UPPER CLASS CULTURAL PRIVILEGE

DAVID BROOKS, NY TIMES

Over the past generation, members of the college-educated class have become amazingly good at making sure their children retain their privileged status. They have also become devastatingly good at making sure the children of other classes have limited chances to join their ranks.

How they’ve managed to do the first task — giving their own children a leg up — is pretty obvious. It’s the pediacracy, stupid. Over the past few decades, upper-middle-class Americans have embraced behavior codes that put cultivating successful children at the center of life. As soon as they get money, they turn it into investments in their kids.

Upper-middle-class moms have the means and the maternity leaves to breast-feed their babies at much higher rates than high school-educated moms, and for much longer periods.

Upper-middle-class moms have the means and the maternity leaves to breast-feed their babies at much higher rates than high school-educated moms, and for much longer periods.

Upper-middle-class parents have the means to spend two to three times more time with their preschool children than less affluent parents. Since 1996, education expenditures among the affluent have increased by almost 300 percent, while education spending among every other group is basically flat.

As life has gotten worse for the rest in the middle class, upper-middle-class parents have become fanatical about making sure their children never sink back to those levels, and of course there’s nothing wrong in devoting yourself to your own progeny.

It’s when we turn to the next task — excluding other people’s children from the same opportunities — that things become morally dicey. Richard Reeves of the Brookings Institution recently published a book called “Dream Hoarders” detailing some of the structural ways the well educated rig the system.

The most important is residential zoning restrictions. Well-educated people tend to live in places like Portland, New York and San Francisco that have housing and construction rules that keep the poor and less educated away from places with good schools and good job opportunities.

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Reeves’s second structural barrier is the college admissions game. Educated parents live in neighborhoods with the best teachers, they top off their local public school budgets and they benefit from legacy admissions rules, from admissions criteria that reward kids who grow up with lots of enriching travel and from unpaid internships that lead to jobs.

It’s no wonder that 70 percent of the students in the nation’s 200 most competitive schools come from the top quarter of the income distribution. With their admissions criteria, America’s elite colleges sit atop gigantic mountains of privilege, and then with their scholarship policies they salve their consciences by offering teeny step ladders for everybody else.

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American upper-middle-class culture (where the opportunities are) is now laced with cultural signifiers that are completely illegible unless you happen to have grown up in this class. They play on the normal human fear of humiliation and exclusion. Their chief message is, “You are not welcome here.”

In her thorough book “The Sum of Small Things,” Elizabeth Currid-Halkett argues that the educated class establishes class barriers not through material consumption and wealth display but by establishing practices that can be accessed only by those who possess rarefied information.

To feel at home in opportunity-rich areas, you’ve got to understand the right barre techniques, sport the right baby carrier, have the right podcast, food truck, tea, wine and Pilates tastes, not to mention possess the right attitudes about David Foster Wallace, child-rearing, gender norms and intersectionality.

The educated class has built an ever more intricate net to cradle us in and ease everyone else out. It’s not really the prices that ensure 80 percent of your co-shoppers at Whole Foods are, comfortingly, also college grads; it’s the cultural codes.

Status rules are partly about collusion, about attracting educated people to your circle, tightening the bonds between you and erecting shields against everybody else. We in the educated class have created barriers to mobility that are more devastating for being invisible. The rest of America can’t name them, can’t understand them. They just know they’re there.

WASHINGTON POST

...In 2015, I interviewed Lauren Rivera, an associate professor of management and organizations at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of management. Her book, “Pedigree: How Elite Students Get Elite Jobs,” examines how inequality is produced by subtle social patterns of education and informal skills as well as big political and economic forces.

When social scientists think about economic inequality and the ways in which elites are able to hand down advantages to their kids, they usually argue that it’s driven by obvious material differences, such as access to good schools. Your book argues that elite privilege can involve subtle benefits that help some students – and not others – get jobs at top ranked law firms, banks and management consultancies. What are these benefits?

LR – Whether intentionally or not, elite parents expose their children to different experiences and styles of interacting that are useful for getting ahead in society. Many of these are taken for granted in upper and upper-middle class circles, such as how to prepare a college application (and having cultivated the right types of accomplishments to impress admissions officers), how to network in a business setting in a way that seems natural, and how to develop rapport with teachers, interviewers, and other gatekeepers to get things you want from those in power. Basically, if we think of economic inequality as a sporting competition, elite parents give their kids a leg up, not only by being able to afford the equipment necessary to play but also by teaching them the rules of the game and giving them insider tips on how to win.

One of your most counter-intuitive arguments is that students from working class and lower-middle class backgrounds are less likely to get elite jobs, because they concentrate on studying rather than their social life at college. That’s the opposite of what the conventional wisdom would suggest. How does these students’ devotion to academic seriousness hurt their job prospects?

LR – Working and lower-middle-class children are less likely to participate in structured extracurricular activities than their more privileged peers while growing up (and when they do, they tend to participate in fewer of them). This hurts their job prospects in two ways. First, it affects the types of schools students attend. Elite universities weigh extracurricular activities heavily in admissions decisions. Given that these employers—which offer some of the highest-paying entry-level jobs in the country—recruit almost exclusively at top schools, many students who focus purely on their studies will be out of the game long before they ever apply to firms. Second, employers also use extracurricular activities, especially those that are driven by “passion” rather than academic or professional interest and require large investments of time and money over many years, to screen résumés. But participation in these activities while in college or graduate school is not a luxury that all can afford, especially if someone needs to work long hours to pay the bills or take care of family members. Essentially, extracurriculars end up being a double filter on social class that disadvantages job applicants from more modest means both in entering the recruiting pipeline and succeeding within it.

Your book finds an enormous difference in how many recruiters at elite firms treat graduates from a tiny number of prestigious colleges, and how they treat everyone else. Candidates who “chose” to go to a lower ranked school are seen by some recruiters as having demonstrated moral failure. What drives this culture of selectivity and perpetuates it?

LR – Quite simply, we like people who are similar to ourselves. Ask anyone what constitutes a good driver, leader, or parent, and chances are they will describe someone like themselves. The same is true for how people think of merit in the working world. Most employees in these firms are graduates of highly elite undergraduate or graduate programs and believe that’s where talent really resides. In addition, given how segregated our society has become socioeconomically, people who grow up in upper-middle or upper-class communities where college attendance is the norm may not realize structural factors that influence educational pathways and erroneously view university prestige as a reflection of ability alone. Finally, national rankings matter. Rankings provide an easily quantifiable, presumably “scientific” way of making sense of the myriad of educational institutions out there. They both reinforce beliefs that school prestige equals student quality (even though things having nothing to do with students’ abilities factor into a university’s rank) and serve as a convenient justification for limiting recruitment to a small number of elite schools with strong alumni ties to firms.

Read more at the  WASHINGTON POST

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Trump ousts Priebus as chief of staff

With his agenda stalled, President Trump became convinced that Reince Priebus was a “weak” leader and had been lobbied intensely by rival advisers to remove the establishment-aligned Republican, who has long had friction with Trump loyalists, according to White House officials. Trump tapped Homeland Security Secretary John F. Kelly as the new chief of staff.

John Kelly listens as Trump speaks during a cabinet meeting yesterday. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)

By Philip Rucker, Abby Phillip, Robert Costa and Ashley Parker  •  Read more »

Priebus's departure is a sign that if Trump believes his presidency is a mess, he thinks his ties to the Republican establishment aren't helping. Priebus was the definition of the establishment. So was former press secretary Sean Spicer (remember him?). In their places are a retired Marine general who has a militaristic view on Islamic terrorism and immigration and a communications director who is musing about firing or “killing” leakers. He has become one of Trump’s favorite members of his Cabinet .... In his tweet, Trump called Kelly the “true star” of his administration. [Vox / Dara Lind]  “As a former White House chief of staff, the best advice I could have given [Kelly] has been overtaken by events: Don’t take the job,” quips John Podesta, who held top positions in the Bill Clinton and Barack Obama administrations, in an op-ed for today’s paper. “Kelly, who has rendered extraordinary service and sacrifice to the nation, just signed up for what may truly be an impossible mission … To have any chance of succeeding, he will have to accomplish...extraordinary tasks, all at odds with President Trump’s instincts. First, discipline. … Kelly’s second task will be to restore strategic direction to Trump’s haphazard policy-making process. “The truth is that the president needs Kelly more than Kelly needs him,” argues Podesta, who was chairman of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign. “Trump simply cannot afford to have Kelly walk without disastrous consequences. The new chief of staff should use that power to restore discipline and dignity to a White House sorely in need of both.” -- “In his 40 years in the military, Kelly developed a reputation for bluntness that won him the respect of his fellow Marines and sometimes grated on senior officials in the Obama administration,” Greg Jaffe and Andrew deGrandpre wrote in a profile over the weekend. “He is best known in Washington as an experienced battlefield commander who led U.S. troops in Iraq and lost a son in Afghanistan in 2010 to a Taliban bomb. But the most relevant experience he will bring to the chief of staff job is a tour as senior military adviser to Defense Secretaries Robert M. Gates and Leon E. Panetta in the Pentagon. The job demanded Kelly act as a disciplinarian, pressing to make sure the military service chiefs and the sprawling Pentagon bureaucracy were executing the defense secretary’s agenda … “As a four-star general, Kelly was frequently at odds with the Obama White House. He spoke out forcefully on issues including Obama’s plan to shutter the prison complex in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and the perceived vulnerability of America’s borders. At a time when the Obama administration was trying to wind down America’s wars and calm fears of a terrorist attack, Kelly often spoke of the threat posed by groups like the Taliban in dire terms. … In charge of U.S. Southern Command, Kelly oversaw the military detention center at (Gitmo). His weekly updates on the prison, which were blasted out to dozens of White House and Pentagon officials, became well known for their candor. ‘His vernacular wasn’t the typical government prose,’ said one former White House official. ‘He would call out some of the military commission judges, saying that they had no idea what they were doing.’” -- “The president gave Mr. Priebus many of the same assurances of control, and then proceeded to undercut and ignore him — to the point where Mr. Priebus often positioned himself at the door of the Oval Office to find out whom the president was talking to,” Michael Shear, Glenn Thrush and Maggie Haberman note on the front page of today’s New York Times. “ … Ms. Trump and Mr. Kushner had hoped to persuade Mr. Trump to appoint Dina Powell, the deputy national security adviser, as chief of staff. Mr. Trump, who likes Ms. Powell, considered doing so…

The End of the End of Obamacare (Hopefully)

VOX

Last night was, without a doubt, one for the history books. The Senate failed to move an Obamacare repeal bill at 1:30 am, and the chamber's two months of work on legislating (and seven years of campaigning) on the issue all came crashing down.

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Three Republican senators — Susan Collins of Maine, John McCain of Arizona, and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska — voted to block the Senate’s so-called “skinny” repeal bill. It was the bare minimum: The bill failed 49 to 51.

All three senators had their reasons, and they had each hinted for weeks that they would be reluctant to back the Senate’s various Obamacare repeal proposals. By the wee hours of Friday morning, three different Senate plans — a robust repeal-and-replace bill, a cleaner repeal bill, and finally so-called skinny repeal — had failed over three days of debate.

GOP Senators Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski 

Collins and Murkowski voted down all three. They had said for two months that they wouldn’t support a plan that resulted in millions fewer Americans having health coverage. The three health care bills that Republicans tried to pass would have led to between 16 million and 32 million fewer Americans having health insurance, when compared to Obamacare.

McCain, though, was the surprise. Diagnosed with brain cancer and the subject of much speculation after a rousing Senate speech calling for a return to an open and bipartisan process in the Senate, the Arizona Republican joined the other Republican dissenters at the climax of the Senate health care fight — and helped kill the bill.

Republicans refused to vote to roll back Obamacare’s coverage gains.

ELIZABETH DREW, NY REVIEW OF BOOKS

...The greatest outrage was stirred by the provisions ... for deep cuts in Medicaid to make up for a repeal of taxes on the wealthy. This proposed transfer of benefits from the poor to the rich plus the threatened cutoff of coverage to many millions of people had numerous Republican members of Congress hiding from their constituents during recesses.

Fearful of the public reaction to their proposals, and not wanting to allow groups time to mobilize against them, Speaker Ryan and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell most unusually drafted the bills in secret and tried to rush them to a vote in both the House and Senate. No committee hearings, no airing of the proposals to see how they stood up to criticism and challenge;...

VOX

McCain decried the absurd Senate process, and then he ended it

Republican leaders, ...unveiled the bill to the public late Thursday night, just hours before the first vote on it. the so-called “skinny” repeal — eliminating just Obamacare’s individual mandate and a few other provisions. 

Senate leaders, meanwhile, were making a puzzling promise: This bill wasn’t actually intended to become law. It was simply a vehicle to enter conference negotiations with the House.

 This last-ditch attempt bill...was such a poorly designed bill that senators were in the awkward position of asking the House not to pass it in order to secure their support.

The floor vote was dramatic. It became clear something was amiss when McCain spoke briefly with the top Senate Democrat, Chuck Schumer, and Schumer seemed elated. A conversation with the No. 2 Republican, John Cornyn, left Cornyn looking dour.

The showdown was with Vice President Mike Pence, present in the Senate in case he needed to cast a tiebreaker vote to give the “skinny” repeal bill a 51-vote majority. McCain and Pence spoke for nearly 30 minutes, in a conversation that at times seemed friendly but then turned serious. McCain was insistent. Pence huddled with McConnell and left the floor for a time. McCain stepped into a back room, believed to be taking a phone call.

But the Arizona senator was unmoved.

ELIZABETH DREW, NY REVIEW OF BOOKS

As usual with McCain there was a lot more subtlety to his act than has been imputed to him. Democratic leader Chuck Schumer told a reporter for The Guardian afterward that he and McCain had spoken “three or four times” a day for the past few days, and one subject was the secrecy with which the Senate had proceeded. (Schumer knew who he was talking to.) A very few other Republicans were also troubled by what the Senate was about to do—this included McCain’s closest Senate friend, Lindsey Graham. But by casting the deciding vote McCain offered them protection from the fury of the base had they themselves voted against changing Obamacare. And there was another thing: candidate Trump had delivered a particularly low blow to McCain by saying that he had greater respect for military personnel who weren’t captured. He charged McCain with not helping veterans. McCain doesn’t forget such things.  McCain also had long had an at best tense relationship with McConnell — the leading Senate opponent of campaign finance reform. Besides, the rather free-spirited McCain and the grim, win-with-whatever-works McConnell, both of them big figures in the Senate, were rarely in tune.....

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The failure was a testament to what can happen when the party taking control of the government seeks to overturn a major advance by the prior administration without any coherent idea of what it will do instead. In their determination to repeal a law greatly expanding the federal government’s commitment to help people obtain decent health care, the Republicans had gotten out of touch with the opinion of the people.

....Trump badly needed a victory. Six months into his presidency he hasn’t had a single major legislative achievement....Trump’s White House has been a shambles, with its internal warfare increasingly spilling into open ferocity. Moreover, the FBI investigation into his and his campaign’s dealings with Russia in connection with the 2016 election is growing more menacing....It has bothered Trump mightily that Obama was far more popular and had achieved a great deal more at this point in his presidency than Trump has. Trump’s aides have tried to cheer him up by telling him he’s doing great, and it’s possible he believes them. 

The Republicans’ implacable determination to put an end to Obama’s proudest legislative achievement has had to do with disdain for our first black president as well as resistance to such an expansion of government. Thus “Obamacare” was intended as a derogatory nickname. But they didn’t reckon on two things: that the program would become popular once a large number of people signed on to it; and that after two terms Obama would end up one of our most liked presidents.

The Republicans are particularly adept at injecting truisms into the ethos that aren’t true. One example is their insistence that Obamacare had been “rushed through Congress,” had been “shoved down our throats.” In fact, the passage of the bill came after more than a year of deliberation and was the subject of dozens of hearings in both houses and lengthy consideration in several committees. ...

One lesson of the Republicans’ entanglement with health care is that you can’t legislate a slogan. For nearly seven years, the Republicans appealed to their base by promising to get rid of the ACA and thereby raising money from unsuspecting followers. Now they needed a new line of attack. They simply declared Obamacare a failure. This has taken various forms—the program is in a “death spiral”; or this or that county doesn’t have any insurance companies who want to participate in its health care exchange. Trump himself routinely deemed the ACA “dead.” The problem with the Republicans’ arguments, as Ezra Klein pointed out in a searing article in Vox in March, is that they weren’t true. For example, the respected Kaiser Family Foundation has reported that all of thirty-eight counties out of 3,143 nationwide—around 1 percent—are at risk of starting out in 2018 without health care exchanges for lack of participants.

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The Trump administration has taken executive actions to try to cripple the program, and has the right personnel in place to do so: Tom Price, a former congressman who was a fierce opponent of the ACA, serving as the secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, and Mick Mulvaney, a founder of the Freedom Caucus, heading the powerful Office of Management and Budget. Trump himself has sometimes suggested that the government cost-sharing fees wouldn’t be paid to the insurance companies, as a way of forcing Obamacare to collapse—but then he’d back off out of fear of getting the blame. Such threats have created uncertainty about the program’s future and frightened some insurance companies out of participating. The Trump administration recently shut down the centers in major cities that help people sign up for Obamacare and shortened by half the time to shop for coverage in 2018. Trump has said several times that he would like to “let Obamacare fail” and blame the Democrats—presumably for backing the program in the first place.

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Trump’s participation in the health care fight if anything made things worse. During the House debate this spring, Trump held meetings with members at the White House and tried to persuade reluctant ones, but it turned out that he was also an easy mark. (This was much noticed about Trump at the time and later it showed up in some of his foreign dealings.) ... It was evident that the president didn’t much care what the bill contained: he just wanted to sign one. It quickly also became clear to Republican legislators that the president was unfamiliar with the details and evinced little interest in learning them. Word of this spread quickly. Trump is the least informed president in modern history....



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McConnell, a practical man undoubtedly eager to put the long-fought issue behind, said “It’s time to move on.” 

Why the Obamacare Repeal Effort Will Never Disappear People will continue to vote for the party that will strip them of their health care as long as it promises to turn back the clock and “Make America White Again.”

TRUTHDIG

Mosul, liberated

Fadel Senna/AFP/Getty Images

After nine months of fighting, the Iraqi government and US-led coalition have succeeded in their battle to liberate Mosul from ISIS. Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi formally declared victory on Monday, just hours after US-led coalition airstrikes dropped bombs on the terror group’s last stronghold in Mosul’s Old City. [Associated Press / Susannah George] ISIS had control of the city since 2014, when Islamic State fighters conquered Mosul for part of its self-declared caliphate. The group’s territory stretched across parts of Iraq and Syria. [Brookings Institution / Cole Bunzel] At the start of the Iraqi army offensive in November 2016, there were between 3,500 and 5,000 ISIS fighters in Mosul. Their number gradually dropped to a couple hundred before the city was recaptured, according to the US coalition. [CNN / Kara Fox] The fighting has completely reduced parts of a once-bustling city to rubble. More than 5,000 building have been destroyed, and civilians are in desperate need of food, water, and basic shelter. [BBC] The civilian toll has been brutal. Mosul used to be home to 2.5 million residents. More than 800,000 fled as the fighting intensified, but many left behind were either killed by ISIS militants who hid in highly populated areas or accidentally killed by US-led airstrikes. [NBC News / Petra Cahill] Even though physical ISIS territory is being wiped out, the terror group is not likely to go away quietly. [Reuters / Isabel Coles and Stephen Kalin] Iraq is a politically unstable region with a power struggle happening between current Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi and former Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. ISIS fighters using guerrilla-style warfare tactics like suicide bombs could make a tenuous situation even worse. [Foreign Policy / Renad Mansour] There are also fears that ISIS may move to other unstable parts of the Middle East like Libya, or that individual fighters will spread to other countries to carry out smaller attacks. Even though the ISIS caliphate has been dealt a fatal blow, it’s no less active trying to radicalize new recruits over the internet. [CNN / Tim Lister]

CONGRESS PASSES RUSSIA SANCTIONS BILL. WILL TRUMP SIGN IT?

TRUMP'S NEWEST DILEMMA:

-- House lawmakers overwhelmingly voted to advance a Russian sanctions bill yesterday, delivering a foreign-policy brushback to Trump and setting up a veto dilemma for the president. Mike DeBonis and Karoun Demirjian report: “Included in the package, which passed 419 to 3, are new measures targeting key Russian officials … as well as sanctions against Iran and North Korea in response to those nations’ weapons programs. Members of the Trump administration … have resisted the congressional push — in particular a provision attached to the Russian measures that would require Congress to sign off on any move to relieve those sanctions. The legislation was revised last week to address some administration concerns … But the bill passed Tuesday retains the congressional review requirement.”

Lawmakers in both parties urged Trump to sign the bill -- but it remains unclear how the president will respond. “

OBAMACARE REMAINS IN PERIL: MCCONNELL WINS A SENATE VOTE.

GOP dives into health-care debate.                                  

Skinny repeal’ could be the Senate’s health-care bill of last resort

The plan would eliminate the Affordable Care Act's individual mandate and two other key elements of the law. Less cost to the government, less coverage for millions of Americans.

Alex Wong / Getty Images For the past few weeks, the Senate health care bill seemed finished. So many senators disliked the bill so much that four said they would not even vote for a motion to proceed with debate on it. [Vox / Dylan Scott]   [But] Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has managed, after prospects looked dim again and again, to open debate on an Obamacare repeal plan. It’s a huge victory for Senate Republicans' hopes of passing some kind of health care bill, and it puts health insurance for millions of Americans at risk. Every plan Republicans are considering is projected to lead to millions fewer Americans having health insurance. Mitch McConnell is like a quarterback who has just converted on fourth and long. The Senate majority leader kept the drive to repeal Obamacare alive, but he’s still trailing by a touchdown, the game clock keeps ticking down and a win is not inevitable. -- He didn’t have a single vote to spare, but the Kentuckian demonstrated impressive legislative prowess by getting 50 Republican senators to vote for the motion to proceed to debate on the health-care bill. It was high political theater: John McCain, recovering from surgery and battling brain cancer, traveled 2,300 miles from Arizona. McCain’s return to Senate injects momentum into GOP health-care battle”:   As police removed protesters yelling “kill the bill” from the gallery, Wisconsin’s Ron Johnson (who has been a holdout in recent weeks) held off on voting until he saw what the outcome was going to be. Vice President Pence then cast a tiebreaking vote. But Republicans haven’t actually settled on what legislation they are trying to pass at the end of this debate. Bills to cleanly repeal much of Obamacare or to more fully repeal and replace the 2010 health care law don’t currently have the votes necessary to pass. In just the past few days, the idea of a much smaller bill, repealing just a few of Obamacare’s most unpopular provisions, surfaced. The Senate’s process from here is byzantine. The vote on Tuesday was technically to start debate on the House’s health care bill, but nobody expects that to be the actual legislation the Senate ultimately votes on. -- Last night underscored what a tough row to hoe this remains. The rules of the body mean that any senator can now submit amendments that need to be voted on. This leads to what’s called a vote-o-rama, an often chaotic and sometimes unpredictable process. The first item members took up last night was the Better Care Reconciliation Act. That is the carefully negotiated package that McConnell spent weeks crafting, with compromises to get conservatives like Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) and moderates like Rob Portman (R-Ohio) on board. But nine Republicans broke ranks and voted no. The diversity of those who opposed the measure underscored the ideological split within the Republican conference about the best path forward on health care. The group included moderates like Susan Collins (R-Maine) and Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska), as well as conservative purists like Mike Lee (R-Utah) and Rand Paul (R-Ky.). Also voting no were Bob Corker (R-Tenn.), Tom Cotton (R-Ark.), Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), Dean Heller (R-Nev.) and Jerry Moran (R-Kan.). Republican Senator Susan Collins It’s hard to overstate the degree to which White House officials and Senate GOP leaders just want to pass something — really, anything — to show the base that they are keeping their promise to roll back Obamacare. They would happily portray even most modest tweaks to the Affordable Care Act as major successes to save face. As far as they’re concerned, whatever gets passed will be the basis for negotiations with the House. So this is not even a final product. That’s where what’s being called “skinny repeal” comes in. “The ‘skinny repeal’ option would repeal the ACA’s mandates that individuals buy plans and that employers with 50 or more employees provide coverage … as well as eliminate the law’s tax on medical device manufacturers,” Sean Sullivan, Juliet Eilperin and Kelsey Snell explain. “This … strategy would keep the overhaul effort alive but amount to a tacit acknowledgment that broader efforts to revise or repeal the law cannot succeed ... The conservative group Freedom Partners (backed by the Koch political network), urged senators to use the votes to partly repeal the law and then keep pushing for full repeal. … But one key way Senate leaders won Tuesday’s procedural vote was by assuring several centrist Republicans that they may end up with a modest bill.” A skinny repeal bill,...[is the modest bill];] an effort to find a slender majority of votes.” Oliver Contreras/For The Washington Post) “John McCain, maverick of the Senate, did not return to Capitol Hill and suddenly stop the progress of the Republican health-care effort. But the Arizona Republican, now battling an aggressive form of brain cancer, did use his moment in the spotlight Tuesday to deliver a sobering message to colleagues,” Elise Viebeck, Paul Kane and Ed O'Keefe report. “The Senate might be known as the world’s greatest deliberative body, McCain said, but it is not clear it deserves that reputation today. The partisanship, the gridlock and the political subterfuge have dragged down the institution, he said. Senators’ work is ‘more partisan, more tribal more of the time than any other time I remember,’ McCain told a rapt audience on the Senate floor. ‘Our deliberations can still be important and useful, but I think we’d all agree they haven’t been overburdened by greatness lately. And right now, they aren’t producing much for the American people.’” (Read Kane’s column about McCain’s emotional return.) Even though he delivered a pivotal vote to move the health-care debate forward, the 2008 GOP presidential nominee publicly criticized his party’s leaders for their lack of transparency and suggested that a bill may not ultimately pass. “We’ve tried to do this by coming up with a proposal behind closed doors in consultation with the administration, then springing it on skeptical members, trying to convince them it’s better than nothing, asking us to swallow our doubts and force it past a unified opposition,” McCain said. “I don’t think that’s going to work in the end, and it probably shouldn’t … TWO WHO REVERSED THEIR STANCE TO SUPPORT MCCONNELL: Sen. Dean Heller  -- Las Vegas Sun: “[Sen. Dean Heller] voted in support of a motion to push forward with efforts to roll back Obamacare. … He noted that his vote to proceed was not a vote in favor of the GOP bill. … Rep. Jacky Rosen, D-Nev., who is running against Heller next year, said in a statement after today's vote that Heller folded under pressure from President Donald Trump and GOP leaders.” U.S. Sen. Shelley Moore Capito, R-W.Va. -- Charleston Gazette-Mail: “Following the roll call, [Sen. Shelley Moore] Capito said she expects that the final Senate version will put more money into combating the worsening opioid epidemic and beefing up the Patient and State Stability Fund, which would soften the blow of some of the lost federal funding.”

THE INVISIBLE REBOOBLICAN HEALTH CARE BILL

Photo by Mark Wilson/Getty Images

VOX, SARAH CLIFF

Republican senators are set to vote on a bill to repeal the Affordable Care Act tomorrow. They just don't know what's in it. 

It's hard to capture what an absurd and somewhat unbelievable situation this is. Health care is a massive part of the economy. The ACA provides coverage to tens of millions of Americans. The Senate plans to vote on a bill tomorrow affecting all of that. And at this moment — 24 hours or so before they vote — they have no idea what the bill contains.

 There are at least four different draft health care bills floating around right now. There are two that seem most ripe for a vote. These are:

• The Obamacare Repeal Reconciliation Act (ORRA): This bill would repeal the Affordable Care Act without a replacement. It would have the repeal start in 2020, presumably allowing the Senate two years to come up with a replacement they would enact. But if they didn't, the consequences would be dire. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that this bill would cause 32 million Americans to lose coverage.
• The Better Care Reconciliation Act (BCRA): This is the bill that repeals and replaces Obamacare, although the replacement will cover 22 million fewer people by 2026. This bill would repeal the Medicaid expansion and vastly scale back the subsidies middle-income Americans receive in the private market. The BCRA has been through multiple iterations at this point, and we still don't know what is in the latest version. 

Throughout this process, Republicans have struggled to articulate what exactly they want to achieve — aside from delivering on a seven-year campaign promise to repeal and replace Obamacare.

Is the point to wipe Obamacare off the books and go back to the old health insurance system? To come up with a new health system that costs less? Or covers more people? The goal has become finding something that can get 50 votes, with less attention paid to what that policy actually is.

"The debate over the Affordable Care Act is really a debate over wealth redistribution": "Overall, it would be ‘a big transfer. This is a massive tax cut for unpopular industries and wealthy individuals,’ said Andy Slavitt, who was acting administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services during the final years of the Obama administration. ‘It is about cutting care for lower-income people, seniors, people with disabilities and kids to pay for the tax cut.’” —Karen Tumulty, Washington Post

TEXAS GERRYMANDERING GOES TO COURT.

Liberal cities have no representation in Texas

Ron Jenkins/Getty Images

A major gerrymandering case in Texas gets off the ground today, as three judges will decide whether state lawmakers intentionally bypassed thousands of Hispanic and black voters when it drew up voting districts. [Texas Tribune / Cassandra Pollack] Texas is a deeply Republican state, but it also has millions of Hispanic and black voters; white voters have actually been in the racial minority since the mid-2000s. [NPR / Farai Chideya] Hispanic and black voters tend to cast their ballots for Democratic candidates, but Texas’s state legislature and its congressional delegation have remained deeply Republican for decades. [New Yorker / Lawrence Wright] Texas maps have been very advantageous to Republicans, who won four more seats in the US House than they would if they hadn’t tweaked the districts, according to analysis from the Associated Press. [Associated Press / Will Weissert] That’s in large part due to some very confusing voting districts. Most recently, when the time came to redraw voting districts in 2012, lawmakers produced maps with some very squiggly district lines. [Houston Chronicle / Matt Levin] Mandy Blott was surprised to learn that her district, which she considers left-leaning, is represented by a Republican. MARTIN DO NASCIMENTO / KUT The result? Liberal cities like Austin get just a fraction of the representation of more Republican areas, because they are lumped in with conservative areas to dilute the power of Democratic voters. [KUT / Ashley Lopez] Gerrymandering to give one political party an advantage is nothing new. Maps are typically drawn up by state legislatures, so they tend to reflect whichever party is in power. As a result, states that are split pretty evenly between Democrat and Republican voters end up heavily represented by one party or the other. [Vox / Andrew Prokop] The key question in Texas isn’t whether this was done to disadvantage a certain political party; instead, it’s about whether it disadvantages people of a certain race. Hispanic and black voters tend to lean Democratic, so separating them into weakened voting districts can prompt the argument that lawmakers are discriminating on a racial basis. [Washington Post / Robert Barnes] This argument has played out in other states. Most recently, the US Supreme Court ruled that North Carolina’s redistricting was racially motivated and without proper cause, which gave Democrats and voting rights activists alike a major win. That decision could also substantially weaken the Texas legislature’s case for keeping its districts as they are. [Vox / German Lopez] Mark Wilson/Getty Images Three federal judges in San Antonio are set to decide the case in a week. They already decided that the maps violated federal law earlier this year, but the issue is back in court because they want the maps to be redrawn before 2018. [Texas Tribune / Cassandra Pollack]