Esquire

The Republican Party Has Bowed, Completely, to the Mad King

They’re now running interference in the Russia probe and kissing the Trumpian ring.

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By Charles P. Pierce          December 21, 2017

After Wednesday’s extended carnival of sycophancy, in which the leaders of the institutions of American government did everything except toss a virgin into a volcano in tribute to the president*, it seems almost too obvious a thing to point out that the Republican Party has handed itself over to this president* as his personal chew-toy. They have figured out that flattering this walking ego is the way for them to get what they want, and he can’t live outside a constant bubble of counterfeit affection. It’s a marriage made several levels lower than heaven.

But there’s more to it than the revolting spectacle to which we were treated after the Loot the Joint Act of 2017 was passed. Over the past week, there has been a staggering welter of reporting about back-channels, hidden agendas, and covert shenanigans that makes the opaque creation of the tax bill look like a town meeting in Vermont. The phrase, “a small group of influential Republicans” has come to mean something very dark and crooked.

The inevitable assault on Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid is hardly a secret anymore. It’s the second stage of Paul Ryan’s grand plan, and everybody knows it. But there is a general effort now to prop up the administration*, especially as Robert Mueller and his hounds get to baying more audibly outside the wrought-iron fence. On Thursday morning, for example, Attorney General Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III, who previously recused himself from “all aspects” of the investigation into the Russian ratfcking of the 2016 presidential election, apparently has decided that the Uranium One “controversy” is not one of those aspects. From NBC News:

“A senior law enforcement official who was briefed on the initial FBI investigation told NBC News there were allegations of corruption surrounding the process under which the U.S. government approved the sale. But no charges were filed. As the New York Times reported in April 2015, some of the people associated with the deal contributed millions of dollars to the Clinton Foundation. And Bill Clinton was paid $500,000 for a Moscow speech by a Russian investment bank with links to the transaction. Hillary Clinton has denied playing any role in the decision by the State Department to approve the sale, and the State Department official who approved it has said Clinton did not intervene in the matter. That hasn’t stopped some Republicans, including President Trump, from calling the arrangement corrupt — and urging that Clinton be investigated”

(Here I would like once again to congratulate The New York Times for getting into bed with Bannonite apparatchik Peter Schweitzer, whose book-like product, Clinton Cash, jump-started all of this nonsense.)

At the same time, according to Politico, Devin Nunes, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee and midnight White House creeper, has been running a parallel “investigation” apparently aimed at pre-emptively discrediting whatever it is that Mueller finds:

“The people familiar with Nunes’ plans said the goal is to highlight what some committee Republicans see as corruption and conspiracy in the upper ranks of federal law enforcement. The group hopes to release a report early next year detailing their concerns about the DOJ and FBI, and they might seek congressional votes to declassify elements of their evidence. That final product could ultimately be used by Republicans to discredit special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into whether any Trump aides colluded with Russia during the 2016 campaign — or possibly even to justify his dismissal, as some rank-and-file Republicans and Trump allies have demanded. (The president has said he is not currently considering firing Mueller.) Republicans in the Nunes-led group suspect the FBI and DOJ have worked either to hurt Trump or aid his former campaign rival Hillary Clinton, a sense that has pervaded parts of the president’s inner circle. Trump has long called the investigations into whether Russia meddled in the 2016 election a “witch hunt,” and on Tuesday, his son Donald Trump Jr. told a crowd in Florida the probes were part of a “rigged system” by “people at the highest levels of government” who were working to hurt the president.”

There is an undercurrent of shared fantasy now driving a Republican Party that controls all the institutions of the government and can do pretty much anything it wants, as long as it doesn’t get in its own way, for which it also has something of a gift. It is armored in unreality, which protects it from all the checks and balances to which this system of government is heir. Clinton sold all our uranium to Russia. The FBI conspired with the Clinton campaign against the Trump campaign. And all this unreality is being weaponized now to one purpose: to protect the presidency* of Donald Trump.

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(Count me as someone who doesn’t believe that the president* will fire Mueller. Absent an uncontrollable fit of Trumpian pique, even I don’t think the president* is that stupid. I think the campaign to delegitimize Mueller and his investigation will go on as long as the investigation does. It will be said to be a waste of time and money. Smokescreens and squid ink will fly thick and fast until most of the country loses the plot entirely. The Russian ratfcking will be yet another something on which Experts Disagree. This was the game-plan the Reagan people used against Lawrence Walsh in Iran-Contra and, by and large, it worked. Of course, it all depends on sane people being able to keep this president* from having a nutty.)

I am sure that, among conservative intellectuals, there are some people sincerely and seriously opposed to the current president*. But among conservative Republican politicians of any influence, there are none. Bob Corker pretty much called the president* a lunatic, and now he’s profiting handsomely from being a performing seal like all the rest of them. Lindsey Graham is conceding putts at Bedminster and dreaming of being Secretary of State. Orrin Hatch may well be seen within the month, climbing up Mount Rushmore with a chisel between his teeth, ready to get to work. The Department of Justice is now acting as an adjunct to a Breitbart comment section.

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And the members of the responsible committee of the House are acting at cross-purposes with each other, with some members meeting secretly to undermine their own investigation. (The Senate committee seems marginally more reasonable, for now, anyway. At the very least, they found someone to put gunpowder in Mark Warner’s oatmeal.) There is no such thing as #NeverTrump among Republicans anymore, and, because of that, the essential destructive corruption that is the very nature of this presidency* now has spread so widely that rooting it out completely may well be impossible. There is the shadow of ruin hanging over everything.

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Politico

No, Trump Hasn’t “Essentially Repealed Obamacare”

Killing the mandate doesn’t gut the healthcare act. Most likely, it will muddle along, because the rest of it is broadly popular.

By  Michael Grunwald          December 20, 2017

In July and again in September, Republicans narrowly failed to repeal the Affordable Care Act. But their newly passed tax legislation included a provision getting rid of Obamacare’s mandate requiring Americans to buy insurance, and President Donald Trump immediately declared victory in the partisan health care wars. “When the individual mandate is being repealed, that means Obamacare is being repealed,” he crowed at a Cabinet meeting on Wednesday. “We have essentially repealed Obamacare.”

Well, no. The individual mandate is only part of Obamacare. It wasn’t even included in the original health care plan that Barack Obama unveiled during the 2008 campaign. The mandate did become an important element of Obamacare, and the only specific element that a majority of the public opposed. But the more generous elements of the program—like a major expansion of Medicaid, significant government subsidies for private insurance premiums, and strict protections for pre-existing conditions—are still popular, and still the law of the land.

“The death of Obamacare has been exaggerated,” says Larry Levitt, who oversees health reform studies at the Kaiser Family Foundation. “Eliminating the mandate creates uncertainty, but all the benefits for people remain in place.”

The Republican ecstasy and Democratic gloom over the death of the mandate reflects the most consistent misperception over the seven-plus years of Affordable Care Act debates, the incorrect assumption that the “Obamacare exchanges,” where Americans can buy private insurance, are synonymous with Obamacare. The vast majority of Americans who get their coverage through Medicare, Medicaid or their employers shouldn’t be affected. Yes, killing the mandate could cause problems for the remaining 6 percent of Americans who have to buy insurance on the open market, but nearly half will remain eligible for subsidies that would insulate them from any premium hikes.

Repealing the tax penalties for Americans who don’t buy insurance would not repeal Obamacare’s perks for Americans who do—like the ban on annual and lifetime caps that insurers previously used to cut off coverage for their sickest customers, or the provision allowing parents to keep their children on their plans until they turn 26. And it would not repeal Obamacare’s “delivery reforms” that are quietly transforming the financial incentives in the medical system, gradually shifting reimbursements to reward the quality rather than quantity of care. The growth of U.S. health care costs has slowed dramatically since the launch of Obamacare, and the elimination of the mandate should not significantly affect that trend.

In fact, during the 2008 campaign, Obama was the only Democratic candidate whose health plan did not include a mandate, because he was the only Democratic candidate who thought the main problem with health care was its cost. “It’s just too expensive,” he explained at an Iowa event in May 2007. Insurance premiums had almost doubled during the George W. Bush era, and Obama believed that was the reason so many Americans were uninsured. He doubted it would be worth the political heartburn to try to force people to buy insurance they couldn’t afford.

But Obama eventually embraced the argument that a mandate was necessary to ensure that young and healthy Americans bought insurance. The fear was that otherwise, insurance markets dominated by the old and sick (who would enjoy the law’s new protections for pre-existing conditions) would have produced even higher premiums, and might scare insurers away from serving Americans who don’t get coverage through their jobs or the government. Killing the mandate will be a step in that direction, boosting Trump’s heighten-the-contradictions effort to sabotage the functioning of Obamacare to build support for a more sweeping repeal.

That effort has already produced some damaging results for the exchanges. Insurers have increased their premiums for 2018, repeatedly citing uncertainty over Trump’s efforts to blow up Obamacare as well as his decision to cut off promised payments to insurers who cover lower-income families. Several insurers left the exchanges even before the elimination of the mandate, and others could follow.

But the widespread warnings that wide swaths of America would have no insurers on the exchanges were wrong; there are zero “bare counties” with no insurers for 2018. And a Kaiser review found the exchanges have gotten more profitable for insurers this year,despite Trump’s efforts to damage them. This year’s enrollment period appears to have gone fairly well even though the Trump administration shortened it by half and slashed its promotional budget.

The fear is that eliminating the mandate could produce a “death spiral” for the exchanges, where higher premiums scare away healthier customers, leading to even higher premiums and even sicker customers—until eventually, the insurers decide to bail. It could also encourage insurers to try to lure healthier customers with cheaper but skimpier plans that don’t provide protections for pre-existing conditions, since those customers would no longer have to pay a tax penalty.

But it is also possible that younger and healthier customers who initially bought insurance because they were required to do so will now buy insurance because they want to; surveys show that more than 75 five percent of Americans covered on the exchanges are happy with their coverage. And as a political matter, repealing the unpopular mandate could make it even harder for Republicans to pass legislation repealing insurance protections, Medicaid expansions and the rest of Obamacare, because the rest of Obamacare is popular. It’s not surprising that Republicans managed to kill the law’s vegetables, but it won’t be as easy to kill dessert.

Trump thinks congressional Democrats will soon be begging him to come up with a replacement for Obamacare, and even many Republicans who don’t embrace that fantasy believe the demise of the mandate will ratchet up pressure for a permanent solution to a seven-year political war. It could happen. But there hasn’t been a lot of bipartisanship in Washington lately, and after the Doug Jones upset in Alabama, it seems unlikely that a Senate with one fewer Republican will be more amenable to a Republican-only repeal bill.

The most likely outcome seems to be at least a few more years of Obamacare muddling through, and at least a few more years of Obamacare political warfare.