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Senate investigators are planning to question Jared Kushner as part of a broad inquiry into ties between Trump associates and Russia.

Senate investigators are planning to question President Donald Trumps son-in-law Jared Kushner as part of a broad inquiry into ties between Trump associates and Russian officials or others linked to the Kremlin, the New York Times is reporting.

Kushner is a close adviser to Trump. The Times said the White House Counsels Office was informed this month that the Senate Intelligence Committee wanted to question Kushner about meetings he arranged with the Russian ambassador to the U.S., Sergey Kislyak. The committee is investigating Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election. A White House spokeswoman told the Times that Kushner is willing to talk with Senate investigators about meetings with Kislyak and also with Sergey Gorkov, the chief of a bank that drew sanctions during the Obama administration.

Republicans scramble over shutdown: A top Republican with close ties to the White House tells Axios that after the health-care failure, a government shutdown in April is more likely than not...Wall Street is not expecting a shutdown and the markets are unprepared. A senior GOP aide disputed the prediction but Axios writes the math is bleak for the House to head off a shutdown. A stopgap budget runs through April 28.

Also read: Debt limit looks like a real struggle after health bill debacle.

Dodd-Frank hearings: The House Financial Services Committee will hold hearings on three portions of Dodd-Frank this week, the Hill writes. The Wall Street reform law has long been in Republican crosshairs, and on Tuesday the panel will have a hearing on the way the Financial Stability Oversight Council designates systemically important financial institutions. That will be followed by a hearing on the state of bank lending, which Republicans argue is hampered by the law. A hearing on the impact of the Volcker Rule is also scheduled. That bans banks from making certain investments and trades with their own assets.

Freedom Caucus member quits group: Rep. Ted Poe quit the conservative House Freedom Caucus on Sunday over its opposition to the Republican health-care plan. CNN says the Texas Republican was the first member of the group to leave in the fallout over its role in defeating the health bill. Poe said in a statement saying no is easy, leading is hard and that quitting the caucus would allow him to be a more effective member of Congress.

Also read: What Trump can do to undermine Obamacare, now that the GOP health bill has failed.

Link:
Senate panel to question Kushner over Russia meetings | Republicans scramble to head off government shutdown - MarketWatch

Republicans may have failed to overthrow Obamacare last week, but there are plenty of ways they can chip away at it.

The Trump administration has already begun using its regulatory authority to water down less prominent aspects of the 2010 healthcare law.

Earlier last week, newly confirmed Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price stalled the rollout of mandatory Medicare payment reform programs for heart attack treatment, bypass surgery and joint replacements finalized by the Obama administration in December.

The delays offer a glimpse at how President Donald Trump can use his administrative power to undercut aspects of the Affordable Care Act (ACA), including the insurance exchanges and Medicaid expansion that Republicans had sought to overturn.

The Republicans' failure to repeal Obamacare, at least for now, means it remains federal law. Price's power resides in how to interpret that law, and which programs to emphasize and fund.

Hospitals and physician groups have been counting on support from Medicare - the federal insurance program for the elderly and disabled - to continue driving payment reform policies built into Obamacare that reward doctors and hospitals for providing high quality care at a lower cost.

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The Obama Administration had committed to shifting half of all Medicare payments to these alternative payment models by 2018. Although he has voiced general support for innovative payment programs, Price has been a loud critic of mandatory federal programs that dictate how doctors should deliver healthcare.

Providers such as Dr. Richard Gilfillan, chief executive of Trinity Healthcare, a $15.9 billion Catholic health system, say they will press on with these alternative payment plans with or without the government's blessing. But they have been actively lobbying Trump officials for support, according to interviews with more than a dozen hospital executives, physicians and policy experts.

Without the backing of Medicare, the biggest payer in the U.S. healthcare system which Price now oversees, the nascent payment reform movement could lose momentum, sidelining a transformation many experts believe is vital to reining in runaway U.S. healthcare spending.

Price "can't change the legislation, but of course he's supposed to implement it. He could impact it," said John Rother, chief executive of the National Coalition on Health Care, a broad alliance of healthcare stakeholders that has been lobbying the new administration for support of value-based care.

The move Friday to pull the Republican bill only reinforces the risk to the existing law, which Trump said on Friday "will soon explode."

"It seems that the Trump Administration now faces a choice whether to actively undermine the ACA or reshape it administratively," Larry Levitt, senior vice president at Kaiser Family Foundation, wrote on Twitter.

"The ACA marketplaces weren't collapsing, but they could be made to collapse through administrative actions," he added.

NEW PAYMENT PLANS AT RISK

The United States spends $3 trillion a year on healthcare - more by far than 10 other wealthy countries - yet has the lowest life expectancy and the highest infant mortality rate, according to a 2013 Commonwealth Fund report.

Health costs have soared thanks in part to the traditional way doctors and hospitals get paid, namely by receiving a fee for each service they provide. So the more advanced imaging tests a doctor orders or pricey procedures they perform, the more money he or she makes, regardless of whether the patient's health improves.

"We have a completely broken economy in healthcare," said Blair Childs, senior vice president at hospital purchasing group Premier Inc. "Literally, all of the incentives in fee-for-service are for higher cost."

Alternative payment models are designed to remove incentives that reward overtreatment of patients. Private insurers are on board, with Aetna Inc, Anthem Inc, UnitedHealth Group and most Blue Cross insurers announcing plans to shift half of their reimbursement to alternative payment models to control costs.

To promote the shift to alternative payments, the ACA created an incubator program at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS). The CMS innovation center is funded by $10 billion over 10 years to test payment schemes aimed at improving quality and cutting the cost of care.

The Obama administration's decision to make some of these payment programs mandatory has drawn the ire of Price, a former U.S. senator and orthopedic surgeon. In response to a mandatory payment program for joint replacements last September, for example, Price charged that the CMS innovation center was "experimenting with Americans health."

In his January 17 confirmation, Price said he was a "strong supporter of innovation," but said he believed the CMS innovation center "has gotten a bit off track."

TRUMP SETS WHEELS IN MOTION ON DAY 1

President Trump has already signed an executive order directing the HHS to begin unraveling Obamacare. In the early hours of his presidency, Trump directed government agencies to freeze regulations and take steps to weaken the healthcare law.

The order directed departments to "waive, defer, grant exemptions from, or delay the implementation" of provisions that imposed fiscal burdens on states, companies or individuals. These moves were meant to minimize the costs and regulatory burdens imposed on states, private entities and individuals.

David Cutler, the Harvard health economist who helped the Obama Administration shape the ACA, said Price could do all sorts of things to undermine the law.

"If he wants to blow it up, he can," Cutler said in an email. But if they do, he added, "they alone will own the failure."

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How Republicans Can Hobble ObamaCare Even Without Repeal - Fox Business

Photo: Spencer Platt/Getty Images

In his inaugural address, President Trump vowed that the forgotten men and women of our country will be forgotten no longer. He then suggested that the government has a responsibility to provide its righteous people with great schools for their children, safe neighborhoods for their families, and good jobs for themselves.

The hedge-fund billionaire who bankrolled Trumps campaign takes a different view. Robert Mercer reportedly believes that human beings have no inherent value other than how much money they make, and that society is upside down because government helps the weak people get strong, and makes the strong people weak by taking their money away, through taxes.

Thus far, Trumps governing style has been more in keeping with his donors private views than with his own official ones. The president has backed a health-care plan that finances a tax cut for millionaires by throwing millions of forgotten Americans off of Medicaid while proposing a budget that would slash spending on public housing, food assistance, after-school programs, and development funds for poor rural and urban areas.

These actions represent the normal part of the Trump presidency. The fact that the new Republican president is serving as a loyal general in the one percents class war would be wholly unremarkable, had Trump not campaigned as a populist outsider. But then, if Trump hadnt run as a populist outsider, its quite possible that there wouldnt be a new Republican president. The moguls success in the primary and general elections had many causes, but one was likely his avoidance of conservative platitudes about bootstraps and makers and takers.

Typically, Republicans attribute the despair of impoverished communities to the moral failings of individual poor people. But Trump never lamented the culture of poverty. Instead, he blamed the misery of the forgotten on rapacious elites who had failed to protect the righteous peoples economic interests.

This message when liberally (or, perhaps illiberally) salted with appeals to white racial resentment proved to be a winning one. In a country that saw its economic elite engineer a financial crisis and then reap the lions share of the gains once growth resumed the market for paeans to job creators has contracted sharply. This is true even within the Republican Party, which has grown increasingly reliant on the support of downwardly mobile white voters.

Trump wasnt the only Republican to recognize that his partys we built that shtick had fallen out of fashion. Paul Ryan took back his whole makers and takers spiel in March of 2016. And during their years-long assault on Obamacare, Republicans mostly attacked the law from the left: Instead of arguing against the morality of taxing the wealthy to expand Medicaid, many conservatives lamented that Obamacare had left too many Americans with insurance they cant afford to use.

Trump gave the GOP the rebrand it desperately needed. But, thus far, hes made few alterations to the actual product. And, judging by their failed attempt to pass a supply-side tax cut dressed as a health-care bill, Republicans believe that the only thing their agenda ever lacked was a racist reality star as its salesman.

But they are wrong about that: Movement conservatism is failing politically because its policies have never had less to offer the voters it relies on.

New research on the surging death rate among white, non-college-educated Americans offers a harrowing testament to this fact. In 2015, Princeton economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton discovered that an epidemic of suicides and substance abuse was driving up the mortality rate of middle-aged, working-class, white Americans even as medical advances were pushing down that rate for college-educated whites and every other racial and ethnic group.

Last week, Case and Deaton published a new paper exploring the causes of this development. It identifies a number of accessories to the crime: Stalled progress on the prevention of heart disease and climbing rates of obesity and diabetes contributed to their morbid finding.

But the prime culprit in their story is the collapsing social mobility and living standards of working-class Americans.

Since the great recession, black and white non-college-educated workers have seen their mortality rates rise, across every age group. And working-class African-Americans still suffer higher death rates than white ones do.

However, only the non-college-educated white population has seen a nearly continuous rise in its mortality rate over the last two decades. And that jump has been driven by a uniquely high spike in deaths of despair.

Case and Deaton suggest that, even though African-American workers are more materially disadvantaged than their white peers and have also suffered greatly from Americas industrial decline the demographic has found some cause for optimism in their nations lurching progress toward racial equality (their data set ends the year before Trump launched his campaign).

By contrast, non-college-educated white workers have seen their economic prospects drop from a higher peak and no countervailing narrative of cultural progress has arrested their sense of decline. This foreboding can pervade whole communities, and lead their most vulnerable members to seek relief in drinking, drugs, or death.

Case and Deaton argue that the erosion of traditional families and religious communities has contributed to the demographics despair, as movement conservatives always insisted. But just as Trump did on the campaign trail, the economists suggest that these breakdowns are rooted in the labor market. People dont struggle economically when they fail to get married and adopt middle-class social norms. They fail to do those things when they struggle economically building strong familial and communal ties is simply much more difficult when no one with your skill set is earning a living wage.

Movement conservatisms other anti-poverty prescription instilling self-reliance in the poor by kicking them out of their welfare hammocks also withers under the papers scrutiny. The United States has the thinnest safety net of any major, western nation. And it is also the only such country in which non-college-educated white workers are dying much younger than they used to.

Of course, there are plenty of other factors that contribute to this discrepancy. American physicians began routinely prescribing opioids for chronic pain beginning in the mid-1990s, after a U.S.-based company aggressively marketed oxycodone for that purpose. And Americas singularly high rate of gun ownership likely boosts its suicide rate.

Nonetheless, the rationale behind House Republicans push to add work requirements to Medicaid that providing a minimum standard of health care to the indigent unemployed breeds an unhealthy dependency is hard to reconcile with the superior health outcomes of workers in European nanny states.

The tenets of movement conservatism have always been belied by the lived experience of working people. But this tension is a lot more conspicuous today than it was when Reagan brought morning to America. Since then, the GOP has grown more radically right wing; income has grown more concentrated at the top; and Republicans have grown ever more dependent on the nonaffluent for votes.

Now, even the GOP base supports more government spending on health care and opposes tax cuts for the rich.

Trumps rise has alerted some conservatives to the bankruptcy of their ideology. In March 2015, David Brooks attributed the plight of the white working class to a plague of nonjudgmentalism explaining that what the downwardly mobile really needed was a stern lecture on its moral failings:

Exactly two years later, Brooks decided that, actually, those people could probably use a stronger social safety net, too:

If you want to preserve the market, you have to have a strong state that enables people to thrive in it. If you are pro-market, you have to be pro-state. You can come up with innovative ways to deliver state services, like affordable health care, but you cant just leave people on their own. The social fabric, the safety net and the human capital sources just arent strong enough.

Republicans can continue putting the superstitions of misanthropic billionaires above the needs of their downscale voters. But in doing so, they will send more forgotten men and women to early graves. And, eventually, the righteous people may take the GOP down with them.

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Last week, the GOP lawmaker suggested the intelligence community mistreated Trumps team. The night before, he met with a source at the White House.

Before GOP can move on to tax reform, it must deal with the real risk of an internal revolt against the current budget.

After Trumpcare failed to reach the House floor, Wall Street loses confidence in the presidents capacity to deliver a large corporate tax cut.

As part of a broader investigation into Kremlins 2016 election meddling.

Shell represent the United States.

Richard Haste was found guilty of departmental charges five years after shooting the unarmed 18-year-old.

A weird news alert.

With some help from the business community.

As many as 200 civilians may have been killed when three houses collapsed after a coalition attack on ISIS militants in the area.

And theyre starting to figure that out.

The nationwide demonstrations were the largest in the country since 2012.

The wounded president is trying to make sure his followers know that the failure of Trumpcare wasnt his fault.

The gunman is still at large. Terrorism is not suspected.

White House and GOP insiders have been leaking their stories following the demise of Trumpcare.

A new survey shows well-funded Democrat Jon Ossoff ahead of or even with his most likely GOP rivals in a second-round runoff in June.

The investigation into Khalid Masood is moving fast.

The collapse of Trumpcare could be the GOP version of Clintoncare: something none of them will hurry to repeat.

Some solid owns coming from the left side of the aisle this afternoon.

Ryan withdraws the GOPs health-care plan after concluding it cannot pass the House. Trump says he wont try to repeal Obamacare again anytime soon.

The Republican Party could not come up with a better idea.

More:
'Small Government' Conservatism Is Killing Republican Voters - New York Magazine

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In the past, presidents have told big lies mostly for one of two reasons. In the midst of scandal or failure, they told lies to protect themselves and deny that they had done wrong: I am not a crook, we did not trade arms for hostages, I did not have sexual relations with that woman. Or they lied to convince the public to go along with a policy initiative, whether a war or a tax cut or a new program, when the truth was insufficiently persuasive.

Unlike his predecessors, President Trump lies for any reason at all.

I imagine the sinking feeling his aides get when he blurts out another whopper. "Now I'm going to have to go out and defend this," they say with a sigh, then huddle together to arrive at the least laughable spin they can come up with, so they can rationalize the lie which Trump will of course be unwilling to retreat from.

White House staff have little choice but to reinforce, justify, and repeat their boss' lies, though I suppose they could retain some shred of dignity and integrity by quitting. But what about Trump's fellow Republicans, particularly the ones in Congress? They're in an uncomfortable position, knowing that he's still popular with the GOP base and so not having his back could have electoral costs. Being a "maverick" might sound appealing, but not when it's going to cost you lots of votes or hinder your ability to work with the rest of the party on your legislative priorities.

So with just a few exceptions, Republicans have chosen to get in line when Trump goes off on one of his near-daily flights of fantasy. Or at the very least, they try to avoid the subject and run from reporters who might bring it up. But they can't escape the taint of this presidency, and the longer it goes, the more likely each one of them is to get dirty.

Consider this remarkable interview Trump did with Time, in which he argued that it was fine for him to claim that Barack Obama tapped his phones, because: "When I said wiretapping, it was in quotes. Because a wiretapping is, you know today it is different than wiretapping. It is just a good description. But wiretapping was in quotes." Before we go on, let's acknowledge that even this idiotic explanation is false; I refer you to this tweet, free of any quotation marks or vague references that might be interpreted to refer broadly to surveillance:

Nevertheless, this is one of Trump's common explanations for his lies, that he didn't actually lie if he got the lie from somebody else ("Well, I'm not, well, I think, I'm not saying, I'm quoting, Michael, I'm quoting highly respected people and sources from major television networks"). When asked whether the country will be able to believe him when he asks for their trust during a future crisis, he responded, "The country believes me. Hey. I went to Kentucky two nights ago, we had 25,000 people in a massive basketball arena." In other words: People can trust that I tell the truth because my fans still come out to see me.

This is not exactly a compelling defense. So every time Trump says something ridiculous, Republicans have to ask themselves: Do I help him on this or not? Some lies he tells are exaggerated versions of the lies they themselves tell, like the idea that three million people voted illegally. Republicans have all invested in the lie that says there is massive voter fraud; most just are careful enough not to put any numbers on it.

Other lies, though, are purely personal to Trump, like the idea that he had the largest inauguration crowd in history. They don't justify a policy or serve some other collective purpose; they're just about Trump feeling good. Defending him on that does nothing to help you with anyone but Trump himself.

Then there are questions that aren't about policy, but threaten the administration to a profound enough degree that Republicans may feel they have no choice but to rally to Trump's defense. The ever-widening Russia scandal falls into that category, which is why we've seen only a few Republicans admit that there's something troubling about a hostile foreign dictator manipulating our election, or that a report that the president's campaign manager had a $10 million per year contract with a Russian oligarch to advance Vladimir Putin's political interests might raise some alarming questions.

If Republicans are tempted to distance themselves from Trump over the Russia scandal, they'll probably be stopped by the realization that any serious threat to his presidency quickly becomes an equally serious threat to their agenda. A president crippled by a major scandal will be far less able to deliver on tax cuts for the wealthy or deregulation for corporations.

And that was the reason almost every Republican lined up behind Trump in the first place: They may have had their reservations about him, but he'd help them do all the things they'd been yearning to do for eight years. Yet now they can't escape the devil's bargain they made.

There are some Republicans more enthusiastic about Trump than others and some that are more sycophantic toward him. But sooner or later, almost all of them will wind up defending him, whether it's about particular lies he's told or scandals he's embroiled in. The stain of cooperating with Donald Trump will be on all of them, and it will never wear off.

See original here:
Why Republicans dutifully defend Trump's most ridiculous lies - The Week Magazine

The idea started with a public Google document.

In the weeks after Donald Trump won last years presidential election and Republicans kept control of Congress, Sarah Dohl, along with a handful of friends and former Capitol Hill colleagues, wanted Americans mostly distraught Democrats to know their voices could still be heard.

Not expecting much, they published online a 26-page document in mid-December, outlining a succinct idea: resist.

Its title, Indivisible: A Practical Guide for Resisting the Trump Agenda, quickly drew interest. George Takei, the actor who starred in the television series Star Trek, tweeted it to his 2.2 million followers. So, too, did former Labor Secretary Robert Reich, who worked in the Clinton administration.

We just had no idea it would turn into this huge movement, Dohl, 33, said Saturday from her house in the suburbs of Washington, D.C. We thought our moms might read it.

What at first started with a small group of young progressives batting around ideas on how to move forward under a Trump administration has blossomed into a national movement, known as Indivisible. The mission centers on grass-roots advocacy targeting members of Congress inclined to work with the new administration and those who, in Indivisibles view, dont do enough to oppose it.

In keeping with the loose structure of other movements such as Black Lives Matter, Indivisible isnt a hierarchical organization with a national headquarters and local chapters. Instead, its a collection of groups committed to the same goal, employing tactics and operating on principles shared by Indivisibles founders online.

Early on, the focus was attacking Republican efforts to repeal the Affordable Care Act.

Members of the movement have caused representatives to flee town halls and, at times, cancel public events altogether. Theyve corralled constituents, visited district offices and made phone calls en masse demanding answers.

Not all people who flooded congressional town halls in recent weeks were part of or had even heard of Indivisible. But many were.

Every member of Congress cares about how their constituents view them and the narrative being formed in their districts, said Dohl, who has held several jobs on Capitol Hill, including communications director for Rep. Lloyd Doggett, a Democrat, whose district includes parts of Austin, Texas. And were not just focused on Republicans. This is about Democrats standing up and having a spine and pushing back against Trump and Republicans.

A chapter within the Indivisible guide is titled How your member of Congress thinks and how to use that to save Democracy. It offers up a simple point:

To influence your own Member of Congress (MoC), you have to understand one thing: every House member runs for office every two years and every Senator runs for election every six years. Functionally speaking, MoCs are always either running for office or getting ready for their next election a fact that shapes everything they do.

The strategy, said Dohl, echoes the tea party movement that sprang up in 2009. At the time, President Obamas efforts to pass the Affordable Care Act caused a conservative uproar. Images of constituents, angered by the legislation and jabbing fingers in lawmakers faces, filled television screens and front pages nationwide. The next election cycle, Democrats, who at the time had controlled both chambers of Congress, lost the House.

Now, members of the movement hope its the reverse.

Were seeing people who have never been involved in politics now motivated to speak up, said Ezra Levin, who came up with the idea for the online guide and is now president of Indivisible Guide, which recently registered as nonprofit group. He worked with Dohl on Capitol Hill in 2009, during the rise of the tea party.

On Saturday, the two celebrated the GOP collapse on healthcare. A day earlier, House Speaker Paul Ryan pulled a bill that would have repealed and replaced the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare, because it did not have enough support. Many in the Freedom Caucus, among the most conservative members of Congress, thought the bill did not dismantle Obamacare enough. Democrats and moderate Republicans thought it went too far.

Levin, 31, credits Indivisible groups for influencing moderates such as Rep. Barbara Comstock, a Republican who represents a swing district in Virginia.

For weeks, Comstock declined requests from constituents some of whom are associated with Indivisible for an in-person town hall. Her Capitol Hill and district offices were also flooded with phone calls from constituents seeking more access to her.

On Friday, hours before the bill was pulled, Comstock said she would not support it.

This is setting the tone for members of Congress to know that constituents are paying attention, Levin said. And theyre not going to stop. This is going forward for months and years.

Laynette Evans, 64, a career coach and resume writer, is among the early organizers of Indivisible Reno.

The Reno group has about 1,100 Facebook members and has met a handful of times in recent months to talk about how to get their representatives at all levels of government Democrats and Republicans alike to hear them out on issues including healthcare and immigration.

Its putting politicians on notice, said Evans, a Democrat. With the election of Donald Trump, I think more people are becoming engaged in politics and how our country is being governed.

In January, a day after Trumps inauguration, millions of people joined womens marches nationwide. As protests of Trump have ensued, several states have sought to pass legislation that would discourage or criminalize protest. And Trump has described protesters those at town halls or marching in the streets as paid professionals who specialize in disrupting Republicans.

After the failure to repeal of Obamacare, Trump has indicated hes ready to move on to other issues, such as tax reform.

Whatever the proposal, Trump and Republicans will probably face Indivisible, Levin said.

The resistance, Levin said, is not going away.

kurtis.lee@latimes.com

Twitter: @kurtisalee

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Meet Indivisible, the young progressives leading the resistance to ... - Los Angeles Times