Archive for the ‘Republicans’ Category

Trump’s trade agenda faces challenge in winning over Republicans … – MarketWatch

WASHINGTON Republican lawmakers are showing increasing resistance to President Donald Trumps trade agenda, worried that his plans could hurt exports from their states and undermine longstanding U.S. alliances.

The concerns indicate that the biggest threat to Trumps trade policy which emphasizes new bilateral deals and a tougher stance against countries blamed for violating trade rules is coming from his own party. The opposition from Republicans, who control both chambers of Congress, stands to complicate Trumps efforts to overhaul the North American Free Trade Agreement, or Nafta, and tackle alleged trade violations in China.

We want to support him on all those things; were not there yet, said Sen. Jim Inhofe (R., Okla.), whose state depends on aerospace and agricultural exports.

While many Democrats in Congress are interested in working with the Trump administration, Republicans who have long backed free trade many of them close to business groups are warning that imposing tariffs could lead to retaliation against U.S. goods. Lawmakers from farm states are upset that Trump in January pulled out of the unratified Trans-Pacific Partnership, or TPP, the 12-nation trade agreement that Barack Obama negotiated.

An expanded version of this report appears on WSJ.com.

The global sports industry is worth roughly $150 billion in revenue, but the competition for consumers' time and money is fierce. So sports organizations are offering new exclusive experiences that can add up to thousands of dollars per ticket.

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U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara fired after refusing Justice Department request to quit.

Authorities question CIA contractors in connection with WikiLeaks dump.

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Trump's trade agenda faces challenge in winning over Republicans ... - MarketWatch

Could Trumpcare Sink Republicans in 2018? – The Weekly Standard

Not much over the past couple of days has made the passage of the American Health Care Act seem more likely. One of the House bills chief Republican critics, Arkansas senator Tom Cotton, told ABC's George Stephanopoulos Sunday that the proposal "as it's written todaycannot pass the Senate."

Cotton was harsh not only on the bill's prescription for Obamacare but on the political fallout for Republicans who support it. "I believe it would have adverse consequences for millions of Americans and it wouldn't deliver on our promises to reduce the cost of health insurance for Americans," he said. "So, I would say to my friends in the House of Representatives with whom I serve, do not walk the plank and vote for a bill that cannot pass the Senate and then have to face the consequences of that vote."

Then Cotton went a step further: "I'm afraid that if they vote for this bill, they're going to put the House majority at risk next year." What does Trump think of Cotton's prediction, and how much does the president think about how to protect his Republican majority in the House? The White House is mum. "Contact the RNC," wrote press secretary Sean Spicer in a curt email.

Republicans Are Damned If They Do or Don't

Is Cotton's warning alarmist or shrewd? It's obviously too soon to tellthe House committees have voted the bill through but GOP leadership won't bring to a floor vote until after the Congressional Budget Office scores itbut Cotton's sentiments reflect a growing sense among some congressional Republicans that the party is not just squandering a great chance to implement a conservative health-care program. With this bill, the GOP may be sowing the seeds of their demise. Bad policy and bad optics, say Cotton and the various Republicans (from Freedom Caucus members in the House to Maine moderate Susan Collins) urging the House to start over, will make for bad politics.

House speaker Paul Ryan pushed back on this on CBS's Face the Nation, agreeing with President Trump's statement that without passing this particular Obamacare repeal, 2018 will be a "bloodbath." "Look, the most important thing for a person like myself, who runs for office and tells the people we are asking to hire us, this is what I will do if I get elected. And then, if you don't do that, you are breaking your word," Ryan said.

Both men have a point. So what's a conflicted Republican congressman to do?

Trump to Listen to Someone on Health Care

On the president's Monday schedule is a late-morning "listening session on healthcare" in the White House's Roosevelt Room. No word from Trump's staff who will be there for the president to listen tomembers of Congress? industry representatives? doctors? patients?but it's a sign Trump may be looking for ways to alter the bill he's already gotten behind.

The director of the National Economic Council, Gary Cohn, said on Fox News Sunday that Trump was "willing to accept improvements to the bill."

"We've met with many groups over the last week, week and a half. We've talked with many different groups as we possibly could. And anyone that comes off with an improvement, we are more than happy to accept," Cohn said.

You're FiredAll 46 of You!

On Friday, Attorney General Jeff Sessions formally asked for the resignation of all 46 United States attorneys who were appointed by Barack Obama. This practice is pretty standard when a new party holds the White House. As former U.S. attorney Andrew McCarthy notes, Bill Clinton's attorney general Janet Reno fired 93 such attorneys in 1993.

But the routine request couldn't escape the constant drumbeat of drama in Trump's Washington. One of those attorneys, Manhattan's Preet Bharara, refused to resign on Friday (unlike his other colleagues, who issued public statements declaring. On Saturday, Bharara said he had been fired.

Why did Bharara not resign? Back in November, the hard-charging attorney had met with the president-elect at Trump Tower, where he said he had been asked by Trump and Sessions to stay in his post. But on Thursday, President Trump reportedly made a phone call to Bharara, who refused to accept the call, citing Justice Department protocols. It's unknown what Trump wanted to discuss, but the next day, Justice asked the U.S. attorneys to resign.

Not every U.S. attorney's resignation was accepted. Those of the acting deputy attorney general, Dana Boente, and the nominated deputy attorney general, Rod Rosenstein, were declined, according to a Justice Department spokesman.

Song of the Day

"Mama Told Me Not to Come," Three Dog Night.

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Could Trumpcare Sink Republicans in 2018? - The Weekly Standard

Why Georgia Republicans are nervous about House health plan – Atlanta Journal Constitution (blog)

U.S. Sen. Johnny Isakson, center, U.S. Rep. Doug Collins (back, left) and U.S. Rep. Tom Graves (back, center) at a rally in Marietta in November. Curtis Compton,ccompton@ajc.com

Georgia Republicans are sharply divided over the GOP proposal to replace the Affordable Care Act thats galloping through the U.S. House of Representatives, raising concerns about the lack of a cost estimate for the overhaul and its impact on the states budget as it moves through Capitol Hill.

As House lawmakers prepare to vote on the sweeping rewrite of health care policy, at least two GOP congressmen from Georgia said they wont support the measure in its current form. And Gov. Nathan Deal has raised concerns about how it will affect Georgia and other states that refused to expand Medicaid.

The fight over the plan is another stinging reminder of the challenges of making substantial changes to health policy even for Republicans who have long vowed to repeal the signature law of Barack Obamas presidency.

Under pressure from President Donald Trump, who has endorsed the plan, House GOP leaders have signaled they would make only minor changes to the proposal. Democrats, health care industry groups and other critics, meanwhile, are eagerly fanning the flames of a budding revolt. Conservative groups arent happy either, taking issue with the bills refundable tax credits that they say are akin to a new federal entitlement.

Before the measure was introduced, Deal recounted a call with fellow Republicans governors who he said took the bait and expanded Medicaid with the promise that the federal government would pick up the bulk of the bill.

I would remind Republican governors who expanded Medicaid that was part of Obamacare, said Deal. And now it could very well go away. I am sympathetic to what they did, but we dont want to be punished for what those states did.

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Why Georgia Republicans are nervous about House health plan - Atlanta Journal Constitution (blog)

Millionaires Will Get $157 Billion In Tax Cuts If Republicans Repeal Obamacare – Huffington Post

Repealing theAffordable Care Act is going to be a windfall for Americas wealthiest families, even as it wipes away programs that have allowed millions of poor and middle-class Americans to get health insurance.

A new government report shows just how big that windfall is.

According to that analysis, which the Joint Committee on Taxation prepared this week and which theNew York Timesobtained, shows households with incomes of more than $1 million will get tax cuts that, over the next decade, would add up to roughly $157 billion.

The money comes from two new closely related taxes that the Affordable Care Act imposed to help finance the laws coverage expansion. These taxes affect wealthy individuals and families exclusively they apply only to households with incomes above $250,000 for joint filers and $200,000 for individuals.

Previous estimates have suggested that 97 percent of Americans do not pay the tax at all, but that for the very wealthiest Americans, including those millionaires, it is worth quite a lot.

In fact, the richest 400 families in America would get an average tax cut of $7 million per year, according an analysis that the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities published in January, based on earlier projections of what those taxes cost now.

The GOP repeal legislation, which its sponsors have called the American Health Care Act, would not simply reduce taxes. It would also roll back the laws expansion of Medicaid and reorient its financial assistance, producing a massive shift of funds away from lower-income Americans.

Initial independent estimates suggest millions would lose insurance as a result. The Congressional Budget Office will release its official estimate next week.

Promoters of repeal legislation, including leaders of the Republican Party, have frequently said that repeal is necessary in order to rescue America from the Affordable Care Act. The 2010 law has raised premiums and forced coverage changes for some people, and in some states insurance markets are in trouble because the insurers are losing so much money.

But the markets in other states are fine, and the law has brought the number of uninsured Americans to an all-time low. Both access to care and financial security have improved overall, according to multiple studies.

House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) was asked this week about cutting taxes for the wealthiest Americans at a time of so much inequality. Im not concerned about it because we said we were gonna repeal all the Obamacare taxes, this is one of the Obamacare taxes, he replied.

JCT prepared the analysis for the House Ways and Means Committee, which considered and approved repeal legislation this week. Neither JCT nor Ways and Means had made the report public.

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Millionaires Will Get $157 Billion In Tax Cuts If Republicans Repeal Obamacare - Huffington Post

When It Comes To Legislation, Sometimes Bigger Is Better – NPR

Printing out the new House Republican health care bill (L) kills way fewer trees than printing out Obamacare (R). But should that really be a selling point? Alex Wong/Getty Images hide caption

Printing out the new House Republican health care bill (L) kills way fewer trees than printing out Obamacare (R). But should that really be a selling point?

To President Trump, bigger is better.

He has inflated the size of his buildings (counting stories that aren't there). He exaggerated the size of the crowd at his inauguration (a million and a half it wasn't). And he, of course, famously lashed out when he was accused of having small hands. (If that implied something else must be small, he said during a nationally televised debate, "There's no problem. I guarantee you.")

But when it comes to the health care bill, the Trump administration believes smaller is better.

When House Republicans released their plan to repeal and replace Obamacare, press secretary Sean Spicer brought props to his daily briefing a table next to his lectern with the 123-page GOP bill, sitting next to a 974-page Affordable Care Act.

"As you'll see, this bill right here was the bill that was introduced in 2009 and 10 by the previous administration," Spicer said Wednesday. "Notice how thick that is."

He later went on to elaborate that the GOP replacement plan is even smaller than it looks.

"So far, we're at 57 for the repeal plan and 66 pages for the replacement portion," Spicer said. "We'll undo this. And remember, half of it, 57 of those pages, are the repeal part. So when you really get down to it, our plan is 66 pages long, half of what we actually even have there."

This tactic isn't new to the Trump administration; making page counts into a talking point has been a fixture of policy debates since at least the Reagan administration, particularly among conservatives. But a bill's length has very, very little to do with its quality. And experts say that keeping major legislation short is getting tougher.

Why all the hate for long bills?

Politicians have criticized long bills for decades, and that history shows a few reasons why people feel (or say they feel) that those bills are a problem.

For one, critics believe these lengthy bills are signs of legislative inefficiency. President Reagan in his 1988 State of the Union address gave a particularly memorable example of it.

"The budget process has broken down; it needs a drastic overhaul," he declared, shaming Congress for late and "monstrous" budget resolutions. And like Spicer this week, Reagan made his point with his own table piled high with paper (the relevant portion begins around 15:50 in the below video):

"Along came these behemoths. This is the conference report 1,053 pages, report weighing 14 pounds. Then this a reconciliation bill six months late that was 1,186 pages long, weighing 15 pounds. And the long-term continuing resolution this one was two months late, and it's 1,057 pages long, weighing 14 pounds. Now, that was a total of 43 pounds of paper and ink. You had three hours yes, three hours to consider each, and it took 300 people at my Office of Management and Budget just to read the bill so the government wouldn't shut down. Congress shouldn't send another one of these. No, and if you do, I will not sign it."

Reagan held up each of three different, massive budget bills, to laughter and applause from congressional members. He underlined his point by dropping each stack of papers with a theatrical thump. (He added a final flourish of shaking out his hand, as if he had injured it.)

A bill's length has also been taken as a sign that bills were simply unworkably byzantine. The Atlantic's James Fallows in 1995 cited the 1,342 pages of Hillary Clinton's health care overhaul as evidence that the bill was "fatally overcomplicated" and "impossible for anyone except the plan's creators ... to understand."

Yet another dimension to the fear of long legislation is the fear that it will contain buried, objectionable provisions that lawmakers won't find until it's too late.

After the George W. Bush White House passed its prescription-drug plan, for example, one Republican lawmaker told 60 Minutes that members of Congress weren't given enough time to understand the legislation.

"The bill was over 1,000 pages," North Carolina Rep. Walter Jones said. "And it got to the members of the House that morning, and we voted for it at about 3 a.m. in the morning."

This is a regular concern, said one former Hill staffer.

"What got snuck into there? What got airdropped into there in conference or whatever?" said Billy Pitts, a longtime GOP congressional aide, explaining a common reaction to long bills. "That's always the threat of a big, fat bill there's always something hidden inside of it."

That notion was hammered home for conservatives with Nancy Pelosi's infamous 2010 remark to the Legislative Conference for the National Association of Counties, that "we have to pass the bill, so that you can find out what's in it."

She has since said that that quote was taken out of context, but Republicans seized upon it as evidence of shady lawmaking. Right-leaning website the Daily Signal characterized its view of Pelosi's message as follows:

"What lurks within the House and Senate health care bills will be revealed in the fullness of time, and it's really good for us if we only knew better."

And finally, there is the symbolic argument perhaps the most common type of argument against long bills. It makes an intuitive sense that Republicans often lambast legislation for being lengthy.

"For conservatives, [long legislation] becomes a metaphor for complicated government," said Norm Ornstein, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, a right-leaning think tank. "You throw down 1,000 pages or 1,500 pages, and it looks like they're doing stuff that gets into every detail of everybody's lives."

Here's how bills get so long (and are getting longer all the time)

A thousand pages might sound insane to people who don't read legislation on a daily basis. But there are substantive reasons why bills can become so large.

The following three reasons explain why worries about lengthy bills are often overblown:

1. Making laws is harder than it looks

Interestingly, Spicer hinted at one of these reasons in his comments this week, when he said that repealing Obamacare itself took 57 pages. That's a lot of pages for doing something that can be explained in two words: "repeal Obamacare."

So while it might seem repealing a law would be simple say, writing a bill that says something along the lines of, "This bill will fully repeal the Affordable Care Act" it often instead requires making many, many changes to many, many different parts of different, specific and carefully crafted laws.

"The fact is even most aficionados could not read most bills and get anything out of them," Ornstein said of the desire to cut length, "which is why we have this army of people in the legislative branch, the Legislative Counsel's Office, to take policies and translate it into the gibberish."

2. Polarization means bills crammed full of things

Another reason why laws can get so long is that polarization has created gridlock that makes passing laws remarkably hard, said Sarah Binder, professor of political science at Georgetown University.

"Laws are long and probably longer today than in the past," she said in an email to NPR, "because the difficulty of legislating pushes lawmakers to craft new laws with big, multidimensional deals: Your team gets X; my team gets Y; we sew them up into one huge bill."

She added, "When you come up against a deadline, everything is multiple trains are leaving the station, and you put them all on the same track. And that's how you make deals."

To illustrate, she points to the fact that the number of bills passed keeps dropping but the length of those bills keeps rising.

In other words, less legislation (by number of bills) is getting passed, but each bill that's passed has way more legislation in it (by number of pages).

This means that the fear of surprise policies being shoehorned into a large bill makes some sense. But as Binder points out, cramming things into bills is also often the only option for passing legislation these days.

3. Some policy areas are just super complicated

Pitts emphasized to NPR the benefits of simple legislation: It's easier to understand, and it's easier to foresee its effects and how it will interact with existing laws.

However, it's also true that some legislation simply deals in complicated policy areas that can't be boiled down to a few dozen pages.

"What you have to keep in mind here in something like this area is you're talking about policy that affects close to one-fifth of the economy," Ornstein said. "And it gets into tax law; it gets into Medicare and Medicaid, which have grown greatly in complexity; it gets into divisions between the states and the federal government."

A similar principle applies to the tax code another area where the more-pages-is-bad argument is often made, as Ed Kleinbard, professor of law and business at the University of Southern California, told NPR last year.

"The tax code is thousands of pages long for a very simple reason: It is a model, in the economic sense, of all of economic activity," he said. "Most Americans don't spend a lot of time worrying about the taxation of cutting timber or of being crew on a tuna boat. But there are rules for that, and you may find the rules irrelevant to you, but the rules are complex for a reason."

So putting too much stock in the length of the bill often makes little sense. This may be something repeal proponents will want to keep in mind in the coming weeks, because this bill is just the first part of a three-part plan.

"One of the reasons that this bill is shorter at this point," Ornstein points out, "is they're taking on only parts of the Affordable Care Act and making changes.

"If they manage to do all these things, and you look at the nature of the regulations and then you do a third bill, it's probably going to be about as long as the Affordable Care Act."

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When It Comes To Legislation, Sometimes Bigger Is Better - NPR