Republican efforts to repeal Obamacare could help Democrats do what they have been unable to for seven years: sell the American people on the benefits of the health law.

Poll numbers are moving in their direction. Grassroots organizing – from protests to town halls – is en fuego. For years, the national and local media focused on the problems with the rollout of the law. But reporters have begun writing much more, instead, about the people who stand to lose benefits they’ve obtained.

The Obamacare repeal effort was already in unstable condition. Now its status must be downgraded to critical — and completely unserious,” Dana Milbank notes in his column today. “For seven years, opponents of the Affordable Care Act vowed to make its repeal their top concern, warning that the law would turn America overnight into a socialist dystopia. Now these opponents have unfettered control of the government and they aren’t even talking about repealing.”

• In his weekend interview with Fox News’s Bill O’Reilly, Trump said that “maybe it’ll take till sometime into next year” for his administration to unveil a new health-care plan. It is, the president said, “very complicated.”
• From Capitol Hill comes new word that Republicans aren’t even talking about a plan. “To be honest, there’s not any real discussion taking place right now,” Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) told reporters Tuesday at the Capitol. Corker, according to the Huffington Post, said he has “no idea” when Republicans might start drafting an alternative to Obamacare, adding, “I don’t see any congealing around ideas yet.”
• 
  
• - Many Republican politicians are speaking pretty openly about the political danger of scaling back coverage. Lawmakers are getting  nervous about facing the kind of contentious town halls that their Democratic counterparts faced in 2009. Several members have already faced  big crowds of angry activists back home. “I’m not sure you’re going to have anyone in Washington with the courage to repeal the ACA,” Maine Gov. Paul LePage said at a town hall meeting last week. “I do not believe for a minute that now that we have exchanges they will take them away.”

-- The tenor of press coverage has shifted dramatically since the election toward emphasizing plusses, rather than minuses, of the law. Check out these 10 headlines from just the past few days:

• McClatchy’s Washington Bureau: “Repealing Obamacare would kill millions of jobs nationwide.”
• CNBC: “Obamacare repeal could crush your retiree medical costs.”
• USA Today: “Hospitals would face higher charity costs without Obamacare.”
• Kaiser Health News (which is picked up by a lot of newspapers): “Hospitals Worry Repeal Of Obamacare Would Jeopardize Innovations In Care.”
• NPR: “Obamacare Helped The Homeless, Who Now Worry About Coverage Repeal.”
• Los Angeles Times: “Trump’s actions on Obamacare threaten to undermine insurance markets.”
• Charlotte Observer: “ACA repeal could cost Mecklenberg and North Carolina millions in health funding.”
• Richmond Times-Dispatch: “Virginia could lose $20 million in public health funds with ACA repeal.”
• Register-Herald of Beckley, West Virginia: “West Virginia to be second most affected state with ACA repeal.” Finally, the conservative-leaning Arizona Republic editorial board has been calling on the GOP to not repeal the law until there is a replacement in place

The most recent Kaiser Health Tracking Poll found that only 20 percent of Americans support repeal alone, while 47 percent oppose repeal altogether and another 28 percent want to wait to repeal the law until the replacement plan’s details are known. The researchers behind the nonpartisan survey relay that a surprising number of people shift their opinions when they hear counter-arguments: “For example, after hearing pro-repeal arguments about the law’s costs to individuals and the government, the share of the public supporting repeal grows as large as 60 percent, while anti-repeal arguments about people losing coverage and the impact on people with pre-existing conditions decreases support for repeal to as low as 27 percent.”

The fluidity of those numbers underscores how impactful the coming debate over repeal could be on public opinion.

Democrats think some shared principles will work to their advantage during the coming fight over the law. The newest Quinnipiac University survey, for instance, found that 96 percent of Americans, including 91 percent of Republicans, say it is "very important" or "somewhat important" that health insurance be affordable for all Americans.

Amid deep partisan rancor, Senate confirms Jeff Sessions for attorney general The victory for Trump and Sessions came after a bruising confirmation process for the longtime senator and other Cabinet nominees, which Democrats have used to amplify their concerns about the president’s agenda. By Sean Sullivan and Kelsey Snell  •  Read more »

After pointed questions, fate of travel ban rests with appeals court

A three-judge panel pressed those challenging and defending President Trump’s controversial immigration order. It asked a Justice Department lawyer about the limits on the president’s power, and what evidence was used in temporarily barring refugees and citizens of seven Muslim-majority countries from entering the U.S.

By Matt Zapotosky and Robert Barnes  •  Read more » Nobody expects Trump to be rooting for the courts to knock down his ban. It is, after all, his signature policy achievement so far, meant to make good on a signature campaign promise to get tough on terrorism. But Trump isn't just sharing his opinion on the ban with us. He's not-so-subtly threatening the entire American court system if they don't side with him, including the above comment he made Wednesday in a speech to law enforcement. Also, he's tweeted a lot about this. Translation, via The Fix's Aaron Blake: “Trump is basically saying: That's a nice reputation you've got there. It'd be a shame if something happened to it.” Republicans L-O-V-E Trump's travel ban Here's some data that could help us understand why Trump is willing to throw out norms about separation of powers if it could mean saving his ban. While America is split down the middle on if his ban is a good thing, WaPo's polling guru Emily Guskin found that an incredibly high number of Republicans support it. It's not just the travel ban Republicans like. They are also incredibly supportive of several of Trump's key policies, like a border wall: Vetted, then blocked: A Syrian odyssey A family’s bags had been packed for a flight when the White House announced a ban on Syrian refugees entering the United States. “At first I thought it was a joke,” Mahmoud Khoja said. “I just froze.” By Louisa Loveluck  •  Read more » A Quinnipiac University poll finds that 51 percent of Americans are opposed to Trump’s order suspending travel from seven majority-Muslim countries, while 60 percent oppose Trump’s order to halt refugee travel to the U.S. for 120 days. By a margin of 70 percent to 26 percent, voters oppose Trump’s order to indefinitely block Syrian refugees.

Republicans vote to rebuke Elizabeth Warren, saying she impugned Jeff Sessions’s character In an extraordinarily rare move, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said the Democrat had breached Senate rules by reading past statements from Coretta Scott King and others critical of Sessions, a senator who is Trump’s attorney general nominee. "She was warned. She was given an explanation,” McConnell said of Warren. “Nevertheless, she persisted.” By Paul Kane and Ed O'Keefe  •  Read more » McConnell gives Warren’s presidential campaign an in-kind contribution Mitch McConnell gagging Elizabeth Warren is one of the best gifts she could have received, and her birthday is not even until June. It solidifies her bona fides as a fighter for progressive causes. By James Hohmann  •  Read more »

DAVID BORDWELL ON DONALD TRUMP

DAVID BORDWELL

Trump has created within the White House a cadre of supplicant–Svengalis who will steer him toward policies I can only regard as despotic. In the first days of his regime, the strategy is clear. He will occupy the forestage, gibbering and gesticulating to grab the news cycle, while behind the scenes a blitzkrieg of intolerance, repression, fear, kleptocracy, and pain will roll across our land. He’s a petty tyrant, but people will be so distracted by the pettiness that they’ll forget he’s a tyrant.

 Most surprising to me is arch Neocon David Frum, with whom I’ve never agreed on anything, writing an eloquent, wide-ranging critique everyone should read.

A president who plausibly owes his office at least in part to a clandestine intervention by a hostile foreign intelligence service? Who uses the bully pulpit to target individual critics? Who creates blind trusts that are not blind, invites his children to commingle private and public business, and somehow gets the unhappy members of his own political party either to endorse his choices or shrug them off? If this were happening in Honduras, we’d know what to call it. 

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 a cold eye toward the recent wave of journalists’ expeditions from the Coasts to report on and empathize with the Forgotten American. Nobody from the boondocks I lived in for eighteen years (an in-depth longitudinal study) ever evinced any curiosity about the ideas of the liberals they despised. Frequent visits back home showed no further stirrings of curiosity about the world, just as today I see no efforts to empathize coming from Trump’s jeering mobs. By contrast, many liberals strive to widen the circle of understanding, and this allows them to be played for suckers again and again.

the bulk of the blame lies with the voters. Granted that many suffer from the economic inequality created by globalization. It’s not their fault that the US lacks an educational system and a welfare state capable of absorbing the shocks of such massive technological change. But many Trump voters are not disadvantaged. A Gallup poll found that support from Trump was strongest in areas less damaged by globalization. (Racial bias seems to be a stronger correlative.)

Whatever the causes, there’s no blinking the fact. Between a demagogic voluptuary and a candidate whose moral obtuseness was matched by tactical incompetence, sixty-two million American adults chose recklessly. They acted in a way that was demonstrably mischievous, stupid, ignorant, selfish, bigoted, cruel, and hateful.

Donald Trump’s latest attack on the media is very, very dangerous

WASHINGTON POST, CHRIS CILLIZZA

what Trump is saying is so, so dangerous. He's implying that the media is allowing its own collective biases to get in the way of his efforts to keep the country safe from the threat of terrorism. That the media is, at best, downplaying these attacks because of their own ideological biases and, at, worst, siding with the terrorists. That's staggering stuff — even for Trump.

As Philip Bump notes, it's not the first time Trump has made an insinuation like this one. In June 2016, in the wake of the Orlando nightclub massacre, Trump said this: “People cannot believe that President Obama is acting the way he acts and can’t even mention the words radical Islamic terrorism. There’s something going on.

The problem is this: For lots and lots of people listening to Trump, his suggestion that the media is complicit in a coverup of terrorist attacks will be taken as fact. They won't seek out context or evidence that, frankly, totally undermines his contention. Because they already believe the media to be bad/biased, they will simply take it as a fact that the media is willfully disrupting the president's efforts to keep the country safe.

By Amber Phillips

President Trump's travel ban could be in legal limbo for months. But if we know where to look in the maze of legalese, we could have a sense of whether the courts will let it be implemented as soon as Tuesday. Here's why: The ban has been on pause since Friday. There are 50+ challenges to the ban, from Boston to Hawaii, but the most sweeping and significant is on the West Coast. A federal Seattle judge — a George W. Bush appointee — put it on hold nationwide almost a week after Trump implemented it, agreeing with Washington and Minnesota attorneys general that the ban could be unduly harming Americans. Some people who were stopped at airports last weekend started traveling again to the United States. On Tuesday,  the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco — will decide whether the Seattle judge's temporary restraining order should stay in place. This is a critical juncture for the ban: It's quite possible that what this court decides ends up being its fate. I'll add that this court is widely seen as one of the most liberal in the nation. The losing side will likely appeal to the Supreme Court. Which means in the next few months, the highest court in the land could tell us whether Trump's temporary travel ban for seven predominantly Muslim countries can resume. Or not. The Supreme Court could also give us an objectively unsatisfying 4-4 split along ideological lines, which it's done before on big cases. If that happens, the 9th Circuit's decision will be the official law of the land. The Supreme Court has been without its ninth member since Justice Antonin Scalia died almost exactly a year ago. It's almost certain that Trump's pick, conservative federal judge Neil Gorsuch, will not be on the bench in time to hear this case. (Remember, this is a temporary travel ban, which expires in 120 days — late May — for most travelers.) So, yes, this legal challenge could take months to complete. But it's possible that a decision Tuesday will signal its fate.

For Trump’s travel ban, a lengthy legal battle lies ahead A federal appeals court ruled that the president’s immigration order will remain suspended, at least until sometime Monday — when both sides have deadlines to present more arguments to a three-judge panel. The administration says the order is needed for national security. By Matt Zapotosky and Robert Barnes  •  Read more » Trump’s blasts at a federal judge raise questions for Gorsuch on independence Democrats are asking whether the Supreme Court nominee, who is likely to be called upon to review what the president already has shown to be a broad reliance on executive power, would be able to stand up to the president who picked him. By Robert Barnes  •  Read more »

Justice Department appeals to restore Trump travel ban

In a brief filed with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit, the acting solicitor general described a judge’s temporary halt to President Trump’s order on immigration as “judicial second-guessing” and an “impermissible intrusion” on presidential authority. The 9th Circuit denied a request for an immediate reinstatement of the ban and instead asked the state of Washington and the Trump administration to file more arguments by Monday afternoon. While his administration followed the court’s order, the president tweeted an extraordinarily personal criticism of U.S. District Judge James L. Robart.

By Robert Barnes, Matt Zapotosky and Abby Phillip  •  Read more »

Trump Moves to Roll Back Obama-Era Financial Rules

NEW YORKER

Steve Bannon is on the National Security Council. That sends a big signal.

Steve Bannon and Reince Priebus’s War for the White House — The New Yorker

Doubtless, many of America’s allies abroad will be delighted to hear that Bannon, who is widely regarded as the Dark Lord of Trumpland, has been nocked down a bit, at least on one front. But of course, there is no way to know if the Journal story is accurate, or merely the result of a mischievous leak from someone on the inside who is hostile to Bannon. As my colleague Ryan Lizza reported on Friday, there is a bitter struggle going on between Bannon and Priebus. Priebus’s allies inside the White House are widely thought to include Mike Pence, the Vice-President, and Sean Spicer, Trump’s spokesman. “In conversations I had with people close to Priebus and those close to Bannon, the two sides talk about each other as leaders of a zero-sum fight for control of the West Wing,” Lizza reported. He also quoted a source close to Priebus who, predictably enough, claimed that Priebus had virtually nothing to do with the disastrous rollout of the travel ban: that was all the fault of Bannon and his sidekick Stephen Miller.

WASHINGTON POST



FOREIGN POLICY

INEQUALITY FROM A CONSERVATIVE POV.

WASHINGTON POST

Five myths about anti-Semitism

WASHINGTON POST

TRUMP'S REFUGEE ORDER: LEGAL OR ILLEGAL? We are in the midst of a great war of national identity.

DAVID BROOKS, NY TIMES

[The] American myth was embraced and lived out by everybody from Washington to Lincoln to Roosevelt to Reagan. It was wrestled with by John Winthrop and Walt Whitman. It gave America a mission in the world — to spread democracy and freedom. It gave us an attitude of welcome and graciousness, to embrace the huddled masses yearning to breathe free and to give them the scope by which to realize their powers.
-----

And so along come men like Donald Trump and Stephen Bannon with a countermyth. Their myth is an alien myth, frankly a Russian myth. It holds, as Russian reactionaries hold, that deep in the heartland are the pure folk who embody the pure soul of the country — who endure the suffering and make the bread. But the pure peasant soul is threatened. It is threatened by the cosmopolitan elites and by the corruption of foreign influence.

The true American myth is dynamic and universal — embracing strangers and seizing possibilities. The Russian myth that Trump and Bannon have injected into the national bloodstream is static and insular. It is about building walls, staying put. Their country is bound by its nostalgia, not its common future.

The odd thing is that the Trump-Bannon myth is winning. The policies that emanate from it are surprisingly popular. The refugee ban has a lot of support. Closing off trade is popular. Building the wall is a winning issue.

We are in the midst of a great war of national identity. We thought we were in an ideological battle against radical Islam, but we are really fighting the national myths spread by Trump, Bannon, Putin, Le Pen and Farage.

We can argue about immigration and trade and foreign policy, but nothing will be right until we restore and revive the meaning of America. Are we still the purpose-driven experiment Lincoln described and Emma Lazarus wrote about: assigned by providence to spread democracy and prosperity; to welcome the stranger; to be brother and sister to the whole human race; and to look after one another because we are all important in this common project?

Or are we just another nation, hunkered down in a fearful world?

WASHINGTON POST

Since 9/11, as has been pointed out many times over the past week, no American has been killed in a terrorist attack on U.S. soil by an immigrant, or even the son or daughter of an immigrant, from any of the seven countries listed in the executive order. That’s true, but (a) it’s the sort of argument that implicitly concedes the propriety of some visa bans in some circumstances, and (b) it’s not by itself a reason to regard Trump’s executive order as wrong or irrational. National security policies such as this one aren’t prompted by statistical analysis of past events — at least one hopes they aren’t — but by current realities and prognostications based on them. The fact that no Islamist Yemeni has set off a bomb in an American city is not by itself an argument for continuing to allow Yemeni asylum seekers into the United States.

Many Americans, though, are guided by a simpler and more cogent logic than what animates policy debates in Washington and New York. It goes something like this: Islamist-inspired terrorism has taken many lives around the globe, especially, though not exclusively, in the Middle East and North Africa. The federal government allows many people from the Middle East and North Africa to enter the United States. It stands to reason that, if our immigration policy continues unchecked, the violence racking Syria, Somalia, Libya, et al., will in some measure show up here, too.

I don’t share that belief. But it is not an irrational one, and it is conceivable that I am wrong. Nor is support of the visa ban evidence of bigotry or coldhearted xenophobia. It is merely to value the safety of neighbors and countrymen whom one knows over the safety of foreigners whom one doesn’t — not an obviously malign preference. And it has the merit of reassuring ordinary Americans that, even if federal policy gets it wrong or goes too far, their government is at least trying to perform its most basic function. I’m not sure Trump’s adversaries can achieve their aims by telling such people they’re idiots and bigots.

The resisters had better pause for long enough to ask why anybody would approve of what Trump is doing. If they can’t or won’t, they’ll find themselves resisting for eight years and not just four.

WASHINGTON POST




GREG SARGENT, WASHINGTON POST

Trump’s (Or Bannon's) Dark View of Immigrants

NEW YORKER

In case you forgot: Nearly everyone in Congress has a college degree.65% of Americans don’t.

WASHINGTON POST

Fighting Gorsuch is hopeless. Democrats should do it anyway

WASHINGTON POST

Airlines Told to Seat Passengers as Court Blocks Travel Ban

• In a defeat for the Trump administration, a federal judge in Seattle temporarily lifted the ban on all refugees and visa holders from seven predominantly Muslim countries.
• The White House called it “outrageous” and vowed to appeal, though the government told airlines to allow passengers from those countries to fly.

Trump Nominates Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court, an Echo of Scalia in Philosophy and Style

NY TIMES



NY TIMES

Picking One Justice, Trump Has Eye on Choosing a Second

The number of people affected by Trump’s travel ban: About 90,000

WASHINGTON POST

Trump blamed “big problems at airports” on other factors, including demonstrators and an airline’s technical problems.

Former president Barack Obama became the latest high-profile voice to weigh in on the issue, offering his first public criticism of his successor while backing the protests.

Refugee groups worried that 20,000 people could be affected by the 120-day suspension of refugee admission.

The disarray underscored the increasingly strained relationship between the new president and congressional Republicans, with some key GOP aides saying they felt the administration was moving too swiftly and without respect for critical protocol for vetting executive actions that have been in place for decades.

The opposition party has all but abandoned their pledge to find common ground with the new president, pledging a protracted fight against Cabinet confirmations and Trump’s imminent pick for the Supreme Court.

Trump’s hard-line actions have an intellectual godfather: Jeff Sessions

The quiet senator from Alabama — Trump’s nominee for attorney general — has become a singular power in the new Washington, with his aides and allies accelerating the president’s most dramatic early moves, including the controversial travel ban.

Before becoming the first sitting senator to support Trump, Sessions had the reputation as someone on the ideological edge of his own party, more conservative than even his fellow Republicans — a lawmaker who opposed even some forms of legal immigration and was denied a federal judgeship in the 1980s because of accusations he made racially insensitive comments.

Now, Sessions is center stage. He's Trump's pick to be attorney general, and three of the president's top policy and political advisers have close ties to Sessions. The Post's Philip Rucker and Robert Costa lay out how so many roads in the Trump White House lead back to Sessions.

TRUMP BANS MUSLIMS FROM 7 COUNTRIES FROM ENTERING AMER.

The 45th president has taken a series of actions in his first full week that have sent opponents of his agenda into an absolute frenzy. How can he do all this? The answer is simple: He’s implementing exactly the sorts of ideas that got him elected.

Marking a draconian shift in US policy, Donald Trump issued an executive order that will deny refugees and immigrants from certain Muslim-majority countries entry to the United States. Trump’s unprecedented action will indefinitely close US borders to refugees fleeing the humanitarian crisis in war-torn Syria and impose a de facto ban on Muslims traveling to the US from parts of the Middle East and North Africa by prioritizing refugee claims “on the basis of religious-based persecution”.

President Trump’s executive order on immigration indefinitely barred Syrian refugees from entering the United States, suspended all refugee admissions for 120 days and blocked citizens of seven Muslim-majority countries, refugees or otherwise, from entering the United States for 90 days: Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen.

The order unleashed chaos on the immigration system and in airports in the United States and overseas, and prompted protests and legal action.

The president reiterated that the U.S. would resume issuing visas to all countries after implementing the “most secure policies over the next 90 days” and compared his order to action taken by then-President Obama in 2011.

On Saturday night, a federal judge in Brooklyn blocked part of Mr. Trump’s order, saying that refugees and others being held at airports across the United States should not be sent back to their home countries. But the judge stopped short of letting them into the country or issuing a broader ruling on the constitutionality of Mr. Trump’s actions.

Federal judges in three states — Massachusetts, Virginia and Washington — soon issued similar rulings to stop the government from removing refugees and others with valid visas. The judge in Massachusetts also said the government could not detain the travelers.

On Sunday morning, the Department of Homeland Security said it would comply with the rulings while it continued to enforce all of the president’s executive orders. “Prohibited travel will remain prohibited,” it said in a statement.

Hundreds lined Pennsylvania Ave. chanting “No hate! No fear! Refugees are welcome here.” Others at Dulles International Airport created a cheering section for travelers emerging from customs.

Reince Priebus, the White House chief of staff,  appeared to reverse a key part of President Trump’s immigration order on Sunday, saying that people from the affected countries who hold green cards will not be prevented from returning to the United States.

But Priebus also said that border agents had “discretionary authority” to detain and question suspicious travelers from certain countries. That statement seemed to add to the uncertainty over how the executive order will be interpreted and enforced in the days ahead.

Even with his statement, much of the order was still being enforced, and travel was disrupted for many around the world.

Questions multiply about Bannon’s role in administration The chief political strategist was directly involved in shaping the controversial immigration mandate, according to those familiar with the process.

President Trump’s Immigration Order, Annotated

WASHINGTON POST

Trump Supporters Applaud Immigration Order as a ‘Welcome Change’

NY TIMES

Forget The Economy: The Election Was Always About Abortion

DAILY BEAST

Democrats’ dilemma: How to be heard in the hurricane of Trump news?

WASHINGTON POST

White House suggests 20% tax on Mexican imports

The feud between the White House and the Mexican government escalated on Thursday when the US press secretary suggested implementing a 20% border tax on goods coming from Mexico to pay for the wall the president intends to build across the southern border. White House press secretary Sean Spicer originally told reporters about the plan on Air Force One as the president returned from a Republican retreat in Philadelphia, before later walking the idea back slightly. “By doing it that way we can do $10bn a year and easily pay for the wall just through that mechanism alone. That’s really going to provide the funding,” he said. Donald Trump’s chief of staff, Reince Priebus, later said that the tax was just one of a “buffet of options” the president had to ensure Mexico paid for the wall. Mexican government officials have criticized the ramifications of a border tax and earlier on Thursday Mexico’s president, Peña Nieto, cancelled a planned visit to the White House.

Trump-Mexico relations hit new low after 20% border wall tax mooted