This proposal was crafted trying to thread a needle between two competing corners of the House GOP Conference: the far-right blockade and a much larger, less vocal crowd from states where their governors accepted the expanded Medicaid provision in the 2010 ACA.
Some Freedom Caucus folks have been strenuously opposed to the proposed tax credits for purchasing insurance, saying it’s a new form of entitlement, and many want to more quickly phase out the Medicaid expansion.
.. If Trump ever fully leans into this legislation, giving it the full-forced endorsement that he’s proven capable of on other issues, Ryan and House GOP leaders believe that the conservative opposition will dissolve quickly.
.. not once but twice he said he wouldn’t sign any bill that “didn’t take care of our people.”
.. Some politicians let bygones be bygones if they win ([Chuck] Schumer is very much like this; he wins, there’s no grudge held, it’s water under the bridge). Trump strikes me as someone who holds grudges, but I’m not certain.
.. But if this disintegrates, if there’s no repeal of Obamacare, it’s bad, very bad, for both men – and what it does to their relationship for the next few years.
.. most House Republicans are more afraid of not approving a bill to repeal Obamacare, any bill to repeal Obamacare, regardless of its fate in the Senate, than to simply do nothing.
.. The way the districts are drawn, the way the funding mechanisms of campaigns now work, the activism of the two bases of the parties – it all pushes members to the extreme. They now act almost entirely at the behest of their base rather than what they believe is the right thing for the country.
.. McConnell has to come up with his own bill that will tilt more friendly to the [Rob]Portman/[Shelley Moore] Capito crowd, which might upset Ted Cruz and Mike Lee but I’m still not certain that in the end Cruz is willing to be the guy who blocks Donald Trump’s first big initiative... I think the two worst character traits in today’s Congress are fear and contentment... You just have to be willing to work hard, willing to go home as much as possible to explain yourself and to run a really disciplined, well-funded campaign if you get a primary. Folks like Lamar Alexander, Lindsey Graham, Tom Cole, Jack Reed, Frank Pallone — these are are all people who’ve done more than their fair share of bipartisan deals in the Senate and House. Some have faced down tough primary elections.They’re all still here.
.. The “contentment” character trait is that too many lawmakers are content with what they have: a tiny fiefdom. They’d rather not rock the boat because that means they might have to work really hard to win re-election.
.. The biggest change that I’ve seen over those years is the shrinking number of leaders on Capitol Hill; not the actual elected leaders, but the men and women in the rank-and-file who commanded the policy brigade and through the sheer force of their character made themselves players. They weren’t afraid and they weren’t content.
Meet the Math Professor Who’s Fighting Gerrymandering With Geometry
Moon Duchin is an associate professor of math and director of the Science, Technology and Society program at Tufts. She realized last year that some of her research about metric geometry could be applied to gerrymandering — the practice of manipulating the shape of electoral districts to benefit a specific party, which is widely seen as a major contributor to government dysfunction.
.. In redistricting, one of the principles that’s taken seriously by courts is that districts should be compact. The U.S. Constitution does not say that, but many state constitutions do, and it’s taken as a kind of general principle of how districts ought to look.
.. So our first aim was to think like mathematicians about compactness and look at all the definitions that already exist, and compare them and try to prove theorems about the relationships between the definitions.
.. this landscape of compactness had a hole in it. It’s not that mathematicians hadn’t been working on it; it’s that [geometry experts] hadn’t entered the legal conversation.
.. the Polsby-Popper score; that’s the area of a district compared to the area of a circle of the same perimeter, given as a percentage.
.. It turns out that if you take a district and you look at the average distances between all of its points, then the bigger that is, the less compact, once you normalize by the diameter. That meant that I already had published theorems that, I think, cast some light on the districting problem.
.. The point of the summer school isn’t just to bring people together so we can convince them of our ideas. We also want to pool ideas and see, putting all those brilliant people in one place, can we make some progress on what’s been a pretty intractable problem?
.. Bouncing things off of diverse audiences has taught me things I didn’t already know about how rhetorically accessible different ideas are. This is well-known to educators: Once you achieve a certain level of expertise, it can be hard to find the difficult spots and the reasoning anymore because they’re so familiar to you.
.. the “efficiency gap.” It was a new metric of partisan gerrymandering that, for the first time, a court said they liked. The way it was devised was that the people who created it, they went back and they read all of Justice Anthony Kennedy’s written decisions about measuring gerrymandering. By reading his words and by reading what he said he found convincing and less convincing, they designed a statistic to appeal to him. He’s that vaunted median justice. If you can come up with something that will be convincing to Anthony Kennedy, then you’ve probably just changed the outcome.
Is American Democracy Strong Enough for Trump?
I find it hard to imagine a personality less suited by temperament and background to be the leader of the world’s foremost democracy.
On the other hand, as a political scientist, I am looking ahead to his presidency with great interest, since it will be a fascinating test of how strong American institutions are.
.. Americans believe deeply in the legitimacy of their constitutional system, in large measure because its checks and balances were designed to provide safeguards against tyranny and the excessive concentration of executive power. But that system in many ways has never been challenged by a leader who sets out to undermine its existing norms and rules. So we are embarked in a great natural experiment that will show whether the United States is a nation of laws or a nation of men.
.. President Trump differs from almost every single one of his 43 predecessors in a variety of important ways. His business career has shown a single-minded determination to maximize his own self-interest and to get around inconvenient rules whenever they stood in his way, for example by forcing contractors to sue him in order to be paid...He could also have argued that the mainstream media, which thinks of itself as a fourth branch holding the president accountable, is under relentless attack from Trump and his followers as politicized purveyors of “fake news.” Acemoglu argues that the main source of resistance now is civil society, that is, mobilization of millions of ordinary citizens to protest Trump’s policies and excesses, like the marches that took place in Washington and cities around the country the day after the inauguration... I argue in my most recent book that the American political system in fact has too many checks and balances, and should be streamlined to permit more decisive government action... I still believe that my earlier position is correct, and that the rise of an American strongman is actually a response to the earlier paralysis of the political system... His strategy right now is clear: He wants to use his “movement” to intimidate anyone who gets in the way of his policy agenda. And he hopes to intimidate the mainstream media by discrediting them and undermining their ability to hold him accountable. He is trying to do this, however, using a core base that is no more than a quarter to a third of the American electorate... And Trump has not done a great job since Election Day in alleviating the skepticism of anyone outside of his core group of supporters, as his steadily sagging poll numbers indicate. Demonizing the media on the second day of your administration does not bode well for your ability to use it as a megaphone to get the word out and persuade those not already on your side... It is absurd that any one of 100 senators can veto any midlevel executive branch appointee they want. In some respects, unified government will alleviate some of our recent dysfunctions, which Trump’s opponents need to recognize... It is important to remember that one of the reasons for Trump’s rise is the accurate perception that the American political system was in many respects broken—captured by special interests and paralyzed by its inability to make or implement basic decisions. This, not a sudden affinity for Russia, is why the idea of a Putin-like strongman has suddenly gained appeal in America... However, the single most dangerous abuses of power are ones affecting the system’s future accountability. What the new generation of populist-nationalists like Putin, Chávez in Venezuela, Erdogan in Turkey, and Orbán in Hungary have done is to tilt the playing field to make sure they can never be removed from power in the future. That process has already been underway for some time in America, through Republican gerrymandering of congressional districts and the use of voter ID laws to disenfranchise potential Democratic voters.
In North Carolina, Some Democrats See Their Grim Future
The GOP’s moves have many on the left worried their bare-knuckle tactics will spread nationally.
The road to political morass began six years ago in North Carolina, when national Republican donors and strategists launched a concerted effort to create a bulwark against the emerging multiracial, center-left coalition that swept Barack Obama into the White House. They sank millions of dollars into cheaply bought local and state races, seizing control of the statehouse for the first time since a now-unrecognizable Republican Party that supported racial integration and voting rights for African-Americans held it during Reconstruction.
.. the new Republican majority gerrymandered districts in which Democrats couldn’t win—which resulted in ever-more-hard-line conservatives winning primaries in each election.
.. Only a third of North Carolina’s registered voters were Republicans, but McCrory and his allies in the legislature ruled as if it were a one-party state—cracking down on abortion, slashing social services and banning state officials from considering climate change when planning development along the state’s vulnerable coastline. It didn’t matter how many would-be voters this angered, because the redrawn districts guaranteed Republican supermajorities in the statehouse and U.S. Congress.
.. Legislators also took advantage of the U.S. Supreme Court’s rollback of the Voting Rights Act to restrict voting in black and other Democratic-leaning communities. When voters unseated McCrory and chose the Democratic attorney general, Roy Cooper, to be governor this fall, the Republican legislature greeted him with a slate of new laws stripping his powers and handing them to the legislature and Republican-controlled agencies.
.. Progressives and moderates watching across the country have been horrified about the evolution of a resolutely purple state into a hard-core bastion of untouchable conservative power—and what that might portend for a country where Donald Trump is in the White House and Republicans will control both chambers of Congress, the Supreme Court and 32 state legislatures—25 of which will have Republicans at the helm of all three branches of government.
.. Much as segregationists had used fears of racially integrated bathrooms as a cudgel during the civil rights era, fear-mongering about the specter of transgender people—imagined by many small-town conservatives to be mostly perverts and deviants
.. “How many fathers are now going to be forced to go to the ladies’ room to make sure their little girls aren’t molested?”