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The Art of the Deal didn't work.

The Trump White House tried simply commanding the intransigent conservatives on healthcare. The conservatives didn't follow orders. Trump tried heckling the resisters on Twitter, but that just alienated them. Trump repeatedly, though indirectly, threatened to work against the re-election of no votes. This hardened opposition. And in the end, as White House chief of staff Reince Priebus said on Sunday, Trump just expected "loyalty" from these members of Congress, a baffling idea.

House Speaker Paul Ryan may have been even clumsier in his attempts to build a majority in the House. He crafted the bill behind closed doors with nearly no consultation. He told the rank-and-file there would be no negotiation, calling it a "binary choice" between voting for his bill or keeping Obamacare. Both Ryan and Trump tried the "take-it-or-leave-it" tactic, claiming they would simply walk away from reform if their bill didn't pass.

None of this worked. Nobody should have thought it would work, because Republican leaders haven't figured out any way to run Congress, not since the Bush years.

"Since I became speaker," Ryan said Tuesday, "I have talked about the need to go from being an opposition party to being a proposition party and a governing party. It may take a little bit more time, but we are certainly listening and we're going to get there." It will take both time and innovation on the part of leadership.

Some Establishment Republicans say the entire problem is unprecedented stubbornness from the likes of the House Freedom Caucus. That's a partial explanation that misses the root causes.

Here's the basic problem:

Republican leaders haven't figured out how to lead in the Tea Party era. The two most relevant changes since the Bush era are: (1) The social media-driven decentralization of information and money and (2) the death of earmarks.

Earmarks were the easiest way for leaders to win votes and influence conservatives. If a member is undecided on a bill, just promise him $11 million for a new athletic center in his district, and bam, he's on board.

Also from the Washington Examiner

"We had a great day with the president," Paul said. "We talked about a little bit of healthcare."

04/02/17 5:29 PM

But after the Tea Party, conservatives fought to end the practice of earmarks, which had proven itself to be fertile for corruption. Indeed, the Jack Abramoff scandal and the Duke Cunningham scandal were both made possible by earmarks.

So after the 2010 elections, the Republican House and Senate caucuses passed party rules banning earmarks. That coincided with the dawn of the Tea Party era, when many Republicans had beaten establishment-backed Republicans in primaries before winning the general election. Suddenly, controlling a majority became much harder.

That's the lesser of the handicaps John Boehner, Kevin McCarthy and Mitch McConnell have experienced. The worse problem is that they lost their monopolies on the dissemination of information and fundraising.

Consider the question of whether the American Health Care Act counted as "repealing Obamacare." Ryan stated that with the bill, Republicans were "Keeping Our Promise to Repeal ObamaCare." Donald Trump spoke the same way. Ryan, being the speaker, had the megaphones of the Wall Street Journal editorial page, Fox News, and CNN to declare that his bill was an Obamacare repeal. Once upon a time, that would have been enough to establish his bill as a repeal of Obamacare. Any member who had campaigned on repealing Obamacare would have felt overwhelming pressure to vote for the bill.

But party leadership can no longer control the message. Through Twitter, Facebook and conservative media came the argument that AHCA wasn't really a repeal of Obamacare because it didn't repeal Obamacare. It left in place the most substantial and costly regulations of that 2010 law. Meanwhile, conservative groups like Heritage Action and the Club for Growth were able to bombard the grassroots with emails and tweets opposing the law, and explaining that it didn't fully repeal Obamacare.

Also from the Washington Examiner

"It is ironic that all of the real evidence of real money and real influence-buying relates to Democrats."

04/02/17 5:24 PM

A bigger deal than the end of the information monopoly is the end of the money monopoly. It used to be that the only place for Republican members to get big injections of campaign cash was by hosting fundraisers with lobbyists their corporate clients who could cut $10,000 checks from a company's political action committee.

Lobbyists formed a symbiotic relationship with committee chairmen and party leaders. Rank-and-file members had to be in the good graces of their chairman or the Speaker and the majority leader if they wanted one of these fundraisers. You couldn't buck leadership without your cash drying up.

No more. Citizens United and Internet fundraising have decentralized campaign cash. If you piss off the party leadership, you can turn to a national network of grassroots ideological donors to fund your re-election. In this fight, it was crystal clear: While the Chamber of Commerce backed the AHCA, the billionaire Koch brothers and the Club for Growth opposed it.

The result: Any Republican who disliked the bill and feared losing the Chamber's fundraising support could simply turn elsewhere for financial support. The Koch network specifically promised to help anyone who voted "no."

Absent the fundraising monopoly, the information monopoly, and earmarks, it will take new methods to lead the GOP. Cajoling, trolling and declaring "take it or leave it," didn't work.

Maybe next time whether it's tax reform or Obamacare again Ryan and Trump will try different methods, such as deliberate, participatory consensus building. There's no guarantee that that would work, but it can't do any worse.

Timothy P. Carney, the Washington Examiner's senior political columnist, can be contacted at tcarney@washingtonexaminer.com. His column appears Tuesday and Thursday nights on washingtonexaminer.com.

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Republicans haven't learned how to govern in Tea Party era - Washington Examiner

In the last couple of months, a new political group has emerged in the Rochester area as part of a nationwide resistance movement.

Borrowing tactics once used by the Tea Party, Indivisible Rochester seeks to effect the same political earthquake as its conservative predecessor, but in a progressive direction.

Its handiwork can be seen locally in various ways: at town hall meetings where activists coordinate their questions in advance; on Facebook where daily action lists are posted to instruct activists which legislators and members of Congress to deluge with calls; in rallies held outside DFL lawmakers' Rochester offices at the Northgate Mall urging resistance to President Donald Trump's agenda and policies.

Many of these Indivisible Rochester activists describe themselves as casual or even indifferent observers of politics until the last several months. They indulged in the usual political rituals. They voted. They followed the news. But few imagined or saw themselves as activists until they were jolted out of their political passivity -- several said by the election of President Trump, whose policies and behavior they saw as an assault on their values.

At one Indivisible Rochester meeting, 80 percent of hands flew up when an Indivisible leader asked how many people had never been politically active before, one member said. There are more than 400 people listed on Indivisible Rochester Facebook.

They view the current moment as a historical turning point. They see the totality of Trump's and GOP lawmakers' agenda the Muslim travel ban, the crackdown on undocumented workers, the proposed defunding of Planned Parenthood, the cutting of Meals on Wheels and a health care proposal that would have led to millions losing their health insurance as a fundamental challenge to the way they see the country.

Laura Zumbrunnen, a Rochester entrepreneur who runs a biomedical startup company, said she was never an overtly political person until she joined Indivisible. Today, she attends forums and rushes to legislative hearings in St. Paul. She confesses to being scared at the prospect of being labeled an activist, "yet, I'm willing to do that," she said. Indivisible appealed to her because she saw it more as offering a plan of action than an ideological platform.

"For me, it was important that it wasn't an extreme group because I'm someone who hasn't been active, and I'm leery of that kind of thing," Zumbrunnen said. "The fact that this was so practical and not particularly ideological appealed to me a lot."

Agitated and fearful, uncertain what to do next, several said they gravitated to Indivisible because it offered a guide, a step-by-step manual crafted by former congressional staffers who had observed the Tea Party and distilled its lessons.

These staffers gleaned two strategic lessons from the the Tea Party's rise and success in thwarting former President Barack Obama's agenda. One was that small, locally based groups could be powerful agents for change.

And two, their efforts were almost entirely defensive. They avoided any attempts at policy development that might fracture their ranks. And instead they focused on resistance.

Practical knowledge, combined with Facebook's ability to connect, has allowed Indivisible to grow, as well as coordinate and mobilize.

That action plan is what drew people such as Suzanne Peterson, a Rochester attorney, to Indivisible.

"Some of us were itching to do something," Peterson said. "We didn't want to just post, not just Facebook and commiserate. We wanted to be active."

It's difficult to say how many Indivisible chapters there are, but Rochester activists believe they are part of a growing nationwide groundswell. They describe Indivisible as loosely organized, a work still in its infancy. Its lack of structure allows people to gravitate to the issues and concerns that interest them.

For some, the cause has become all-consuming.

"I gave up my life, really," said Deb Duffy-Smet, a Rochester mother and grandmother. "It's like a full-time job. The thing is for me: I have five kids spread across the U.S. I have four grandkids and growing. And I'm scared to death what kind of world that we're leaving for my children."

Indivisible members believe the group's efforts have begun to pay off. They cite the failure of House Republicans to pass legislation last week that would have repealed and replaced Obamacare as one sign of the movement's impact.

The conservative Freedom Caucus has been assigned much of the blame for torpedoing the bill, but moderate Republicans opposed the bill, too. And that moderate opposition, they argue, was stiffened and reinforced by Indivisible members and other activist groups, who flooded Washington switchboards.

At the state level, an Indivisible Rochester group has focused on tracking bills at the state Legislature. For most of these Indivisible members new to the legislative process, following the progress of a bill is like peering into tea leaves.

"I have to say: Anyone who wants to track these bills, they could not make it any more difficult," one Indivisible Rochester member said at a recent meeting.

Of particular concern to the group have been redistricting bills authored by GOP Rep. Sarah Anderson and Sen. Mary Kiffmeyer.

Indivisible members say the bills would lead to gerrymandered districts and an unfair playing field because they would disallow an independent commission or the state Supreme Court from drawing congressional and state legislative districts.

On Feb. 24, after a 24-hour Facebook notice went out, Indivisible activists and other opponents of the bill packed a hearing room in St. Paul to oppose the bills.

Recently, it was discovered that a Senate omnibus bill had been changed. It no longer containing language that confined redistricting to the state Legislature only.

"This is indeed a HUGE victory!" DFL Rep. Jennifer Schultz, of Duluth, wrote in an email. Shultz is authoring a bill that would delegate redistricting to a nonpartisan independent commission. "I think the activists did play a role, with so many testifiers, emails and phone calls."

But she noted the redistricting language still could be introduced in conference committee, "so we are a long way from over."

Asked if she was aware of Indivisible at the Legislature, Sen. Carla Nelson, a Rochester Republican, said she has held five town hall meetings since the legislative session started, all of them well-attended.

"As in the past, I receive a high volume of emails daily," she wrote in an email. "I read them all and try to respond to as many constituents as possible. While there have been more town halls than usual, the volume of email is usual hundreds per day."

Activists point out that Indivisible is not the only resistance movement in Southeast Minnesota. Other groups include Minnesota Southeast Progressives and Stand Up, Minnesota. Given the welter of such groups, concerns have been raised by some that the groups overlap to the point of redundancy. The groups have been talking among themselves about ways in which to better differentiate themselves.

Sarah Hocker, a member of Indivisible Rochester and chair of Rochester United Now, another grassroots group, sees value in the diversity of activist groups.

"I've heard that concern from a lot of different people. 'Why are there so many groups?" Hocker said. "I tend to strongly disagree. I think people need to work where they are and where they feel most comfortable. These different groups have formed for a reason, and it also makes it more grassroots."

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Local progressive group adopts Tea Party tactics - Post-Bulletin

President Trump answers reporters' questions in the Oval Office on March 30, 2017.(Photo: Chip Somodevilla, Pool/European Pressphoto Agency)

WASHINGTON More than a dozen of Ohios leading conservative activists fired off a letter to President Trump on Thursday asking him to back off his attacks on the House Freedom Caucus.

The letter, from 20 tea party leaders and Republican stalwarts across Ohio, came after Trump publicly threatened todefeat members of the Freedom Caucusin the 2018 midtermelections. The Freedom Caucus is a group of about three dozen arch-conservatives in the House, including Rep. Jim Jordan of Urbana.

We respectfully ask you to stand with our conservative heroes in the Freedom Caucus,along with other conservatives in the House and Senate, the Ohio contingent wrote in their letter. Please workwithmembers of the Freedom Caucus, notagainstthem.

Among those signing the letter wereAnn Becker, president of theCincinnati Tea Party, and Lori Viars, vice president of Warren County Right To Life.

Trump attacked the Freedom Caucus lawmakers after they helped torpedo the GOP Obamacare repeal bill last week, which the president and House GOP leaders had championed as their best chance to kill the 2010 Affordable Care Act. Trump's jab raised the specterof a bruising internal GOP fight.

We felt he was going a little bit too far, Tom Zawistowski, of the Portage County TEA Party,said of Trumps threat. He said the Freedom Caucus saved the president from a bill that would have been an albatross around his neck.

We just think maybe hes putting some blame where he should putting some thanks, he said.

The letter, while politely worded, signals that conservatives will not sit quietly on the sidelines if Trump abandons hard-core GOP principals and takes a more pragmatic route that involves working with Democrats.

Read more:

Trump threatens House Freedom Caucus, says it needs to 'get on the team'

What is the House Freedom Caucus and why is Trump attacking its members?

Republican moderates reject talks with House Freedom Caucus

Here is the full letter and the list of signers:

Open Letter to President Trump from Ohio conservative leaders

Dear Mr. President,

We, the undersigned conservative leaders in the swing state of Ohio, voted for you and worked hard to bring others to the polls to elect you last November. We want to see you succeed in Making America Great Again! We appreciate much of what you have already done in the first few months of your administration.

However, we respectfully ask you to stand with our conservative heroes in the Freedom Caucus,along with other conservatives in the House and Senate.These patriotsare working to keep the campaign promises that you and they made tous.

Please workwithmembers of the Freedom Caucus, notagainstthem, to ensure you are all successful in keeping your campaign promises and "draining the swamp." Mr. President, we are praying for your success as you work to rebuild our nation.

Respectfully,

Ann Becker, Butler County for Trump co-chair; Cincinnati Tea Party president; GOP State Central Committee member

Tom Zawistowski,"We the People" Convention president; Portage County TEA Party

Janet Folger Porter,Faith2Action president; Trump general election volunteer

State Rep. Candice Keller,Butler County Trump volunteer; Ohio House Dist. 53

State Rep. Nino Vitale,Ohio House Dist. 85 (Champaign, Shelby & Logan Co.)

Kirsten Hill,Ohio Liberty Coalition president

Mike Lyons,Ohio Liberty Coalition board member

State Rep. Paul Zeltwanger,Ohio House District 54 (Warren, Hamilton & Butler Co.)

John McAvoy,Toledo Tea Party president

State Rep. John Becker,Ohio House District 65 (Clermont Co.)

Terri Iannetta,Summit County Tea Party president

Jim Green,North Central Ohio Conservatives, Inc. president

Mary Ellen Buechter,Miami County Liberty vice-president

Jim & Jennifer Hiles,Hocking Hill TEA Party Patriots co-founders

Jeff Malek,Medina TEA Party Patriots president

Anne Kaczmarek,Liberty Camp for Kids president

Barbara Burkard,Miami Valley Citizens Info

T.J. Honerlaw,Warren Co. Republican Party Central Committee

Lisa Cooper,Republican State Central Committee, District 26tee vice-chairman; Trump general election volunteer

Lori Viars,Conservative Republican Leadership Committee board member; Trump Campaign general election volunteer; Warren Co. Right To Life vice-president

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Ohio tea party to Trump: Stop attacking conservatives - Cincinnati.com

Back in January, I argued in these pages that whatever President Donald Trumps proclivities toward being a strongman ruler, the American system of checks and balances in the end had a good chance of containing him. Fridays failure of the Republican attempt to repeal Barack Obamas Affordable Care Act underscores how difficult our political system makes any kind of decisive political action. During Obamas presidency, House Republicans voted some 60 times to repeal parts or the whole of the ACA, and Trump himself pledged that he would replace it with something wonderful on Day One of his administration. And yet it appears the ACA will continue to be, as House Speaker Paul Ryan admitted, the law of the land. This happened despite the fact that we no longer have divided government, with the Republicans controlling both houses of Congress and the presidency.

The fundamental reason for the failure of the American Health Care Act lies, of course, in the internal divisions within the Republican Party. The bill was extremely unpopular from the beginning due to the fact it would have potentially resulted in 24 million fewer Americans having health insurance, according to the Congressional Budget Office. The Democrats, though a minority, were therefore uniformly opposed to repeal, meaning that the Republicans could afford only 26 defections for the legislation to fail. The hard-line Freedom Caucus in the end could not be badgered or threatened to accept Obamacare Lite, coming, as many of them do, from safe, gerrymandered districts.

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This is where the mounting number of institutional checks within the American system came into play. Had this vote been held 75 years ago, the powerful committee chairmen in the House, together with the Republican Party leadership, could have corralled these renegades through a combination of bribes or threats. Today, such tools do not exist: Earmarks have been eliminated along with the powers of the committee chairs, and there is too much money from groups outside the control of the party hierarchy. The Freedom Caucus holdouts were much more frightened of a Tea Party challenge in the primaries than they were of either Paul Ryan or Donald Trump.

And then, of course, there is the fact that the Republican Party is itself much more narrowly ideological and fragmented than it was in the mid-20th century, making it better adapted to vetoes and obstruction than to actually governing. As Ryans ill-fated predecessor, John Boehner, understood, party discipline no longer exists.

President Trump came into office seeming to think he could run the U.S. government like he ran his family-owned business, through executive orders. As he admitted on Friday, We learned a lot about the vote-getting process. Unlike a parliamentary system, the U.S. Constitution firmly vests most powers in Congress; the president is powerful only to the extent that he can be a cheerleader and consensus-builder in a system of widely shared powers.

So, far from being a potential tyrant as many Democrats fear, Trump looks like he is heading to the history books as a weak and ineffective president, hobbled by the same checks and balances as his predecessor. He has expressed regret that he went for health care reform before tax reform, but he will find that the latter is an even further bridge. Should the Republicans push ahead with their border adjustment tax, they will find a huge coalition of powerful and well-organized interest groups opposing them. (Note, for instance, how vociferously Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas, home of retail giant Wal-Mart, has expressed his opposition.) Whatever the national interest in lowering the headline rate of corporate taxation, the organization of Congress gives these interest groups the ability to veto any measure affecting their narrow part of the economy. Ditto for an ambitious infrastructure initiative: It is that same Tea Party bloc that will be the most relentless opponents of any effort to spend federal dollars on it. And even if Congress approves, the courts and states will have a major say in how and whether projects are executed: just look at the remaining obstacles to Keystone XL getting built.

Trump could end up being a powerful and transformative president under one condition: that he breaks decisively with the Tea Party wing of his own party and pursue bipartisan cooperation from the Democrats. On the infrastructure initiative and possibly on tax reform this is entirely plausible. This would also have been possible with health care reform, had Trump worked sincerely to fix the ACA rather than foolishly demonizing from the start what has proven to be a popular law.

Im not counting on any of this happening, however. Trumps instinct is to run to his red-state base of core supporters for comfort and adulation, rather than seeking to govern as president of the entire country. Note that he has yet to hold an event in a state he didnt win. He needs moreover to think carefully about the interests of his working-class supporters, rather than outsourcing policy to conservative ideologues like Paul Ryanwhose ideas would make them worse off. In Latin America, populist presidents shower their supporters with new social programs; our populist president has spent much of his early days trying to take benefits away from them.

Moreover, Trump has done so much to undermine trust that its not clear the Democrats would accept an olive branch even if it were offered. Their intention to filibuster the appointment of Neil Gorsuch, an eminently qualified jurist, to the Supreme Court is a harbinger of future obstruction for its own sake. It is much more likely that the Trump presidency will continue to hobble along, weakened by its own lack of experience and internal contradictions. I am personally very pleased that the AHCA failed, since I thought Obamacare was a good thing, and I hope Congress will reverse many of the cuts proposed in Trumps budget. But Americans should not be pleased with an institutional system that privileges small minorities like the Freedom Caucus and makes the search for broad consensus so difficult. This is what feeds demands for strongman leadership in the first place and prevents the country from facing difficult decisions for the common good.

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Trump's a Dictator? He Can't Even Repeal Obamacare - POLITICO Magazine

MINOT, N.D. - A group of students at Our Redeemer's in Minot took a break from reading, writing and arithmetic Thursday for a tea party!

And they had an expert from across the pond teaching them how to have their tea in class.

England native Silvia Rau knows a thing or two about tea party etiquette.

Rau shared some lessons with the youngsters at Our Redeemer's.

A group of students donned in fancy colorful hats gathered for a sip of tea and a snack, in the British tradition.

Rau, who moved to the U-S in the '90's, taught them how to properly sip their drink, and to take food one item at a time.

It's not like a buffet where you pile it all on because that's the idea of a small tea plate, said Rau.

Rau also debunked some myths about the tea party.

We actually are not supposed to point up, we're not actually supposed to sip tea with our pinky. It's kind of a joke, said Tavia Carlson, 4th Grader.

If I had to pick... the sandwiches. They were really good, said Carlson, when asked her favorite part of the party

Rau also showed the importance of manners.

I said, 'When you come in for tea, it's a very relaxed, but nice meal.' And I said, 'We have our best manners when we have tea,' and they've done that. Please and thank you, I've heard it all the time, said Rau.

Bringing a taste of British culture to the Northern Plains of North America.

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Fancy that! Our Redeemer's students learn tea party etiquette - KFYR - KFYR-TV