Why is Ryancare so sick? In short, it’s a House bill written under Senate rules.
.. Under the Congressional Budget and Impoundment Act of 1974, the reconciliation process would allow Senate Republicans to avoid a Democratic filibuster and repeal and replace Obamacare with a simple 51-vote majority. Nonetheless, the House GOP-leadership bill excludes popular, important, conservative measures because Democrats might try to disqualify them for having a “merely incidental” budget impact.
.. Cruz added: “And even if the parliamentarian arrived upon that erroneous interpretation of the statutory language, the Budget Act of 1974 gives the authority to resolve this question to the vice president of the United States, Mike Pence.”
.. If a Trump-backed House bill guaranteed every illegal alien a free weekly visit to the doctor of his choice, Democrats would explode in rage: “Racists!” they would erupt. “Trump is Satan and the Republicans are his demons! Weekly medical visits? Why not daily? And how dare these Nazis deny undocumented employees the pleasure of house calls?”
.. If the parliamentarian agrees with the Democrats, however, Vice President Pence can ignore her advice and rule the bill in order. If so, Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer of New York may attempt to overturn Pence’s decision with a three-fifths majority. Schumer would need to rally all 48 Senate Democrats and twelve Republican senators to reach 60 votes.
.. Ryancare and its discontents could demolish the prospects for securing a 60-seat, filibuster-proof GOP Senate majority. Even worse, Republicans could shrink or even sink their House majority, perhaps returning Nancy Pelosi to the speaker’s chair. It is unfathomable that two months into a unified Republican government, such a nightmare scenario is being discussed. And yet it is, all because the highly intelligent, truly diligent, and dangerously cautious Paul Ryan has fallen victim to a virus that makes him think like a Senate Democrat.
Sam Waterston: The danger of Trump’s constant lying
In 1999 I gave a talk at one of the last bipartisan congressional retreats, using what I had learned preparing to play Abraham Lincolnto warn against faction, partisanship’s original name. The founders knew partisanship to be one of the few things powerful enough to destroy the great American democratic experiment.
.. The great issue of today is lying — constant lying in public. Lying is the ally of faction and, since President Trump’s rise to power, it is the greater danger. Yes, the word is lying — not negotiation, salesmanship, bluster, attention-getting, delusion, deception, braggadocio, exaggeration, bullying, alternative facts, or any other euphemism.
.. Trump has lied about climate change and the character and motives of refugees, about how asylum-seekers have been vetted in the past and how many have been able to enter the United States, about immigrants, and a long list of other matters. As with partisanship, the more lying there is, the worse it is. And Trump’s alternative facts have meant nasty real-world consequences.
.. Trump doesn’t lie about this and that, and he doesn’t lie sometimes. He is a liar, a person who lies. This news should be reported everywhere.
.. By the frequency of his lying, Trump has revealed a truth we have avoided confronting: Like partisanship, regular and habitual lying is an existential threat to us, to our institutions, our memories, our understanding of now and of the future, to the great American democratic experiment, and to the planet. It blurs the truth, subverts trust, interferes with thought, and destroys clarity. It drives us to distraction.
It’s impossible to overstate what is at stake. “I won,” says Trump truly, following it up with lies about landslides, voter fraud and crowd size.
Can Donald Trump Handle the Truth?
Debating crowd sizes may seem inconsequential and petty, and it is. But Mr. Trump was the one who had been unable to let go of the issue during his first week in office: On Thursday, The Washington Post reported that on the morning after he was sworn in, the president himself pressured the director of the National Park Service to locate more photos of the crowd in hopes of disproving news media accounts of its size. With behavior like this, Mr. Trump has reminded the nation of an essential truth about his personality: He sees what he wants to see, and nothing else.
.. Any information that challenges his worldview does not lead him to reconsider his beliefs; it “gets flushed down the sort of emotional and intellectual dispose-all that I think he carries around with him,” Timothy O’Brien, one of Mr. Trump’s biographers, told Politico recently.
.. We have had incurious presidents before, and they also displayed tremendous self-certainty. Yet even The Decider himself, George W. Bush, proved willing to rethink his views as contrary facts came to light — like the failure of Iraqis to garland American occupiers with flowers. Mr. Trump is not merely uninterested in facts; he repels them. In their place, he confects his own reality to feed his bottomless emotional and psychological needs. It is not America First, it is Donald Trump First, and always.
Paul Krugman’s Lack of Self-Awareness Is Truly Stunning
The claim that Bush “lied” is, frankly, unsupportable. There is no evidence that Bush took us to war believing that Saddam Hussein did not possess weapons of mass destruction. None. It’s the kind of blatantly absurd and destructive conspiracy-mongering that only men such as Paul Krugman or — Hey! — Donald Trump would spread.
.. No legitimacy to opponents,” huh? What he means is that he wants conservatives to recognize him as legitimate, even as he spits disgusting, historically illiterate bile at the GOP. Respect for me, but not for thee.