Yesterday, the membership of the House Freedom Caucus of No forced the American Health Care Act, the first stage of a three-stage Obamacare repeal and replace program offered by the majority of the House Republican Conference, to be withdrawn from the day’s backup vote (recall that these No-ers already had forced a delay from Thursday’s vote over their demand to have their way or there could be no Act), and so there will be no AHCA.
The House Republicans were forced to cancel yesterday’s scheduled American Health Care Act vote. The Freedom Caucus, the Caucus of No, couldn’t be satisfied. Congressmen like Jim Jordan (R, OH) and Caucus of No Chairman Mark Meadows (R, NC) refused late compromises, all the while insisting by implication from their refusals that constituents of other Congressmen, for instance Tom Cole (R, OK), worked for them and not that Cole worked for his Oklahoma constituents—and that those Oklahoma constituents might have different imperatives than those Congressmen of the Caucus. So, no compromise from the No-ers.
Karl Rove talked about health care coverage prospects in a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed, and that triggered a thought in my pea brain.
Senator Tom Cotton (R, AR) has announced that the House plan on offer, a plan designed to be passable through reconciliation, with later phases of repeal and replace for completing the task, is dead on arrival, and the House shoe start over and produce a more comprehensive plan in this first phase. But Cotton has chosen to not offer a plan of his own, or outline what a plan acceptable to him would look like other than to address taxes and to more fully repeal right damn now Obamacare, or even to offer the tactics he’d use to get the new plan—which could not be done through reconciliation—past a Progressive-Democrat filibuster.
Cross-posted from my comment on the matter at Grim’s Hall and based on a CNN article.
From Comey’s quote as provided by CNN:
There is no such thing as absolute privacy in America….
That’s his (cynically offered, because I don’t agree he’s either as stupid or as ignorant as he’d have to be otherwise) straw man; he’ll have to play with his dolly without me.
He also has distorted (deliberately, if not from his lack of understanding, coming from Government’s perspective as he does) what the Founders wrought:
San Francisco asked a federal judge Wednesday to block President Trump’s order threatening to strip federal funds from so-called sanctuary cities that bar police from enforcing immigration laws.
This suit has a good chance of succeeding. In 1987’s South Dakota v Dole, the Supreme Court ruled (in a dispute over the State’s minimum drinking age and Federal highway funds transfers to the State) that the Federal government cannot withhold already agreed Federal funds from a State in order to coerce State acquiescence with Federal wishes. Funds can be withheld to “persuade,” but the withheld funds must be related to the question at hand rather than a blanket withholding, and the amount withheld cannot be coercive in its size, but only persuasive. Without naming a threshold for the amount, the Court held that the 5% withholding imposed by the Federal government was not coercive.
In light of whose DoJ it’s been doing this most recently, it’s easy to say it was nefarious. But the whole thing could be eliminated with either of a couple of steps and a change in underlying procedure.
What is “it?” It’s a secret (or merely secretive) slush fund fed by settlement proceeds from DoJ civil suits against large banks.
When big banks are sued by the government for discrimination or mortgage abuse, they can settle the cases by donating to third-party non-victims. The settlements do not specify how these third-party groups could use the windfall.
Heather Higgins, CEO of Independent Women’s Voice, says go big or go home regarding Obamacare. Republicans in Congress should quit dithering, should not play reconciliation games, and should simply put an Obamacare repeal and replace package up for vote. This would force the Democrat obstructionists—especially those #NeverTrumpNoHow and #NeverRepublicanNotEver Progressive-Democrats in the Senate on the record as by-name blocking reform of the Obama program that is in its death spiral, the endpoint of which will leave millions of Americans without health coverage and without even coverage providers to which to appeal. Especially put those 10 Progressive-Democrats pretending to moderacy in order to protect their precarious reelection chances in 2018 on the spot.
That’s the term currently in vogue for the permitless carrying of handguns, whether openly or concealed; it’s the concept that the 2nd Amendment is all the permit an American citizen needs to carry his handgun.
New Hampshire has become the 12th State eliminate the need for a State-issued permit for concealed carry; it already had permitless open carry. With the bill signed into law by Governor Chris Sununu, a New Hampshire citizen is allowed
the unlicensed transport or carry of a firearm in a vehicle, or on or about one’s person, whether openly or concealed, loaded or unloaded…if that individual is not otherwise prohibited by statute from possessing a firearm in the state of New Hampshire.
California has an infrastructure failure problem that involves everything from its roads to its dams and other water control facilities. Governor Jerry Brown (D) says it will cost $187 billion to fix its infrastructure, and he wants $12 billion per year of Federal funding to help with that. In actuality, Brown doesn’t want Federal funding, he wants what Federal funding consists of: money taxed by the Federal government from the good citizens of financial straitened New York to help pay for his needs, he wants money taxed by the Federal government from the good citizens of nearly bankrupt Illinois to help pay for his needs, he wants money taxed by the Federal government from the good citizens of fiscally responsible and so flush Texas and Utah to help pay for his needs.
Within days of President Trump’s executive order to crack down on so-called sanctuary cities, San Francisco had filed a lawsuit opposing the order [to block federal funding for them]….
We also have this regarding…coercion…by the Federal government.
Last year, a federal judge in Illinois ruled that it was unconstitutional for the Department of Homeland Security to force local jails to detain suspected undocumented immigrants without a warrant. And in a 1997 Supreme Court decision, Printz v US, a 5-4 majority held that the federal government “may neither issue directives requiring the States to address particular problems, nor command the States’ officers, or those of their political subdivisions, to administer or enforce a federal regulatory program.”