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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

The FBI chief he fired called the president a liar, but the response from many Republicans was a collective shrug. The GOP still needs Donald Trump if it has any hope of accomplishing its legislative agenda and winning elections, and it's going to take more than James Comey's testimony to shake them.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell on Friday boasted of the GOP's accomplishments under Trump thus far, and promised more to come, making no mention of Comey in a speech. A group of House conservatives discussed taxes and the budget, with no reference to Comey or the federal investigations into Russia's election meddling and possible collusion with the Trump campaign.

Elsewhere, there were few outward signs of concern from the top Republican officials, donors and business leaders who gathered largely behind closed doors in Park City, Utah, for a conference hosted by former presidential candidate Mitt Romney.

"The people in this room, who give money to the Republican Party and who are focused on helping get Republicans elected, they do it because they believe in an agenda," Spencer Zwick, House Speaker Paul Ryan's fundraising chief, said in an interview. As for the Comey testimony, "there's nothing we can do about it," Zwick said.

It all underscored what's become a hardening dynamic of the Trump presidency: Republicans on Capitol Hill and off are mostly sticking with the president despite the mounting scandals and seemingly endless crises that surround him.

Though some are privately concerned, and frustration is regularly voiced about the president's undisciplined administration and the distractions he creates, Republicans have scant incentive to abandon him now. Trump's signature remains key to the still-nascent GOP agenda, and he has the ability to appoint judges to lifetime appointments, a thrilling prospect for conservatives.

And, despite Trump's low approval ratings nationally, his core base of supporters remains firmly behind him. Those voters will be key to the GOP's success in next year's midterms when Republicans will be defending a fragile majority in the House and looking to pick up seats in the Senate, thanks to a favorable map that has a large group of Democratic incumbents up for re-election in states that voted for Trump.

"I think the last 24, 48 hours were all good for the president, confirmed he was telling the truth all along, that he wasn't under investigation," GOP Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio said Friday, referring to Comey's confirmation that he had informed Trump that the president wasn't being personally investigated.

Comey also bluntly accused the Trump White House of lying, asserted that Trump asked him to back off an investigation into former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn, and contended that Trump fired him in an effort to change the course of the Russia investigation. But Republicans chose to ignore those things and focus on the aspects of Comey's testimony on Thursday that were favorable to Trump. Trump himself, appearing alongside the president of Romania on Friday, attacked Comey and said some of his testimony wasn't true.

"I think he was exonerated," GOP Rep. Mark Meadows of North Carolina, who chairs the conservative House Freedom Caucus, said Friday of Trump. "He said that he wasn't under investigation and indeed that was verified."

Ryan and other Republicans explained away Trump's interactions with Comey as the understandable blunders of a Washington neophyte.

"It's no secret to anybody that this president is not experienced in the ways of Washington, of how these investigations work," said GOP Sen. John Cornyn of Texas, who sits on the intelligence committee. "When you have the FBI director telling you three times you're not the subject of an investigation and you ask him, 'would you please announce that publicly' and he refuses, I can understand why the president would be frustrated by that."

Outraged Democrats argued that Comey had laid out all the elements of an obstruction of justice case, even as Democratic leaders tried to tamp down calls for impeachment coming from some liberals, including some members of Congress. Chances that Republicans themselves would initiate or even consider impeachment proceedings were zero, and that will change only if the Justice Department special counsel on the case, Robert Mueller, delivers a verdict they cannot ignore whenever his investigation concludes.

To be sure, not all Republicans were so quick to dismiss Comey's testimony and the Russia investigation.

The Tucson Weekly published quotes from what it said was a private talk by GOP Rep. Martha McSally of Arizona to the Arizona Bankers Association last week. McSally, who represents a closely divided district targeted by Democrats, expressed concerns that the House majority could be at risk partly because of "distractions" from Trump and his tweets.

"Any Republican member of Congress, you are going down with the ship. And we're going to hand the gavel to Pelosi in 2018," McSally said, referring to House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi of California. "The path to that gavel being handed over is through my seat. And right now, it doesn't matter that it's me, it doesn't matter what I've done. I have an 'R' next to my name and right now, this environment would have me not prevail."

A litmus test comes in two weeks when voters chose a new House member in a competitive Georgia district, where a GOP loss would unnerve some two dozen incumbents like McSally.

Associated Press writers Michelle Price in Park City, Utah, and Andrew Taylor in Washington contributed to this report.

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With an eye on agenda, Republicans shrug off Comey revelations, stick with Trump - Chicago Tribune

New York Times

Republicans' Secretive Plan for Health Care New York Times Republicans in the Senate will need 50 votes to pass their version of the American Health Care Act. Several senators have expressed reservations about the House version of the bill, which withdraws federal support for Planned Parenthood and rolls back ... Republicans are making Trumpcare happen while no one is lookingVICE News Senate Republicans Hope You Won't Notice They're About to Repeal ObamacareThe Nation. Senate Republicans consider keeping parts of Obamacare they once promised to killWashington Post snopes.com -MSNBC -Daily Kos -Politico all 587 news articles »

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Republicans' Secretive Plan for Health Care - New York Times

When questioned June 8 about President Trump's interactions with Former FBI director James B. Comey, House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) said President Trump is "new to government" and "probably wasn't steeped in the long running protocols." (Reuters)

THE MORNING PLUM:

Now that James B. Comeys testimony to Congress has painted a picture of President Trumps contempt for the rule of law thats far more forceful and persuasive in its dramatic details than Republicans ever bargained for, the new and emerging GOP defense is that Trump is a political and procedural naif. He merely needs tolearn the rules. This line of obfuscation requires pretending that many of the events of the past six months never happened.

But this spin from Republicans has a significance that runs deeper than merely revealing the absurd lengths to which theyll go to protect Trump from political and legal harm. More urgently, their new line unwittingly reveals the degree to which Trumps abuses of power and assault on our democracy have depended all along upon their tacit and willful complicity and, perhaps worse, it leaves little doubt that this enabling will continue, with unforeseen consequences.

The Posts Mike DeBonishas a good piece laying out this strategy. It takes various forms. Paul Ryan casts Trumps interactions with Comey as a mere matter of inexperience.The presidents new at this, Ryan says, adding that Trump probably wasnt steeped in the long-running protocols that under our system establish law enforcements independence from the White House. Others ground the argument in Trumps business past or affection for the theatrics of disruption. Hes used to being the CEO, insists one House Republican. Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.)adds that Trump is merely being crude, rude and a bull in a china shop.

[Comeys testimony changed everything and not in Trumps favor]

But Republicans making this argument are dishonestly feigning naivete about much of what weve seenfrom Trump since the beginning of his presidency. The problem with the idea that Trump merely needs to learn the rules is that we have a large pile of evidence showing that Trump is deeply convinced that the rules should not apply to him.

Post Opinion columnists Ruth Marcus and Jennifer Rubin deconstruct the legal and moral quagmire President Trump faces following fired FBI director James B. Comey's testimony to the Senate Intelligence Committee on June 8. (Adriana Usero/The Washington Post)

For starters, there is a massive clue in Comeys written testimony that shows this to be the case. In Comeys recounting of Trumps requests of him,Comey also relates his own effort to explain to Trump why his requests were improper. After Trumpdemanded loyalty during their private Jan. 27 dinner, Comey recounts that he then explained why it was so important that the FBI and the Department of Justice be independent of the White House. Comey added that he explained that blurring those boundaries undermines public trust. After that, Trump nonetheless repeated: I need loyalty. And then, on Feb. 14, Trump asked Comey to let his former national security adviser Michael Flynn go, a request Comey interpreted as a direction or order.

Comeys previous effort to explain the rules to Trump went entirely ignored twice. And when Comey testified yesterday, he said explicitly that he took notes because he was concerned Trump might lie about their interactions, because of the nature of the person. Every Republican who continues to pretend Trumps interactions with Comey are merely a matter of Trumps inexperience, theatrical inclinations or business mind-set knowsthese basic facts. They all know perfectly well that Comeys suspicions that Trump would deliberately mislead the American people about them had ample basis, and, indeed, are now being borne out.

Beyond this, as Brian Beutler points out, this faux naivete about Trump on the part of Republicans requires forgetting that he is surrounded by experienced officials who are ostensibly there to keep the White House within basic boundaries. Instead, they are willfully carrying out Trumps relentless trampling of them.

This touchingly innocent GOP naivete also requires forgetting all the ways that Trump has flouted the rules and shown total contempt for our institutions and democratic processes, norms and constraints on multiple other fronts for months. All these Republicans have witnessed the White Houses repeated attacks on the news media, which have strayed deep into an effort to undermine the fundamental institutional role of the press as a check on lawmakers excesses or corruption. They know Trumps attacks on the courts have shaded into an effort to undermine their very legitimacy at a time when they are constraining Trumps power to impose an immigration ban, which a senior Trump adviser explicitly described as a test run to demonstrate that his power will not be questioned.

All these Republicans know that Trumps business arrangement and refusal to release his tax returns are shredding basic norms of transparency (in fact, many Republicans criticized the latter during the GOP presidential primaries, remember?) that presidential candidates in both parties held themselves to for decades. They have witnessed Trumps serial use of important diplomatic business to promote Mar-a-Lago, at an increased cost to taxpayers. All these things are about more than just concealing conflicts or enriching himself and his family. They are functions of Trumps autocratic and authoritarian tendencies he does these things to demonstrate that he can.

Republicans, of course, have done little to nothing to check all of these abuses. But this amounts to more than mere abdication of oversight. It represents a refusal to acknowledge what all of these things add up to a picture of a lawless president who does not believe that rules, norms or constraints should apply to him. In this context, the spin that Trump will behave once he learns the rules represents a much broader and deeper abdication of responsibility to admit to, and grapple with, the authoritarian reality in our midst. Even worse, it confirms that their complicity with these abuses will continue. With Trump likely to descend further, to unforeseen depths, we have only begun to grasp the stakes of this enabling exercise, and have no idea where the bottom lies, in the minds of Republicans, or indeed, if there is any bottom at all.

* DUMB GOP TALKING POINT ON TRUMP IS DEBUNKED: Republicans keep saying Comey testified that Trump only said he hoped Comey would drop the probe into Michael Flynn, as if this shows it was not a directive. Charlie Savage punctures this talking point by citing several casesin which a prosecution was brought for obstruction based on such a vague formulation.

As one former prosecutor tells Savage:We have examples all the time in criminal law of people saying things only slightly subtly, where everyone understands what is meant Nice pair of legs you got there; shame if something happened to them. Indeed, Comey testified that he took Trumps hope as direction.

* RNC GOES ON THE ATTACK AGAINST COMEY: The Washington Examiner reports that the Republican National Committee is launching attacks on Comey, a shift in the committees mission its now acting as Trumps defender against accusations of legal wrongdoing:

Its unusual in the recent history of the Republican Partys national campaign organization to defend a president or other top leaders in personal feuds and against threats emanating from beyond the traditional political and legislative arenas. Yet the RNC has slowly shifted in the direction of functioning as an arm of Trumps personal attack machine.

Something tells us the RNC will be increasingly busy in this new and less-than-savory role in the coming weeks and months.

* A BIG BLOW TO THE SENATE REPEAL BILL? The Hill reports that the Senate parliamentarian now says a key provision in the Senate repeal-and-replace bill may not be passable under reconciliation by simple majority:

The parliamentarian, Elizabeth MacDonough, has flagged language that would bar people from using new refundable tax credits for private insurance plans that cover abortion If Republicans are forced to strip the so-called Hyde language from the legislation, which essentially bars federal funds from being used to pay for abortions unless to save the life of a mother or in cases of rape and incest, it may doom the bill Unless a workaround can be found, conservative senators and groups that advocate against abortion rights are likely to oppose the legislation.

The thing is that in the dark underground maze otherwise known as Senate rules, magical and surprising things tend to happen.

* IS OSSOFF IN THE LEAD? A new Atlanta Journal-Constitution poll finds that Democrat Jon Ossoff has taken a seven-point lead among likely voters, 51 percent to 44 percent, over Republican Karen Handel in the special House election in the Atlanta suburbs. Note this:

Hes capturing about 13 percent of Republican voters and 50 percent of independents a crucial voting bloc that typically leans right in Georgia. It shows almost no cross-over on the flip side; only 3 percent of Democrats say theyre backing Handel.

One wonders whether thats the Trump Effect. Still, view these numbers with care; other polls have shown a much tighter race, and this district went for Republican Tom Price in 2016 by 23 points.

* WHAT COMEY DIDNT SAY IS ALSO IMPORTANT: Eugene Robinson makes a good point: What Comey didnt say yesterday is at least as important as what he did say:

Topics he scrupulously avoided may give a hint of where the investigation is headed. He declined, for example, to answer a question in open session about Vnesheconombank (VEB), a Russian government-owned development bank linked to President Vladimir Putin. Trumps adviser and son-in-law, Jared Kushner, met last year with VEB executives. Comey was also reticent about his interactions with Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who was his boss and who had to recuse himself from Russia-related investigations.

Kushner is now a focus of the FBI investigation. Meanwhile, Comey subsequently told senators in a closed-door briefing that Sessions may have had an additional undisclosed meeting with the Russian ambassador that Comey didnt want to discuss in open session.

* THE WORST IS YET TO COME: Paul Krugman notes that the Comey testimony starkly revealed Trumps contempt for the rule of law and runs through all of the damage Trumps unfitness for office is doing on many other fronts:

Everything suggests that Trump is neither up to the job of being president nor willing to step aside and let others do the work right The American presidency is, in many ways, sort of an elected monarchy, in which a temperamentally and intellectually unqualified leader can do immense damage. Thats whats happening now. And were barely one-tenth of the way through Trumps first term. The worst, almost surely, is yet to come.

Happy Friday!

* AND THE TRUMP TWEET OF THE DAY, TOTALLY-IN-THE-CLEAR EDITION: Good morning, Mr. President. Thinking about the Russia probe again at this early hour, are we?

Yeah, except you werent vindicated at all. Nonetheless, were going to see lots of headlines that trumpet Trumps claim of vindication, without informing readers this is total nonsense.

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The latest Republican defense of Trump is built on a massive lie - Washington Post (blog)

Just a handful of California cities still have a majority of Republican voters Sacramento Bee Good luck finding a California city these days where most voters are Republicans. Fifteen years ago, Republicans comprised more than half of the voters in 66 of California's 482 cities. Today, they are a majority in just 14 cities, according to the ...

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Just a handful of California cities still have a majority of Republican voters - Sacramento Bee