THE ECONOMY REMAINS STAGNANT.

Al Drago for The New York Times After Donald J. Trump won the presidential election, Americans’ optimism about the economic future soared. But midway through the year, that optimism has not translated into concrete economic gains.

This seeming contradiction exposes a reality about the role of psychology in economics — or more specifically, how psychology is connected only loosely to actual growth. It will take more than feelings to fix the sluggishness that has been evident in the United States and other major economies for years. Confidence isn’t some magic elixir for the economy: Businesses will hire and invest only when they see concrete evidence of demand for their products, and consumers intensify their spending only when their incomes justify it.

President Trump said on Twitter on Sunday that the stock market was at an “all-time high” and that unemployment was at its lowest level in years, both of which are true (he added that wages would start going up, which is certainly possible).



 [But] "Despite bravado and big promises, the economy that President Trump is touting this week looks a lot like the one he lambasted as a candidate: a slow, largely steady grind that has chipped away at the damage done by the 2008-2009 recession but failed to produce the prosperity of decades past,” Damian Paletta and Ana Swanson report: “Now, as he approaches the six-month marker of his presidency, Trump faces several new warning signs that key areas of the economy could be losing steam, including in industries he specifically promised to revitalize. Automobile sales, the heart of the manufacturing economy, are in a months-long swoon. Both General Motors and Ford on Mondayreported that their sales had slid 5 percent in June as the industry’s workers continue to be hit with layoffs. U.S. factory output fell in May … [and] construction of new homes fell to an eight-month low.” Economist Lindsey Piegza said she believes there is a sense of “pessimism fatigue”: “There’s a sense where, it’s not fantastic, but this may be as good as it gets, so let’s celebrate mediocrity."

ACCEPTANCE

THE ATLANTIC, MARK BOWDEN


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Unless Kim Jong Un is killed and replaced by someone better, or some miracle of diplomacy occurs, or some shattering peninsular conflict intervenes, North Korea will eventually build ICBMs armed with nuclear warheads. In the words of one retired senior U.S. military commander: “It’s a done deal.”

Acceptance is likely because there are no good military options where North Korea is concerned. As frightening as it is to contemplate a Kim regime that can successfully strike the United States, accepting such a scenario means living with things only slightly worse than they are right now.

Pyongyang has long had the means to all but level Seoul, and weapons capable of killing tens of thousands of Americans stationed in South Korea—far more than those killed by al-Qaeda on September 11, 2001, an atrocity that spurred the U.S. to invade two countries and led to 16 years of war. Right now North Korea has missiles that could reach Japan (and possibly Guam) with weapons of mass destruction. The world is already accustomed to dealing with a North Korea capable of sowing unthinkable mayhem.

Pyongyang has been constrained by the same logic that has stayed the use of nuclear arms for some 70 years. Their use would invite swift annihilation. In the Cold War this brake was called mad (mutual assured destruction). In this case the brake on North Korea would be simply ad: assured destruction, since any launch of a nuclear weapon would invite an annihilating response; even though its missiles might hit North America, it cannot destroy the United States.

There is already a close-to-even chance that, in the 30 minutes it would take a North Korean ICBM to reach the West Coast of the United States, the missile would be intercepted and destroyed. But the other way of looking at those odds is that such a missile would have a close-to-even chance of hitting an American city.

This is terrible to ponder, but Americans lived with a far, far greater threat for almost half a century. Throughout the Cold War, the U.S. faced the potential for complete destruction. I was one of the kids who performed civil-defense drills in the 1950s, ducking under my school desk while sirens wailed. During the Cuban missile crisis, the possibility seemed imminent enough that I plotted the fastest route from school to home. The threat of nuclear attack is a feature of the modern world, and one that has grown far less existential to Americans over time.

It is expensive to build an atom bomb, and very hard to build one small enough to ride in a missile. It is also hard to build an ICBM. But these are all old technologies. The know-how exists and is widespread. Preventing a terrorist group from acquiring such a weapon may be possible, but when a nation—whether North Korea or Iran or any other—commits itself to the goal, stopping it is virtually impossible. A deal to halt Iran’s nuclear program was doable only because that country has extensive trading and banking ties with other nations. The Kim regime’s isolation means that no country besides China can really apply meaningful economic pressure. Persuading a nation to abandon nuclear arms depends less on military strength than on the collective determination of the world, and a decision made by the nation in question. What’s needed is the proper framework for disarmament—the right collection of incentives and disincentives to render the building of such a weapon a detriment and a waste—so the country decides that abandoning its pursuit of nukes is in its best interest.

It is expensive to build an atom bomb, and very hard to build one small enough to ride in a missile. It is also hard to build an ICBM. But these are all old technologies. The know-how exists and is widespread. Preventing a terrorist group from acquiring such a weapon may be possible, but when a nation—whether North Korea or Iran or any other—commits itself to the goal, stopping it is virtually impossible. A deal to halt Iran’s nuclear program was doable only because that country has extensive trading and banking ties with other nations. The Kim regime’s isolation means that no country besides China can really apply meaningful economic pressure...

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....Acceptance is how the current crisis should and will most likely play out. No one is going to announce this policy. No president is going to openly acquiesce to Kim’s ownership of a nuclear-tipped ICBM, but just as George W. Bush quietly swallowed Pyongyang’s successful explosion of an atom bomb, and just as Barack Obama met North Korea’s subsequent nuclear tests and missile launches with strategic patience, Trump may well find himself living with something similar. If there were a tolerable alternative, it would long ago have been tried. Sabotage may continue to stall progress, but cannot stop it altogether. Draconian economic pressure, even with China’s help, is also unlikely to curb Pyongyang’s quest.

“The North Koreans have demonstrated a strong willingness to continue this program, regardless of the price, regardless of the isolation,” says Abe Denmark, the former deputy assistant secretary of defense for East Asia under Obama. “To be frank, my sense is that their leadership really could not care less about the country’s economic situation or the living standards of their people. As long as they are making progress toward nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles, and they can stay in power, then they seem to be willing to pay that price.”

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...Every test, successful or not, brings him closer to building his prized weapons. When he has nuclear ICBMs, North Korea will have a more potent and lethal strike capability against the United States and its allies, but no chance of destroying America, or winning a war, and therefore no better chance of avoiding the inevitable consequence of launching a nuke: national suicide. ... Perhaps when he feels safe enough with his arsenal, he might turn to more-sensible goals, like building the North Korean economy, opening trade, and ending its decades of extreme isolation. All of these are the very things that create the framework needed for disarmament.

But acceptance, while the right choice, is yet another bad one. With such missiles, Kim might feel emboldened to move on South Korea. Would the U.S. sacrifice Los Angeles to save Seoul? The same calculation drove the U.K. and France to develop their own nuclear weapons during the Cold War. Trump has already suggested that South Korea and Japan might want to consider building nuclear programs. In this way, acceptance could lead to more nuclear-armed states and ever greater chances that one will use the weapons.

With his arsenal, Kim may well become an even more destabilizing force in the region. There is a good chance that he would try to negotiate from strength with Seoul and Washington, forging some kind of confederation with the South that leads to the removal of U.S. forces from the peninsula. ... Kim, who sees himself as the divinely inspired heir to leadership of all the Korean people, is not likely to be satisfied with only his half of the peninsula.

...Perhaps the most reassuring thing about pursuing the acceptance option is that Kim appears to be neither suicidal nor crazy. In the five and a half years since assuming power at age 27, he has acted with brutal efficiency to consolidate that power; the assassination of his half brother is only the most recent example. As tyrants go, he’s shown appalling natural ability. For a man who occupies a position both powerful and perilous, his moves have been nothing if not deliberate and even cruelly rational.

And as the latest head of a family that has ruled for three generations, one whose primary purpose has been to survive, as a young man with a lifetime of wealth and power before him, how likely is he to wake up one morning and set fire to his world?

Read the entire article at  THE ATLANTIC

NO KOREA SUCCESSFULLY TESTS AN ICBM.

AFP PHOTO/KCNA VIA KNS

The U.S. government confirmed that North Korea successfully tested an intercontinental ballistic missile, crossing a chilling threshold. 

The latest missile flew higher and remained in the air longer than previous attempts — enough to reach all of Alaska,” Anne Gearan and Emily Rauhala report. “The launch follows a string of recent actions by Pyongyang, including a salvo of missiles last month and three tests in May. Kim has now launched more missiles in one year than his father and predecessor in the family dynasty did in 17 years in power. North Korea has also conducted five nuclear weapons tests since 2006, including two last year.

 Experts say the missile was a “real ICBM” and showed technical sophistication that Western experts believed North Korea was years away from mastering. “North Korea’s apparent accomplishment puts it well ahead of schedule,” Joby Warrick explains. “The Hwasong-14 tested Monday could not have reached the U.S. mainland, analysts say, and there’s no evidence to date that North Korea is capable of building a miniaturized nuclear warhead to fit on one of its longer-range missiles. But there is now little reason to doubt that both are within North Korea’s grasp.”

The past three presidents have tried to negotiate, only to learn that Pyongyang can never be trusted....The president-elect believed he could use his reputation for unpredictability to unnerve and intimidate America’s adversaries into making concessions that they would not otherwise make. Some people close to Trump thought, for example, that North Korea might come to the table out of fear that the American president might just be crazy enough to take preemptive military action. 

• Foreign policy experts generally agree there is a handful of possible options, but with a country as unstable as North Korea, none of them are ideal. The first would be to continue the Obama-era policy of “strategic patience,” essentially working to punish the regime through further sanctions and diplomatic means in the hopes that they start behaving better. [The Atlantic / Mark Bowden]

 As the first president in U.S. history with no prior military or government experience, Trump has clearly never studied “deterrence theory”: If he thought a show of force would deter North Korea, he thought wrong. If anything, the president’s previous saber-rattling has only driven the regime to accelerate its efforts to build a nuclear weapon capable of striking the mainland United States.

North Korea’s ability to bomb American population centers – whether Seattle, San Francisco or Los Angeles – would dramatically change the Washington calculus and massively constrain our ability to use military force. That’s the whole point of these tests. “The fear is not that Mr. Kim would launch a pre-emptive attack on the West Coast; that would be suicidal, and if the 33-year-old leader has demonstrated anything in his five years in office, he is all about survival,” David Sanger writes on the front page of today’s New York Times. “As he looks around the world, he sees cases like that of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi of Libya — an authoritarian who gave up his nascent nuclear program, only to be deposed, with American help, as soon as his people turned against him. That is what Mr. Kim believes his nuclear program will prevent — an American effort to topple him. He may be right.”

“There is no good option here,” former acting CIA director Michael Morell said on “CBS This Morning.” “There is no military option here to destroy the nuclear program (or) his missile program. There is no option to do that that wouldn't start a second Korean War and wouldn't raise the possibility of him using nuclear weapons against his neighbors. The risks are extraordinarily high in a military standoff.”

While China pledges cooperation with the United States over North Korea, Beijing has not fundamentally shifted away from a strategy that balances pressure on the Kim regime with keeping the regime afloat, said Chris Steinitz, a research scientist at the federally funded, nonprofit Center for Naval Analyses. “It’s kind of how China looks at everything. They have a very long view,” Steinitz told my colleagues Anne and Emily. “They will wait. They will bide their time. They have a lot of priorities.”

• [While] President Xi Jinping of China is known for acting boldly, but for all the grief Pyongyang and its nuclear tests have been causing him, his options are limited as well.

Don’t forget that the U.S.-Sino relationship involves far more than North Korea: China yesterday vowed to step up its air and sea patrols after a U.S. warship sailed near a disputed island in the South China Sea, and last week the United States announced a new arms deal with Taiwan. 

 US Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley warned China that if it continues to trade with North Korea, the US would consider pulling its trade deals with China. [Associated Press / Edith Lederer].

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....“Global action is required to stop a global threat,” Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said in a statement yesterday afternoon. “Any country that hosts North Korean guest workers, provides any economic or military benefits, or fails to fully implement UN Security Council resolutions is aiding and abetting a dangerous regime. All nations should publicly demonstrate to North Korea that there are consequences to their pursuit of nuclear weapons.”

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-- Is Trump’s mental health “immaterial”? At the Aspen Ideas Festival last week, during a panel on U.S. national security in the Trump era, former CIA director David Petraeus defended the president’s foreign policy. He said Trump’s national security team is the strongest he had ever seen, and he argued that Trump is far more decisive than Obama, who he said was indecisive to the point of paralysis.

David Rothkopf, who teaches at Columbia University and was previously chief executive at Foreign Policy magazine, was moderating the panel. He noted that, for the first time, he’s getting regular questions about the mental health of the president. He asked Petraeus if he thought the president was fit to serve. “It’s immaterial,” he reportedly replied, arguing that because the team around Trump is so good, they can offset whatever deficits he might have.

“I was floored. It was a stunningly weak defense,” Rothkoph writes in an op-ed for today’s Post. “Daily he shows he lacks the character, discipline, intellect, judgment or respect for the office to be president of the United States.

Democrats will keep losing, unless they go local.



JOE SCARBOROUGH, WASHINGTON POST

TRUMPCARE FLATLINES.

Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images

Repealing Obamacare, which unified Republicans for six years, has now become the party’s albatross. 

• Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is having a rough week. Late yesterday, he announced the procedural vote on the Senate health care bill would be pushed back to an undetermined time after Congress’s Fourth of July recess as it failed to garner enough support among members of his own party. [NPR / Arnie Seipel]

The Senate majority leader believed that the blowback for keeping his health-care bill secret would be less than the blowback for negotiating it in public....But the Kentuckian misread the degree to which members of his own conference wanted a seat at the table. With little margin for error, he also had too much confidence in his ability to hammer out a compromise that could win over both hardliners who want full repeal and moderates who want to protect Medicaid expansion.
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• However, the bill isn’t completely doomed yet, because the draft legislation contains $200 billion that McConnell could theoretically add to appease moderates. He could also potentially get rid of more of Obamacare mandates that conservatives are looking for. [Vox / Dylan Scott]
• But striking that balance between moderate and far-right Republicans is going to be tricky, and McConnell can only afford to lose two votes.

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 Last week, [McConnell] flippantly dismissed complaints about bypassing the committee process. “No transparency would be added by having hearings in which Democrats offered endless single-payer system amendments,” the leader said at a press conference. “That is not what this Republican Senate was sent here to do.”

Many of his members felt otherwise. There was technically a working group of senators that came up with the bill, but McConnell was in the driver’s seat. Republican senators who were invited to closed-door “listening sessions” say they were sounded out about what they could and couldn’t support. But several grumbled that they couldn’t get any information out of leadership about what was and wasn’t on the table. Others said privately that the meetings felt less substantive and more like a box-checking exercise.

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Senator Susan Collins, Republican of Maine, on Capitol Hill on Tuesday, was an early opponent of the Senate health care bill. CreditStephen Crowley/The New York Times

• Throughout the process, McConnell made some tactical errors of his own, such as excluding Republican senators including Collins and Louisiana’s Bill Cassidy — both known for their health care knowledge — from the early working group that drafted the bill. [NYT / Jennifer Steinhauer]

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Another consequence of the secretive process is that almost no Republican senators have been out there trying to sell the bill – to the public or to each other. Dozens of GOP lawmakers who privately planned to vote for the motion to proceed today made a public show of saying that they were undecided and still studying the proposal. They avoided local reporters and put out opaque statements that gave themselves plenty of wiggle room, as they waited to see how things shook out.... That ensured one-sided coverage in the press, which in turn made it even harder for members to justify supporting the bill.

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Sarah Binder, a professor of political science at George Washington University and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution: “First, most closed-door bargaining in the Senate is bipartisan. … Second, when leaders close the doors, it’s often because the legislative process has ground to a halt. … Third, McConnell’s tactics are particularly unusual because Republicans are trying to legislate on one of the nation’s most complicated policy issues. Health care affects one-sixth of the economy … Usually, issues that demand secret negotiations are must-pass measures about to hit a nonnegotiable deadline, such as failing to raise the debt ceiling or to fund the government on time.”

Don Ritchie, the historian emeritus of the Senate, said that the chamber has not taken such a partisan, closed-door approach to major legislation since in the years before World War I. A century ago, Senate Democrats, at the urging of President Woodrow Wilson, drew up major tariff reforms while shutting out Republicans. But when Democratic leaders tried that again when they had large majorities during the Great Depression, rank-and-file senators revolted. It hasn’t happened since, he told the Los Angeles Times.

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Gov. John R. Kasich of Ohio, a Republican, at the White House in November.  CreditKevin Lamarque/Reuters

One majorly under-covered angle in the press coverage of why the Senate has punted is the widespread opposition of GOP governors. “More than half a dozen Republican governors, including several from states with Republican senators, expressed either grave reservations or outright opposition to the bill,” Alex Burns reports on A17 of the New York Times: Two examples:

• Nevada Gov. Brian Sandoval (R) rejected the Senate proposal so forcefully that he helped sway his state’s Republican senator, Dean Heller, to oppose the measure.
• Ohio Gov. John Kasich (R) had a press conference in D.C. yesterday to call the Senate bill “unacceptable,” saying it would victimize the poor and mentally ill, and redirect tax money “to people who are already very wealthy.”

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President Trump spoke in the Cabinet Room of the White House before having lunch with Republican senators on Tuesday. CreditAl Drago/The New York Times

Trump’s inability to twist the arms of wavering Senate Republicans, despite his best efforts, makes him looks impotent. ...Even in private, Trump is unfamiliar with what the bill he has endorsed would actually do: The president convened Republican senators in the East Room yesterday afternoon so that members could air their grievances. “A senator who supports the bill left the meeting at the White House with a sense that the president did not have a grasp of some basic elements of the Senate plan — and seemed especially confused when a moderate Republican complained that opponents of the bill would cast it as a massive tax break for the wealthy,” Glenn Thrush and Jonathan Martin report in the Times. “Trump said he planned to tackle tax reform later, ignoring the repeal’s tax implications.”

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If Senate Republicans manage to pass a health-care bill, it's safe to say the legislation will have come back from the dead... A new Quinnipiac University poll shows just 18 percent of Republicans strongly approve of the bill. The all-important political bloc of independents really dislike it too: 72% disapprove.

The bill, as is, makes nobody happy. It cuts Medicaid deeply and scales back Obamacare’s financial aid for people who buy private coverage. It’s projected to reduce premiums in the long term, but only because people would see higher out-of-pocket costs. But then it also keeps some of the health care law’s major insurance regulations, a cardinal sin for conservatives.

On the other end of the ideological spectrum, more moderate senators have been saying for weeks that they want to soften the Medicaid cuts and want additional funding for the opioid crisis.

In its current form, the Senate bill gradually ends the general federal funding for Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion, which covered millions of poor Americans, in 2024. It also places a federal spending cap on the entire program for the first time. The result, according to the CBO, would be a $772 billion cut, versus current law, and 15 million fewer people enrolled in Medicaid a decade from now than under Obamacare.

The bottom line is that CBO estimates 22 million fewer Americans would have health insurance under the plan 10 years from now. “His problem is that the policy is just really bad,” a Republican health care lobbyist said. 

The phony Time cover from March 1, 2009 featuring Trump with the headline 'The Apprentice is a television smash!' was found hanging in frames in the president's various clubs stretching from Florida to as far as Scotland. It is still unclear who is behind the mock-up cover but Time has since asked Trump's clubs and resorts to take them down, according to the Washington Post who first reported the fake cover on Tuesday. Twitter, of course, has since gone wild with thousands of memes poking fun at Trump. 'Russian Bride of the Year. Donald Trump - Vladimir Putin's blushing bride,' one cover read with a photo of Trump dressed in a wedding dress. Another one featured a cartoon of Trump's face with various words pasted across it, including golf, cake, Russian women and Vladimir Putin & Donald Trump BF4ever.



His more recent covers have been, shall we say, less flattering than the fake one:

SUPREME CT ALLOWS TRUMP A TEMPORARY AND PARTIAL TRAVEL BAN.

Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images

• President Trump scored a big — if temporary — win on his travel ban today, as the US Supreme Court announced it would hear arguments on the ban later this fall and, in the meantime, lifted a block the lower courts had placed on its implementation. [Vox / Dara Lind]

-- The Supreme Court agreed to review a series of lower-court rulings blocking Trump's contentious travel ban — allowing a scaled-back version of his executive order to move forward until justices can review merits of the case in the fall. Robert Barnes and Matt Zapotosky report: “The court’s unsigned order delivered a compromise neither side had asked for: It said the ban may not be enforced against those with a ‘bona fide’ connection to this country, such as family members here or an awaiting job or place in an American university. But the justices indicated that lower courts had gone too far in completely freezing Trump’s order[:] ‘The government’s interest in enforcing (the executive order) and the executive’s authority to do so, are undoubtedly at their peak when there is no tie between the foreign national and the United States,’ the court wrote...

“In the opinion, the court said it will consider the merits of the case [when] it reconvenes in October. In the meantime, the court nudged the Trump administration to get on with what it said would be a temporary pause to review vetting procedures. ‘We fully expect that the relief we grant today will permit the executive to conclude its internal work and provide adequate notice to foreign governments’ within 90 days, the court said. That means by the time the court takes the case up in the fall, circumstances could be quite different. Depending on the results of the review, Trump could push to extend the measure, or even make it permanent. And the court told lawyers to address whether the court’s consideration of the case might be moot by fall.”

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• The people primarily affected by the Court’s decision are tourists from the six majority-Muslim nations — Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen — as well as refugees. (Iraq was in Trump’s first ban but has since been cut.) The ruling will not affect foreigners coming into the US to study, teach, or work at American businesses. It also won’t impact people who are coming to stay with family members. [Vox / Dara Lind]
•  At least three of the Supreme Court justices, Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, and newest Court member Neil Gorsuch wrote they would have supported the ban taking full effect, with even more restrictions on travelers. [BuzzFeed / Chris Geidner]

FILE PHOTO: U.S. Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst/File Photo

 Bigger picture: The flurry of activity showcased just how conservative Gorsuch will be on the court. Reuters’ Lawrence Hurley and Andrew Chung report: “Gorsuch showed his inclination to rule from a spot occupied by fellow conservative Clarence Thomas. At a minimum, he is so far living up to Trump's claim that he would be a conservative in the mold of the man he replaced, Justice Antonin Scalia. … Liberal groups and Democratic senators had vociferously opposed Gorsuch's appointment, with the evidence so far suggesting their depiction of him as a dogged conservative was largely correct.... Conservatives are delighted. Their hope that Gorsuch, 49, would be a solid vote on the right, would appear to be well founded.”

THE KOCH BROS. CONTINUE THEIR MARCH TO VICTORY.

Charles Koch  (Patrick T. Fallon For The Washington Post)

The wealthy donors who finance the conservative Koch network have many reasons to celebrate five months into Donald Trump’s presidency.

Justice Neil Gorsuch sits on the Supreme Court, and a slew of other pro-business judges have been nominated. Major regulations enacted under Barack Obama have been rescinded. Environmental rules have been scaled back. A bill signed into law Friday, which makes it easier for the Department of Veterans Affairs to fire employees, offers a blueprint for scaling back civil service protections. The administration has proposed massive spending cuts.

But with Trump’s self-inflicted wounds and persistent GOP infighting in the capital, the financiers assembled at the Broadmoor resort on Cheyenne Mountain are also being forced to reckon with the possibility that golden opportunities to overhaul the tax code and repeal Obamacare are being squandered. Some also quietly fear that voter backlash to the president in 2018 could derail their long-term plans to remake the federal government.

[They] are frustrated that national Republicans are not doing more to capitalize on having unified control of the federal government. But at their summer seminar here in the Rocky Mountains, which wrapped up last night, many were ecstatic—even giddy—about significant conservative gains that have been made this year in state capitals across the country.

Republicans now control the governorship and legislature in 25 states, compared to only six states for Democrats. Last November, the GOP seized all the levers of lawmaking in four new states – Iowa, Kentucky, Missouri and New Hampshire – making it much easier to pass far-reaching legislation.

The network, led by the billionaire brothers Charles and David Koch, has spent hundreds of millions of dollars on low-profile races and building out grassroots operations in 36 states over the past decade.

In 2017 alone, several of these states have reduced union power, scaled back regulations, cut taxes, blocked Medicaid expansion, promoted alternatives to public education, loosened criminal sentencing laws and eased requirements to get occupational licenses.

Because President Trump is such an all-consuming story, most of these moves received scant national attention. But the 400 donors who descended on the Broadmoor resort over the past few days have been paying close attention and are keenly interested in the outcome of these state-level fights.

“Even in the past six months we’ve seen a lot of success: We have two new right-to-work states, school choice wins in five states, and a dozen states have reduced spending or taxes,” Roger Pattison, director of member relations for the Koch network, said at a dinner on Saturday night. “I could go on and on.”

“We’re coming off the most successful legislative session that this network has ever had, and it’s a result of your investments,” added Luke Hilgemann, chief executive of Americans for Prosperity, which is part of the constellation of Koch-funded groups.

TRUMPCARE: 22 MILLION MORE UNINSURED BY 2026.

Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

• The latest version of the plan to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act would leave 22 million people more uninsured by 2026, according to the latest report from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office. [Congressional Budget Office]
• As expected, the bill would predominantly affect the poor. Many of those people who would lose insurance are low-income Medicaid recipients, as the bill would cut Medicaid spending by $772 billion over the next decade. [Vox / Dylan Scott]
• ...It’s...an extremely high number of uninsured people, and could prove to be too much for some Senate Republicans, who will decide the bill's fate. 
• Still, the bill is hurtling toward a vote before the upcoming July 4 recess. The bill was released on Thursday, and there are just a few more days until senators are expected to vote. A big consequence of the speedy process is less time to catch gaps in the bill, some of which have already been discovered. [Vox / Sarah Kliff]
• One of the issues with the bill that consumer advocates recently noticed is that it could raise health insurance premiums for small businesses. Another glaring omission was the initial lack of a continuous coverage clause, which would penalize Americans for not maintaining their health insurance. That had been left out of the bill’s original draft, but made it into a newer draft released on Monday. [Vox / Sarah Kliff and Dylan Scott]
• Right now, one of Mitch McConnell’s toughest challenges is satisfying concerns of both far-right Republicans and those in the middle, like Sens. Dean Heller of Nevada, Susan Collins of Maine, and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska. Murkowski has said she won’t vote for a bill that defunds Planned Parenthood (which this one does, for one year). [NYT / Robert Pear and Thomas Kaplan]

Senator Rand Paul, Republican of Kentucky, opposes the bill, saying it does not do enough to lower health costs. CreditAl Drago for The New York Times

• Then there are the conservatives. Republican senators including Rand Paul of Kentucky, Mike Lee of Utah, Ted Cruz of Texas, and Ron Johnson of Wisconsin say the bill simply doesn’t go far enough to cut costs. Johnson has also said he thinks there’s far too little time before the vote. [NYT / Robert Pear and Thomas Kaplan]
• No matter the outcome, the bill simply does not make good on Donald Trump's repeated promise to lower health costs for Americans. During the 2016 campaign, Trump promised “insurance for everybody” that would be cheaper, and told his supporters he would not cut expanded Medicaid.  [Washington Post / John Wagner, Abby Phillip, and Jenna Johnson]
• For more health care coverage, don't miss Vox's daily health care newsletter, edited by Sarah Kliff. [Click here to subscribe automatically for this email address.]