The Republicans are in Charge? The Challenges- the budget, DACA, keeping the government open. Trump clarifies all by noting that despite the GOP controlling the branches of government, a shutdown would be the Democrats’ fault. Republicans are now trying to entice Democrats into a deal by including funding for Children’s Health Insurance (CHIP). [Why not just fund CHIP?] And McConnell conveys that he won’t push for anything till he understands what Trump wants, but we know knowledge-free, ideology-free Trump hasn’t a clue.
Thomas Kaplan, Robert Pear:
With little hope of an immigration agreement this week, Republicans in Congress are looking to head off a government shutdown this weekend by pairing another stopgap spending measure with long-term funding for the popular Children’s Health Insurance Program, daring Democrats to vote no.
The bill would leave in limbo hundreds of thousands of young immigrants brought to the country illegally as children. But Democrats would still be left with a difficult political decision: withhold their votes unless the plight of such immigrants, known as Dreamers, is addressed and risk a government shutdown, or vote to keep the government open and fund the Children’s Health Insurance Program, which provides coverage for nearly nine million children.
The bill would set up another possible showdown in mid-February, with government funding set to expire Feb. 16. But it would give lawmakers time to continue negotiations on immigration and long-term government funding levels. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/16/us/politics/government-shutdown-immigration-childrens-health.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=first-column-region®ion=top-news&WT.nav=top-news
Ben Jacobs:
Capitol Hill edged closer to a potential shutdown on Wednesday, as Republicans struggled to come up with a bill to keep the government open past a funding deadline on Friday.
Democrats have long insisted that they will not support any legislation to further fund the government unless protections are added for the “Dreamers”, undocumented immigrants who were brought to the United States as children. An Obama-era program that protected them from deportation was cancelled by the Trump administration last year, and is set to expire on 5 March.
A potential compromise on the program, negotiated by a bipartisan group of senators, was vetoed in a White House meeting last week in which Donald Trump reportedly disparaged a number of nations as “shithole countries”. The resulting impasse forced Republicans to introduce a short-term bill, instead, which would keep the government open for one month, repeal several taxes, and renew the Children’s Health Insurance Program (Chip) for six years, a top Democratic priority.
…as Congress points towards yet another round of brinkmanship over keeping the government open, lawmakers are growing frustrated with the process.
“A lot of Americans are scratching their heads and saying we didn’t know the Jerry Springer show was in syndication, what’s going on up there,” said Senator John Kennedy, a Republican from Louisiana. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/jan/17/us-government-shutdown-looms-as-republicans-struggle-to-pitch-bill
Trump-Russia: Bannon agrees to share with Mueller, in a private chat with investigators, avoiding the grand jury.
Betsy Woodruff:
Former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon broke some bad news to House investigators Tuesday, announcing that the White House had invoked executive privilege to keep him from answering many of their questions.
But executive privilege—the president’s right to keep certain information from the public so he can have frank conversations with aides—will not keep Steve Bannon from sharing information with special counsel Robert Mueller’s team, according to a person familiar with the situation.
“Mueller will hear everything Bannon has to say,” said the source, who is familiar with Bannon’s thinking.
During a closed-door hearing before the House Intelligence Committee on Tuesday, Bannon reportedly told lawmakers that President Donald Trump has invoked broad executive privilege for the purposes of congressional inquiries. Because of that, Bannon refused to answer committee members’ questions about what happened during the presidential transition and in the White House.
This sweeping understanding of privilege will not affect what Bannon tells Mueller’s team, according to our source. (To be sure, Bannon isn’t known for being predictable, and it’s possible his team may still look for ways to dodge Mueller’s queries.) https://www.thedailybeast.com/steve-bannon-will-tell-all-to-robert-mueller-source-says?ref=home
Another Sign of a coming ‘Wave’? Democrat’s win in a Wisconsin Republican-leaning district alarms Ryan and Governor Walker, encourages Democrats.
A Democrat’s victory in a special election to fill a vacant seat in the Wisconsin state Legislature is “a wake-up call for Republicans in Wisconsin,” Gov. Scott Walker wrote on Twitter on Tuesday night.
The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel reported that Patty Schachtner, a Democrat, was victorious in Tuesday’s special election for Wisconsin’s 10th Senate District, a Republican-learning district in the northwest part of the state along the Minnesota border. The seat had previously been filled by Sheila Harsdorf, who resigned last November after 17 years in office to join Walker’s administration as Wisconsin’s secretary of agriculture.
…The victory by Schachtner in a Republican-leaning state Senate district could prove another warning sign for the GOP of a potential Democratic wave, sparked by animosity toward President Donald Trump, that many have predicted in this year’s 2018 midterm elections. Already, Democrats have won a Senate seat in deep-red Alabama and performed well above expectations across Virginia state Legislature races. https://www.politico.com/story/2018/01/17/scott-walker-wisconsin-patty-schachtner-win-343237
If a Cyber Attack on the U.S.- the Pentagon considers a nuclear response. In other words, we would initiate nuclear war.
David Sanger, William Broad:
A newly drafted United States nuclear strategy that has been sent to President Trump for approval would permit the use of nuclear weapons to respond to a wide range of devastating but non-nuclear attacks on American infrastructure, including what current and former government officials described as the most crippling kind of cyberattacks.
For decades, American presidents have threatened “first use” of nuclear weapons against enemies in only very narrow and limited circumstances, such as in response to the use of biological weapons against the United States. But the new document is the first to expand that to include attempts to destroy wide-reaching infrastructure, like a country’s power grid or communications, that would be most vulnerable to cyberweapons.
The draft document, called the Nuclear Posture Review, was written at the Pentagon and is being reviewed by the White House. Its final release is expected in the coming weeks and represents a new look at the United States’ nuclear strategy. The draft was first published last week by HuffPost.
It called the strategic picture facing the United States quite bleak, citing not only Russian and Chinese nuclear advances but advances made by North Korea and, potentially, Iran. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/16/us/politics/pentagon-nuclear-review-cyberattack-trump.html?ref=todayspaper
The Quiet Sabotaging of the ACA/Obamacare, even though the law is increasingly popular and a majority of Republicans hold favorable views of Medicaid and want it maintained, even strengthened.
Catherine Rampell:
Unable to roll back Obamacare’s health-care expansion legislatively, they’re now doing so administratively, through a series of technical, boring-sounding regulatory changes.
This GOP effort ramped up last week, when the Trump administration began allowing states to erect new barriers to Medicaid eligibility.
In the half-century since Medicaid was first created, eligibility has always been based almost entirely on financial circumstances such as income and assets; the program’s goal, after all, was to help less-well-off Americans obtain medical care. Last week, though, the Trump administration announced that it would start allowing states to impose other requirements on Medicaid recipients, including proof that they are working, looking for work, volunteering or in school.
“I was raised with a mind-set to work, give an honest day’s work for an honest day’s pay,” Kentucky Gov. Matt Bevin (R) said at a news conference announcing that his state was the first to receive a waiver allowing Medicaid work requirements. “It’s the very same thinking that we want to bring to people here in Kentucky that are able to participate.”
But there’s no reason to think, in Kentucky or other states itching to add work requirements, that there are legions of Medicaid loafers. Nearly 8 in 10 Medicaid-enrolled nonelderly adults already live in working families, and most (60 percent) are working themselves, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation. Most who are not working report major impediments to their ability to get a job, such as illness, disability, school enrollment or caregiving responsibilities.
But that won’t necessarily protect eligible low-income people from being kicked off Medicaid rolls anyway.
Verifying that beneficiaries meet work requirements will impose a huge and costly new administrative burden on states, and also on the working poor. As the Trump administration letter approving Kentucky’s work requirements acknowledged, the state’s Medicaid phone lines are already overwhelmed. If working Kentuckians are unable to cut through the red tape, they can get locked out of the system for six months. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/trump-is-hoping-you-wont-notice-his-backdoor-repeal-of-obamacare/2018/01/15/aa33f968-fa3b-11e7-8f66-2df0b94bb98a_story.html?hpid=hp_no-name_opinion-card-e%3Ahomepage%2Fstory&utm_term=.4a4be3a05eb1
GOP Tax Cut: Getting More Popular
Americans are warming to the Republican tax law, and becoming more confident in the economy as a whole. They just aren’t sure that President Trump deserves much credit.
The tax overhaul that Mr. Trump signed into law just before Christmas remains relatively unpopular and highly polarizing, according to a new poll conducted for The New York Times by SurveyMonkey. But support for the law has grown significantly over the past month, and more Americans believe that they will receive a tax cut. Forty-six percent of Americans strongly or somewhat approved of the law in early January, up from 37 percent when the bill was nearing passage in December. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/16/business/economy/tax-economy-survey.html?ref=todayspaper
Maybe people are happy for the banks?
The nation’s banks are finding a lot to love about the Trump administration’s tax cuts.
The $1.5 trillion tax overhaul signed into law late last year provided deep and lasting tax cuts to all types of businesses, but financial institutions are among the biggest winners so far, reaping benefits from a lower corporate rate and more preferable tax treatment for so-called pass-through companies, which include many small banks.
While some of the biggest banks are reporting fourth-quarter earnings hits stemming from the new tax law, they see rich benefits over the long term, including effective tax rates that are even lower than the new 21 percent corporate rate. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/16/us/politics/banks-are-big-winners-from-tax-cut.html?ref=todayspaper
Is Net Neutrality Being Saved?
Fifty senators have endorsed a legislative measure to override the Federal Communications Commission’s recent decision to deregulate the broadband industry, top Democrats said Monday.
The tally leaves supporters just one Republican vote shy of the 51 required to pass a Senate resolution of disapproval, in a legislative gambit aimed at restoring the agency’s net neutrality rules.
Those rules, which banned Internet providers from blocking or slowing down websites, were swept away in a December vote led by Republican FCC Chairman Ajit Pai. Republicans had argued that the rules were too restrictive for industry, while Democrats said they provided a vital consumer protection.
The resolution aims to overturn the FCC’s decision and prohibit the agency from passing similar measures in the future. It has the support of all 49 Democratic senators as well as one Republican, Sen. Susan Collins of Maine.
“With full caucus support,” said Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.), one of the lawmakers spearheading the effort, “it’s clear that Democrats are committed to fighting to keep the Internet from becoming the Wild West where ISPs are free to offer premium service to only the wealthiest customers while average consumers are left with far inferior options.” https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2018/01/15/the-senates-push-to-overrule-the-fcc-on-net-neutrality-now-has-50-votes-democrats-say/?hpid=hp_hp-top-table-main_fcc-815pm%3Ahomepage%2Fstory&utm_term=.1ed82eabc115
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