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AARP is targeting 11 GOP senators, including key centrists, to oppose the House-passed healthcare bill that would raise premiums for seniors.

The ad campaign expands a May effort that ran ads targeting five senators, calling for the House-passed American Health Care Act to be scrapped. The expansion comes at a pivotal time as Senate leadership hopes to vote on a healthcare bill by the end of July.

AARP is targeting Sens. Lisa Murkowski and Dan Sullivan of Alaska, Jeff Flake of Arizona, Cory Gardner of Colorado, Joni Ernest and Chuck Grassley of Iowa, Dean Heller of Nevada, Rob Portman of Ohio, Lamar Alexander and Bob Corker of Tennessee, and Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia.

The list includes some key centrists who will be critical to the GOP leadership's hopes of passing its own version of the American Health Care Act before Congress' August recess.

Heller and Flake are up for re-election in 2018. Heller, Portman and Capito are pushing leadership for a seven-year phaseout of Obamacare's Medicaid expansion.

AARP, the nation's biggest seniors lobby, has been opposed to the American Health Care Act for some time, angry over a proposed change to premiums for senior citizens in insurance plans on the individual market.

Obamacare allowed insurers to charge seniors three times the amount they charge a younger person. The American Health Care Act would increase that to five times.

"Our members and other Americans over age 50 are very worried about legislation that would raise their premiums through what is, in effect, an age tax," said AARP Executive Vice President Nancy LeaMond.

It is not clear what pieces of the legislation the Senate will keep, including the age-rating ratio.

AARP also derided problems with Medicaid and hurting "protections for people with pre-existing conditions."

A controversial last-minute amendment to the legislation, which passed the House last month by a 217-213 vote, let states opt out of community rating mandate. States could get a waiver that would let insurers charge sicker people more money.

House Republicans say that $23 billion included in the legislation for high-risk pools could help offset any increases. A recent estimate from the Congressional Budget Office said that money wasn't enough to offset major increases for people with pre-existing conditions such as cancer or diabetes.

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AARP targets more Republicans in new healthcare ad buy - Washington Examiner

(WASHINGTON) Fellow Republicans pressed President Donald Trump on Sunday to come clean about whether he has tapes of private conversations with former FBI Director James Comey and provide them to Congress if he does or possibly face a subpoena, as a Senate investigation into collusion with Russia or obstruction of justice extended to a Trump Cabinet member.

It was a sign of escalating fallout from riveting testimony from Comey last week of undue pressure from Trump, which drew an angry response from the president on Friday that Comey was lying.

Attorney General Jeff Sessions was in for sharp questioning by senators on the Senate Intelligence committee Tuesday. Whether that hearing will be public or closed is not yet known.

"I don't understand why the president just doesn't clear this matter up once and for all," said Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, a member of that committee, referring to the existence of any recordings.

She described Comey's testimony as "candid" and "thorough" and said she would support a subpoena if needed. Trump "should voluntarily turn them over," Collins said.

Sen. James Lankford, R-Okla., also a member of that committee, agreed the panel needed to hear any tapes that exist. "We've obviously pressed the White House," he said.

Trump's aides have dodged questions about whether conversations relevant to the Russia investigation have been recorded, and so has the president. Pressed on the issue Friday, Trump said "I'll tell you about that maybe sometime in the very near future."

Lankford said Sessions' testimony Tuesday will help flesh out the truth of Comey's allegations, including Sessions' presence at the White House in February when Trump asked to speak to Comey alone. Comey alleges that Trump then privately asked him to drop a probe into former national security adviser Michael Flynn's contacts with Russia.

Comey also has said Sessions did not respond when he complained he didn't "want to get time alone with the president again." The Justice Department has denied that, saying Sessions stressed to Comey the need to be careful about following appropriate policies.

"We want to be able to get his side of it," Lankford said.

Sen. Jack Reed, D-R.I., said "there's a real question of the propriety" of Sessions' involvement in Comey's dismissal, because Sessions had stepped aside from the federal investigation into contacts between Russia and the Trump campaign. Comey was leading that probe.

Reed said he also wants to know if Sessions had more meetings with Russian officials as a Trump campaign adviser than have been disclosed.

Trump on Sunday accused Comey of "cowardly" leaks and predicted many more from him. "Totally illegal?" he asked in a tweet. "Very 'cowardly!'"

Several Republican lawmakers also criticized Comey for disclosing memos he had written in the aftermath of his private conversations with Trump, calling that action "inappropriate." But, added Lankford "releasing his memos is not damaging to national security."

The New York City federal prosecutor who expected to remain on the job when Trump took office but ended up being fired said he was made uncomfortable by one-on-one interactions with the president just like Comey was. Preet Bharara told ABC's "This Week" that Trump was trying to "cultivate some kind of relationship" with him when he called him twice before the inauguration to "shoot the breeze."

He said Trump reached out to him again after the inauguration but he refused to call back, shortly before he was fired.

On Comey's accusations that Trump pressed him to drop the FBI investigation of Flynn, Bharara said "no one knows right now whether there is a provable case of obstruction" of justice. But: "I think there's absolutely evidence to begin a case."

Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein of California, a member of the Intelligence committee, sent a letter to Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, urging him to investigate possible obstruction of justice by Trump in Grassley's position as chairman of the Judiciary Committee. Feinstein is the top Democrat on that panel and a member of both.

She said Sessions should also testify before the Judiciary Committee, because it was better suited to explore legal questions of possible obstruction. Feinstein said she was especially concerned after National Intelligence Director Dan Coats and National Security Agency Director Michael Rogers refused to answer questions from the intelligence committee about possible undue influence by Trump.

Feinstein said she did not necessarily believe Trump was unfit for office, as House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi has asserted, but said he has a "destabilizing effect" on government.

"There's an unpredictability. He projects an instability," Feinstein said. "Doing policy by tweets is really a shakeup for us, because there's no justification presented."

In other appearances Sunday:

Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer of New York said he would take Trump up on his offer to testify under oath about his conversations with Comey, inviting the president to testify before the Senate.

Feinstein acknowledged she "would have a queasy feeling, too" if Comey's testimony was true that Loretta Lynch, as President Barack Obama's attorney general, had directed him to describe the FBI probe into Hillary Clinton's email practices as merely a "matter" and to avoid calling it an investigation. Feinstein said the Judiciary Committee should investigate.

Sessions stepped aside in March from the federal investigation into contacts between Russia and the campaign after acknowledging that had met twice last year with the Russian ambassador to the U.S. He had told lawmakers at his January confirmation hearing that he had not met with Russians during the campaign.

Sessions has been dogged by questions about possible additional encounters with the ambassador, Sergey Kislyak.

As for the timing of Sessions' recusal, Comey said the FBI expected the attorney general to take himself out of the matters under investigation weeks before he actually did.

Collins and Feinstein spoke on CNN's "State of the Union and Lankford and Schumer appeared on CBS' "Face the Nation." Reed was on "Fox News Sunday."

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Republicans Tell Trump to Come Clean on Possible Comey Tapes - TIME

This article first appeared on the Dorf on Law site.

In the aftermath of former FBI Director James Comey's dramatic sworn testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee this week, it is clear that the Republicans are not yet ready to void their deal with the devil.

Republican senators on the committee went to embarrassing lengths to defend Trump, and the rest of the party seems perfectly content to let Trump try to declare victory and walk away.

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This raises a question that we can address from at least two different angles: What did we really expect? That is, what did we think would happen at the hearing?

More broadly, for those of us who are not at all surprised that Trump has proved himself unfit for office again and again, what have we been expecting for the last six months, or even two years?

When we expressed fears about Trump being president, is this even close to what we thought would be happening?

On the immediate question of Comey's testimony, much of the odd post-hearing optimism on the Republican side is a simple result of there having been no game-changing moments at the hearing.

Republicans were able to float various defenses of Trump, including efforts to impugn Comey's motives and methods. As weak as those arguments were, that is not the point. All they had to do was hope for anything but the worst, and in that they were not disappointed.

Republicans are well accustomed to having to keep a straight face while making fatuous arguments. They are unashamed of their own oddball ideology-driven positions (climate denialism, tax cuts that pay for themselves, that a sitting president has no right to nominate a Supreme Court justice, and on and on), and they have now become similarly inured to responding to Trump's many outrages.

In short, Republicans are practiced at making bad arguments, and yesterday was no exception. Paul Ryan tried to say that Trump is simply new to politics, so his interference with the FBI's investigation of Russia's election meddling was merely a rookie error.

Nice try. "Your honor, my client had never been in a bank before. He didn't know that you couldn't just take the money and run."

Donald Trump in the East Room at the White House on February 16, 2017 in Washington, DC. Mario Tama/Getty

On a different tack, the Republicans on the committee tried to claim that Trump did not try to shut down the entire Russia investigation, asking Comey only to lay off Michael Flynn. As Elizabeth Goitein wrote in The New York Times : "Imagine defending Nixon by pointing out that he didnt erase every tape he created and didnt order a break-in of every facility used by Democratic operatives."

Imagine a situation in which there are six different avenues that a prudent investigator would follow. Now imagine that the president says: "You can follow these five as far as you want, but don't follow that one." Has he attempted to block the investigation? Even if it ended up being possible to find everything via the other five routes, the president's intervention is still an attempt to obstruct the investigation.

By far the funniest trial balloon that Republicans pushed at the hearing was the idea that Trump never directly ordered Comey to stop. Many people have pointed out how unnecessary it is for powerful people to use specific words. It is only necessary to say that you hope something will happen, and your underlings will know what to do.

What would Republican senators say if they heard a guy in a dark suit and shirt say, "Make sure that Luca Brasi sleeps with the fishes"? "Gee, maybe he only means that we should buy his friend Luca some aquariums filled with exotic species of fish and have them installed in his bedroom. How nice!"

Or how would they interpret this: "You've got a nice army base here, Colonel. We wouldn't want anything to happen to it." What would the senator from Idaho say? "Why, thank you. I feel the same way. Have a great day!"

In any event, the right-wing mediaverse has convinced Republicans that the only impeachable offenses are criminal offenses. This continues to be clearly wrong, as I pointed out in a column last week, because "high crimes and misdemeanors" as grounds for impeachment is not limited to chargeable crimes.

Although I noted in that column that those four words high crimes and misdemeanors are to be read together as a term of art, it is worth noting that the word "high" in that context refers to the position of the wrongdoer, not the seriousness of the offense. That is, we are talking about wrongdoing by people who hold high office.

Of course, if Trump is guilty of criminal behavior that could be charged by a grand jury, then that is obviously sufficient to justify impeachment. This is why some of Trump's detractors have focused on the elements of the crime of obstruction of justice.

The problem is that focusing on the criminal aspect can inadvertently lead people to believe that chargeable crimes are necessary and not merely sufficient for impeachment. In the end, grounds for impeachment are whatever members of Congress decide they are. (Heck, Senator Arlen Specter decided to draw from Scottish common law in the Clinton impeachment trial.)

The broader issue is that Republicans are already, in a strange way, running out the clock on the Trump presidency. They approached the Comey hearing as an opportunity to muddy the waters enough to say that they are not required to impeach Trump, for any of a number of embarrassingly weak reasons. If they can keep the clock moving, they might be able to get the public to think that what is happening is not so bad. And the band plays on.

So what was I expecting, going into yesterday's hearing? I admit that I considered it a non-zero probability that some kind of cataclysm would occur, but it is no surprise that things proceeded in what we now must admit is the new version of normality. Republicans have majorities in both houses, and they know that their base will punish them for abandoning Trump. As long as both of those things continue to be true, all else follows.

As I noted at the top of this column, however, there is a broader way to ask the question, "What were we expecting?" From the day that Trump announced his candidacy through his improbable nomination and non-majority electoral victory, people have been predicting that Trump will be a disaster as president. They were obviously right in a broad sense, but is what we are seeing what we thought we would be seeing?

I ask this question because I am one of the people who has long been sounding the alarm regarding Trump's existential threat to constitutional democracy, most prominently in a column last June. Similarly, people like David Brooks of The New York Times have been saying for months that Trump would almost certainly be impeached, probably within his first year in office.

Having gone back to reread what I wrote in that column and elsewhere, however, it is striking just how difficult it was to offer examples of impeachable things that Trump might do.

Trump's obvious disdain for the rule of law made it easy to believe that he would do anything that struck his fancy and then either deny doing it or say, "Come and stop me if you can!" Yet it was surprisingly difficult to imagine (much less predict) what has actually come to pass.

In response to Republicans' reassurances that their congressional leaders would be able to control Trump's worst impulses, I once asked how that would work. What if Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan went to the White House to tell Trump that he could not do something, but Trump had them arrested?

But that is such an extreme example that it does not really fit into the pattern that we are now seeing. I honestly expected that Trump and his people would be careful about toeing the line while they were in the process of undermining constitutional democracy. I certainly did not, for example, expect them to brazenly violate the emoluments clause or to laugh at ethics rules.

Instead, I expected that they would try to suppress votes (and they are) in order to make future elections sham events. I expected them to change rules to make money even more dominant in politics. Until they had consolidated power sufficiently to be untouchable, however, I did not expect them to be sloppy.

And maybe that is the answer. Maybe this Comey hearing was the definitive signal that the Republicans have concluded that Trump is truly and completely untouchable. Have we reached the point where Trump's boast about being able to shoot someone dead on Fifth Avenue without consequence has become almost literally true?

I certainly hope not. In any case, it is also possible that this is merely an intermediate phase. Some probably most Republicans will stick with Trump to the bitter end. Others, however, might have their limits.

When you have a president who, less than five months into office, has already tried to derail an FBI investigation (and was eager to fire someone in order to do it), who has put national security at risk by revealing intelligence information to foreign governments, and who shows no awareness that the rules or norms of government must apply to him, you are looking at a ticking time bomb.

Most significantly, Trump responded to the unanimous conclusion of the U.S. intelligence community that Russia which certainly qualifies as a hostile foreign power had tried to interfere in U.S. internal affairs by saying, "Nothing to see here." Comey or no Comey, Flynn or no Flynn, this is the kind of thing that a president is supposed to care about, not sweep under the rug in the service of his own ego.

At some point, some Republicans and it only needs to be a few are finally going to ask what it really means for a president to "preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States." A president who demands complete loyalty to himself, rather than to the rule of law, cannot be trusted to uphold that oath.

Neil H. Buchanan is an economist and legal scholar and a professor of law at George Washington University. He teaches tax law, tax policy, contracts, and law and economics. His research addresses the long-term tax and spending patterns of the federal government, focusing on budget deficits, the national debt, health care costs and Social Security.

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Neil Buchanan: Republicans Wriggle On the Hook Making Excuses for Trump - Newsweek

Republicans searching for consensus on how to pay for tax cuts are beginning to weigh attacking spending in potentially sensitive areas of the budget.

Senate Finance Chairman Orrin Hatch told Bloomberg he prefers to find spending cuts to pay for a tax overhaul, though he stopped short of guaranteeing any outcome.

Thats what should be the solution, Ill put it that way, Hatch, a Utah Republican, said Thursday. And Im hopeful that the Republicans will work to do that. Id like to find some spending cuts. Were spending us into oblivion."

GOP leaders have not moved off their calls for revenue-neutral tax legislation -- that is, a bill that balances tax cuts with other provisions that would raise revenue. Still, a growing number of Republican lawmakers is calling for abandoning that concept.

Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio, a leader of the ultraconservative House Freedom Caucus, called for $400 billion in unspecified cuts to welfare programs to help cover the cost of tax cuts. Thats the way to unlock the logjam in the House on setting tax and spending levels in a budget resolution, Jordan said Friday at an event sponsored by the Heritage Foundation, a conservative policy and advocacy group. Drawing up a budget resolution is a procedural prerequisite for Congress to tackle a tax overhaul.

At issue is how to comply with Senate rules that require 60 votes for any bill that adds to the long-term budget deficit. Republicans have only 52 votes in the chamber, and they arent counting on Democratic support. So tax-overhaul legislation must either avoid increasing the deficit or set its changes to expire within 10 years.

House Speaker Paul Ryan has proposed financing tax cuts with new revenues, but his proposals -- including imposing a border-adjusted tax on U.S. companies imports and eliminating their ability to deduct net interest payments -- face considerable opposition. No consensus has emerged on any other ways to raise revenue, however.

The political facts are that there is not consensus for the border-adjustment tax, said Representative Mark Meadows, the Freedom Caucus chairman.

Jordan and Meadows said the Freedom Caucus wont insist on revenue-neutral legislation, meaning some tax provisions would have to automatically expire in 10 years. Some of the tax cuts could be temporary, so you dont have to get full revenue-neutral, Jordan said.

Republican Senator David Perdue of Georgia, a staunch opponent of the border-tax proposal, also floated spending cuts as a possible offset for a tax-cut package. Representative Mark Sanford of South Carolina floated a hybrid -- revenue-raisers and spending cuts, particularly for entitlement programs -- of offsets.

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Achieving spending cuts on a large scale is easier said than done. The costliest programs in the U.S. budget are Medicare, Social Security and defense spending, which President Donald Trump has promised not to cut. The discretionary part of the budget has faced deep cuts in recent years, and many Republicans are reluctant to go further. That leaves mandatory spending, which covers popular safety-net programs like unemployment benefits, food stamps and veterans benefits.

If we dont get after mandatory spending, we will bankrupt our country, Representative Warren Davidson, an Ohio Republican. And that is not compassionate and we should not let that happen.

Some Republicans see no way out of the logjam other than to change the rules and allow deficit-raising tax cuts for a longer time horizon. Senator Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania cast doubt on the prospects for consensus on major spending cuts and instead has called for imposing a 30-year time horizon for budgetary changes that can add to the deficit.

I hope were not going to hold ourselves to something that is revenue-neutral, because then were not going to get good tax reform, Toomey said.

But Ryan and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell havent revised their calls for revenue-neutral tax reform. The White House hasnt taken a definitive position on that question, and the lack of guidance has fueled a free-for-all political environment. But the clock is ticking, and Republicans are eager to see some progress soon in order to keep hope alive of passing a tax bill in 2017.

Weve got to make some decisions, Meadows said. It is time to make some decisions.

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Republicans Tiptoe Toward Safety-Net Cuts to Unlock Tax 'Logjam' - Bloomberg

OVERLAND PARK, Kan. Kansas was at the heart of the tea party revolution, a red state where, six years ago, a deeply conservative group of Republicans took the state for a hard right turn. Now, after their policies failed to produce the results GOP politicians promised, the state has become host to another revolution: a resurgence of moderate Republicans.

Moderate Republicans joined with Democrats this week to raise state taxes, overriding GOP Gov. Sam Brownbacks veto and repudiating the conservative governors platform of ongoing tax cuts. The vote was a demonstration of the moderates newfound clout in the state Republican Party. Brownback was unable to successfully block the bill because many of the die-hard tax cut proponents had either retired or been voted out of office, losing to more centrist candidates in GOP primaries.

The citizens of Kansas have said Its not working. We dont like it. And theyve elected new people. said Sheila Frahm, a centrist Republican who served as lieutenant governor of Kansas and briefly as a U.S. senator.

Kansass moderate ascendance may portend problems for Republicans in Washington, where many in the party, including President Trump, are pushing to adopt federal tax policies similar to the ones Brownback has installed in Kansas. But while Brownback had hoped what he called Kansass real-live experiment in conservative economic policy would become a national model, it has instead become a cautionary example.

Brownback and his promised tax cuts were expected to spur enough economic growth to keep the government well funded, but when that economic boom never materialized, state lawmakers faced perennial deficits and had to implement spending reductions to close the gap. And when they did, some lawmakers found that while promising to cut spending plays well during a campaign, the subsequent loss of public services often proves far more unpopular.

Kansas seems to be ahead of the curve, said Rep. Melissa Rooker, a Republican who represents a suburb of Kansas City. If you look at the national political scene right now, I think it seems to me were about ready for a course correction.

That conclusion will be tested in the upcoming gubernatorial Republican primary, when representatives of the partys more moderate and more conservative wings will square off to replace Brownback when his term expires.

Nobody wants to pay more taxes, but they also dont want to live in a state that is fiscally reckless, said Republican Ed OMalley, a former state representative and now a primary candidate.

Kris Kobach, Brownbacks secretary of state who was once thought likely to join the Trump administration, entered the contest this week and is decrying the new tax increase. It is time to drain the swamp in Topeka, he wrote on Twitter on Wednesday, borrowing a phrase from President Trump.

This state does not need more money, and the people of Kansas do not need to keep feeding the government monster with year after year of increased taxes, Kobach told supporters in a speech announcing his candidacy. Kansas does not have a revenue problem. Kansas has a spending problem.

The states deep spending cuts to schools and programs aimed at helping the poor have been especially controversial. Michael Speer, a schools superintendent and business manager in Coffeyville a town near Kansass border with Oklahoma says he previously voted for Brownback, but is now troubled by the changes forced on his profession.

Were trying to make all the money stretch as far as it can, Speer said. We made a conscious effort to not impact the classroom. But I cant continue to cut custodial staff.

I can no longer support him, Speer said of Brownback.

The gubernatorial primary will involve competition for voters like Judith Deedy. A registered Republican who lives in the Kansas City suburb of Mission Hills, Deedy said that she was never very interested in politics until she and parents at their local public school started to notice a shift.

The school increased its class sizes and scaled back gifted education. Teachers, worried about their wages and future, began fleeing the Kansas City, Kansas school system for jobs across the state line in Missouri. Now she is an avid opponent of Brownbacks tax cuts.

In 2016, enough people woke up and said, We have to fix this. The guys in office are refusing to fix this, and come on, the evidence is plain, she said. I really dont care if its a Democrat or a Republican, I just want someone reasonable.

Meanwhile, Brownbacks remaining supporters have been quick to lambaste moderate Republicans for enacting what they have termed the largest tax increase in Kansas history.

Jeff Glendening, the state director for Americans for Prosperity, pledged retaliation. The conservative organization, funded in part by the wealthy Koch brothers, will campaign against Republican lawmakers who voted to raise taxes, he said.

Well be busy with our activists holding those legislators accountable for raising those taxes, Glendening said. This issue is not going to go away.

What happens in Kansas breaks so significantly with Republican orthodoxy on taxes, said Stephen Moore, a former adviser to both Trump and Brownback.

Theres one thing that unifies the Republican Party today more than anything else. We are a tax-cutting party. We are not a tax-increasing party, Moore said. I think Republicans across the country have to be paying attention to this.

The return to more centrist policies could foreshadow trouble for Trumps tax plan, which is based on the same concepts that guided Brownbacks overhaul beginning in 2012. Trump has proposed reducing the number of different rates on marginal income and setting all of them at lower levels, as Brownback did.

Trump has also proposed slashing taxes for small businesses. Brownback exempted small-business income from taxation entirely, opening what analysts described as a loophole, in which individuals represented themselves as small businesses to qualify for the tax break.

Trump has not issued a detailed proposal since taking office, but in April the White House released a one-page document on tax policy that reiterated these basic principles.

A plan put forward a year ago by House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.), contains some similar provisions. The resemblance points to the connections between Brownback and the conservative establishment in Washington. Before becoming a congressman himself, Ryan served on Brownbacks staff when the governor represented Kansas in the Senate.

Trump and Brownback have relied on the same advisers, including the conservative economist Arthur Laffer, who famously laid out the principle of supply side economics on a cocktail napkin. Laffer argued that excessive taxation could slow the economy by discouraging people from working. His signature theory was that the government, by cutting taxes, could encourage people to earn more, maintaining or increasing overall tax revenue. Yet most economists believe that U.S. tax rates are already far too low to benefit from Laffers curve.

The tax cuts for the wealthy frequently advocated by Republican politicians are viewed unfavorably by many voters, polls show. The Public Religion Research Institute, a nonpartisan group that conducts public-opinion surveys, found that 57 percent of Americans nationally, including over a third of Republicans, support increasing taxes on those earning at least $250,000 a year. By contrast, Brownbacks policies reduced them drastically.

Yet Dan Cox, the institutes research director, said that Brownbacks defeat did not augur more victories for Republicans pursuing more moderate economic policies. He said Republican policymakers and their advisers around the country are likely to view the example of Kansas as a failure of implementation, rather than one of principle, and they will argue that Kansass experiment would have succeeded had the legislature reduced spending even more.

Moreover, Cox said, the business lobby remains more influential in the party than those who support centrist or populist points of view.

Trump was supposed to upend that, but it looks like hes not going to, Cox said. Despite the rebuke that conservative economic policy received in the last election, it doesnt necessarily mean that were going to see the same thing happen on the national stage.

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Republicans are predicting the beginning of the end of the tea party in Kansas - Washington Post