And key Republican leaders are confident that pressure will eventually weaken the holdouts. Old-timers recall the 2003 vote on the Medicare prescription drug benefit, during which leaders held open the vote for almost three hours while a whip team blocked all the exits from the House floor until they had twisted enough arms.
.. Yet the debate over the repeal bill is the latest sign that Republicans and Democrats are miles apart on health care, and there’s little indication the two parties can bridge that gap anytime soon. In a floor speech Thursday, Lloyd Doggett (D-Texas) trashed Republicans’ work on health care, calling their efforts not just a “crumbling and destruction of health care, but also a crumbling of our democracy.”
.. Do nothing and blame the Democrats
Trump said it himself just weeks ago: “I say to Republicans, if you really want to do something good, don’t do anything. … Let it be a disaster.”
Republicans could shelve their quest to overhaul the health care system, hope Obamacare premiums keep spiking and insurers keep fleeing marketplaces and bet they won’t pay the political price in 2018. Trump has already expressed his misgivings about taking ownership of health reform, and privately assured conservative groups that he can pin the whole mess on Democrats if the repeal effort fails.
What if Trump won’t accept defeat?
As their nominee unravels, Republicans worry where his scorched-earth, rigged-election rhetoric leads the GOP and the country.
The first image of a Trump campaign ad, released on Friday, is that of a polling place as a narrator alleges “the system” is “rigged”; and his campaign has already begun recruiting volunteers to monitor polling places, specifically in urban precincts where African-American voters, very few of whom support Trump, predominate.
Trump’s words are having an effect. Just 38 percent of Trump supporters believe their votes will be counted accurately, and only 49 percent of all registered voters are “very confident” their votes will be tabulated without error, according to a Pew Research survey last week.
The implications — short- and long-term — are serious. Interviews with more than a dozen senior GOP operatives suggest growing panic that Trump’s descent down this alt-right rabbit hole and, beyond that, his efforts to delegitimize the very institutions that undergird American democracy — the media and the electoral process itself — threaten not just their congressional majorities or the party’s survival but, potentially, the stability of the country’s political system.
.. “Among the values most necessary for a functioning democracy is the peaceful transition of power that’s gone on uninterrupted since 1797. What enables that is the acceptance of the election’s outcome by the losers,” said Steve Schmidt, the GOP operative who was McCain’s campaign strategist in 2008.
.. “Here you have a candidate after a terrible three weeks, which has all been self-inflicted, saying the only way we lose is if it’s ‘rigged’ or stolen
.. That’s an assault on some of the pillars that undergird our system. People need to understand just how radical a departure this is from the mean of American politics.”
.. many Republicans fear that Trump’s efforts to diminish people’s confidence in mainstream media, fair elections and politics itself will have a lasting impact.
.. He is a postmodern authoritarian who’s in the process of delegitimizing every institution — the media, the ballot box — that can be a check on him.”
.. “I can’t see the fever swamp, alt-reality media universe on the right learning the lessons of this,” Sykes said. “Can you see Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham saying, ‘OK, sorry, we screwed up’?”
.. But my fear is that Bannon and Trump uniting could be about them looking to do something long-term that would ensure this fringe element remains.”
Sheriff Joe Arpaio suffers another defeat in profiling case
U.S. District Court Judge Murray Snow on Friday ordered another judge to rule on whether Joe Arpaio, the Republican sheriff of Arizona’s Maricopa County, and a deputy should be held in criminal contempt of court for repeatedly ignoring court orders to stop racially profiling Latinos.
.. Two years later, Snow found that Arpaio had intentionally flouted his order, citing the sheriff’s own public comments, such as a 2012 interview with Fox News in which he declared, “I’m not stopping anything” and said he was “not going to bend to the federal government.”
.. Arpaio’s opponent in the Aug. 30 Republican primary is Dan Saban, a former local police chief who ran against him in 2004 and 2008. During their 2004 race, Arpaio opened an investigation into Saban for allegedly raping his own adoptive mother decades earlier. The case was dropped, and Saban sued Arpaio unsuccessfully for defamation.
.. In June, Penzone likewise threatened to sue Arpaio if he recycled ads from their 2012 contest, when the sheriff accused him of beating his ex-wife.
The Problem With Congress, and How to Fix It
Lawrence Lessig is a Harvard Law professor and 2016 candidate for the Democratic nomination. In this interview filmed at the Aspen Ideas Festival, he explains how money’s influence in politics threatens American democracy. Congress has become deeply unrepresentative, he says, because politicians are focused on answering to their biggest campaign donors rather than the general population. This is why people are drawn to anti-establishment candidates like Donald Trump or Bernie Sanders. “We could fix these problems if we had a Congress with the will to address the corruption that has broken the representative system,” Lessig says. “Unfortunately we don’t have that will right now, we have to find a way to create it.”