Philip Bump/WaPo:
When next year’s campaign rolls around, which ad would you like to see run in your district: one with Jimmy Kimmel crying as a narrator explains that you voted to weaken preexisting conditions, or one that shows a frustrated Trump railing against your opposition to the bill he decided to champion?
If you’re House Speaker Paul Ryan, how, without simply insisting on partisan loyalty, do you make the case that the former is the cost of doing business?
Sarah Kliff/Vox on why things stand the way they do, and an important read:
As former Republican Senate aide Chris Jacobs presciently described the situation in February, it appears legislators have split into two camps: “the repealers” and the “replacers.” Each faction took the part of the Republican slogan they liked, and clung to it.
There is little space for compromise between these two positions. Either the Republican replacement plan will let insurers charge sick people higher prices, or it won’t.
Statements like these have badly damaged Republican repeal efforts, not just because legislators have opposed the bill. Rather, their statements make clear the stark choice that Republicans face with this bill — either to allow insurers to charge higher premiums or not.
Jack Shafer/Politico:
For quality trash talk, bury yourself in an eye-gouging, loose-ball NFL pileup. Those who don’t play pro football? The next best alternative would be eavesdropping on the not-for-attribution quotations White House sources have been dishing to the press about other White House sources over the first 100 days of Baby Donald’s presidency. If this were theater, it would be the Grand Guignol. If it were a movie, it would be The Shining with blood bursting through White House elevator doors. If it were a 911 call, it would be the report of a murder…
If the anonymice don’t rip White Housers while they’re working there, they rip them on the way out. The door hit Sebastian Gorka firmly in the ass as he began his departure from the Trump administration over the weekend. A “White House source” told the Washington Examiner’s Sarah Westwood that Gorka had no real national security portfolio. His own known duties were “speaking on television about counterterrorism, as well as ‘giving White House tours and peeling out in his Mustang.’”
Anonymity makes all this gratuitous cruelty possible—in fact, nourishes it.
Great opening paragraph.
Amber Philips/WaPo:
In the meantime, a unified Democratic Party is getting much of what it wanted: Funding for Planned Parenthood; more money, not less, for domestic programs; and not a dime spent on building Trump’s wall. Oh, and Obamacare remains in place, and Trump will have to agree to pay subsidies to keep it alive.
Ben Terris/WaPo:
Jon Tester could teach Democrats a lot about rural America — if he can keep his Senate seat
“It’s hospitals like that out here in rural America that will close down if we don’t look out for them,” the second-term Democrat said recently from his Montana farm. “If you tack on another 35 miles on that trip, who knows, I could be dead.”
Tester is now 60. He’s close to 300 pounds and has sports a flat-top haircut. He works the land his parents and grandparents worked before him. He still uses the same meat grinder.
The Hill:
Schumer’s hardball tactics sent a message: he and his colleagues were dead serious about pulling out all the stops to fight Trump. It gave him leverage in the recent spending talks, since Republicans had little doubt Schumer would force a shutdown if they didn’t back off their demands.
“We made it clear that if the government shut down it would be on the Republicans’ backs,” Schumer told reporters at the Capitol Monday. “That became the general consensus and that gave us real leverage even though we were in the minority to get things done.”
Fearing a shutdown would delay tax reform and derail any hopes of reviving healthcare reform legislation, Republicans abandoned Trump’s request to fund construction of a border wall as well as various riders to loosen environmental and financial regulations.
Schumer was exultant, touting it as “a very good deal for the American people.”
He sees the budget as a roadmap for upcoming talks on other major issues.
Chuck Schumer ain’t the perfect progressive. Wall Street is his constituency. But he knows his job.
Robert P.Jones/NY Times:
The profoundness of the American experiment, [G. K. Chesterton] argued, was that it aspired to create “a home out of vagabonds and a nation out of exiles” united by voluntary assent to commonly held political beliefs.
But recent survey data provides troubling evidence that a shared sense of national identity is unraveling, with two mutually exclusive narratives emerging along party lines. At the heart of this divide are opposing reactions to changing demographics and culture. The shock waves from these transformations — harnessed effectively by Donald Trump’s campaign — are reorienting the political parties from the more familiar liberal-versus-conservative alignment to new poles of cultural pluralism and monism.
An Associated Press-NORC poll found nearly mirror-opposite partisan reactions to the question of what kind of culture is important for American identity. Sixty-six percent of Democrats, compared with only 35 percent of Republicans, said the mixing of cultures and values from around the world was extremely or very important to American identity. Similarly, 64 percent of Republicans, compared with 32 percent of Democrats, saw a culture grounded in Christian religious beliefs as extremely or very important.
These divergent orientations can also be seen in a recent poll by P.R.R.I. that explored partisan perceptions of which groups are facing discrimination in the country. Like Americans overall, large majorities of Democrats believe minority groups such as African-Americans, immigrants, Muslims and gay and transgender people face a lot of discrimination in the country. Only about one in five Democrats say that majority groups such as Christians or whites face a lot of discrimination.
Republicans, on the other hand, are much less likely than Democrats to believe any minority group faces a lot of discrimination, and they believe Christians and whites face roughly as much discrimination as immigrants, Muslims and gay and transgender people. Moreover, only 27 percent of Republicans say blacks experience a lot of discrimination, while 43 percent say whites do and 48 percent say the same of Christians.
Xpostfactoid:
As I've noted before, interviewers have picked up a good deal of Medicaid envy among Trump voters, including those enrolled in ACA Marketplace plans, often on the wrong side of the ACA's deductible cliff at 200% FPL. It seems that many people would accept Medicaid's narrow networks in exchange for minimal cost-sharing.
All of which reinforces my conviction that the ACA marketplace should be structured basically as managed-Medicaid-plus, like the Basic Health Programs established under the ACA by Minnesota and New York for people in the 138-200% FPL income range. Why not allow a phased buy-in, with proportionate cost sharing and age-rating, for people at any income level who lack access to employer-sponsored or other insurance?
If these low-cost exchanges became a genuine fallback for the middle class, as the marketplace now is for the working poor (with low cost-sharing up to 200% FPL), I believe that the networks would gradually widen, with hopefully-finite upward pressure on provider payment rates, perhaps settling a bit below or at Medicare levels. As takeup and acceptance grew, the next step would be to allow employer buy-in, as a 2009 New York proposal for something very like the BHP the state later founded envisioned.
Medicaid-for-all-who-need-it, gradually swallowing the healthcare system. That, incidentally, is the only way Trump -- as his buddy Christopher Ruddy has recognized -- can fulfill his healthcare promises.
Texas Tribune:
State's failures led to voter ID problems in 2016
Texas' efforts to enact and enforce the strictest voter ID law in the nation were so plagued by delays, revisions, court interventions and inadequate education that the casting of ballots in the 2016 election was inevitably troubled.
Brian Beutler/TNR:
Do Republicans Really Want Donald Trump Running Health Care in Their Name?
If Republicans in Congress send Trump a bill, they won’t simply be replacing Obamacare with Trumpcare. They will be entrusting the administration of a major federal program to a man who won’t understand the most basic facts about the legislation he is signing.
Keep in mind Rs have a built in advantage over Ds on health care. Leadership doesn't care what the final product is. But it's still failing.
Dave Leonhardt/Upshot:
School Vouchers Aren’t Working, but Choice Is
Students using vouchers to attend a private school did worse on math and reading than similar students in public school, the study found. It comes after other studies, in Ohio and elsewhere, have also shown weak results for vouchers.
To channel President Trump: Who knew that education could be so complicated?
The question for DeVos is whether she’s an ideologue committed to prior beliefs regardless of facts or someone who has an open mind. But that question doesn’t apply only to DeVos. It also applies to all of us trying to think about education, including her critics. And the results from Washington are important partly because they defy easy ideological conclusions.
Before diving into those results, I want to make two broader points. First, education isn’t just another issue. It is the most powerful force for accelerating economic growth, reducing poverty and lifting middle-class living standards. Well-educated adults earn much more, live longer and are happier than poorly educated adults. When researchers try to tease out whether education does much to cause these benefits, the answer appears to be yes.
Jennifer Rubin/WaPo:
Why the GOP health-care bill looks like a loser — again
This confirms a few observations, none of which bodes well for House Republicans.
First, the decision to allow states to opt out of the community rating provision (in effect, allowing insurers to charge people with preexisting conditions more) is a big deal that unnerved many House members. For moderates, the change made the bill worse. And, as Long suggests, it may not have helped keep mainstream Republicans together. The way these things work is that a prominent defection usually spurs a flood more.