We begin today’s roundup with the latest developments on Republican attempts to strip affordable health insurance from millions of Americans. First up, Russell Berman at The Atlantic:
There remains a slim possibility that in the next few days, Senate Republicans will pass the health-care proposal known as Graham-Cassidy, the legislation that party leaders have described as their “last, best chance” to substantially repeal the Affordable Care Act.
But for that to happen, the bill’s champions would have to win back the vote of at least one of the three Republicans who have signaled their opposition. They’d have to persuade multiple others to abandon their previously stated positions on the sanctity of protections for people with preexisting conditions. And they’d have to lock down still more Republicans who balked on Monday at changes to the legislation that were made expressly to secure their support.
Paul Kane at The Washington Post:
The process of making legislative sausage on Capitol Hill has never been pretty, but the effort to repeal the ACA has stretched the limits of congressional norms — and given lawmakers hesitant to support the controversial GOP health-care proposal an excuse to back away. [...]
McConnell then spoke of the legislation as if it were already defeated, thanking the committee staff who had been involved in the process through its many phases.
“I’d like to thank them all for their dedicated work,” McConnell said.
He then moved on to a discussion about labor-law disputes.
Meanwhile, David Graham at The Atlantic calls out White House staff for their hypocrisy in using private email:
[I]t takes a special sort of hypocrisy, or dark sense of humor, or lack of self-awareness for Trump’s daughter and son-in-law to do this after watching a race in which Donald Trump campaigned for, and arguably won, the presidency because of Clinton’s imprudent decision to use the private email server. She was cleared by the FBI and the Justice Department of any crimes, though then-FBI Director James Comey called her “extremely careless” with classified information. It was the political sin of looking like she had something to hide, and was trying hard to hide it, that stuck to Clinton. Somehow, Kushner and Trump still decided to set up their own family server, and no one convinced them it was a bad idea.
This is only the latest example of the Trump administration committing the very sins for which it crucified its political opponents. Trump assailed Barack Obama for taking vacations and playing golf too frequently; Trump vacations, and he plays golf more often than Obama. Trump assailed Obama for laying down red lines and not enforcing them; Trump keeps doing the same. Trump accused Obama of dividing the nation and of distancing America from its closest allies; Trump is a virtuosic divider, and frequently at odds with allied leaders. Trump vigorously attacked Clinton for having a private email account; a handful of his top advisers did the same.
The Daily Beast looks at Trump’s undermining of Mitch McConnell:
The Trump White House is gearing up to lay blame for a series of likely failures this week squarely at the feet of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY), according to sources in and outside of the administration. [...]
One senior Trump administration official told The Daily Beast that the president is “well prepared to” shovel blame onto McConnell if and when the latest Obamacare repeal effort goes down in flames later this week. Another Trump confidant noted that the president regularly vents about “Mitch’s” seeming inability to get “anything over the finish line.”
Damon Linker argues that liberals are playing into Trump’s hands on the NFL protests:
He may say that he wants America to come together and unify in pursuit of making the country “great again.” But his words almost always have the opposite effect — not because the electorate preemptively hates him, but because he continually says and does things seemingly designed to antagonize large segments of the country and therefore increase its polarization.
Instead of acting to bring the country together, Trump intentionally seeks to divide it.
Trump's true predecessor in this regard was another right-wing populist, George Wallace, whose 1968 third-party presidential campaign practiced a politics of anger, hatred, contempt, resentment, and yes, of course, blatant racism. Like Wallace, Trump uses inflammatory insults to provide his angry supporters with a catharsis — and to provoke his political opponents into lashing back. When they do, it serves to vindicate the original insult. That's how deliberately sowing divisiveness can be a political boon.
Here’s Michael Scherer’s take:
As a businessman, Donald Trump erected unauthorized flagpoles on his properties to embarrass local officials who were trying to uphold zoning ordinances. As a presidential candidate, he told the first football player who sat in protest during the national anthem to “find another country.” And as president-elect, he attempted unsuccessfully to revive the decades-old debate about the constitutionality of flag burning, after a single incident at a small college in Massachusetts.
So when he decided, out of the blue, to attack the National Football League over its players’ protests during the national anthem, the resulting controversy followed a well-worn formula. What was different, however, was the enormous backlash that his comments created — far larger than any of those previous incidents combined.
John Nichols:
No national political figure since former Alabama governor and frequent presidential contender George Wallace has played the race card so frequently and so aggressively as Trump has since he announced his candidacy for the Republican presidential nomination in 2015. The president’s default response to tough political circumstances is to stir divisions that he hopes will inflame and energize his base. If that happens, he calculates, they will do his political bidding.
This explains the president’s weekend obsession with the exercise of First Amendment rights by African-American football players and their allies. Trump is trying to win an election. Not his own election, mind you. But an election that matters a great deal to his presidency.
Alabama Republicans will nominate a Senate candidate to replace Attorney General Jeff Sessions, a man whose record of working to divide Alabama, and the nation, along lines of race and ethnicity is as haunting as it is wicked. Sessions and Trump may not get along as well as they did in the days when the former senator played a critical role in winning the South for the Republican presidential contender. But Trump desperately wants to make sure that the man who replaces Sessions is an ally—or, at the very least, a Republican. As the current wrangling over ACA repeal and replacement illustrates, the president cannot afford to lose a Republican seat.
On a final note, at The Week, Jeff Spross writes about saving Puerto Rico:
The bitter perversity is that the solution to both problems — fixing the damage from both the debt crisis and hurricane — is simple: Just spend the money necessary to repair Puerto Rico's society. All that stands in the way are policy myths, economic ignorance, and blinkered ideologies. [...] Over the long term, Puerto Rico should be made a U.S. state. But in the short term, the federal government needs to step in and spend the money necessary to rebuild the island.