Adding extra letters to the genetic code opens the possibility of making novel proteins. One such, a cancer drug, is now in development
Why Trump has spared Pelosi from his personal vitriol — so far
The president genuinely respects the incoming speaker, and needs her if he’s going to get anything done in the next two years. But the government shutdown is about to test his restraint.
Though she, too, has avoided public name-calling, it’s clear Pelosi doesn’t feel the same admiration for Trump. After a recent meeting at the White House, Pelosi returned to the Hill and questioned his manhood before a room full of House Democrats. She likened negotiating with him to getting sprayed by a skunk, and expressed exasperation that he is even president.
Pelosi’s allies say she doesn’t trust him, pointing to
- a tentative immigration compromise they reached in 2017 that she believes Trump backed out of. She’s noticed how
- he’s blamed Republican congressional leaders when his base decries spending bills, and
- upended their legislative plans with surprise tweets.
“Speaker Pelosi has a history of bipartisan accomplishments. … But the test for this president is figuring where he stands on issues from one day to the next,” said Nadeam Elshami, Pelosi’s former chief of staff.
Pelosi is also uncomfortable with Trump’s handling of facts — a big obstacle, in her mind, to cutting deals with him — and has occasionally called him out. During their first meeting after his inauguration, when Trump opened the gathering by bragging that he’d won more votes than Hillary Clinton, Pelosi was the only person in the room to correct him, noting that his statement was false and he’d lost the popular vote.
Since then, Pelosi has tried to correct Trump privately, her allies say. She doesn’t like fighting in public, they added, and it was one of the main reasons she tried, in vain, to end the sparring match over border wall funding that unfolded on TV live from the West Wing last month.
Sources close to Pelosi say she’s willing to work with Trump despite her party’s total rejection of him. Her confidants note that when Pelosi first became speaker in 2007, some Democrats were calling for the impeachment of President George W. Bush over the invasion in Iraq. Pelosi ignored them and went on to strike major deals with Bush, including a bank bailout and stimulus package in response to the 2008 financial meltdown.
“They became friends,” said Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.), a Pelosi confidant. For the incoming speaker, “It’s always about: Can you get things done? There are always going to be different points of view. How do we overcome them to get to a conclusion?”
Pelosi allies say as long as Trump is willing to compromise on Democratic priorities, she’ll work with him, too. But with the shutdown dragging into Pelosi’s takeover on Jan. 3, there’s a serious question about whether the two can make any headway.
On New Year’s Day, Trump and Pelosi exchanged words on Twitter over the shutdown — relatively mild ones, especially by Trump’s standards — in a sign of the tense days and weeks ahead.
“I think the president respects her and wants to work with her … Their personalities would lend themselves to strike deals,” Short said. “But I don’t know if Democrats will allow it. … She’s going to have so many members who will object to any transaction or communication with the president, that it puts her in a tight spot.”
It’s just as unclear whether Trump is willing to risk the wrath of his base by compromising with Pelosi. Just as he did on immigration, promising a “bill of love” to protect Dreamers from deportation, Trump privately told Pelosi after their contentious televised negotiation session that he wants to make a deal with her. Even after news that she’d questioned his masculinity went viral, he called her that afternoon to reiterate: We can work together to avert a shutdown.
But that was more than three weeks ago. The two haven’t spoken since.
Elizabeth Warren’s generic drugs plan: More placebo than cure
In theory, generic markets should be the Walmart of the health-care world, where everything is dirt cheap and readily available. In practice, the makers of branded drugs often display a malevolent ingenuity at keeping generic competition at bay. And even when they play fair, a number of factors, including tighter safety regulation and more complex formulas, often means that too few firms enter the market.
.. Lots of drugs, especially those used by only a smaller number of patients, have at best a handful of firms producing them. So if one company has production problems — or decides to withdraw from the market entirely — supply contracts dangerously, as prices shoot skyward.
.. you don’t get to be president by saying “The FDA is working on it.” No, you call for action! Specifically, Warren wants the federal government to get into the business of manufacturing drugs or contracting with third parties to do the production.
.. One can describe all sorts of reasons that state-owned firms ought to be better than the profit-grubbing variety. Freed from the incessant demands of greedy investors, state-directed firms can invest for the long term, pursuing innovation and social welfare rather than profit.
One can describe it easily enough; what’s hard is finding one of these creatures in the wild. Rather than providing a shining rebuke to free-market fundamentalists, state-owned enterprises (SOEs) often seem to have a secret mandate to prove their skeptics right about everything.
.. There are examples of well-run SOEs, but they’re suspiciously concentrated in one tiny patch of northern Europe where government institutions more generally outperform counterparts in the rest of the world. And even high-performing SOEs are vulnerable to a change in administration. PDVSA, Venezuela’s state-run oil company, used to be regarded as one of the best in its class. Then Hugo Chávez decided that he would rather use the company’s investment funds for social spending than for stodgy old petroleum extraction, and rather have the firm managed by cronies than professionals. Venezuela’s disastrous economic collapse can be traced directly to those decisions.
.. President Trump’s election has finally nullified the conservative shibboleth that Washington could be fixed if only we could get a businessman into the Oval Office to show all those government chair-warmers how a real organization does things. Unfortunately, the left is busy reviving its own shibboleth, the mirror image of the conservative mistake: that whenever markets frustrate us, the government can and should step in and do it better. Nationalize the health-care system, bring back public housing development … and if you don’t like the price or availability of various drugs, then have the feds become drug-makers, too.
.. This idea is particularly silly given that so many of the problems that make it harder for generic drug-makers to enter the market are created by government regulations in the first place. Unless the government enterprise bypasses the regulatory hurdles constraining supply, it will face much the same difficulties that private firms do.
And if the government is going to relax regulatory requirements, wouldn’t it make more sense to just retool the way the market works for everyone?
Well, yes, it would, if what you wanted to do was actually fix the problem. But that involves a lot of fiddly, boring, regulatory tweaks and can’t possibly happen fast enough to aid Warren’s run for president. It’s unsurprising that Warren has instead hit upon what I call a “Washington issue” — a proposal with little policy merit that nonetheless retains great political charm because it can be explained to voters in under two sentences. Which may be good enough for a presidential candidate. But it’s not nearly good enough for the country.
Could an Amy Klobuchar Solve Democrats’ Dilemma?
They seek a presidential candidate who appeals to both their liberal coastal base and to Midwestern working- and middle-class voters
When asked recently who Republicans should fear most in the 2020 presidential campaign, two prominent GOP figures, both women speaking independently of each other, gave the same response: Sen. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota.A third Republican, a male, asked which kind of candidate Democrats should want, replied: “They need a boring white guy from the Midwest.”
So, there you have it: The dream ticket of Amy Klobuchar and Sen. Sherrod Brown of Ohio. Case closed, cancel the primaries, on to the general election.
So if all that creates an opportunity for Democrats in 2020, here’s their dilemma: Can they pick a candidate who can blend the party’s conflicting impulses?
This may seem a long ways off, but the reality is that most Democrats thinking of running for president—and the number probably runs into the 20s—plan to make their decision over the next several weeks, so they can move out starting in early 2019.
.. The winning lottery ticket, of course, goes to somebody who can appeal to both. And that’s why Ms. Klobuchar’s name—and profile—attract attention. She’s a woman, obviously, which is important at a time when newly energized women are a growing force within the party. She pleased her party base in the hearings on the Supreme Court nomination of Brett Kavanaugh when she challenged him about his use of alcohol, but did so in a sufficiently calm and understated manner that she won an apology from Mr. Kavanaugh after he initially responded angrily.
.. She also won re-election this year with more than 60% of the vote in the one state Trump forces lost in 2016 but think they have a legitimate chance to flip their way in 2020.
.. The question is whether she or anyone can put together a policy agenda that pleases both party liberals, who are pushing for
- a Medicare-for-all health system,
- the demise of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement system and an
- aggressive new climate-change action plan, and more moderate Midwestern voters, who may be scared off by all of those things.
Ms. Klobuchar’s policy priorities may suggest a path. To address health care, the top priority of Democratic voters, she advocates a step-by-step approach, one that seeks to
- drive down prescription drug costs by opening the door to less-expensive drugs from Canada,
- protect and improve the Affordable Care Act, and
- expand health coverage by considering such steps as allowing more Americans to buy into the Medicare system.
.. She’s talked of a push to improve American infrastructure that would include expanding rural Americans’ access to broadband service, paying for it by rolling back some—though not all—of the tax cuts Republicans passed last year. She pushes for more vigorous antitrust enforcement, more protections for privacy and steps to curb undisclosed money in politics
.. For his part, Sen. Brown, a liberal who this year won Ohio as it otherwise drifts Republican, offers a working-class-friendly agenda that combines progressive impulses for government activism to drive up wages with Trumpian skepticism about trade deals and corporate outsourcing.