Sen. Kamala Harris, D-Calif., weighs in on AG Barr’s hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee, including her line of questioning to Barr whether the president or anyone in the WH suggested that he open an investigation into anyone. »
Mueller Calls Out William Barr’s LIES
The Justice Department is admitting that Robert Mueller is frustrated with William Barr. Cenk Uygur, Ramesh Srinivasan, and Brooke Thomas, hosts of The Young Turks, break it down. MORE TYT: https://go.tyt.com/7ks
“A Justice Department spokeswoman said Tuesday that special counsel Robert Mueller expressed “frustration” to Attorney General William Barr in late March over the lack of context in the attorney general’s four-page memo describing his investigation’s findings. Mueller “expressed frustration over the lack of context and the resulting media coverage” of his obstruction inquiry in a phone call following the release of Barr’s four-page letter, Justice Department spokeswoman Kerri Kupec said in a statement to The Hill. Kupec said Barr called Mueller after receiving a letter in which, according to The Washington Post, the special counsel wrote that Barr’s March 24 memo did not “capture the context, nature, and substance” of his findings.”
Sen. Klobuchar pushes back on Barr’s conclusion against Trump obstruction of justice
Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., pushed back against Attorney General William Barr’s conclusion that President Donald Trump’s actions as detailed in the Mueller report did not constitute obstruction of justice. During a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, Barr explained why he did not think several of the instances outlined in the Mueller report constituted obstruction. Sen. Klobuchar, a 2020 presidential candidate, also asked Barr to work with senators on a bill that aims to prevent Russian interference in the 2020 elections. Barr said he would look into the proposal.
The worst thing Barr did this week had nothing to do with the Mueller report
The worst thing that Attorney General William P. Barr did this week arguably had nothing to do with possible contempt of Congress or the Mueller report.
It had to do with health care.
On Wednesday, amid the circus over alleged special counsel snittiness, the department that Barr oversees formally asked a federal appeals court to strike down the entire Affordable Care Act, jeopardizing access to health care for tens of millions of Americans.
If the Trump administration prevails, everything in the law would be wiped out. And I do mean everything: the protections for people with preexisting conditions, Medicaid expansion, income-based individual-market subsidies, provisions allowing children to remain on their parents’ insurance until age 26, requirements that insurance cover minimum essential benefits such as prescriptions and preventive care, and so on.
The administration’s rationale was laid out in a policy brief supporting a lawsuit challenging Obamacare by 20 red states. Their logic: When Congress, as part of President Trump’s 2017 tax cuts, set the penalty for not carrying health insurance to zero, that effectively made it no longer really a “tax,” and therefore made it unconstitutional. Somehow, that rendered the rest of the law unconstitutional, as well — including lots of provisions having nothing to do with the mandate.
This reasoning has been rejected even by conservative legal scholarsotherwise opposed to the law. But legal merits (and demerits) aside — which are likely to be ultimately adjudicated by the Supreme Court — it’s also not clear what political upside Republicans could possibly see in mounting yet another overt attack on Obamacare.
The GOP’s November congressional losses were largely motivated by voter rage over the party’s attacks on Obamacare, after all. Trump has, of course, more recently proclaimed the GOP the “party of health care,” and he and other party leaders continue repeating the obvious fiction that they’re cooking up “something terrific” to replace the ACA.
About half of the U.S. population has employer-based coverage, including 60 percent of nonelderly adults. While most say they are generally satisfied with these health plans, many nonetheless struggle with the financial burden they impose — particularly the high-deductible plans that cover 4 in 10 people with employer-sponsored insurance.
Deductibles in employer-sponsored insurance have been rising since long before the ACA. They have nearly quadrupled over the past 12 years and now average $1,350 for a single-person plan. But separate survey data show that only half of nonelderly, one-person households report having at least $2,000 in savings available.