Mr. Trump has grown incensed by Mr. Price’s liberal renting of expensive planes, which he views as undercutting his drain-the-swamp campaign message, according to several administration officials with direct knowledge of the president’s thinking. Through intermediaries and the media, Mr. Trump has let it be known that offering reimbursement as repentance was no guarantee that Mr. Price would keep his job.
.. The newspaper said Mr. Price took at least 26 flights on private jets, including to Nashville, where his son lives, and where Mr. Price owns a condominium, and to St. Simons Island, a Georgia resort area where Mr. Price owns property and recently spoke at a medical conference. Mr. Price also booked a charter flight that included a leg to Philadelphia from Dulles International Airport in Virginia, a distance of about 130 miles.
.. Politico estimated at over $400,000, a number that has not been disputed — and asked why Mr. Price had only offered to pay back only $51,887.
.. On Thursday night, Politico reported that the White House approved Mr. Price flying on United States military aircraft to travel to Europe, Asia and Africa for official events, at a cost of more than $500,000.
.. Combined, the total cost to taxpayers for Mr. Price’s flights comes to more than $1 million, according to Politico.
.. Mr. Price, who was already poised to shoulder some of the blame for the failed Graham-Cassidy health care effort, may have one main saving grace: Mr. Trump has few options of people who want his job
GOP Dysfunction Will Paralyze the Conservative Base in 2018
If Republicans can’t get their act together, they will pay at the polls.
.. Republicans reputedly control majorities in both houses of Congress. A GOP chief executive itches to deploy his signature pen. Regardless, senators from President Trump’s own party concoct excuses to avoid forwarding bills to his desk
.. The free-market, conservative movement is blessed with hardworking, dedicated, and idealistic (in the best sense) donors, scholars, opinion journalists, broadcasters, and activists. Alas, we are doomed by flaccid, nearly non-existent congressional leadership, “so-called Republicans” (in President Trump’s words) who crave big government, and libertarian utopians who — on too many issues — will reject significant policy improvements while demanding nothing less than a live-action version of Atlas Shrugged.
.. The free-market, conservative movement is blessed with hardworking, dedicated, and idealistic (in the best sense) donors, scholars, opinion journalists, broadcasters, and activists. Alas, we are doomed by flaccid, nearly non-existent congressional leadership, “so-called Republicans” (in President Trump’s words) who crave big government, and libertarian utopians who — on too many issues — will reject significant policy improvements while demanding nothing less than a live-action version of Atlas Shrugged.
.. he should have yanked their committee assignments. This perfectly illustrates McConnell’s problem: He is neither loved nor feared. He is barely respected. Mainly, he is disregarded
.. The end of reconciliation means that any new repeal-and-replacement bill will need 60 votes, rather than 51. The need to recruit at least eight Democrats to push a new healthcare bill over the filibuster threshold will move it, ipso facto, to the left of GCHJ. Perhaps Rand Paul and Ted Cruz can explain how this would advance capitalism and freedom.
.. “Collins’ state would have received a 43 percent increase in federal healthcare funding” from GCHJ, health-policy expert Betsy McCaughey of the London Center for Policy Research tells me. “She was cowed by the rhetoric and demagoguery.”
.. McCain left intact a calamitous law that lacked bipartisan support and jacked up the average Arizonan’s premiums last year by 116 percent.
.. Come 2018, the Republican Party will need these patriots to knock on doors, man phone banks, attend get-out-the-vote rallies, and of course, cast ballots. Watching Republicans stagger from one self-inflicted defeat to another will unleash a pandemic of learned helplessness on the Right. If repeatedly campaigning hard for Republican candidates achieves so little, why knock ourselves out a year from now?
.. GOP powerbrokers worry that inability to deliver while in full control of government will enrage the grassroots and depress turnout of a broader electorate that could wonder what’s the point of reelecting a Republican House and Senate.”
Cruelty, Incompetence and Lies
Graham-Cassidy, the health bill the Senate may vote on next week, is stunningly cruel. It’s also incompetently drafted: The bill’s sponsors clearly had no idea what they were doing when they put it together. Furthermore, their efforts to sell the bill involve obvious, blatant lies.
The Affordable Care Act, which has reduced the percentage of Americans without health insurance to a record low, created a three-legged stool:
- regulations that prevent insurers from discriminating against people with pre-existing conditions,
- a requirement that individuals have adequate insurance (and thus pay into the system while healthy)
- and subsidies to make that insurance affordable. For the lowest-income families, insurance is provided directly by Medicaid.
Graham-Cassidy saws off all three legs of that stool.
- it eliminates the individual mandate.
- sharply reduces funding relative to current law, and especially penalizes states that have done a good job of reducing the number of uninsured.
- And it effectively eliminates protection for Americans with pre-existing conditions.
Did Graham-Cassidy’s sponsors know what they were doing when putting this bill together? Almost surely not, or they wouldn’t have produced something that everyone, and I mean everyone, who knows anything about health care warns would cause chaos.
Republicans are trying to ram the bill through before the Congressional Budget Office has time to analyze it — an attempt that is in itself a violation of all previous norms, and amounts to an admission that the bill can’t bear scrutiny.
.. Lindsey Graham, Bill Cassidy, and the bill’s other sponsors have responded to these critiques the old-fashioned way — with lies.
.. Cassidy has also circulated a spreadsheet that purports to show most states actually getting increased funding under his bill. But the spreadsheet doesn’t compare funding with current law, which is the relevant question.
.. That’s actually a well-known dodge, one that Republicans have been using since Newt Gingrich tried to gut Medicare in the 1990s. As everyone in Congress — even Cassidy — surely knows, such comparisons drastically understate the real size of cuts, since under current law spending is expected to rise with inflation and population growth.
.. Republicans are desperate to destroy President Barack Obama’s legacy in any way possible, no matter how many American lives they ruin in the process.
.. most Republican legislators neither know nor care about policy substance. This is especially true on health care, where they never tried to understand why Obamacare looks the way it does, or how to devise a nonvicious alternative.
.. the evasions and lies we’re seeing on this bill have been standard G.O.P. operating procedure for years. The trick of converting federal programs into block grants, then pretending that this wouldn’t mean savage cuts, was central to every one of Paul Ryan’s much-hyped budgets.
.. Graham-Cassidy isn’t an aberration; it’s more like the distilled essence of everything wrong with modern Republicans.
.. But even if the handful of Republican senators who retain some conscience block it — we’re looking at you, John McCain — the underlying sickness of the G.O.P. will remain.
Bannon Calls Comey Firing the Biggest Mistake in ‘Modern Political History’
He cited as an example a request that Mr. McConnell once made of Mr. Trump to stop talking about “draining the swamp.”
.. Mr. Bannon predicted deep division within the Republican Party over Mr. Trump’s recent move to end the program that provided temporary relief from deportation for hundreds of thousands of young people in the United States illegally. The president set a March end date for the program and asked Congress to come up with a solution in the meantime, a task that Mr. Bannon said could split Republicans and cost them their House majority in the 2018 midterm elections.
“If this goes all the way down to its logical conclusion, in February and March it will be a civil war inside the Republican Party,” he said.
.. “The media image, I think, is pretty accurate,” he said. “I’m a street fighter. That’s what I am.”
.. Mr. Bannon also condemned top officials in the George W. Bush administration, calling them “idiots” friendly to what he termed China’s anti-American economic agenda. He singled out Condoleezza Rice and Colin L. Powell, former secretaries of state, and Brent Scowcroft, an adviser to Mr. Bush and his father, as those most worthy of his scorn, criticizing them for China’s 2001 entry into the World Trade Organization.
“They’ve gotten us in this situation, and they question a good man like Donald Trump,” he said. “I hold these people in contempt, total and complete contempt.”
.. Mr. Bannon also attacked Gary D. Cohn, Mr. Trump’s top economic adviser, who publicly criticized the president’s comments about Charlottesville. “If you don’t like what he’s doing and you don’t agree with it, you have an obligation to resign,” Mr. Bannon said. “You can tell him, ‘Hey, maybe you can do it a better way.’ But if you’re going to break, then resign.”