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Reeling from the defeat of their health care proposal last week, Republicans in Congress are regrouping and planning for the coming months. There are budget deadlines to meet and policy issues to tackle, ranging from tax reform to infrastructure .

But prospects for achieving major victories in the coming months looks dim. Many lawmakers are concerned that divisions in its ranks between conservatives and moderates will make it difficult to notch any major achievements in the coming months.

Things that you assumed could happen automatically, youd better now spend a lot more time on and make sure they occur, said Republican Rep. Tom Cole of Oklahoma.

Many have advocated looking beyond the partys own ranks and finding common ground with Democrats.

Weve got a lot of work to do, said Republican Sen. John McCain of Arizona. One of the things we need to do and its going to be harder now, because we just failed is theres got to be bipartisanship.

Here are the five issues Republicans will have to work out.

How to defund Planned Parenthood

The government is set to partially shut down on April 28 unless Congress approves a spending package first. Republicans are deciding how many of their policy priorities to squeeze into the proposal without risking a government shutdown.

Planned Parenthood is one measure many Republicans want to see in the spending package due by the end of April. But Democrats could filibuster the government funding bill in the Senate, thereby forcing Republicans to decide whether they want to shut down the government.

That has made House Speaker Paul Ryan wary about defunding it through the April spending package, leading him to suggest defunding the womens health organization through a budget reconciliation measure instead.

The budget reconciliation will head off the risk of Senate filibuster from Democrats, as it only requires a simple majority to pass the upper chamber.

We think reconciliation is the tool, because that gets it into law, Ryan told reporters, responding to a question about Planned Parenthood funding. Reconciliation is the way to go."

If conservatives in the Republican conference object to Ryans delay, however, there could be a fight on the partys hands.

Whether to pay for a border wall

Another measure that some want to see in the government funding bill next month is funding for President Trumps proposed wall on the border with Mexico. It is a major campaign promise by the president, and one that galvanized many voters in Republican Congressional districts.

Does that need to be a presidential priority? Well hes made it one, said Randy Weber, Republican from Texas. Is there support for getting it in there? Unequivocally yes. Can they get it in? I dont know, well have to see.

Democrats have firmly objected, with Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer saying border wall funding would be a poison pill that would lead to a filibuster.

Whether to pursue the border adjustment tax

Tax reform is the next big item on the Republicans agenda. But rewriting the tax code is notoriously difficult, and there are strong divisions among Republicans about what would work best.

Republican leaders in the House have insisted that the best method would be through a 20% border adjustment which would tax goods consumed in the United States and slash the corporate tax rate. Its a revolutionary plan that would likely help domestic manufacturers like Boeing and hurt importers like Walmart , but it has enough skeptics in the Senate that it might be a pipe dream.

The conflict is setting up the GOP for another fight.

Whether to end the filibuster on the Supreme Court

It is looking increasingly likely that Democrats will have the votes needed to block the confirmation vote for Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court, with Democratic senators from across the political spectrum saying they will oppose President Trump's nominee. That will force Senate Republicans to either back down, or trigger the so-called nuclear option , which would abolish the filibuster on Supreme Court nominees, and force Gorsuch through.

It is a difficult choice for Republicans. Many longtime senators are traditionalists and do not want to change the rules of the Senate. Abolishing the filibuster requires a majority in the Senate, so just two Republicans would need to get cold feet for the effort to fail, and thus sink Gorsuch's confirmation.

Still, even moderate Republicans with a longstanding respect for the Senate's rules are adamant that Gorsuch will get confirmed one way or another. "He will be confirmed," said McCain.

"We will confirm him. So whatever it takes, were going to have to do," Sen. Orrin Hatch of Utah told National Journal .

Whether to try repealing Obamacare again

Republicans are not done with their effort to repeal Obamacare. After Fridays defeat, the House Republicans held a rousing conference meeting, where members committed again to finding a way to repeal Obamacare and replace it with a law that repeals certain regulations and reduces federal expenditures.

What shape that law will take is hard to know, and Republicans have not started drafting new ideas. The old, deep divisions in the party have not disappeared, and the hard-right members of the Freedom Caucus will still want a plan that looks very different from what moderates want.

Still, despite the difficulty of health care and all the other pressing matters President Trump promised to address, many members want to repeal Obamacare first .

If we just sit up here and play diddly-winks, itll hurt us, said Republican Rep. Morgan Griffith of Virginia. I think you need to do health care first.

The fact that we did not pass a bill next week doesnt mean we are not going to pass a billId love to see it pass next weekbut if its not next week, then its next month, said Republican Rep. Austin Scott of Georgia.

Until we decide what were doing with health care, everything is going to be a stumbling block, Republican Rep. Dennis Ross of Florida.

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5 Big Decisions Republicans in Congress Have to Make Soon - TIME

NEW YORK Republicans mostly blame the U.S. Congress, and not President Donald Trump or party leaders, for failing to pass their party's healthcare overhaul, according to a Reuters/Ipsos opinion poll released on Wednesday.

The March 25-28 poll asked who should take responsibility for the failure of the American Health Care Act (AHCA), which Republican leaders pulled from consideration last week without a vote.

Besides Trump, who backed the bill, and House of Representatives Speaker Paul Ryan, who was expected to shepherd it through Congress, the poll asked if people blamed House Republicans, House Democrats or the media.

Republicans were most likely to blame Congress. Some 26 percent said House Democrats were most responsible and 23 percent blamed House Republicans. Another 13 percent blamed Trump and 10 percent blamed Ryan. Only 8 percent blamed the media. (Graphic: tmsnrt.rs/2nhOmjI PDF link: tmsnrt.rs/2nhtM30)

Their assessment appeared to align with Trump's criticism of Democratic leaders and the conservative Freedom Caucus, whom he blamed for the bill's failure.

Overall, nearly one in four Americans, including Democrats and independents, blamed Trump. Ryan, Congress and the media received less criticism.

The Republican reform was widely criticized after estimates by the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office showed 24 million people could lose their health insurance over the next 10 years.

Trump said on Tuesday he still thinks healthcare reform can happen "very quickly" in Washington, but he did not offer any specifics on how it could get done, or what would be changed from the previous bill.

Nearly half of all Americans said they would like to see that happen, though the response was split along party lines. Some 80 percent of Republicans said they would like to see their party take another swing at a bill, compared with only 25 percent of Democrats.

In a separate poll conducted between Jan.7-23, 46 percent of Americans wanted to keep Obamacare, the popular name for President Barack Obama's healthcare reform, while fixing problem areas, and another 8 percent wanted to keep it exactly as it is.

The Reuters/Ipsos poll was conducted online in English in all 50 states. The March 25-28 poll included 1,332 people, including 456 Republicans and 558 Democrats. It has a credibility interval, a measure of accuracy, of 3 percentage points for the entire group and 5 percentage points for Democrats and Republicans.

(Reporting by Chris Kahn, editing by Ross Colvin)

WASHINGTON Ivanka Trump said on Wednesday she would work in the White House in an unpaid, informal advisory role to the president as she sought to allay ethics concerns about working there.

WASHINGTON The U.S. Interior Department said on Wednesday that it would form a new committee to review royalty rates collected from oil and gas drilling and coal mining on federal lands to ensure taxpayers receive their full value.

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Exclusive: Republicans mostly blame Congress for healthcare reform failure - Reuters/Ipsos poll - Reuters

Today, the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology held a heated hearing on the assumptions, policy implications, and the scientific method of climate science. In fact, the hearing was just an excuse to pretend theres uncertainty within the scientific community on whether human-made climate change is real.

Four witnesses were asked to testify before the committee; only one of them Michael Mann, a climate scientist at Penn State University agreed with the other 97 percent of scientists who believe that human activity, like the burning of fossil fuels, is causing our planet to heat up. The other witnesses testified that we dont really know how much people are contributing to climate change, and theres too much uncertainty to consider global warming a threat.

For a balanced panel, we need 96 more Dr. Manns.

The witness panel does not really represent the vast majority of climate scientists who have concluded that there is a connection between human activity and climate, Rep. Suzanne Bonamici (D-OR) said at the hearing. For a balanced panel, we need 96 more Dr. Manns.

In fact, Manns views arent only representative of pretty much the entire science community; they also represent the views of the majority of Americans. Data released last week by the Yale Program on Climate Communication shows that 70 percent of Americans believe that climate change is happening; 53 percent believe that global warming is caused mostly by human activities. And 75 percent want the US government to regulate heat-trapping carbon dioxide as a pollutant. (More than 70 percent of Americans also trust climate scientists on global warming.)

Bonamici said that the hearing was a waste of time. Yet, the committee chairman Lamar Smith (R-TX) commented in his opening statement that much of climate science today appears to be based more on exaggeration, personal agendas, and questionable predictions than on the scientific method. He added, Alarmist predictions amount to nothing more than wild guesses.

Alarmist predictions amount to nothing more than wild guesses.

Some members of Congress went on by asking some ridiculous questions and targeting the only climate scientist in the room who seemed to take climate change seriously. Rep. Mo Brooks (R-AL) asked the witnesses whether its true that sea levels are actually going to fall, not rise as a result of global warming. (Melting glaciers and land-based ice caps are already causing sea levels to rise.) Rep. Daniel Webster (R-FL) asked whether we know what caused the ice ages just to make the point that the ice ages occurred naturally and so we cant claim with certainty that climate change is human-made. (Again, within the scientific community, theres basically no disagreement that by pumping heat-trapping gases like CO2 into the atmosphere, people are warming up the planet.)

In a particularly intense moment, Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA) attacked Mann for saying that Smith took part in a climate science denying conference at the Heartland Institute. From the get go, we have heard personal attack after personal attack after personal attack coming from those how are claiming to represent the mainstream of science, even to the point that our chairman is attacked, Rohrabacher said. That is ridiculous, people should be ashamed of yourselves. (The live stream then stopped working.)

Rep. Darin Lahood (R-IL) asked three of the witnesses whether they had ever been personally attacked by Mann for their views on climate science. As I understand it in the past, and this is public record, Dr. Mann has referred to you as a carnival barker and also a contrarian pundit. Are you aware of that? Lahood asked the witness Roger Pielke Jr., a professor at the University of Colorados Environmental Studies Department. I cant keep up with all of Dr. Manns epithets, Pielke responded.

climate change is only getting worse

Mann did represent the only mainstream scientist at the hearing, so the fact that he was repeatedly attacked is not that surprising. There was a lot of what one congressman referred to as a food fight among scientists. But as members of Congress hold useless hearings and President Donald Trump tries to bring back coal mining, climate change is only getting worse and were running out of time.

The consequences for this country are very grave for our citizens, Rep. Elizabeth Esty (D-CT) said at the hearing. At some point we have to go with consensus for the time being, as we continue research. She added: We cannot wait for final ultimate truth to make decisions.

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Republicans held a fake inquiry on climate change to attack the only credible scientist in the room - The Verge

Republicans withdrew the American Health Care Act moments before a scheduled vote on March 24, after failing to woo enough lawmakers to support it. Here are the key turning points in their fight to pass the bill. (Jenny Starrs/The Washington Post)

With the Republican effort to repeal the Affordable Care Act in tatters and President Trumps approval ratings in the 30s, Democrats are feeling pretty good about their ability to limit the damage Republicans are able to do. But another unfolding story demonstrates that the dangers of unified GOP rule come from many different directions, and dramatic change can happen almost before you realize it.

If you dont closely follow issues around technology and communication policy, you probably didnt see this one coming, but Republicans in Congress just passed a bill allowing your Internet service provider to sell your browsing history without your consent:

In a party-line vote, House Republicans freed Internet service providers such as Verizon, AT&T and Comcast of protections approved just last year that had sought to limit what companies could do with information such as customer browsing habits, app usage history, location data and Social Security numbers. The rules also had required providers to strengthen safeguards for customer data against hackers and thieves.

The Senate has voted to nullify those measures, which were set to take effect at the end of this year. If Trump signs the legislation as expected, providers will be able to monitor their customers behavior online and, without their permission, use their personal and financial information to sell highly targeted ads making them rivals to Google and Facebook in the $83 billion online advertising market.

Welcome to the world the Republicans envision, where even after you turn on incognito mode and do some private Internet exploration about an embarrassing problem, before you know it there are fliers turning up in your mailbox saying HELP FOR YOUR GENITAL WARTS IS HERE!!!

The bill passed the Senate, 50-48, with every Democrat voting against it and every Republican present voting for it (two Republicans did not vote). The result in the House was almost as divided: All 190 Democrats present voted against it along with just 15 Republican defectors, while the other 215 Republicans voted in favor.

Ive been unable to find any polling data on this question, but if you could get 5 percent of Americans to say they want their ISPs to sell their browsing history without their consent, Id be shocked. So how does something like this happen?

The simple answer is lobbying. A set of powerful corporations would love to be able to sell your information, so they invested heavily in lobbying Congress to get it done. But its not just about the Washington swamp; its also about the philosophical differences between the two parties.

Democrats put a premium on protecting consumers, and Republicans are much more interested in maintaining and expanding the prerogatives of corporations. Indeed, if youre looking for the Republicans public-spirited argument in favor of this bill, youll find it hard to discern. Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) is quoted in that article saying that privacy will be enhanced by removing the uncertainty and confusion these rules will create, which makes no sense at all, while the ISPs themselves tout all the benefits targeted ads will have for their customers.

Making this all worse, the bill was passed using a heretofore obscure law called the Congressional Review Act, which allows Congress to not only nullify recently written regulations but also forbid the agency in question (in this case, the Federal Communications Commission) from ever writing similar rules again. Since the rule guaranteeing your privacy was written at the end of the Obama administration, Republicans are taking the opportunity to undo it. In the 20 years after the CRA itself was passed, it had been used to undo a regulation exactly once. But this year, congressional Republicans have already passed 11 CRA bills to nullify Obama regulations on things such as guns, the environment and worker protections, and there are more on the way.

If youre like most people, you think the bill allowing your ISP to sell your information without your consent is outrageous, but it may not be enough in and of itself to get you to call your member of Congress. Not only that, the bill has already passed. And by the time the next election rolls around, you may have forgotten about it.

Have no doubt: Thats the whole idea. All the Republicans who voted for this had no illusions that it would be a popular thing to do. But they figured that with everything else going on, most people wouldnt notice. And theyre probably right.

Were going to be seeing this a lot in the next four years. Youll come across an article telling you about some appalling bill that just passed Congress, and youll say, Wait they did what? Itll be the first youve heard of it, and maybe the last as well. Republicans may suffer more high-profile losses on sweeping legislation that gets debated for weeks or months, but meanwhile theyll be racking up one victory after another on smaller items, many of them giveaways to corporate interests, such as the Internet privacy bill.

Is there anything you can do about this? Sure. Even though the bill has passed, it isnt too late to tell your member of Congress how you feel about it (and if that member is a Republican, you might ask them whether theyd like to share their own browsing history with their constituents, since they think your private information ought to be bought and sold). Even if that doesnt stop this bill from becoming law, it would show your representative that theyre being watched, and perhaps make them a little less willing to do the same sort of thing in the future.

Raising a stink about this bill might also make it possible that President Trump could veto it, even though the White House has already issue a statement in support of it. Trumps opinions are always subject to change, and if he became convinced that this was incredibly unpopular, you never know what he might do.

Even if that doesnt happen, this is a valuable lesson: Republicans in Congress may have suffered a huge defeat on ACA repeal, but theyre still going to be working like busy little bees, and we cant take our eyes off them for a moment.

Originally posted here:
Democrats won big on health care. But Republicans are still doing terrible things. - Washington Post (blog)

By Harold Pollack By Harold Pollack March 29 at 2:20 PM

Harold Pollack is a professor at the University of Chicago.

Republicans seven-year repeal and replace effort died in a fiery legislative crash two months into the Trump administration last week. Various tactical missteps helped produce this legislative failure, but the most fundamental reason the Affordable Care Act (ACA) prevailed has nothing to with the legislative tick-tock: In its own imperfect way, the ACA has insured 20 million people who would otherwise have gone uncovered. It has helped tens of millions of others who face financial or health challenges. And in doing so, it has quietly embedded itself within the fabric of American life and has become very difficult for politicians to kill.

The GOPs failure to take down the ACA is an object lesson in what makes a politically resilient program. As Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W. Va.) put things, voters dont exactly know how they got coverage under ACA, but they certainly learned who was trying to take it away. The ACA brings important financial flows to individuals, states and medical providers that Congress cannot blithely disrupt without accompanying political pain. Meanwhile, aspects of the ACA solve real problems for officials in both parties. Many of these officials opposed the law when it was originally enacted. But politics is a pragmatic enterprise, and both Democrats and Republicans across the country found ways for itto serve their purposes. Thus, politicians and their constituents acquired a stake in defending the program, making it a very durable entity.

Some aspects of the ACA are more sturdy than others. The law included two main pillars that expanded health insurance coverage. The pillar most specifically derided as Obamacare is an ideologically moderate, fiscally disciplined market model of state insurance marketplaces popularized by conservative economists, backed by an individual mandate proposed by a Heritage Foundation scholar, and first implemented by Republican Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney. These marketplaces have faced intricate and daunting implementation problems, enjoy little bipartisan support, and have been openly and quietly undermined by Republicans. There is much speculation that the Trump administration may sabotage the marketplaces, for example by limiting important payments to participating insurers. Its telling that few Republican politicians have spoken out on the need to bolster these arrangements.

But the second pillar that is, the expansion of Medicaid to serve low-income individuals and families across the country has proved surprisingly resilient. The program is popular among Republican voters in most Medicaid expansion states. More than a few Republican governors speak of the Medicaid expansion with a sense of ownership and pride, and warned Congress not to repeal these components of the ACA. Ohio Gov. John Kasich has been especially effusive, noting that When we expand Medicaid and treat the mentally ill, they dont live under a bridge or in a prison and when we take the drug addicted and we treat them, we stop the revolving door of people in and out of prisons.

In political and human terms, Medicaid expansion is the jewel of the ACA. Within the states that embrace it, Medicaid expansion is the most important public health advance in decades. I see that every day in my work as an urban public health researcher. Most of the people I encounter in this work people with addiction disorders, those under the supervision of the criminal justice system and homeless people receive health care through the ACAs Medicaid expansion. Most detainees leaving Cook County Jail are insured this way.One-third of Illinois residents living with HIV are apparently covered through the expansion, too. Federal monies reliably flow to support hospitals, safety-net providers and other key constituencies, bolster local economies, and address problems of concern to Democrats and Republican alike.

During the recent AHCA fight, Kasich and his counterparts from Michigan, Nevada, and Arkansas wrote a letter to Congresscritical of the Republican House approach.Their letter was remarkable, not so much for its policy positions as for its granular understanding of the operational details. These governors show real familiarity with their Medicaid expansions, and appear all-too-cognizant of what a reversal would mean for their constituents.It is better to get it right than go too fast, they concluded. Fifteen Republican governors expressed concerns about the likely consequences of cutting Medicaid. Republican governors across the country have supported more-moderate approaches than AHCA that would preserve coverage in replacing ACA.

These governors familiarity with Medicaid expansion is visible not only in their politicking, but in their on-the-ground work, too.Our research team on the National Drug Abuse Treatment Systems Survey has been interviewing Democratic and Republican officials across the country.In our conversations, we have learned thatgovernors are using Medicaid to address their states serious opioid epidemics. Governors are also using the Medicaid waiver process to tackle other challenges, too, including addressing housing needs among individuals with severe mental illness. These governors understand the partisan politics surrounding the ACA, but they also understand ways Medicaid expansion serves their own political and governing purposes. They also see that doing away with Medicaid expansion would be a disaster for the citizens they serve, and would be a political vulnerability for Republican politicians inevitably tied to that effort. Thus Medicaid expansion has earned itself bipartisan support.

Bipartisanship arises when politicians in both parties having ongoing incentives to provide support. Such incentives arise from politicians tactile sense that they can influence operations to serve their own goals. They also arise from politicians fear that they will be held accountable if things dont go well.On this point, Kasich was admirably direct: We dont want to lose coverage for 700,000 people in our state.

Thus, for the immediate future, Republican officeholders around the country will likely embrace Medicaid, even as Washington Republicans work to undermine the market-based alternative to expanded public insurance coverage. Meanwhile, Republican politicians apparently perceive few practical incentives to make private marketplace coverage really work.

Looking over the next hill, though, Republicans might want to rethink that. The more ACA marketplaces falter, the more pressure will build for their replacement, which is surely an expanded Medicare or Medicaid role. If Democrats ever succeed in enacting such a public option, Republicans will quickly feel powerful incentives to join that effort, just as they felt powerful incentives to defend Medicaid expansion. Any public option program would serve Republican voters, who probably prefer Medicare to private coverage, and who would look to politicians of both parties to address whatever challenges arise. In that case as in this one, Republicans might find it very difficult to do away with programs once they have improved peoples lives.

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Republicans couldn't kill Obamacare. That's the genius of its design. - Washington Post