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Senior Senate GOP officials have grown concerned that Rep. Kevin Cramer's penchant for controversial remarks could damage their chances at one of the party's most prized opportunities to pickup the crucial seat occupied by Heitkamp, a rare Democratic statewide officeholder in the conservative state. Cramer's latest remark: Defending Sean Spicer this week in the aftermath of the White House spokesman's widely condemned comments about Adolf Hitler and the Holocaust.

Behind the scenes, there's a growing GOP push to woo a wealthy North Dakota state senator, Tom Campbell, who has the resources to largely self-fund a campaign against Heitkamp, according to multiple sources familiar with the matter.

Campbell is taking a series of steps to mount a challenge, putting together an organization with the resources that will let him run for a statewide office next year, according to Chip Englander, a political adviser to the state senator. Campbell "definitely" will run for either the House seat now occupied by Cramer or for the Senate seat next year, Englander said.

"He can even the score on Day 1," Englander said, suggesting Campbell could drop roughly $2 million into the campaign to immediately eliminate Heitkamp's financial advantage. He said Campbell would raise some money also if he mounts a run.

A final decision could come within a matter of weeks.

"On paper, it looks like he could win, but he also appears to have a few Akin-like tendencies that make a lot of people nervous," said one Senate GOP campaign veteran, who, like other top Republicans, asked for anonymity to assess the field candidly.

In an interview, Cramer pushed back, saying Washington Republicans don't understand his state, noting that he has held more than 400 town hall meetings since 2013 and won his statewide race with 69% of the vote last year. He said had Heitkamp's 2012 opponent, Rick Berg, relied on North Dakota consultants rather than Washington experts, "he'd be a United States senator today."

"This is what the people in the swamp think: We can't have this overexposed guy who has 100% name ID and says things that are on his mind," Cramer, an early support of President Donald Trump, told CNN. "What they don't calculate is how very much appreciated that is in places like North Dakota."

Cramer said he is still undecided on if he'll run for the Senate, saying a decision would come in a matter of months. But Cramer, who met with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell about a possible run in December, said "not at all" when asked if Cambell's prospective candidacy would dissuade him from running for Heitkamp's seat.

Cramer got national attention this week when he said that there was some "validity" to Spicer's comments that Hitler did not use chemical weapons in World War II. While Spicer apologized for his remarks, Cramer said it was a "factual" statement that Hitler didn't use chemical weapons on the "battlefield" similar to what's happened in Syria.

"I can't even believe that anybody in the media, much less all of the major networks, led with this story," Cramer said earlier this week. "A spokesperson, who by the way made a poor illustration, but it's not completely, it's not without some validity."

Cramer has made other controversial remarks in the past, including after Democratic women wore white to highlight the women's suffrage movement during Trump's speech to Congress earlier this year. Cramer called them "poorly dressed" with "bad-looking white pantsuits."

On Friday, Cramer told CNN that the media "overblew" his comments on Spicer and said Republicans in Washington get caught up in the media frenzy, which he said is dismissed by voters back home.

"I know how North Dakotans think," Cramer said.

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Nervous about GOP congressman, Republicans woo new North Dakota Senate candidate - CNN

Some influential Republicans in Congress dont want a fight President Trump is threatening to pick over extra Obamacare payments to insurers.

Trump suggested this week that as Congress seeks to fund the government beyond April, Republicans should refuse to pay for cost-sharing subsidies provided through the Affordable Care Act to low-income Americans. Theres widespread agreement that without the subsidies, insurers would be forced to hike premiums next year, worsening conditions in the Obamacare insurance marketplaces.

The president told the Wall Street Journal on Wednesday that not only would such a move cause Obamacare to die, it could also be used to force Democrats to negotiate on repealing the health-care law altogether. Without the payments, Obamacare is gone, just gone, Trump said.

[Trumps threat prompts Democrats to play hardball over Obamacare payments]

Many Republicans are well aware that the public is likely to blame them for premium increases, now that they control both Congress and the White House and have so far failed to agree on a health-care replacement plan. And Democrats are keenly aware of the shifting dynamics, seizing every opportunity they can to insist Republicans now own the health-care law.

The Democratic leadership in Congress says it will hold up the government funding bill that expires on April 28 in order to secure the payments if Trump decides to withhold them. But Republicans are unlikely to want to shut down the government or for Trump to withhold the payments in the first place.

I dont think Democrats will let this happen, but I frankly dont think the Republicans want it to happen either, said Timothy Jost, a health-law professor at Washington and Lee University.

Rep. Greg Walden (R-Ore.), who, as chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, helped craft the GOP health-care plan, told constituents this week that the subsidies need to be funded, period.

It was a commitment made by the government to the insurers and the people, Walden said Wednesday at a town hall in his district. That needs to happen.

Rep. Tom Cole (R-Okla.), who chairs the powerful Appropriations subcommittee with jurisdiction over health care, has also said its important to fund the payments for insurers, although he stressed its a decision that the House leadership would have to make.

Its probably the right thing to do, I think, Cole told The Washington Post last month. Otherwise youre going to have insurance companies exiting the market.

Other top Republicans are remaining quiet about how to handle the subsidies, letting the White House lead the way. Ways and Means Chairman Kevin Brady (R-Tex.) isnt taking a position. A Brady spokeswoman said Friday that the congressman believes the administration is taking important steps to stabilize Obamacares collapsing marketplace.

(Peter Stevenson/The Washington Post)

The Trump administration must decide whether it will continue pursuing a GOP lawsuit to block the subsidies. The House sued the Obama administration for awarding the subsidies without a clear congressional appropriation and won in federal court last year. The Obama administration appealed the decision.

Now the GOP has the White House on its side and a new concern that Republicans will bear the public blame for problems with Obamacare. Trumps victory created a tricky new situation that House Republicans surely didnt envision when they filed the lawsuit, said Bill Pierce, a health policy expert at APCO Worldwide.

It is a situation entirely of their own doing, Pierce said.

Republicans have said they were fighting the awarding of insurer payments without permission from Congress not the subsidies themselves. House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) hasnt said whether he wants to fund the subsidies in a spending bill later this month, and his office didnt respond Friday to a query about the issue.

We believe in Congress retaining its lawmaking power, but this lawsuit hasnt run its course, Ryan said late last month. While the lawsuit is running its course, the administration is exercising their discretion with respect to the [cost-sharing reductions].

The health-care law requires marketplace insurers to discount extra insurance costs beyond the monthly premium such as deductibles and co-payments for people earning less than 250 percent of the poverty level. Without federal payments to cover those discounts, its estimated that insurers would hike premiums by an average of 19 percent.

That reality is leading lawmakers such as Walden and Cole to back the subsidies, even if they want to get rid of the underlying law. The cost-sharing reductions would cost an estimated $7billion or $8billion in the next year, but with that cost already built in, Congress wouldnt have to come up with extra money to fund them.

If Trump pushes for withholding the payments, it could fuel a clash between these lawmakers and conservatives who want to damage Obamacare in any way they can.

Im not alone in my party in [wanting to fund the cost-sharing reductions], but there are a lot in my party that dont think that, Walden said.

Insurers are watching the situation with trepidation, with rapidly approaching deadlines for announcing whether they will continue selling plans on the insurance marketplaces next year. Kristine Grow, a spokeswoman for the trade association Americas Health Insurance Plans, said more plans will likely exit without the cost-sharing reductions.

A lot of plans are very likely to drop out of the market because of continued instability, Grow said.

Read more at PowerPost

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Republicans may not want Trump to end Obamacare payments - Washington Post

Sacramento Bee

Which California legislative Republicans represent pro-Clinton districts? Sacramento Bee Newly installed Senate Republican Leader Patricia Bates has three GOP-held swing seats to defend next year. The Laguna Niguel lawmaker also may want to keep an eye on her own race. Bates and 16 other legislative Republicans represent districts where ...

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Which California legislative Republicans represent pro-Clinton districts? - Sacramento Bee

House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) told reporters, April 4, Republican lawmakers are having productive talks on a new health-care reform bill but would not say if a new proposal would be put forth. (Reuters)

Republicans haven't been able to replace Obamacare, because they think the problem with it, metaphorically speaking, is that the food is terrible and the portions are too small.

That, of course, is what Woody Allen had to say about life in Annie Hall. But the same kind of contradiction you hate something, and want more of it is why Republicans haven't been able to agree on anything other than that they want to be able to saythat they repealed Obamacare. That might work on for campaigning, but, as we've seen, it's a flop in office. President Trump on Tuesday in what's become something of a weekly tradition again promisedhis party would strike a deal. But even if Republicans keep trying to come to terms on a compromise, they're going to keep tripping over the same problem. That's because no matter how much dealmaking prowess you might have, you can't make one if people want fundamentally different things.

Now, when it comes to Obamacare, there are generally two types of Republicans: ones who despise everything about it, and ones who understand nothing about it. The first group are libertarians who want to get rid of the law root-and-branch. They don't think the federal government should play any part in helping people getcoverage, or telling insurers what that has to be. Instead, they'd like to go back to a world where the sick are mostly on their own, and insurance companies are mostly free to discriminate against them. This, together with higher deductibles, is what they believe is the best way to keep costs and premiums down for everybody else. The idea, you see, is that people will spend less overall if they have to spend more out-of-pocket, and if that's too much for them, they can always be put in a slightly subsidized high-risk pool.(Emphasis on the word slightly. The Kaiser Family Foundation's Larry Levitt says that the technical term for the funding in the GOP's latest proposal is chump change.")

In other words, they want to make insurance more affordable for the young and healthy by making it unaffordable for the old and sick, and worse for everyone.

The second group are so-called moderates who oppose Obamacare entirely because of politics, not policy. Which is to say that they attack the unpopular parts of the law, like penalizing people for not getting insurance, at the same time that they support the popular parts, like banning insurance companies from discriminating against people with preexisting conditions. What they don't get, though, is that you can't have the latter without the former. If you're going to force insurers to cover sick people, then you have to force healthy people to sign up too so that premiums don't explode. And if you're going to force healthy people to sign up, then you need to help them be able to afford it.

And that brings us to the GOP's real problem. It's that a lot of Republicans secretly kind of like Obamacare, or at least they like what it does. They don't want to get rid of the way it's covered sick people or expanded coverage or let kids stay on their parent's insurance until they're 26 years old. The only thing they do want to change well, other than the name and the individual mandate is the way that premiums and deductibles have continued to march ever higher. But that, whether they realize it or not, is actually an argument that Obamacare hasn't gonefar enough. That we need bigger subsidies so people can buy better coverage that doesn't make them pay as much out-of-pocket.

So how do you reconcile the idea that the healthy should pay more and the sick pay too much with the belief that the healthy should pay less and the sick be taken care of? You don't. At least not when you're in power. When you're out of it, you can at least hide these differences behind the amorphous mantra of repeal and replace. But not anymore, not whenit'sclear that there's a philosophicaldivide between Republicans who thinkthe federal government shouldn't be involved in covering people, and ones like Louisiana Sen. Bill Cassidy who believethat there's a widespread recognition that the federal government, Congress, has created the right for every American to have health care. That used to be what Republicans and Democrats argued about, but, now that Obamacare has made people expect more from the government, it's what Republicans and other Republicans argue about today.

And there are going to be large portions of that.

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Republicans can't find a way to repeal Obamacare because too many of them secretly love it - Washington Post

No matter where you come down on that question -- I think there were clear warning signs for Republicans in their victory -- the history of the first midterm election of a newly-elected president should scare Republicans tasked with retaining their House majority in 2018.

If past is prologue, then Mehlman's chart suggests that Republicans will face across-the-board losses in 2018 and could even lose control of the US House.

The chart documents seat losses in the House, Senate, state legislatures and governor's mansions in the first midterm election of the last eight presidents -- from John F. Kennedy in 1962 to Barack Obama in 2010.

The average loss in the House for the President's party over that period is 23 seats. If you take out the 2002 midterms -- a totally unique situation created by the terrorist attacks of 2001 -- the average loss is 26 seats. If Democrats make gains consistent with that history, they will be right on the edge of re-taking the House; the party needs a 24-seat gain for the majority in 2018.

All of which should worry Republicans more than anything that happened in Kansas on Tuesday night.

The history of Senate seat switches in a president's first midterm election is slightly less conclusive and, given the 2018 map, may be less predictive as well.

Since 1962, the average loss for the President's party in the Senate is 2.5 seats -- although three presidents (Kennedy, Richard Nixon and George W. Bush) actually picked up Senate seats in their first midterms.

As for governorships and state legislatures, Republicans are nearly maxed out in terms of gains -- meaning that the party is primed to suffer large-scale losses consistent with historical norms. (The President's party has typically lost five governor's mansions and 245 state legislative seats in the first midterm.)

Add it all up and you can see why 2018 should be a tough year for Republicans. Of course, if Trump's candidacy (and victory) proved anything, it's that history is only predictive until it isn't anymore.

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Forget Kansas. This chart shows why Republicans need to worry about 2018 - CNN