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Republican Karen Handel won a nationally watched congressional election Tuesday in Georgia, and she thanked President Donald Trump after she avoided an upset that would have rocked Washington ahead of the 2018 midterm elections.

Returns showed Handel, a former Georgia secretary of state, winning about 52 percent of the vote over Democrat Jon Ossoff, who won nearly 48 percent in Georgia's 6th Congressional District.

"A special thanks to the president of the United States of America," she said late Tuesday night as her supporters chanted, "Trump! Trump! Trump!"

It was Handel's most public embrace of the man whose tenuous standing in this well-educated, suburban enclave made a previously safe Republican district close to begin with.

Handel's margin allows Republicans a sigh of relief after what's being recognized as the most expensive House race in U.S history, with a price tag that may exceed $50 million.

Yet the result in a historically conservative district still offers Republicans a warning that Trump, for better or worse, will dominate the looming campaign cycle. Georgia's outcome follows similar results in Montana, Kansas and South Carolina, where Republicans won special House races by much narrower margins than they managed as recently as November.

Republicans immediately crowed over winning a seat that Democrats spent $30 million trying to flip. "Democrats from coast to coast threw everything they had at this race, and Karen would not be defeated," House Speaker Paul Ryan said in a statement.

Democrats still must defend their current districts and win 24 GOP-held seats to regain a House majority next November. Party leaders profess encouragement from the trends, but the latest losses mean they will have to rally donors and volunteers after a tough stretch of special elections.

Handel, 55, will become the first Republican woman to represent Georgia in the U.S. House, according to state party officials.

Her win comes after losing bids for governor in 2010 and the Senate in 2014, and it builds on a business and political career she built after leaving an abusive home as a teen.

"It's that fighting spirit, that perseverance and tenacity that I will take to Washington," she said Tuesday night.

Handel is the latest in a line of Republicans who have represented the district since 1979, beginning with Newt Gingrich, who would become House speaker. Most recently, Tom Price resigned in February to join Trump's administration. The president himself struggled here, though, edging Democrat Hillary Clinton but falling short of a majority among an affluent, well-educated electorate that typically has given Republican nominees better than 60 percent of the vote.

Handel emphasized that Republican pedigree often in her campaign and again in her victory speech.

She also noted throughout the campaign that she has lived in the district for 25 years, unlike Ossoff, who grew up in the district but lives in Atlanta, a few miles south of the 6th District's southern border.

In victory, she commended Ossoff and pledged to work for his supporters. She noted last week's shooting of Republican Majority Whip Steve Scalise of Louisiana and said politics has become too embittered.

"My pledge is to be part of the solution, to focus on governing," she said.

Ossoff, taking the stage at his own party after conceding the race, told his supporters his campaign "is the beginning of something much bigger than us," adding, "The fight goes on."

Party organizations, independent political action committees and donors from Los Angeles to Boston sent a cascade of money into a race, filling metro Atlanta's airwaves with ads and its 6th District neighborhoods with hordes of paid canvassers.

Contrary to the chants at Handel's victory party, she insisted for months that voters' choice had little to do with Trump. She rarely mentioned him, despite holding a closed-door fundraiser with him earlier this spring. She pointed voters instead to her "proven conservative record" as a state and local elected official.

Her protestations aside, Handel often embraced the national tenor of the race, joining a GOP chorus that lambasted Ossoff as a "dangerous liberal" who was "hand-picked" by House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi of California. She also welcomed a parade of national GOP figures to Atlanta to help her raise money, with Ryan and Vice President Mike Pence holding fundraisers following Trump's April visit.

It was enough to help Handel raise more than $5 million, not a paltry sum in a congressional race, but barely a fifth of Ossoff's fundraising haul. The Republican campaign establishment, however, helped make up the difference. A super PAC backed by Ryan spent $7 million alone.

On policy, she mostly echoes party leaders. She said she'd have voted for the House Republican health care bill, though she sometimes misrepresented its provisions in debates with Ossoff. She touts traditional supply side economics, going so far as to say during one debate that she does "not support a living wage" her way of explaining her opposition to a minimum-wage increase.

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Republican Karen Handel wins Georgia special election for hotly contested House seat - Chicago Tribune

White House deputy press secretary Sarah Sanders stole a line from President Trump on Wednesday to celebrate Republicans' winning their fourth and fifth special election less than a day earlier.

"Frankly, I think Republicans are going to get tired of winning at some point if the Democrats don't ever get an agenda," Sanders told Fox News' "Fox and Friends" Wednesday.

Sanders said conservatives were able to pull out wins in Georgia's 6th Congressional District and South Carolina's 5th Congressional District on Tuesday because Republicans have campaigned on an agenda, while Democrats have not touted a plan for leading.

"The American people put him and other Republicans in place for a reason they have an agenda, they want a healthcare system that works, they want an environment where we're creating jobs and growing the economy," Sanders said. "That's what this president is focused on. That's why he was elected in the first place, and that's why he continues to keep winning."

Trump's line about winning became famous during a speech he gave while visiting the Iowa State Fair during the presidential campaign. He continued to use it throughout the campaign and it became a signature phrase.

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Sarah Sanders: 'Republicans are going to get tired of winning' - Washington Examiner

The paradox of secrecy in American politics is how much attention it gets. Over the last couple of weeks, the penchant of the White House and the Republican Senate for blocking the release of information has become a central issue in Washington. Its a case of making lemonade from lemons: If you cant cover the story, cover why you cant cover it.

Perhaps most immediately important is the Senate GOPs refusal to reveal anything about the bill the health-care bill currently under consideration. Meanwhile, the administration has been quietly clamping down on various forms of access, from public schedules to visitor logs to the daily briefings at the White House. The executive branch has taken to refusing requests for information from congressional Democrats too.

The White House Press Briefing Is Slowly Dying

The result is a weird reversal of the normal course of business: Gossipy nuggets leak out of the White House on a daily basisTrump is yelling at TVs! Trump is angry at Jared! Sean Spicer/Reince Priebus/Steve Bannon is on the chopping block!and the president tweets as fact things his lawyers claim are not true, yet next to nothing is known about a huge bill that could change health coverage for millions of Americans.

This kind of secrecy is bad for policymaking and bad for democracy, but since abstract arguments like that are difficult to plead effectively, its customary to argue that secrecy is also politically unwise. For example, it is clearly hypocritical. When Obama was president, Republicans complained that the White House was too secretive, and that Democrats were trying to railroad through health-care reform without public inputeven though the process behind the Affordable Care Act was far more public and lengthy than the present process. But hypocrisy is seldom lethal for any politician, let alone a party, especially in todays partisan climate.

Another argument is that clamming up will actually hurt the clams. As Politicos Playbook puts it today, This could be bad for the White House, as it will be far more difficult for them to drive a message and respond to questions. This might be true, but take it with a healthy dose of skepticism. For one, its obviously self-serving for journalists to say that giving journalists more access is good for them, and the press corps, smelling blood, is out for damaging stories about Trump. Sometimes openness is not a zero-sum game, but in this case, it probably is.

Second, wheres the proof? The George W. Bush administration was more secretive than the Clinton administration; the press howled; and Bush got reelected. The Obama administration was more secretive than the Bush administration; the press howled; and Obama got reelected. Part of Obamas success was that he found other ways to get his message out: Social media, for example, and interviews with non-traditional interlocutors, from Zach Galifianakis to YouTube stars. Trump may be different in degree and extremity from his predecessors, but his administrations secrecy is part of a disturbing, bipartisan progression.

The secrecy will continue as long as it works. It certainly worked in the House, where GOP leaders watched a first attempt at a health bill go down as its flaws became public. For the second try, they acted fast and quietly, not even waiting for the Congressional Budget Office to score the bill.

And so far, the strategy is working for Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell as well. Its not just Democrats and the press who are upset; some Republicans are speaking out too:

But until enough members of the GOP caucus actually demand that McConnell open up the process, their complaints will make little difference. In fact, that might be by design. McConnell and his lieutenants would much rather have an argument about process and take the lumps they get from that fight: They can write complaints off as either the whingeing of a biased press or hypocrisy from Democrats who did the same thing. Thats far better than trying to defend an unpopular bill that will likely push millions off insurance, redistribute money to the wealthy, and slash popular entitlements. The secrecy gives disgruntled Republican members of the caucus something else to complain about instead.

(The general public may not really be the audience from whom the Senate leadership is hiding its bill; public disapproval of the House health bill is already very high, and Democrats will vote en masse against it. The bigger danger for McConnell is that Republican constituenciesfrom the business lobby to GOP governorswill react fiercely to the bill and convince Republican senators to defect.)

Meanwhile, Senator Chuck Grassley, the Iowa Republican, has taken a bold stand on behalf of Democratic colleagues, writing a letter to President Trump complaining about the executive branch ignoring document requests. But as long as Grassley stands alone, and has only angry letters to write, the White House can blithely ignore him, too.

In the long run, shutting out public attention can have some ill effects. Just ask Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, who has gone to historically drastic extents to avoid dealing with reporters. The result has been that the State Department cant seem to ever present a clear message about what its policies are, and keeps getting undercut by the president. Perhaps cutting down on briefings will make the administrations message control even worse, though its hard to imagine what that would look like. (The White House did belatedly add an on-camera briefing to Tuesdays schedule.) Perhaps enough Republican senators will get upset about the closed-door health-care process to force it out into public hearings. But for as along as it continues to succeed, secrecy is likely here to stay.

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Republicans Will Continue to Stick With Secrecy as Long as It Works - The Atlantic

Jun. 20, 2017 at 4:23 PM

While the Senate Republicans bill to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act has been shrouded in secrecy, at least one thing is all but certain: the final bill will include hundreds of billions of dollars in tax cuts, mostly for the richest Americans. It might seem unsurprising that Republicans are proposing tax cuts, except for one fact: The cuts would go disproportionately to Democratic-leaning states.

To fund the insurance expansion, the Affordable Care Act created a variety of new taxes. Some, like those on medical devices, pharmaceuticals and health insurers (and lets not forget tanning salons), were levied on consumers via the health care industry. But a hefty portion were charged directly to the wealthiest taxpayers. One such tax is a 0.9 percent payroll tax on individuals earning more than $200,000 a year, often referred to as the Medicare surcharge. The other is a 3.8 percent tax on net investment income, also for people who earn more than $200,000. These taxes largely affect the top 5 percent of earners, with the majority of the money collected coming from the top 1 percent of earners.

A look at who is paying these taxes, based on Statistics of Income data from the Internal Revenue Service, reveals that of the eight states that paid the most in 2014, six voted for Hillary Clinton in last years presidential election. Those six states collectively accounted for 47 percent of all the money raised by the taxes in 2014.

That pattern holds when we look at all states and the District of Columbia, too: These taxes as a whole both in terms of dollar amounts paid and the share of people paying them are largely coming from states that leaned Democratic in the 2016 election. That doesnt necessarily mean the specific people paying the taxes voted for Clinton, of course, but it is revealing in terms of the decisions legislators are making in supporting or rejecting the current health care reform efforts. People in states that backed Clinton in 2016 filed just 44.6 percent of all 2014 tax returns. But residents of those states accounted for 56.3 percent of all taxpayers who paid the investment tax and 59.0 percent of those who paid the Medicare surcharge. In all, states that voted for Clinton paid 17.3 billion dollars, which is 59.9 percent of the combined ACA-related taxes. In short, in repealing these taxes, Republican senators would be giving tax breaks predominantly to states that favor their Democratic opponents.

Net investment tax is a 3.8 percent tax on net investment income for individuals earning more than $200,000 a year. Medicare surcharge is a 0.9 percent payroll tax on individuals earning more than $200,000 a year.

Sources: IRS, Cook Political Report

Of course, these taxes fund specific benefits, including the expansion of Medicaid and the tax credit that helps lower-income Americans buy insurance via the private health insurance marketplace. In the table below, we show the difference between the share of people in each state who receive the tax credits to buy insurance and the margin of voters the Democratic party won in the 2016 presidential election. Almost all the states where more residents pay the tax than receive the credit are blue, while most of the states where more people receive the credit than pay the tax are red.

The Obamacare credit is formally known as the Advance Premium Tax Credit.

Sources: IRS, Cook Political Report

The story is a bit different when it comes to the ACAs other major mechanism for increasing insurance coverage: the Medicaid expansion. The ACA intended to open Medicaid eligibility up to essentially all low-income Americans, not just children, the disabled, and other groups historically covered by the program. In 2012, however, the Supreme Court ruled that states didnt have to accept the expansion, and 19 states have chosen not to do so. Those states, unsurprisingly, lean red and tend to have Republican Senators; 17 have Republican governors and 17 voted for President Trump in 2016. Nonetheless, several red states, including Kentucky and Arkansas, did accept the expansion, and a large share of their populations are receiving coverage as a result.

One way to think about the tradeoffs of the ACA is to look at how many of a states residents directly benefited from the law (via tax credits or the Medicaid expansion) relative to how many paid the investment tax. That ratio shows that in certain red states, many more people are receiving financial support from the law than paying for it. In 2014, the three states with the highest ratio of beneficiaries to investment-tax payers were all won by Trump: West Virginia, Kentucky and Arkansas. In those three states, for every person who paid the investment tax, more than sixteen people benefited directly from either the Medicaid expansion or the tax credit that subsidizes premiums on private plans. To be clear, while the ratio of ACA taxpayers to beneficiaries may favor red states, that doesnt mean that residents of blue states havent received benefits under the law, and in far greater numbers than in those that paid additional taxes. In California, for example, 2.5 million people were newly enrolled in Medicaid in 2014 as a result of the expansion, whereas fewer than 600,000 households paid the investment tax.

Not all the ACAs taxes fall disproportionately on the wealthy. For example, the law also imposes a tax on people who dont have insurance, which affects far more people than the investment tax. (In fact, in 2014, more than twice as many people paid that tax as received tax credits for coverage.) In dollar terms, however, that tax is relatively small: It generates less than 6 percent of the amount raised by the investment tax and Medicare surcharge. Overall, 40 percent of the total cuts proposed by the Houses health care bill would go to people with the highest 1 percent of incomes, according to an analysis by the left-leaning Tax Policy Center. Again, these are people who are disproportionately likely to live in states that voted for Clinton.

The text of the Senate bill hasnt yet been released, so it is impossible to calculate the exact impact it would have on each state. It is possible that Republican leaders could sweeten the deal for specific states in order to pass the bill, a tactic Democrats also used to get Nebraskas then-Senator Ben Nelson to cast the 60th Obamacare vote in the Senate. (This cornhusker kickback was removed from the final version of the law.) But focus on state-level interests is certainly not the reason that Republicans are within striking distance of repealing the ACA.

Since our analysis suggests that Obamacare taxes are disproportionately paid by blue states and disproportionately benefit red states, in an important sense, Republican senators are lining up to vote against their states interests. Of course, the ACA taxes were originally enacted by Democrats, so prioritizing ideological and partisan commitments over the state-level costs and benefits is by no means unique to the GOP. But this trend does highlight a key fact about contemporary policymaking: Senators evaluating big-ticket bills like the ACA and the Houses American Health Care Act are looking at them through the lenses of partisanship and ideology much more than through the lens of how the bills will affect their states.

Tiger Brown, Saleel Huprikar, and Louis Lin provided research assistance. A Russell Sage Foundation Presidential Authority Award supports Dan Hopkins ACA-related research.

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Republicans' Obamacare Repeal Would Cut Taxes But Mostly In Blue States - FiveThirtyEight

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said on June 20 that Americans will have "plenty of time" to look at the health-care bill before it goes to the Senate floor for debate. (The Washington Post)

In Washington, the need to spin is strong. Which is why it's so amazing that Senate Republicans aren't even trying to spin their secret health-care negotiations as anything but: Yeah, this isn't good.

Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.), chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, was asked Tuesday by MSNBC's Willie Geist if getting a first look at the bill this week and then votingon it next week allows for enough time.

Corker's answer: Well, that's it looks like the time that's going to be allotted. He went on: I would have liked, as you already know, for this to be a more open process and have committee hearings. But that's not what we're doing.

Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) was more blunt:

And Sen. Mike Rounds (R-S.D.) just straight up acknowledged the fact that in 2010, Republicans might as well have been criticizing their future, 2017 selves:

This is not how Republicans wanted this to go.

They control Washington. They can finally make good on their near-universal promise to repeal Obamacare. And instead of publicly celebrating that, they're negotiating a bill in secret and more or less criticizing themselves for it. The Senate could vote on a version of the House's health-care bill as soon as next week, and key senators as well as the health and human services secretaryand possibly even the president haven't seen it.

[Are Republicans leading the most secretive health-care bill process ever?]

(Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) told reportersTuesday that the bill could become public by Thursday.)

Republicans might not be able to defend keeping their health-care bill secret until the last minute, but they have a reason for doing it: They're calculating that the blowback for keeping it secret is a lesser evil than the blowback for negotiating it in public.

Last month, they watched House Republicans negotiate their bill in the open, and they saw a torturous process. Every iteration was extensively reported by the media. Lawmakers went home and got yelled at by their constituents for supporting a bill that could cut their benefits or that wouldn't fully repeal Obamacare. Republicans had to pull the bill from the floor at the last minute because they couldn't get enough support from their own party; an embarrassing and humbling moment.

Senate Republicans have been crafting their version of the bill for more than a month now. But because most of them don't know what's in it, we haven't written any stories about it, and opposition hasn't had time to harden.

Actually,opposition probably won't have time to coalesceif McConnell gets his way: There will be about a week between the bill's introduction and a vote, and lawmakers won't have more than a long weekend back home.

By contrast, the 2009-2010 Obamacare negotiations included months of public hearings before they were ultimately finished behind closed doors. In 2010 and now, both sides say they were forced into secrecy by a minority party that wanted only to stall.

But Republicans have taken the secrecy to a new level, refusing to even hold committee hearings.

The result is that, yes, McConnell gets awarded flip-flops from The Washington Post's Fact Checker for overseeing the most secretive health-care bill process ever. Yes, Democrats get to thrust hypocrisy in the faces of their colleagues. And yes, Republicans are doing something that, by their own definition, is indefensible.

But from Republicans' perspective, they don't have a choice.Their party is too ideologically fractured, and the margin of victory in the Senate too slim (Republicans can afford to lose just two GOP votes), to craft a health-care bill in the open, despite the fact that most Republican senators wish this process were more transparent.

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Republicans aren't even trying to defend their secret health-care negotiations - Washington Post