Category: Labor and Working

Senate Republicans set to release health-care bill, but divisions remain

Washington Post, Power Post

Senate Republicans set to release health-care bill, but divisions remain

By Paige Winfield Cunningham, Juliet Eilperin and Sean Sullivan, June 21, 2017

Senate Republicans on Thursday plan to release a health-care bill that would curtail federal Medicaid funding, repeal taxes on the wealthy and eliminate funding for Planned Parenthood as part of an effort to fulfill a years-long promise to undo Barack Obama’s signature health-care law.

The bill is an attempt to strike a compromise between existing law and a bill passed by the House in May as Republicans struggle to advance their vision for the country’s health-care system even though they now control both chambers of Congress and the White House.

The Senate proposal largely mirrors the House measure with significant differences, according to a discussion draft circulating Wednesday among aides and lobbyists. While the House legislation would peg federal insurance subsidies to age, the Senate bill would link them to income, as the Affordable Care Act does. The Senate proposal would cut off expanded Medicaid funding for states more gradually than the House bill but would enact deeper long-term cuts to the health-care program for low-income Americans. It also would eliminate House language aimed at prohibiting federally subsidized health plans from covering abortions, a provision that may run afoul of complex Senate budget rules.

But on the eve of the bill’s release, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) faced the prospect of an open revolt from key conservative and moderate GOP senators, whose concerns he has struggled to balance in recent weeks. Republicans familiar with the effort said Senate leaders have more work to do to secure the 50 votes needed to pass the measure, with Vice President Pence set to cast the tiebreaking vote, from the pool of 52 GOP senators. No Democrats are expected to support the bill.

Republican aides stressed that the plan is likely to undergo more changes to secure the votes needed for passage, but there were major concerns Wednesday from senators on opposite ends of the GOP spectrum.

“My main concern is I promised voters that I would repeal — vote to repeal Obamacare. And everything I hear sounds like Obamacare-lite,” said Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.).

Sen. Shelley Moore Capito (R-W.Va.), whose state expanded Medicaid and has been pushing for a more gradual unwinding of that initiative than many conservatives prefer, said she is waiting to scrutinize what is released but has not seen anything yet that would make her drop her concerns with the proposal.

“Up to this point, I don’t have any new news — tomorrow we will see it definitively — that would cause me to change that sentiment,” she said.

Like the House bill, the Senate measure is expected to make big changes to Medicaid, the program that insures about 74 million elderly and lower-income Americans and was expanded in most states under the ACA. In effect, the revisions would reduce federal spending on the program.

The Senate measure would transform Medicaid from an open-ended entitlement to one in which federal funding would be distributed to states on a per-capita basis. The Senate measure would also seek to phase out the program’s expansion — although at a more gradual rate than the House version.

Yet the Senate bill is expected go further than the House version in its approach to cutting Medicaid funding in the future. In 2025, the measure would tie federal spending on the program to an even slower growth index than the one used in the House bill. That move could prompt states to reduce the size of their Medicaid programs.

That provision, a nod to conservative lawmakers led by Sen. Patrick J. Toomey (R-Pa.), risks alienating moderates, including Capito and Sen. Rob Portman (R-Ohio), who also represents a state that expanded Medicaid under the ACA. Some Republicans worry that such a move would force states to cut services or coverage, potentially leaving millions of low-income people without sufficient health care.

The growth rate that is applied to Medicaid spending going forward has major implications, said Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine). “That inflater is critical, because it translates into billions of dollars over time,” she said.

Portman and Capito have also been pushing for the inclusion of a $45 billion fund to treat and prevent opioid addiction. As of early Wednesday afternoon, the opioid money was not included in McConnell’s proposal, according to a top GOP senator and Senate aide familiar with the discussions.

“I don’t think there is right now,” Senate Finance Committee Chairman Orrin G. Hatch (R-Utah) said when asked whether the legislation includes a distinct opioid fund. “It might have to be considered separately.”

But Portman and Capito, like all senators, will have a chance to introduce amendments to the bill when it heads to the Senate floor, which McConnell said is likely to happen next week. This process will allow senators to draw attention to the causes they have championed and potentially change the final bill.

Moderates who are on the fence about whether to support the Obamacare overhaul are likely to be pleased at the bill’s approach to insurance subsidies because they would be based on financial need, potentially preserving coverage for more people who got insurance under the ACA.

Subsidies are currently available to Americans earning between 100 percent and 400 percent of the federal poverty level. Starting in 2020, that threshold would be lowered to 350 percent under the Senate bill — but anyone below that line could get the subsidies if they’re not eligible for Medicaid.

That provision, said Larry Levitt, senior vice president for special initiatives at the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation, would be “a real benefit to poor people in states that don’t expand Medicaid.”

In a move that will please the health-care industry, the draft also proposes repealing all of the ACA taxes except for its “Cadillac tax” on high-cost health plans in language similar to the House version. Senators had previously toyed with the idea of keeping some of the ACA’s taxes.

It would also eliminate Medicaid reimbursements for Planned Parenthood for one year. Federal law already prevents taxpayer funding to pay for abortions except to save the life of the woman or in the case of rape or incest. But some Republicans want to ban all federal funding for Planned Parenthood, which also provides health services such as birth control, because their clinics provide abortion services.

Like the House measure, the Senate bill would eliminate two central requirements of the current health-care law: that individuals provide proof of insurance when filing their annual tax returns and that companies with 50 or more employees provide health coverage for their workers.

In a move that is critical to insurers, the Senate measure would continue to fund for two years cost-sharing subsidies that help 7 million Americans with ACA plans. House Republicans have challenged the legality of the $7 billion in subsidies — which help cover consumers’ deductibles and copays — in court, and insurers have warned that they will have to increase premiums dramatically next year unless the federal government commits to continuing the payments.

McConnell has told Republican senators that he wants to maintain protections for people with preexisting conditions under the law. But it was not clear to some lawmakers Wednesday what that would entail.

“I haven’t seen the draft yet. I like the idea of preexisting conditions being more firmly clarified,” Portman said.

Paul criticized GOP leaders for potentially keeping some of the ACA’s “most expensive regulations,” which he says are the primary drivers of higher premiums.

“It may well be that prices don’t come down at all,” he said.

But the Senate proposal may change rules for waivers that states can file with the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services that could allow them to potentially scale back some of these federal mandates.

While the details of McConnell’s proposal are expected to be made public Thursday, much of focus in recent weeks has been on the process used to draft the bill.

Democrats and even some Republicans have been critical of Senate GOP leaders for crafting the proposal behind closed doors without hearings and consideration of the legislation by the relevant committees.

Several GOP senators have expressed concern about moving quickly to a vote before they fully understand how it would impact health insurance markets and their constituents.

Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) said that in addition to reading the bill, “I’ll also want to get full input from constituencies in Wisconsin.”

Given that there may be just a week between the bill being posted and a final vote, he added, “I find it hard to believe we’ll have enough time.”

Amy Goldstein and Kelsey Snell contributed to this report.

Paige Winfield Cunningham covers health policy and authors PowerPost’s daily tipsheet The Health 202. A St. Louis native, she graduated from Wheaton College in Illinois and started her journalism career as a county board reporter at the Naperville Sun.

Juliet Eilperin is The Washington Post’s senior national affairs correspondent, covering how the new administration is transforming a range of U.S. policies and the federal government itself. She is the author of two books—one on sharks, and another on Congress, not to be confused with each other—and has worked for the Post since 1998. 

Sean Sullivan has covered national politics for The Washington Post since 2012.

We finally know what’s going to be in the Senate version of Trumpcare — and it’s not pretty

ThinkProgress

We finally know what’s going to be in the Senate version of Trumpcare — and it’s not pretty

An ugly process begets an ugly bill.

Judd Legum, Editor-in-Chief, ThinkProgress       June 21, 2017

For weeks, Senate Republicans have negotiated their version of Trumpcare in near total secrecy. There have been no public hearings — just private meetings among a select group of Republicans about a bill that could reshape one-sixth of the American economy. For many Americans, the contours of the bill could be a matter of life and death.

Text of the bill was released on Thursday, but key details began to leak Wednesday night (some from lobbyists who learned about the bill before the American people). Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) is insisting on a vote before the July 4th holiday, which means everyone has a week to learn about this bill — including many of the senators who will be voting on it.

So let’s get started. Here are the most important things you need to know.

The bill would strip health care coverage from millions of low income Americans by rolling back the expansion of Medicaid — and then making even deeper cuts.

The core of the Senate bill, like the House version, is a massive cut to Medicaid, which millions of low income Americans rely on for health care coverage. The Senate bill will reportedly phase out the expansion of Medicaid under Obamacare, although the process won’t start until 2021. In the end, the impact is the same. The Congressional Budget Office found that rolling back Medicaid expansion would cost 14 million people their health insurance.

But the Senate bill makes even deeper, more dramatic cuts to Medicaid that, over time, would leave more low income Americans without health coverage. Instead of a program that pays for health coverage for people who need it, the House and Senate versions of the Republican health care bill place per capita caps on the program. In other words, the federal government will only send states, who administer the program, a certain amount of money no matter what the actual cost of care may be.

The Senate version, according to a report in Bloomberg, makes even deeper cuts than the House.

The House bill ties these per capita caps to the “growth rate of medical inflation (CPI-M) plus 1 percentage point.” The Senate version, however, ties caps to the general rate of inflation (CPI-U). Since medical costs consistently grow at a much faster rate than overall costs, this means states would receive a smaller and smaller percentage of the actual cost of care each year.

The bill would follow the Obamacare subsidy model, but help fewer people.

In the House version of the Republican health care bill, people receive premium subsidies based on their age. The Senate bill retains the Obamacare model where subsidies increase as incomes go down.

But while Obamacare provided subsidies to anyone making up to 400 percent of the poverty line, the Senate bill ends subsidies at 350 percent of the poverty line. This means fewer people will get help. For some people, the impact of this change could be dramatic.

The Senate bill is a massive tax cut for the rich.

At it’s heart, Trumpcare is less a health care bill than a tax cut bill. There was speculation that the Senate bill would leave more taxes in place, but it will largely mirror the House version, according to the Washington Post.

The Senate bill will repeal hundreds of million of dollars in taxes that Obamacare used to help more people afford health care providing a massive transfer of wealth to people with incomes over $200,000.

The bill will mean higher out-of-pocket medical costs for many people with insurance.

Republicans would like to reduce health care premiums. But the only mechanism to do so in the Senate bill is to allow insurers to provide fewer benefits. That means, for some people, premiums may be slightly lower. But those same people will end up with far greater costs if they do get sick.

The Senate bill will reportedly give “states more leeway in opting out of the ACA’s insurance regulations through expanding the use of so-called ‘1332’ waivers already embedded within the law.” (The House bill creates a new waiver program.) The waivers are not expected to allow states to let insurers reject or charge more to people with pre-existing conditions. But the waivers will let states allow insurers to offer skimpier plans, potentially leaving consumers with huge medical bills.

The bill also reportedly changes what percentage of costs, on average, an insurance plan must cover from 75 percent to 58 percent. This means more deductibles and out-of-pocket expenses. The Senate plan could increase these costs by 68 percent.

The bill will seek to limit the ability of insurers to provide coverage for abortions.

Senate rules may prevent the Republican health care bill from including explicit restrictions on coverage for abortion. The Senate is exploring an arcane way to limit abortion coverage anyway, according to Axios. The Senate may create a “stabilization fund” that insurance companies can tap into through the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP). Most insurers will want to take advantage of this fund. But CHIP already has a restriction on abortion coverage. So insurers that take advantage of the stabilization fund will not be able to include coverage for abortion.

The bill will hit older Americans especially hard.

Across the board, older Americans who use the exchanges will be expected to pay a larger share of their income for health insurance. Those who make over 350 percent of the poverty line will now be expected pay full price.

Trumpcare’s passage is far from certain, with a number of moderate and conservative Republicans raising objections. Conservatives are likely to balk at keeping the basic Obamacare subsidy structure. Moderates are likely to object to the aggressive Medicaid cuts, particularly in states that have expanded Medicaid.

This is a developing story and will be update as we learn more details about the Senate bill.

Trump’s putdown of wind energy whips up a backlash in Iowa

Washington Post

Trump’s putdown of wind energy whips up a backlash in Iowa

By Ryan J. Foley,  AP    June 22, 2017

IOWA CITY, Iowa — President Trump’s putdown of wind energy at his Iowa rally was denounced Thursday across the state, which takes pride in its position as a national leader in wind generation.

Trump was talking up his support for coal during his speech in Cedar Rapids on Wednesday night when he said: “I don’t want to just hope the wind blows to light up your homes and your factories.” He paused before adding, “as the birds fall to the ground,” a reference to birds killed by turbines.

The remark drew some cheers and laughs inside the arena but didn’t go over well across Iowa, where the rapid growth of the state’s wind energy industry has been a bipartisan success story. Environmentalists and politicians said the president’s suggestion that wind is unreliable was outdated and off-base, and noted that bird deaths have been minimized and aren’t a source of controversy in Iowa.

Democratic gubernatorial candidate Andy McGuire called Trump’s comment “an attack on Iowa’s economy.” Iowa Environmental Council executive director Ralph Rosenberg called the president “inaccurate and misinformed.”

Iowa’s senior Republican senator, U.S. Sen. Chuck Grassley, who is considered the father of the federal wind production tax credit that has subsidized the expansion of the industry since the 1990s, again vowed to oppose any anti-wind policies Trump may pursue.

Through a spokesman, Grassley reiterated his year-old pledge that Trump would succeed in ending the production tax credit in Congress “over my dead body.” Last month, Grassley took issue with a study ordered by Energy Secretary Rick Perry into the reliability of the electric grid, saying he believed it was meant to undermine wind. Grassley argued that Iowa’s utilities have proven wind can be dependable.

In the most ever for any state, Iowa last year generated 36.6 percent of its electricity from wind. That figure is expected to keep growing, with the state’s two largest utilities having already started $4 billion in additional wind expansion projects.

Des Moines-based Mid American Energy, a leader in wind, said that using a balanced mix of traditional and renewable energy sources allows the company to deliver power to customers regardless of whether the wind blows.

MidAmerican says its adoption of wind has helped make its rates among the lowest in the nation. That has also made Iowa an attractive state for companies that use lots of power but want it to be clean. Microsoft, Facebook and Google have each built large data centers in Iowa in recent years.

A recent state report says 6,000 Iowa workers are employed in the wind energy industry, including those who manufacture and install wind turbines. Farmers also benefit from receiving payments for leasing their land to host them.

“Wind has been a great story in Iowa in every aspect,” said Josh Mandelbaum, an attorney in Des Moines for the Environmental Law and Policy Center. “For everyone else who has looked at this — policymakers across the political spectrum — all those things make supporting wind a no-brainer.”

He said the state is proving that the environmental and economic benefits of wind can be achieved without compromising the grid’s reliability. He said wind farms have been located in areas designed to avoid routes flown by migratory birds.

“There are way more bird deaths from birds striking tall buildings, like the type of towers that the president owns, than there are from birds striking wind turbines,” Mandelbaum said. “If the president’s concerned, maybe he should take a look at his own portfolio.”

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service estimates that between 134,000 and 327,000 birds die in wind turbine collisions annually, while at least 365 million die from window collisions.

Republican Gov. Kim Reynolds, who appeared with Trump on Wednesday, recently helped develop a state energy plan that calls for building upon the “tremendous growth of Iowa’s wind energy industry.” The plan recommends developing more energy storage infrastructure to house excess wind generated by turbines, which operate best during daylight

Trump bashes wind energy in a state that gets a third of its electricity from wind

ThinkProgress

Trump bashes wind energy in a state that gets a third of its electricity from wind

It’s like going to Georgia and talking about how peaches are terrible.

Natasha Geiling, Reporter at ThinkProgress,       June 22, 2017

On Wednesday night, President Donald Trump held a rally in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, where he praised coal and ridiculed wind energy.

“I don’t want to just hope the wind blows to light up your homes,” Trump told the crowd.

Iowa is the leading producer of wind energy in the country and generated 36.6 percent of its electricity from wind in 2016. Statewide, the wind industry employs between 8,000 and 9,000 people and has added $11.8 billion to the state’s economy through capital investments. Wind farms that are built on private land, which is leased to wind developers, collectively earn farmers and landowners an estimated $20 million annually.

The mining industry in Iowa, by contrast, employs around 2,200 people  — and is primarily made up of stone mining and quarrying jobs. Because of the way Iowa breaks down its employment data, that number also includes natural gas and petroleum extraction.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the wind industry currently employs more than 100,000 people in the United States, and wind turbine technician is the fastest growing occupation in the country. In 2016, wind capacity — the total amount of output a particular electricity generator can produce at a given time — passed hydropower to become the largest source of renewable energy capacity in the United States.

During his speech, Trump also made a reference to wind turbines killing birds, adding that “birds fall to the ground” when wind power is generated. This is not the first time Trump has claimed that wind power poses a serious threat to birds — in an interview with radio host and 2012 Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain in October, Trump said that wind power “kills all the birds” and that in areas with a lot of wind turbines, “thousands of birds are lying on the ground.”

Wind turbines do account for between 140,000 and 368,000 bird deaths annually. And while that might seem like a lot, it’s still well below the number killed each year by cell phone towers (6.8 million), collisions with glass buildings (one billion), and cats (3.7 billion).

And, as the Audubon Society notes, without wind power, birds face a much greater threat —climate change, which, by causing a shift in the habitable ranges for birds, could endanger nearly half of U.S. birds by the end of the century.

Trump has a longstanding grudge against wind power, stretching back to before his days in politics. As a developer, he fought plans to install a wind farm off the coast of one of his golf courses in Aberdeen, Scotland, which he argued would destroy the aesthetic value of his property. In 2012, he sent a letter to the then-head of the Scottish government where he called wind turbines “monsters” and described the wind farm project as “insanity.”

Donald J. Trump tweets:

“Palm Springs, Ca has been destroyed–absolutely destroyed–by the world’s ugliest wind farm at the Gateway on Interstate 10. Very very sad!

Many countries are cutting back, big time, on ugly, industrial wind turbines. The energy is very inefficient and …..

Ugly industrial wind turbines are ruining the beauty of parts of the country–and have inefficient unreliable energy to boot.

Bird killing windfarm that I oppose in Aberdeen got delayed by at least 2 years.”

Trump’s struggle against the wind farm was ultimately unsuccessful — the Scottish government approved construction of the farm in 2013, and Trump’s attempts to derail the project were rejected twice in court.

Trump has not always taken such a hard line against wind power, however. During a campaign stop in Iowa early in the 2016 presidential election, he told voters that he supports subsidies for the wind industry, like the production tax credit.

“It’s an amazing thing when you think — you know, where they can, out of nowhere, out of the wind, they make energy,” Trump said.

As president, however, Trump has been far less supportive of the “amazing” power of wind and renewable energy. He appointed Daniel Simmons, a vocal critic of renewable energy, to lead the Energy Department’s Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (EERE) and called for deep cuts to renewable energy research in his budget.

Senate Republicans set to release health-care bill, but divisions remain

Washington Post, Power Post

Senate Republicans set to release health-care bill, but divisions remain

By Paige Winfield Cunningham, Juliet Eilperin and Sean Sullivan, June 21, 2017

Senate Republicans on Thursday plan to release a health-care bill that would curtail federal Medicaid funding, repeal taxes on the wealthy and eliminate funding for Planned Parenthood as part of an effort to fulfill a years-long promise to undo Barack Obama’s signature health-care law.

The bill is an attempt to strike a compromise between existing law and a bill passed by the House in May as Republicans struggle to advance their vision for the country’s health-care system even though they now control both chambers of Congress and the White House.

The Senate proposal largely mirrors the House measure with significant differences, according to a discussion draft circulating Wednesday among aides and lobbyists. While the House legislation would peg federal insurance subsidies to age, the Senate bill would link them to income, as the Affordable Care Act does. The Senate proposal would cut off expanded Medicaid funding for states more gradually than the House bill but would enact deeper long-term cuts to the health-care program for low-income Americans. It also would eliminate House language aimed at prohibiting federally subsidized health plans from covering abortions, a provision that may run afoul of complex Senate budget rules.

But on the eve of the bill’s release, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) faced the prospect of an open revolt from key conservative and moderate GOP senators, whose concerns he has struggled to balance in recent weeks. Republicans familiar with the effort said Senate leaders have more work to do to secure the 50 votes needed to pass the measure, with Vice President Pence set to cast the tie-breaking vote, from the pool of 52 GOP senators. No Democrats are expected to support the bill.

Republican aides stressed that the plan is likely to undergo more changes to secure the votes needed for passage, but there were major concerns Wednesday from senators on opposite ends of the GOP spectrum.

“My main concern is I promised voters that I would repeal — vote to repeal Obamacare. And everything I hear sounds like Obamacare-lite,” said Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.).

Sen. Shelley Moore Capito (R-W.Va.), whose state expanded Medicaid and has been pushing for a more gradual unwinding of that initiative than many conservatives prefer, said she is waiting to scrutinize what is released but has not seen anything yet that would make her drop her concerns with the proposal.

“Up to this point, I don’t have any new news — tomorrow we will see it definitively — that would cause me to change that sentiment,” she said.

Like the House bill, the Senate measure is expected to make big changes to Medicaid, the program that insures about 74 million elderly and lower-income Americans and was expanded in most states under the ACA. In effect, the revisions would reduce federal spending on the program.

The Senate measure would transform Medicaid from an open-ended entitlement to one in which federal funding would be distributed to states on a per-capita basis. The Senate measure would also seek to phase out the program’s expansion — although at a more gradual rate than the House version.

Yet the Senate bill is expected go further than the House version in its approach to cutting Medicaid funding in the future. In 2025, the measure would tie federal spending on the program to an even slower growth index than the one used in the House bill. That move could prompt states to reduce the size of their Medicaid programs.

That provision, a nod to conservative lawmakers led by Sen. Patrick J. Toomey (R-Pa.), risks alienating moderates, including Capito and Sen. Rob Portman (R-Ohio), who also represents a state that expanded Medicaid under the ACA. Some Republicans worry that such a move would force states to cut services or coverage, potentially leaving millions of low-income people without sufficient health care.

The growth rate that is applied to Medicaid spending going forward has major implications, said Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine). “That inflater is critical, because it translates into billions of dollars over time,” she said.

Portman and Capito have also been pushing for the inclusion of a $45 billion fund to treat and prevent opioid addiction. As of early Wednesday afternoon, the opioid money was not included in McConnell’s proposal, according to a top GOP senator and Senate aide familiar with the discussions.

“I don’t think there is right now,” Senate Finance Committee Chairman Orrin G. Hatch (R-Utah) said when asked whether the legislation includes a distinct opioid fund. “It might have to be considered separately.”

But Portman and Capito, like all senators, will have a chance to introduce amendments to the bill when it heads to the Senate floor, which McConnell said is likely to happen next week. This process will allow senators to draw attention to the causes they have championed and potentially change the final bill.

Moderates who are on the fence about whether to support the Obamacare overhaul are likely to be pleased at the bill’s approach to insurance subsidies because they would be based on financial need, potentially preserving coverage for more people who got insurance under the ACA.

Subsidies are currently available to Americans earning between 100 percent and 400 percent of the federal poverty level. Starting in 2020, that threshold would be lowered to 350 percent under the Senate bill — but anyone below that line could get the subsidies if they’re not eligible for Medicaid.

That provision, said Larry Levitt, senior vice president for special initiatives at the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation, would be “a real benefit to poor people in states that don’t expand Medicaid.”

In a move that will please the health-care industry, the draft also proposes repealing all of the ACA taxes except for its “Cadillac tax” on high-cost health plans in language similar to the House version. Senators had previously toyed with the idea of keeping some of the ACA’s taxes.

It would also eliminate Medicaid reimbursements for Planned Parenthood for one year. Federal law already prevents taxpayer funding to pay for abortions except to save the life of the woman or in the case of rape or incest. But some Republicans want to ban all federal funding for Planned Parenthood, which also provides health services such as birth control, because their clinics provide abortion services.

Like the House measure, the Senate bill would eliminate two central requirements of the current health-care law: that individuals provide proof of insurance when filing their annual tax returns and that companies with 50 or more employees provide health coverage for their workers.

In a move that is critical to insurers, the Senate measure would continue to fund for two years cost-sharing subsidies that help 7 million Americans with ACA plans. House Republicans have challenged the legality of the $7 billion in subsidies — which help cover consumers’ deductibles and co-pays — in court, and insurers have warned that they will have to increase premiums dramatically next year unless the federal government commits to continuing the payments.

McConnell has told Republican senators that he wants to maintain protections for people with preexisting conditions under the law. But it was not clear to some lawmakers Wednesday what that would entail.

“I haven’t seen the draft yet. I like the idea of preexisting conditions being more firmly clarified,” Portman said.

Paul criticized GOP leaders for potentially keeping some of the ACA’s “most expensive regulations,” which he says are the primary drivers of higher premiums.

“It may well be that prices don’t come down at all,” he said.

But the Senate proposal may change rules for waivers that states can file with the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services that could allow them to potentially scale back some of these federal mandates.

While the details of McConnell’s proposal are expected to be made public Thursday, much of focus in recent weeks has been on the process used to draft the bill.

Democrats and even some Republicans have been critical of Senate GOP leaders for crafting the proposal behind closed doors without hearings and consideration of the legislation by the relevant committees.

Several GOP senators have expressed concern about moving quickly to a vote before they fully understand how it would impact health insurance markets and their constituents.

Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) said that in addition to reading the bill, “I’ll also want to get full input from constituencies in Wisconsin.”

Given that there may be just a week between the bill being posted and a final vote, he added, “I find it hard to believe we’ll have enough time.”

Amy Goldstein and Kelsey Snell contributed to this report.

Paige Winfield Cunningham covers health policy and authors PowerPost’s daily tipsheet The Health 202. A St. Louis native, she graduated from Wheaton College in Illinois and started her journalism career as a county board reporter at the Naperville Sun.

Juliet Eilperin is The Washington Post’s senior national affairs correspondent, covering how the new administration is transforming a range of U.S. policies and the federal government itself. She is the author of two books—one on sharks, and another on Congress, not to be confused with each other—and has worked for the Post since 1998.

Sean Sullivan has covered national politics for The Washington Post since 2012.

The Southwest is broiling. Are you paying attention, President Trump?

CNN

The Southwest is broiling. Are you paying attention, President Trump?

By Jill Filipovic        June 20, 2017

The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of the author.

Jill Filipovic: There’s plenty of reason to believe extreme heat in West is climate change portent. Yet Trump, many in GOP continue to deny reality.

She says they are mistaken to believe their base is with them on this: they will be as affected by ruined crops, rising sea level as everyone else.

(CNN) Record temperatures. Roads cracking and buckling. Planes that can’t take off. Power knocked out. Wildfires raging. These are just some of the trying conditions currently roiling America’s West Coast, which is in the midst of a record-breaking heatwave.

Nervous about how these disruptions will negatively impact the economy and even cost human life? You should be. And there’s more to come.

Changing weather patterns are the new normal, thanks to decades of trashing the environment and a refusal from many in the party currently controlling Washington, the Republicans — and their corporate patrons — to even acknowledge climate change as a reality, let alone do anything about it.

Entire nations may soon be under water. Mega-cities that are home to hundreds of millions are set to drown, leaving huge numbers of people stranded, constraining already-limited resources, fueling violence and competition over those resources, and creating a whole new category of need: climate refugees. A delayed flight out of Phoenix will soon be the least of our worries.

Yes, of course, heat waves happen, and the causes are complex. There is not a direct A to B line from “pollute the environment” and “die in a scorching June.” But there is virtually no real dissent that the Earth is getting warmer. The ice at the poles of our oceans is melting. Irregular and dangerous weather patterns are increasing. Sea levels are rising.

We have polluted, depleted and abused this planet so badly that there is much damage that can’t be undone. But there remain ways to rein in the ills we continue to reap — and ways to at least slow our progress toward a chaotic and barren global hellscape.

Even if you are a climate change skeptic and doubt human agency in this crisis — if you write off the consensus of the overwhelming majority of scientists who study this issue — now that we are regularly faced with weather extremes, why not at least entertain the idea that scientists are onto something?

And if you allow that you just might be wrong — that climate change could be real — how about reconciling to the idea that the downside of doing nothing is so immensely catastrophic that it’s our immediate obligation to act?

Let’s say the climate change skeptics get their way and we don’t act according to the pleas of environmentalists and scientists. If the doubters are right, then the upside is that we save a good deal of money on palliative measures. If they’re wrong, though, and if people who study the environment professionally are in fact better able to predict its condition than businessmen and politicians, the downside is massive — many will die.

What marginally sane person would ever take that gamble?

Our President and many in the Republican Party, it turns out.

For one example, candidate Trump made a campaign pledge to eliminate the Environmental Protection Agency, and as President has settled instead for appointing an administrator who is cozy with the oil and gas industry; who is reluctant to acknowledge the human causes of global warming; who has announced cuts that essentially gut the agency that stands between Americans and environmental disaster. For his part, the President has signed an executive order targeting regulations that had aimed to slow climate change.

For another, Trump has backed the country out of the Paris climate agreement — a move wildly opposed by Americans!

This is just a short list (there is more) of the steps this administration is taking to undo climate protections.

In all, it represents a shocking combination of greed and shortsightedness, compounded by an apparent urge to appeal to the worst impulses of the Trump base — people he and Republicans seem to assume are motivated by an urge to stick it to Prius-driving egghead liberals, even if doing so means their grandchildren might suffer or perish in a world of flooded metropolises, un-breathable air and expansive, unlivable deserts.

Surely this calculation is wrong: Republican voters whose livelihoods depend on the ability to harvest corn crops in Iowa or ship goods to their store in Arizona (or who live near the water and can’t afford flood insurance that’s more than their mortgage) can take a look around and realize this “see no evil” strategy is going to hurt them, and soon.

Indeed, that the American right has transformed climate change into a partisan issue defies all reason and rational self-interest. Climate change will have the largest and most immediate impacts on the world’s poor — not a demographic the GOP has shown much concern for. But make no mistake — rich or poor we all share the earth, and the catastrophic impacts of defiling it are coming for all of us.

If you’re stranded in Phoenix right now, or worried about an elderly acquaintance in California, or are without power in the Bay Area, or nervous about a wildfire taking your home, you can thank the long list of politicians who do the bidding of polluting corporations instead of their constituents and protect profit over the environment.

You can thank the President who tore up the Paris climate agreement. And you can show your displeasure by refusing to support candidates who don’t take climate change seriously, and don’t do whatever they can to keep the world inhabitable.

Anything less is global suicide.

Report: 1 In 5 Plants In Danger Of Extinction

MintPress News

Report: 1 In 5 Plants In Danger Of Extinction

The number one cause of plant extinction, according to the study, is habitat destruction.

By Amelia Kinney     June 20, 2017

Experts at the Royal Botanic Gardens Kew have just published their second ever State of the World’s Plants report. They reveal there are 390,000 known species of plants, with over 30,000 being used by humans. Unfortunately, the report also says that 1 in 5 plant species are in danger of extinction.

“Plants are absolutely fundamental to humankind. Plants provide us with everything – food, fuel, medicines, timber and they are incredibly important for our climate regulation. Without plants, we would not be here. We are facing some devastating realities if we do not take stock and re-examine our priorities and efforts.” said Prof. Kathy Willis, director of science at Kew.

The biggest driving factor behind plant extinction is the loss of habitat. Loss of habitat is caused by farming, deforestation and infrastructure expansion. Climate change isn’t currently a major contributor, but the report warns that it will have a dramatic impact on plants within the next 30 years.

On a positive note, new scientific discoveries offer hope. “I find that really encouraging and exciting. We are still finding new species of trees, new species of food: five new species of onion were found last year, for example.” says Prof. Willis.

She went on to say, “There are huge areas of the world where we just don’t know what is growing there. They may hold the key to the future of food. Genetic diversity in our foods is becoming poorer and poorer.”

The report references the global challenges of “population size, land-use change, plant diseases and pests” and says preserving biodiversity is urgent, as well as finding and conserving wild relatives of crops.

Major agriculture companies like Monsanto put world food security in jeopardy by propagating homogenous crops, known as “mono-cropping”. This is in contradiction with natural evolutionary processes which promote strong diverse crops with area-specific defenses and characteristics.

“As the global population rises and the pressure increases on our global food system, so does our dependence on the global crops and production systems that feed us. The price of failure of any of these crops will become very high.” says Luigi Guarino, senior scientist at the Global Crop Diversity Trust.

According to the report, “Having access to this large and diverse genetic pool is essential if we are to furnish crops with the valuable traits that enable resilience to climate change, pests and diseases, and ultimately underpin global food security.”

Watch State of the World’s Plants 2017 by Kew:

America’s Oligarchs Will Control 70% Of National Wealth By 2021

MintPress News

America’s Oligarchs Will Control 70% Of National Wealth By 2021

A new study by the Boston Consulting Group has found that while wealth inequality is growing on a global scale, it has kicked into overdrive in the United States – where America’s 1% are expected to control 70 percent of the nation’s private wealth by the year 2021.

By Whitney Webb      June 20, 2017

America’s rich just won’t quit getting richer, according to a new study released in mid-June by the Boston Consulting Group (BCG), a global management consulting firm. The study, which seeks to analyze the global wealth management industry, as well as the evolution of private wealth, uncovered some startling statistics that suggest that global financial inequality will grow significantly by the year 2021.

The firm found that the already massive gap between the world’s wealthy elite – the approximately 18 million households that hold at least than $1 million in assets – and everyone else is continuing to widen at a remarkable rate. The estimated 70 million people who make up these households were found to control 45 percent of the world’s $166.5 trillion in wealth. And in just four more years, it is estimated that they will control more than half of the world’s wealth, despite representing less than 1 percent of the world’s current population.

However, while rising inequality is a global phenomenon, it is especially pronounced in the United States. While wealth inequality in the U.S. is by no means an unknown phenomenon, the U.S. is significantly more unequal than most other countries, with the nation’s elite currently holding 63 percent of the private wealth. The U.S. elite’s share of national wealth is also growing much faster than the global average, with millionaires and billionaires expected to control an estimated 70 percent of the nation’s wealth by 2021.

The U.S.’ high wealth inequality largely owes to post-World War II government policies that have seen almost a quarter of all national income go to its wealthiest residents. Meanwhile, wages for the majority of Americans have remained stagnant for decades – in contrast to the richest Americans, their future economic outlook is incredibly bleak by comparison.

The U.S. is also home to more billionaires and millionaires than anywhere else in the world, which partly explains how U.S. policy has come to favor them over the years. According to Bloomberg, two out of five millionaires and billionaires live in the United States – and their ranks are growing.

While the world’s richest citizens may be pleased by the results of BCG’s recent study, there is plenty for them to be worried about if history is any indicator. Indeed, history shows that societies with drastic wealth inequality are much more unstable and more likely to experience drastic economic failure or outright societal collapse.

For instance, a 2014 study conducted by the National Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center noted that over-consumption and wealth inequality have occurred in the collapse of every civilization over the last 5,000 years. That same study also warned that rising inequality could easily lead to an unsustainable use of resources and the “irreversible collapse” of global industrial civilization.

This warning seems particularly prescient, given that wealth inequality in the U.S. is well above that of past civilizations that eventually collapsed as a result of these factors. For example, at the time of the collapse of the Roman Empire, the top 1 percent of the Roman elite controlled just 16 percent of the society’s wealth, a measly figure compared to the percentage commanded by the 1-percenters of the U.S.

While the BCG study paints a rosy picture for the world’s millionaires and billionaires, particularly in the United States, they should be gravely concerned that their growing accumulation of wealth could have drastic consequences – not just for those poorer than them, but for everyone.

Whitney Webb is a MintPress contributor who has written for several news organizations in both English and Spanish; her stories have been featured on ZeroHedge, the Anti-Media, 21st Century Wire, and True Activist among others – she currently resides in Southern Chile.

Too hot to handle: Study shows Earth’s killer heat worsens

Associated Press

Too hot to handle: Study shows Earth’s killer heat worsens

Seth Borenstein, Associated Press    June 19, 2017

WASHINGTON (AP) — Killer heat is getting worse, a new study shows.  Deadly heat waves like the one now broiling the American West are bigger killers than previously thought and they are going to grow more frequent, according to a new comprehensive study of fatal heat conditions. Still, those stretches may be less lethal in the future, as people become accustomed to them.

A team of researchers examined 1,949 deadly heat waves from around the world since 1980 to look for trends, define when heat is so severe it kills and forecast the future. They found that nearly one in three people now experience 20 days a year when the heat reaches deadly levels. But the study predicts that up to three in four people worldwide will endure that kind of heat by the end of the century, if global warming continues unabated.

“The United States is going to be an oven,” said Camilo Mora of the University of Hawaii, lead author of a study published Monday in the journal Nature Climate Change .

The study comes as much of the U.S. swelters through extended triple-digit heat. Temperatures hit records of 106, 105 and 103 in Santa Rosa, Livermore and San Jose, California on Sunday, as a heat wave was forecast to continue through midweek. In late May, temperatures in Turbat, Pakistan, climbed to about 128 degrees (53.5 degrees Celsius); if confirmed, that could be among the five hottest temperatures reliably measured on Earth, said Jeff Masters, meteorology director of Weather Underground.

Last year 22 countries or territories set or tied records for their hottest temperatures on record, said Masters, who wasn’t part of the study. So far this year, seven have done so.

“This is already bad. We already know it,” Mora said. “The empirical data suggest it’s getting much worse.”

Mora and colleagues created an interactive global map with past heat waves and computer simulations to determine how much more frequent they will become under different carbon dioxide pollution scenarios. The map shows that under the current pollution projections, the entire eastern United States will have a significant number of killer heat days. Even higher numbers are predicted for the Southeast U.S., much of Central and South America, central Africa, India, Pakistan, much of Asia and Australia.

Mora and outside climate scientists said the study and map underestimate past heat waves in many poorer hot areas where record-keeping is weak. It’s more accurate when it comes to richer areas like the United States and Europe.

If pollution continues as it has, Mora said, by the end of the century the southern United States will have entire summers of what he called lethal heat conditions.

A hotter world doesn’t necessarily mean more deaths in all locales, Mora said. That’s because he found over time the same blistering conditions — heat and humidity — killed fewer people than in the past, mostly because of air conditioning and governments doing a better job keeping people from dying in the heat. So while heat kills and temperatures are rising, people are adapting, though mostly in countries that can afford it. And those that can’t afford it are likely to get worse heat in the future.

“This work confirms the alarming projections of increasing hot days over coming decades — hot enough to threaten lives on a very large scale,” said Dr. Howard Frumkin, a University of Washington environmental health professor who wasn’t part of the study.

Mora documented more than 100,000 deaths since 1980, but said there are likely far more because of areas that didn’t have good data. Not all of them were caused by man-made climate change.

Just one heat wave — in Europe in 2003 — killed more than 70,000 people.

This Trump Tarbaby Will Leave a Permanent Stain on the GOP

This Trump Tarbaby Will Leave a Permanent Stain on the GOP

John Hanno      June 16, 2017

The best all of Trump’s apologists, just like Sen. Marco Rubio, can muster in defense of the Trump administration’s run-away train wreck, is that he’s not a typical politician. All the stumbling and bumbling is only because he doesn’t do things like Presidents have always done in the past; in spite of the hundreds of times Trump had denigrated “all” politicians because they really needed to conduct themselves more like successful businessmen like Trump.

House Speaker Paul Ryan says of Trump, after it was discovered Trump tried to get FBI Director Comey to shut down the Russia investigation: “The President is new at this….he’s new to government….he probably wasn’t steeped in the long running protocols that established the relationships between DOJ, FBI and White Houses….he’s just new to this….”

But did Ryan and these Republican apologists in Congress and in the far right media give President Obama the same consideration and latitude? Would they have afforded the same courtesy to Hillary, if she had been elected but were conducting herself like Trump is now? The answer is a resounding no. These highpocrits would be conducting dozens of congressional hearings, 6 days a week and on Sundays and holidays.

No one first elected as President of The United States, has previous experience for the job; but they typically hire consultants and cabinet members who do have previous experience. And they council with experts and rely on career government employees to get them up to speed.

The Republicans handed Barack Obama an economy in free fall. Banks, the housing industry and businesses were collapsing and we were losing 800,000 jobs a month. Obama put his nose to the grindstone, hired capable experts and with the help of a Democratic controlled Congress, eventually dug us out of the Great Recession, all in spite of the Republican conspiracy to oppose him at every turn. He worked hard (and actually studied and read books) and based his corrective policies on facts, not the flawed alternative reality and conspiracy theories or conflicted and disproved dogma Trump and the Republicans rely on.

But Trump has so denigrated, and has such a low opinion of, politicians and career federal employees, that he’s clearly shot himself in the foot by hiring sycophants and family members to run the most complex organization on earth. He thinks he knows more than anyone, more than the intelligence community, more than the generals, more than budget experts in the Congressional Budget Office, more than the scientists, more than legislators and their staffs, more than the judiciary, more than leaders throughout the world, especially our historical democratic allies. His self promotion and aggrandizement is boundless.

But when have you ever heard of an American President’s spokesperson (Sarah Huckabee Sanders) actually deem it necessary to come out and say: “I can definitively say the president is not a liar and I think it’s frankly insulting that question would be asked;” probably because a vast majority of Americans and folks around the world are convinced Trump has lost any shred of credibility and believe he’s the most dishonest person they have ever encountered. Its not surprising his approval ratings are in the mid 30’s and disapproval ratings are more than 60%.

It’s becoming more and more apparent that Trump’s business acumen and aura is as symbolic and unsubstantial, as the TRUMP brand displayed on properties around the world. He’s obviously not as rich nor as savvy as he claims and was probably on the verge of another business bankruptcy, until the Russian devils bailed him out and sunk their fangs into his business empire and soul. This Russian/Trump saga could be the next Coen Brothers sequel to the current Season 3 Fargo series on FX.

His campaign boasts and promises as a great builder, is as credible as the real estate properties that someone else actually builds and then pays Trump to put his name on. He’s spent the first half year of his first and only term tearing down President Obama’s programs and accomplishments. Trump Inc. should be more appropriately, in the demolition business. He’s not a builder; he’s a destroyer. What has he actually built or accomplished?

Trump fired United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York Preet Bharara, because he was investigating Russian money laundering in the New York real estate business. He fired FBI director James Comey because he was stepping up the Russian hacking and collusion investigation of Trump’s campaign and administration. Trump obviously has a lot to hide. All he’s clearly building is a classic case of obstruction of justice that closely resembles the Watergate cover-up.

Everyone seems to agree that the most remarkable and telling theme, is that Trump hasn’t once asked or tasked anyone in his cabinet or the intelligence departments to get to the bottom of the Russian interference in our election. Its seems he couldn’t care less.

Trump said he would be “100% willing to testify under oath” about his meetings with James Comey. I guess I’ll believe it when I see him in front of the cameras, taking the pledge to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.

As in the past, and in spite of the Trump brand accruing a patina of tarnish and scandal, Trump personally, will probably survive America’s national disgrace financially in tact, as he did from his six bankruptcies and the Trump university scandal (minus the $25 million). Trump’s conflicts of interests, and entanglement with the emoluments clause of the U.S. Constitution, are already paying dividends to his failing empire.

Unless all these investigations are able to prove Trump and his family engaged in Russian money laundering schemes or shady real estate deals, Trump will end up bloodied, bruised and thoroughly defrocked, but probably not broke or in prison. That probably can’t be said for all the Trump administration folks caught up in the scandals and cover-up shenanigans. They’re already hiring defense attorneys. Even their defense attorneys are hiring defense attorneys. Trump voters didn’t know the jobs Trump promised were all going to Washington lawyers. Historical note: Nixon was able to resign but dozens (I think 59) of the conspirators in his administration went to jail. And all those millions in legal fees are probably still not paid off. I’m guessing the plea deals are already in the planning stages.

Trump will call it all fake news and blame the media. He and his apologists will stonewall and obfuscate, they’re even attempting to somehow implicate Hillary Clinton in the Russia Thing; and Trump may even try to fire Special prosecutor Robert Mueller. But sooner or later, we just might get the whole truth.

In the mean time, the folks who went all in on Trump will suffer. Obamacare will get worse and may ultimately fail because of Republican tactics to defund the Affordable Care Act. Trump and the Republican controlled congress will go to any extreme to give the super rich their tax cuts by cutting Medicaid and health care subsidies for the poor, elderly and disabled. Workers and the middle class, even those with employer subsidized health insurance, will get the same crappy substandard health insurance they had before the ACA was passed, with double digit increases, skyrocketing deductibles and cancellations because of pre-existing conditions. And the insurance industry will be back to skimming 30% off the top of America’s health care costs instead of the 15% mandated under Obamacare. And good luck with any legitimate type of tax reform or infrastructure plan. And I wouldn’t count on those coal jobs coming back. Hillary and Bernie at lease had a plan to replace those lost jobs.

These pretenders and evil doers will try to reverse the progress the Obama administration made towards sustainable energy and slowing climate change and global warming. They’ll embarrass America in the eyes of the world by exiting the Paris Agreement, they will bend over backwards for fossil fuel and corporate polluters, they will try to turn back the clock on progress made in the Cuba accord and try to overturn Dodd-Frank, but the 2018 elections are right around the corner. Hopefully they will be so bottled up with the criminal investigations, the amount of damage they do will be limited.

And the loyal Trump supporters may be very slowly coming to their senses. Its reported that the super die hard Trumpers have gone from 30% down to close to 20%.

Unfortunately we can’t say the same for the Republicans in congress. What will it take before they find the courage displayed by Republicans during the Watergate and Iran Contra scandals? It could be the damage done to the Republican party by this Trump Tarbaby will be far worse than Watergate.     John Hanno

Newsweek

Neil Buchanan: Is Trump Naive? Stupid? Evil? Or All of the Above?

Neil H. Buchanan,  Newsweek    June 18, 2017

This article first appeared on the Dorf on Law sire.

Donald Trump is wrong almost all of the time about almost everything.

He lies constantly, and even though he is constantly being caught in his transparent lies, he never admits error, pressing ever forward on his destructive path.

Does he do this because he knows nothing about the world? (That is, is he naive ?)

Alternatively, maybe it is because he is incapable of logical thinking. (Is he stupid ?)

Or is it instead because he has horrible policy goals? (Is he evil ?)

All three of those explanations fit, and then some. As Michael Dorf argued in a recent column, normal human beings can be “evil, stupid, or ignorant,” but “Trump is not a normal human being. He is not even a normal but evil, stupid, or ignorant human being. Trump is Trump.”

In order to understand how Trump is different, we first need to understand what it means to be normal yet wrong in one of those three ways —naive, stupid, or evil. Because those three categories should be sufficient to explain every bad decision, it is important to understand how Trump is a category unto himself.

When Professor Dorf and I were much younger men, we frequently discussed the many ways in which the nation’s then-new president, Ronald Reagan, was wrong. It was a frustrating experience to watch a touchingly naive fool lead the nation in harmful directions, but it certainly created a need to understand exactly what was going wrong.

For me, the issue that helped to clarify how to think about all of this was Reagan’s opposition to imposing economic sanctions on South Africa’s apartheid regime. Led by protests and boycotts on college campuses, politicians on the left at that time were beginning to pressure our reactionary president to force the Botha regime to change its shockingly racist legal and social system.

Reagan resisted, arguing at one point that South Africa was simply in the process of evolving into a civil rights-friendly nation, just as the United States had evolved in the fifties and sixties. This was jaw-droppingly wrong, so much so that it took a great deal of effort to tease out Reagan’s many errors.

One possibility was that Reagan simply did not have the facts necessary to see the situation clearly. As bad as the Jim Crow era had been in the United States, it was obvious that South Africa was not “merely” going through what the U.S. had experienced.

Moreover, Reagan seemed not to know how bad things had been here, even though he had lived through those decades. Saying, “They’ll be fine, just like we figured it out,” could have been explained by complete ignorance about one or both countries. The problem was that, even if Reagan himself believed these fantasies, he surely had access to advisors who should have known otherwise.

If ignorance about the facts was not at work, it was possible instead that Reagan knew the facts but was not smart enough to draw logical conclusions from them. Was there something like 2 + 2 = 5 error at work in Reagan’s head, a reasoning error along the lines of “All men are mortal, Socrates was mortal, therefore all men are Socrates”?

Reagan argued that sanctions would do no good, even though it was clear that South Africa’s government (notwithstanding its claims to the contrary) was being forced to respond to world pressure. The civil rights leaders in South Africa also rejected Reagan’s argument, saying that outside pressure was key to reaching the goal of ending apartheid.

In any case, Reagan’s policy errors did not seem to fit into the category of mere logical folly. What seemed much more likely was that Reagan, who had been supported by American racists and who had perfected Richard Nixon’s ” southern strategy ” to scare white voters away from Democrats, was simply not particularly concerned about the evils of white supremacy (and maybe actually supported racist goals).

In short, Reagan’s bad policy views could be explained by one of three possibilities. He was naive, or he was stupid, or he was evil. He might also have been some combination of the three.

Being a young man, I thought that maybe I was onto something with the naive/stupid/evil framing of policy debates. Admittedly, there was nothing genuinely new in my taxonomy. People have often said things like, “He’s either a fool or a liar,” when trying to explain their opponents’ errors.

Moreover, one has to decide how to treat things like willful ignorance. Is that a fourth category? It turns out, however, that it is easy to explain this as a version of evil, because a person who decides not to gather facts must be doing so in order to avoid facing the consequences of that knowledge. (This is currently seen, for example, in Republicans’ blocking government statisticians from gathering facts about gun violence.)

The naive/stupid/evil taxonomy can also be expressed with different synonyms—ignorant/illogical/malevolent, uninformed/irrational/malicious, and so on—and the order can be changed. Hence, Professor Dorf’s “evil, stupid, or ignorant” rendering of the taxonomy.

In any case, I have noticed over the years the many ways in which people who are unaware of this taxonomy struggle to identify and understand what they are seeing. Sometimes a shorthand is valuable simply for being a shorthand. And the Trump era has left many people struggling to understand what in many cases boils down to that simple triad.

For example, the conservative columnist Jennifer Rubin of The Washington Post recently offered an excellent critique of Trump’s ill considered Muslim ban, concluding with this:

One might conclude that the administration is too incompetent or lazy to make [its case in court]. We prefer a different theory: These orders have no national security or other justification, but rather are blatant appeals to prejudice that have no factual, rational basis. No lawyer in the world can defend that in court.

In short, Rubin first considers whether the administration is incompetent or lazy, which are somewhat fuzzy concepts because incompetence can refer either to stupidity or ignorance, and laziness is most likely (at least in Trump’s case) a version of willful ignorance, that is, evil.

By saying that Trump has “no national security justification,” Rubin means that Trump’s argument is not actually “stupid.” That is, there is no logical argument from Trump’s people that says that A (the ban) causes B (less terrorism). They simply assert their conclusion, as opposed to offering a logically fallacious if-then argument.

Why do they do that? Rubin reasonably concludes that Trump is evil because he is appealing to prejudice. He is so focused on getting to an evil outcome—discriminating against people on the basis of religion and national origin—that he will deny reality and not even bother with logical arguments.

An interesting variation on this method of framing the Trump problem was recently offered by the editorial board of The New York Times : “Stupidity, paranoia, malevolence—it’s hard to distinguish among competing explanations for the behavior of people in this administration.”

Paranoia is a particular form of ignorance, because it means that Trump’s people are living in a different reality from the rest of us. (Using “naive” here would sound too much like an excuse, which is why I am calling it ignorance, with all of its connotations.)

As I wrote above, however, I agree with Professor Dorf that Trump is not simply the unique case of a normal person who is somehow always dealing with an incomplete or incorrect set of facts, or who makes logical errors, or who is always acting in bad faith —naive, stupid, or evil. He is his own category.

The reason Trump is different is that there is always the sense (or hope) that the normal people who have supported Trump are making one of more of those three errors—and, most importantly, that they might be open to fixing those errors.

A person who thinks that there was a “war on coal,” for example, might be persuadable if she exited the Fox New alternative fact zone and saw that it is the simple economics of cheap natural gas and other non-conspiratorial factors that explain the decline of coal.

Also, a person who thinks that Trump will bring back manufacturing jobs might, if prompted, notice that Trump has no actual logical argument regarding how he will make that happen.

Even people who are acting on what I am calling evil motivations are not always beyond reach. Many people are able to confront their demons and say, “Wow, I didn’t realize that I was motivated by hatred.”

That is one of the reasons that same-sex marriage has gained such wide acceptance so quickly. Many people thought, “What was I so scared or angry about?” And the world became a meaningfully better place.

It is impossible to imagine anything like that happening with Trump.

Many of us do hold out some hope every day that even some of Trump’s closest advisors will say, “I can’t do this anymore. I tried to deny to myself what was happening, but this is too much.” It is safe to say that that will not happen with Steve Bannon or some others, but some people have said that even hard-core Trumpists like Kellyanne Conway might harbor doubts.

But Trump? Not a chance. He is ignorant, both as a matter of never having learned anything and because he likes it that way. He is stupid, usually not even bothering to make an argument, but making incoherent arguments when he tries. (We will, he says, just start winning again, somehow.) His goals are racist, sexist, and in other ways bigoted, and he is corrupt to boot.

What are we to think when we learn that Trump does not care about whether the Russian government is undermining American democracy? He only cares about whether he will look bad and lose power if the truth comes out.

“Trump is naive, stupid, and evil” simply does not cover it. Trump is Trump, and heaven help us all.

Neil H. Buchanan is an economist and legal scholar and a professor of law at George Washington University. He teaches tax law, tax policy, contracts, and law and economics. His research addresses the long-term tax and spending patterns of the federal government, focusing on budget deficits, the national debt, health care costs and Social Security.

HuffPost

Donald Trump’s Attorney Marc Kasowitz Hit With Ethics Complaints

Mary Papenfuss, HuffPost    June 17, 2017

Complaints have been lodged with the District of Columbia and New York City Bar Associations against President Donald Trump’s personal defense attorney Marc Kasowitz, calling for an investigation to determine if he has breached rules of professional conduct.

Separate complaints were filed over the week against Kasowitz by the Campaign for Accountability, a nonprofit government watchdog organization, and by attorney Neil Goldfarb, a former board member of the American Civil Liberties Union. They both allege that Kasowitz may have inappropriately counseled other White House staffers while representing the president, raising conflict-of-interest concerns.

In addition, the CAF complaint alleges that Kasowitz is not currently authorized to practice law in Washington, D.C.

Mark Corallo, a spokesman for Kasowitz, dismissed the complaints in a statement to Law.com, calling them “obviously politically motivated” and “based on press reports, which were based on anonymous sources.”

Trump has called on his longtime personal attorney to represent him as investigations heat up into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election. Trump acknowledged Friday that he is now a target of a probe by Special Counsel Robert Mueller into possible obstruction of justice linked to the president’s firing of former FBI Director James Comey.

Last week, Kasowitz issued a statement characterizing Comey’s testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee as very positive for the president (which he spelled “predisent”). He threatened to file legal complaints against Comey because of Comey’s admission that he had given a memo about a meeting with Trump to a friend and asked the friend to give it to a reporter.

Kasowitz, a member of the New York bar, has been advising Trump and reportedly other members of the president’s staff, even though he is not currently authorized to practice law in the District of Columbia, according to the CAF complaint. He told White House aides it was not yet necessary to hire their own private attorneys, The New York Times reported, citing anonymous sources. Such behavior could be construed as a conflict of interest.

“By meeting with White House staff within the White House complex and offering the legal opinion that those staffers need not hire counsel, [Kasowitz] may have engaged in the unauthorized practice of law,” the CAF complaint states. “In addition, by advising White House staff members, who are not represented by counsel and who have a reasonable possibility of having interests that conflict with those of Mr. Kasowitz’s client, President Trump, Mr. Kasowitz appears to have violated” a rule of professional conduct concerning conflicts of interest.

Goldfarb similarly pointed out in his complaint that “there is obviously a very reasonable possibility that [aides’] personal interests are in conflict with those of President Trump’s.”

The complaints from CAF and Goldfarb come as another of Trump’s private attorneys, Mark Cohen, confirmed to The Washington Post that he has hired his own lawyer to represent his interests during federal investigations into possible ties between Russia and the Trump campaign team.

International Business Times

Trump’s Lawyer Broke Ethics Rules, Complaint Claims

Josh Keefe,   International Business Times    June 17, 2017 

President Donald Trump’s longtime personal attorney is the subject of a complaint filed by a watchdog group Thursday with the disciplinary body in charge of Washington attorneys, allegedly for dispensing legal advice to unrepresented White House staffers, a violation of bar rules and legal ethics.

Campaign for Accountability, a government ethics group, filed the complaint with the District of Columbia Court of Appeals’ Office of Disciplinary Counsel in response to a story in Sunday’s New York Times that said Marc Kasowitz, who has represented Trump for 15 years, told presidential aides they did not yet need to hire lawyers in response to special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation.

By telling White House aides they did not need to hire lawyers, Kasowitz dispensed legal advice to people who not only weren’t his clients, but whose interests in the coming legal storm might be contrary to the president’s, the complaint alleges. The complaint, which asks the office to open an investigation, comes as Mueller’s investigation reportedly has expanded to examine whether the president attempted to obstruct justice.

“It was really concerning to read he was providing legal advice to White House staffers,” Daniel Stevens, executive director of the Campaign for Accountability, told International Business Times. Stevens is an alumnus of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics In Washington, the watchdog group that filed suit against the president just days after his inauguration over his foreign business dealings.

“They weren’t his clients and they might take heed of that advice and it might not be in their best interest. [Kasowitz] needs to be held accountable for giving that advice,” Stevens said.

The D.C. bar, as well as the American Bar Association’s model rules, which have been adopted by all 50 states and the District of Columbia, forbid attorneys from giving legal advice to people who don’t have lawyers, other than recommending they retain counsel, if the “interests of such person are or have a reasonable possibility of being in conflict with the interests of the lawyer’s client.”

Kasowitz’s discussions with White House staff reportedly bypassed White House counsel Donald F. McGahn II,  a departure from previous protocol that worried former attorneys who have held that position.

“The president’s private lawyer is representing only his interests, not the interests of the United States government or the individual interests of the White House staff,” Robert F. Bauer, who was White House counsel under President Barack Obama, told the Times.

The White House declined to comment and directed IBT to send questions to Kasowitz, who did not respond to IBT’s inquiries. A spokesperson for Kasowitz previously said the Times’ categorization of the meeting was “inaccurate,” but, according to the Times, “would not specify how.”

Campaign for Accountability copied the complaint to the New York State Bar. Bar. Court records indicate Kasowitz is not a member of the D.C. Bar but is a member of the New York Bar. The committees in D.C. and New York that evaluate complaints would not confirm they received the complaint, as complaints against attorneys are confidential unless a complaint ends in disciplinary action, which can run the gamut from requiring attorneys take continuing education classes to disbarment.

The Committee on Character and Fitness for Manhattan and the Bronx, which has jurisdiction over Kasowitz’s law practice, told IBT that Kasowitz has never been disciplined by the courts for misconduct since becoming a member of the New York Bar in 1978.

Trump hired Kasowitz to represent him in all matters connected to the Russian investigation at the end of May, shortly after the Justice Department tapped Mueller as special counsel.

After FBI Director James Comey testified to a Senate panel June 7th about his interactions with Trump, Kasowitz attacked Comey and defended Trump at the press.

“From before this president took office to this day, it is overwhelmingly clear that there have been and continue to be those in government who are actively attempting to undermine this administration with selective and illegal leaks of classified information and privileged communications,” Kasowitz said. “Mr. Comey has now admitted that he is one of these leakers.”

Trump’s legal team has said it is planning on filing a complaint against Comey for leaking conversations with the president. The team initially planned to file the complaint this week, but the legal team’s spokesperson confirmed on Tuesday the complaint would most likely be filed next week. It’s unclear with which office in the Justice Department, which oversees the FBI, the legal team will file the complaint.

Kasowitz has represented Trump in a variety of matters since the turn of the century, including defending the president in the Trump University lawsuit, keeping the president’s divorce records sealed, restructuring Trump casino bondholder debt and suing a Trump biographer in 2009 for citing unnamed sources claiming the real estate mogul wasn’t actually a billionaire.

ProPublica has reported Kasowitz bragged to friends about convincing Trump to fire Manhattan U.S. Attorney Preet Brahara, who was investigating Tom Price, Trump’s secretary of health and human services, at the time of his firing.

Kasowitz’s firm, Kasowitz Benson Torres LLP, employs former Connecticut Sen. Joseph Lieberman, whom Trump briefly considered for FBI director after he fired Comey. Trump tapped Kasowitz’s partner, David Friedman, to serve as ambassador to Israel prompting the firm to change its name  (until late March, Kasowitz’s firm’s name was Kasowitz Benson Torres & Friedman). In addition to Trump, Kasowitz also represents Russia’s largest bank, Sberbank, which counts the Russian government as a majority shareholder.

Vice President Mike Pence has also retained counsel to represent him in the Russia inquiry, the Washington Post reported Thursday. Pence hired Richard Cullen, a former U.S. attorney in the Eastern District of Virginia, a Pence spokesman confirmed to the Post.