealing with Trump has been discredited. So, too, the speaker added, would doubters of his party's legislation to partially repeal Obamacare.

"The Democrats are in disarray. All they're doing is suggesting they're going to come and fight and resist, and I don't think that's what voters want," the Wisconsin Republican told the Washington Examiner. "We just saw four victories for tackling problems and addressing issues, and four defeats for just simple resistance and that was the basis of their campaign."

The "resistance" is a slogan used by many of Trump's opponents on the Left.

Just days away from a critical Senate vote for companion legislation to the House-passed American Health Care Act, Ryan's happy talk on healthcare struck a familiar tone.

Back in 2009 and 2010, as President Barack Obama and the Democrats in Congress were closing in on final passage the extremely unpopular Affordable Care Act, they vowed that Americans would embrace Obamacare once it was implemented and they experienced the benefits.

It never happened, and Democrats paid a heavy price in dozens and dozens of lost seats in consecutive midterm elections. Until, that is, this year, when the Republicans' plans to replace the law got rolling. For the time in its existence, Obamacare has spent consecutive months more popular than not.

Republicans are pushing forward, but they're concerned about blowback in 2018, especially with Trump in the White House. They shouldn't be, Ryan insisted.

"Whether or not it's being perceived well, or understood fairly, is not the question so much as: Do we achieve the result? That means we have to pass our policies to achieve good results and let the results speak for themselves," Ryan said. "Whether or not we can communicate in the fog of the moment is not as important as: Do our policies make a difference and do they solve the problem? And, the answer is, yes.' And, that's why we have to see it through."

Ryan's bullishness isn't without some justification.

Georgia's suburban Atlanta 6th District is educated and upscale. It's been Republican for decades but barely chose Trump in November over Democrat Hillary Clinton. It's the type of seat Democrats needs to compete for to have any chance of winning back the House next year.

Democratic energy and money poured into the race from all over the country, and polls showed Democrat Jon Ossoff poised to pull an upset until the very end, when the race started to turn. It was the fourth victory in as many House specials that included narrower than expected wins in three other districts that are solidly conservative.

It also happened with Trump's job approval hovering around 40 percent, after the appointment of a special counsel to investigate Russian meddling in the 2016 election that could implicate the president.

It also happened during the debate, and after passage, of a health care overhaul in the House that, according to a poll from NBC News and the Wall Street Journal, only 16 percent of Americans think is a "good idea," with 48 percent saying it's a "bad idea."

Still, it was unusual to hear Ryan eschew the usual lines about caution and the danger of midterm elections for the party that controls the White House. Even Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., whose majority appears more secure than Ryan's because of a favorable map, is warning his members that the winds can change quickly.

"Voters want us to do what we said we would do. They like what we said we would do, and we simply have to execute. And, so by executing our agenda, by keeping our momentum, we'll keep a virtuous cycle going," Ryan said. "We are on offense; we need to stay on offense."

Ryan dismissed questions about Trump's drag on his members, especially incumbents running for re-election in districts that Trump lost to Clinton last year despite their tradition of voting for Republicans.

The day that James Comey, the FBI director Trump fired under controversial circumstances, testified before a Senate committee, House Republicans repealed Dodd-Frank, Obama's signature financial reform law, the speaker said, as proof that the president's periodic distractions aren't really that distracting.

But Ryan's robust political operation, and his personal attention to fundraising, suggests that he understands what his party could be up against in 2018.

The National Republican Congressional Committee, the House GOP campaign arm, and his affiliated super PAC, Congressional Leadership Fund, were the biggest players for the party in the specials. He is raising record amounts of cash for a speaker, and has already transferred $22 million to the NRCC.

Since January, Ryan has held 154 fundraisers and meetings across the country, traveling to 42 cities and 20 states, raising more than $30 million. The speaker has raised an additional $3.4 million for his colleagues by headlining their fundraisers.

So what's Ryan telling his members to keep them on track and discouraged by the heat, or the tweetstorm, of the moment? "Let's get our work done. We built out a timeline for this agenda for this term. Let's go execute it," he said.

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Paul Ryan: Republicans will be vindicated in 2018 on healthcare - Washington Examiner

By Travis Fain

Raleigh, N.C. Republicans released a redraw of the state's judicial and prosecutorial districts Sunday evening, setting up a committee hearing Monday afternoon on a potential overhaul of the state's third branch of government.

Gov. Roy Cooper, during a budget press conference, said he needed to review the legislation but said it appears an attempt to "rig the courts" in favor of the GOP legislative majority.

"What I've heard simply tells me they're trying to rig the courts because they lost," Cooper said. "This is an attempt to threaten the judiciary and to rig the judiciary in their favor."

House Bill 717 is 21 pages of detailed precinct movements to rework judicial lines in the state. Maps tweeted Sunday night by state Rep. Justin Burr, R-Stanly, the bill sponsor, show a number of changes from the status quo.

Peg Dorer, director of the Conference of District Attorneys, said the new districts would eliminate two district attorneys one covering Scotland and Hoke counties and another for Anson and Richmond ceding their area to other districts. It makes changes to seven prosecutorial districts overall, Dorer said.

"They're pairing some things up and moving some things around that is going to cause a lot of hardship," she said. "It's just a mess.

"And, if you want to get political about it, all of the losers are Democrats," Dorer said.

On Twitter, Democracy North Carolina called the bill a "gerrymander" that merges maps "for conservative control." State Rep. Grier Martin, D-Wake, said in a telephone interview that the bill seems to be part of "the same effort to bend the government of North Carolina toward the will of the Republican Party."

Martin said he received a "stat pack" with racial and partisan breakdowns of the changes at about 9:30 a.m. Monday and that he would review the crucial information in analyzing the changes. The timing a new map released in what may be the last week of this legislative session, by a GOP majority whose congressional and legislative maps have been found unconstitutional by the federal courts is disturbing, Martin said.

"Utter lack of transparency," he said.

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NC Republicans seek to redraw judicial maps - WRAL.com

The Brezhnev Doctrine said that the Soviet empire could only expand and never give back its gains. A domestic version of the doctrine has long applied to the welfare state and never so brazenly as in the debate over the Republican health-care bill.

Its reforms to Medicaid are portrayed as provisions to all but forcibly expel the elderly from nursing homes and send poor children to the workhouse. Bernie Sanders has called the bill barbaric, a word that once was reserved for, say, chattel slavery or suttee, but is now considered appropriate for a change in the Medicaid funding formula.

The Republican health bills have two major elements on Medicaid, rolling back the enhanced funding for the Obama Medicaid expansion and over time instituting a new per-capita funding formula for the program. The horror.

The Democrats now make it sound as if the Obama expansion is part of the warp and woof of Medicaid. In fact, it was a departure from the norm in the program, which since its inception has been, quite reasonably, limited to poor children, pregnant women, the disabled and the ailing elderly. ObamaCare changed it to make a priority of covering able-bodied adults.

ObamaCare originally required states to enroll able-bodied adults with incomes less than 138 percent of the federal poverty line starting in 2014. The Supreme Court re-wrote the law to make the expansion voluntary, and 31 states and the District of Columbia took it up.

Traditionally, the federal government had paid more to poor than rich states, with a match ranging from 75 percent for the poorest state, Mississippi, to 50 percent for the rich states. ObamaCare created an entirely new formula for the Medicaid expansion population. It offered a 100 percent federal match for the new enrollees, gradually declining to a 90 percent match supposedly, forever.

So, perversely, ObamaCare had a larger federal match for the able-bodied enrollees in Medicaid than for its more vulnerable populations.

This higher federal matching rate, writes health-care analyst Doug Badger, allows states to leverage more federal money per state dollar spent on a non-disabled adult with $15,000 in earnings than on a part-time minimum-wage worker with developmental disabilities, who earns barely half that amount.

According to Badger, West Virginia received seven times as much federal money for spending $1 on an able-bodied adult than for spending $1 on a disabled person.

This obviously makes no sense, and the Senate health-care bill phases out the enhanced funding over four years. But it doesnt end the expanded Medicaid eligibility for the able-bodied. And a refundable tax credit will be available for low-income people that is meant to pick up any slack from Medicaid. This is hardly social Darwinism.

The other, longer-term change in the House and Senate bills is moving to a per-capita funding formula for Medicaid, with the Senate bill ratcheting the formula down to per-capita growth plus the inflation rate in 2026. Maybe this will prove too stringent, but it used to be a matter of bipartisan consensus that the current structure of Medicaid creates an incentive for heedless growth in the program.

The way it works now is that Mississippi, for instance, gets nearly $3 from the federal government for every $1 it spends. Why ever economize? In the 1990s, the Clinton administration advanced what it portrayed as an unobjectionable proposal to make Medicaid more efficient while preserving the programs core function namely, a per-capita funding formula.

The presidents per-capita proposal, the liberal lion Henry Waxman enthused at the time, responds to the pleas of those who want more cost discipline in Medicaid without terminating the guarantee of basic health and long-term care to 36 million Americans.

But that was before ObamaCare lurched the program in the other direction. The Brezhnev Doctrine dictates that what once was common sense must now be unimaginable cruelty.

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Relax, Republicans' Medicaid changes aren't that big of a deal - New York Post

First Read is your briefing from Meet the Press and the NBC Political Unit on the day's most important political stories and why they matter.

For Republicans, its a make-or-break week on health care either they pass their Senate legislation (which then would be on easy street to become law), or they dont (which likely would stop their reform efforts for good). Its that simple, with Senate Republicans hoping to hold a vote by the end of this week before lawmakers go on their July 4 recess. To succeed, they will have to overcome four challenges. Call them the Four Ps:

Five Senate Republicans oppose the current bill: To pass the Senate, Republicans can afford only two defections, assuming that no Democrats support the legislation. And according to NBCs whip count, five GOPers oppose the current legislation:

And there are other undecided/unannounced GOP senators beyond these five, including Sens. Susan Collins (R-ME), Lisa Murkowski (R-AK), Shelley Moore Capito (R-WV), Bill Cassidy (R-LA), and Rob Portman (R-OH). Do remember: Because someone says they oppose the current legislation doesnt mean they wont support it after some changes. So we will update this list as things change.

As NBCs Kristen Welker reported on Today, President Trump has criticized Barack Obama for not acting more decisively to stop Russias interference in the 2016 election a significant change from Trumps previous indifference on the issue. Well, I just heard today for the first time that Obama knew about Russia a long time before the election, and he did nothing about it. But nobody wants to talk about that, Trump told Fox News. The president also tweeted, Obama Administration official said they choked when it came to acting on Russian meddling of election. They didn't want to hurt Hillary? But with Trump blasting Obama on Russia, its worth pointing out all of the times on the campaign trail that Trump USED Russias information to help him defeat Clinton.

In addition, dont miss this piece from NBCs Ken Dilanian, Hallie Jackson, and others: The Trump administration has taken little meaningful action to prevent Russian hacking, leaking and disruption in the next national election in 2018, despite warnings from intelligence officials that it will happen again, officials and experts told NBC News ... According to recent Congressional testimony, Trump has shown no interest in the question of how to prevent future election interference by Russia or another foreign power. Former FBI Director James Comey told senators that Trump never asked him about how to stop a future Russian election cyber attack, and Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who sits on the National Security Council, testified that he has not received a classified briefing on Russian election interference. Dozens of state officials told NBC News they have received little direction from Washington about election security.

The U.S. Supreme Court heads into Monday, its last day of the current term, with two important questions so far unanswered: What's to become of President Donald Trump's travel ban and will 80-year-old Justice Anthony Kennedy retire? NBCs Pete Williams reports. Politicos Eliana Johnson tweets, No Kennedy retirement announcement at clerk reunion, I'm told, leading to dimming WH hopes he'll step down this year.

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Republicans Face Climactic Week for Health Care - NBCNews.com