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March 10, 2017, 1:57 p.m.

Republican David Hadley, a former assemblyman from Manhattan Beach, says he is exploring a run for governor in 2018.

Hadley, who served one term in Assembly District 66 before being defeated by Democrat Al Muratsuchi last year, filed papers Friday to open a gubernatorial campaign committee.

"On a whole series of issues, I think California public policy is lacking a lot of balance and a lot of common sense," Hadley said in an interview with the Times. "We have allowed the distractions of political polarization and fake culture war battles to keep us from focusing on the things that we should be focusing on, which is a better future for all Californians."

Hadley said if he proceeds with a run, his attention will be on Californians who "are struggling the most," particularly with poverty, high housing costs and the cost of energy.

He said he plans to make a final decision about whether he's running in the "next couple of months."

Hadley emphasized his bipartisan appeal as an asset for his possible gubernatorial run. In 2014, he was elected to a district where Democrats had an eight-percentage-point voter registration advantage, and during his tenure was the Republican legislator representing a district entirely within Los Angeles County.

"I'm confident that if I chose to fully pursue and declare my candidacy and run, that I would have a lot of support both inside and outside the Republican Party," Hadley said. "I think I have a good track record of engaging with voters and residents from all over the political spectrum."

Hadley is the only potential GOP candidate for governor that has prior experience as an elected official. Former NFL player Rosey Grierand attorney John Cox have also said they're running, while San Diego Mayor Kevin Faulconer and former Fresno mayor Ashley Swearengin have said they will not.

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David Hadley, former Republican assemblyman from Manhattan Beach, files to run for California governor in 2018 - Los Angeles Times

In 2013 during a meeting of the House Energy and Commerce committee, another Republican, Rep. Renee Elmers of North Carolina asked the same thing.

"Do men not have to buy maternity coverage?" Ellmers said, referring to the health-care law's essential health benefits. "To the best of your knowledge, has a man ever delivered a baby?"

Hey, Republicans, heres a newsflash: the men will be just fine. But in case you really need proof, heres what insurance expert Nancy Metcalf has to say about that:

Health insurance, like all insurance, works by pooling risks. The healthy subsidize the sick, who could be somebody else this year and you next year. Those risks include any kind of health care a person might need from birth to death-prenatal care through hospice. No individual is likely to need all of it, but we will all need some of it eventually. [...]

So, as a middle-aged childless man you resent having to pay for maternity care or kids' dental care. Shouldn't turnabout be fair play? Shouldn't pregnant women and kids be able to say, "Fine, but in that case why should we have to pay for your Viagra, or prostate cancer tests, or the heart attack and high blood pressure you are many times more likely to suffer from than we are?"

We know the Republican men in Congress certainly dont want to give up their Viagra or Rogaine. And women across the country dont want to give up pregnancy and childbirth coverage either. And in a decent and humane society, we shouldnt have to.

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Covering pregnancy and birth through insurance? Not part of the Republican agenda - Daily Kos

After CNN reported Thursday night that President Donald Trump was open to moving up the sunset of the Medicaid expansion up from 2020 to the end of this year, GOP leaders supporting the bill are still committed to their original plan.

"I think right now that would be very difficult to do," Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy told reporters in a news conference Friday morning on Capitol Hill.

Republican leaders in Congress warn that making changes to the Medicaid provision could seriously imperil the legislation among more moderate members and perhaps still not be enough to assuage the most stringent conservatives.

Reforming the Medicaid expansion allowed under the Affordable Care Act has becomes one of the most contentious hurdles for lawmakers repealing the Affordable Care Act. Not only are there conservative and moderate Republican interests at odds, but the wishes of non-expansion state and expansion-state lawmakers are in direct conflict. The Kaiser Family Foundation estimates that nearly 11 million people have become insured because of the expansion, people who moderates and expansion states lawmakers have argued cannot be left out in the cold as a consequence of the GOP bill.

Rep. Tom MacArthur, a Republican from New Jersey and co-chair of the moderate Tuesday Group, said that moving up the Medicaid expansion sunset could cost votes.

"We are giving states more time and people, more importantly, more time to move into the Medicaid expansion opportunity. I think the current date is better and I don't like the idea of making it shorter," MacArthur said. "I think the needle leadership is trying to thread right now is exactly that between people who want to take things out of the bill and make it less than it is and those of us who are already struggling with the effectiveness on the most vulnerable. "

While Trump has hinted he's open to changing the Medicaid provision, Republican leadership has kept tight control of this process. This week, both the House's Ways and Means and the Energy and Commerce's Committees voted along party lines to advance the substance of the legislation as it was originally written. Rep. Joe Barton, a Republican from Texas, had threatened to introduce an amendment rolling back Medicaid expansion to the end of this year, but even he ended up pulling it. And as a senior Republican aide pointed out, three freedom caucus members who serve on the committees voted for the bill without changes.

Friday morning there was some agitation that Trump was adding a bit of unpredictability to a process House leaders had managed effectively up till this point.

The insinuation Friday morning from members was that the White House had worked hand-and-hand with Hill leaders to negotiate this package even though some conservatives in the House -- as well as several senators -- have publicly criticized the bill since it was introduced Monday.

When asked Friday if Trump's comments had changed the dynamics on Medicaid, Rep. John Shimkus, a Republican from Illinois on Energy and Commerce said that just because Trump was open to it, didn't mean other members would be.

"Maybe he is. I'm not sure all the members are," Shimkus said.

Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Greg Walden vehemently defended the Medicaid portion of the bill as it is written now saying that it came after consultation with governors, insurance commissioners and the White House.

"What we want to make sure is we don't create any gaps here," Walden said. "Our best effort is what you see before us."

McCarthy reiterated that Trump supported the bill and wanted the bill to pass.

"Why shouldn't the President communicate and listen to members?" McCarthy asked. "If we're going through three different phases why wouldn't we continue to listen to them? Why wouldn't we continue to work together?"

Republican leaders have said at every turn that the House bill to repeal Obamacare is just the first step in their plans to reform health care. They also plan to have Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price use his authority at the agency to make changes at the administrative level. Then, members will be able to move additional legislation on the floor through regular order. The obstacle on that, however, is that those pieces of legislation will require 60 votes in the Senate, not the 51 required through the process of reconciliation. Getting Democrats on board with Republican health care bills will be a major and perhaps, impossible lift

GOP leaders are aiming to finish the legislative process with the proposal by the mid-April Easter recess.

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Hill Republican leaders reject suggestion to move up Medicaid expansion sunset - CNN

South Korea is in an uproar. Crowds numbering in the hundreds of thousands have been surging through the streets of Seoul, the capital city. Some of the marchers are celebrating a ruling Friday by the Constitutional Court, which has upheld the impeachment of President Park Geun-hye. Others who support the president have been angrily denouncing the court, leading to clashes with police that have resulted in the deaths of two protesters.

All of this turmoil is taking place against the backdrop of ominous gestures from North Korea, which fired off a salvo of four medium-range missiles in a test Monday. The distance traveled by the missiles would have enabled them to hit a U.S. military base in Japan a point explicitly mentioned by the North Koreans in a communique accompanying the launch.

What are we supposed to make of all of this? Is the Korean Peninsula descending into chaos?

Its important to keep two things separate here. First of all, the latest developments in South Korea follow revelations of corruption at the highest levels of political power. The allegations encompass not only the conservative President Park who is accused of using her close friend, Choi Soon-sil, to funnel bribes to businessmen but also the de facto head of Samsung, the vast business conglomerate that accounts for more than 10 percent of the countrys GDP. The companys vice chairman, Lee Jae-yong, was maneuvering to expand his power at the top of the Samsung hierarchy. His trial on corruption charges has just gotten underway.

Eight court justices voted unanimously to remove the president from office. Parks actions in office, said acting chief justice Lee Jung-mi, betrayed the trust of the people and were of the kind that cannot be tolerated for the sake of protecting the Constitution. Note: It was all about the people and the Constitution. The courts act of institutional defiance is especially remarkable when you consider that democracy in South Korea is a mere 30 years old

This is the first time in Korean history that a democratically elected head of state has been removed from office by nonviolent, legal means. But thats not all. The fact that Parks fate became intertwined with that of Lee, a scion of the immensely powerful clan that controls Samsung, has given her case even greater resonance. This is a major landmark in the young political history of the South Korean state, says Sung-Yoon Lee, a professor at the Fletcher School at Tufts University. Its significant because it really speaks to the deep problem of collusion between the government and big business. The scandal has fueled the outpouring of public anger by reminding the public that the people in the country who have money and power feel theyre above the law, says Lee. In this sense, this is a big blow against the old political culture. Its a victory for the rule of law.

Now the country faces fresh elections within the next 60 days. The current front-runner is the opposition leader Moon Jae-in, head of the Democratic Party. Among other policy proposals, he favors a return to the so-called sunshine policy, a program of rapprochement with North Korea that was favored by left-wing governments in the 1990s and early 2000s. Parks conservative administration, routinely vilified by North Korea, preferred sanctions to negotiations.

At the moment, North Korea doesnt appear to be particularly interested in compromise. The rhetoric coming from the regime of Kim Jong Un has been especially harsh lately, and this weeks missile launch (not to mention the bizarre assassination of Kim Jong Nam, the current rulers half-brother) doesnt exactly sound like an overture to reconciliation. Yet Sung-Yoon Lee, the Tufts scholar, notes that North Korea has little incentive to moderate its appalling behavior since thats the only way it can get regional powers to treat it like a player. (Plus, a revival of the sunshine policy would give the North a new lease on life by allowing it to squeeze financial and material benefits from the Southerners.)

For the time being, though, not even North Koreas military prowess or South Koreas current political instability can conceal the fundamental divide between the two. North Korea remains one of the worlds few examples of a fully totalitarian state, its leaders presiding over an impoverished and brutalized population. South Korea, which boasts one of the worlds most dynamic economies, continues to evolve and broaden its democratic institutions. Observers sometimes invoke the rivalry between the two states, but it isnt really much of a competition, and it hasnt been for years. Thats worth contemplating at a time when many around the world are bemoaning the authoritarian resurgence and the ills of democracy.

To be sure, South Korea still has many problems. But its people, buoyed up by an extraordinary wave of civic activism, are showing that they arent prepared to accept the established way of doing things. They have mounted a remarkable campaign for change, and today that campaign has borne fruit of the most dramatic sort. Their cousins to the north can only dream of similar acts of defiance which is why their country remains frozen in time, beholden to a leader whose only plan for the future is tied to the machinery of violence.

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South Korea shows the world how democracy is done - Washington Post

Unless we act fast, the world may have already reached peak democracy.

After World War II, there were only a few lonely democracies scattered across the West. This began to change dramatically in the 1980s, when most of Latin America joined that exclusive club. But most crucially, in the 1990s, the fall of the Soviet Union unleashed a rapid and broad expansion of democracy across the world. From Eastern Europe to sub-Saharan Africa, civil liberties rose as dictatorships fell.

That rosy trend has reversed. In each year since 2006, the world has become less democratic. We have now suffered more than a full decade of declines for global democracy.

At the same time, despots across the globe are becoming more authoritarian. Their abuses are becoming more brutal; their violations of democracy more egregious. From Turkey to Russia to Iran, ruthless regimes are steadfastly suffocating the dying gasps of pro-democracy reform movements in their societies. Indeed, in the last 11 years, 109 countries have seen a net decline in their level of democracy, according to the independent watchdog organization Freedom House.

The Westthat hodgepodge of developed countries that embody liberal values, from Canada to the European Union to Japanis partly to blame for the global recession of democracy. Misguided Western foreign policy, like backing friendly dictators, turning a blind eye to abuses of democracy, or actively toppling democratic regimes, hurt democracy in the long run. More recently, counterproductive foreign policy decisions have corresponded with the rise of illiberal populism.

Unfortunately, in the short term, the state of global democracy is going to get worse. US president Donald Trump certainly did not start the trend of democracys retreat, but his America First foreign policy guarantees its continuedand likely acceleratedglobal decline.

To understand why we find ourselves in this perilous tipping point, we need to look at our foreign policy choices over the past several decades.

The United States and its Western allies have, at best, a checkered relationship with promoting democracy around the globe. During the Cold War, American foreign policy was far more concerned with finding friendly pro-West, anti-Soviet regimes than it was with finding democratic ones. Indeed, in de-classified memos, former secretary of state Henry Kissinger argued that the biggest threat to American interests was the insidious model of a legitimately elected democratic regime that supported the Kremlin instead of the US. As a result, from Iran to the Congo to Chile, the American government has actively intervened (often with the help of European allies) to overthrow democratically elected regimes at various points in history.

That calculation shifted when the Cold War ended. The Berlin Wall crumbled, and despotic regimes collapsed. Western foreign policy began to earnestly support democracy in a much stronger way. It was still imperfect, of course. But there was genuine, sustained diplomatic pressure exerted in an attempt to liberalize authoritarian states. The results were clear: The 1990s were so auspicious for the spread of democracy that Stanford political scientist Francis Fukuyama even claimed that the world was approaching The End of History, with democracy as the natural and inevitable endpoint of global development.

But we now live in a darker period for democracy. Certainly, the true culprits for democracys decline are dictators and despots, along with counterfeit democratsthose authoritarian wolves like Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines or Viktor Orban in Hungary who cloak themselves in the faade of democratic sheepskins to gain political legitimacy.

They deserve the overwhelming blame. They have organized and executed a heist against democracy, from Turkey to Thailand and Azerbaijan to Afghanistan. But when you look closely, its clear that the West has often been driving their getaway car.

First, theres what I call the Saudi Arabia effect. The Westwith America at the helmhas, for decades, cozied up to awful, abusive authoritarian regimes out of geopolitical expediency. The United States knows that it is being two-faced, praising democracy publicly while inking arms deals with emirs and despots under the table. But the West proceeds nonetheless because it perceives some despotic regimes as key strategic allies. The same hard-nosed realpolitik calculation is made with many countries across the world, even though that type of global diplomacy inhibits democracy and empowers authoritarian regimes.

Second, increasingly since the 1990s, Western governments set laughably low standards for what constitutes democracy. This serves as a counterproductive incentive for cynical leaders to do only the bare minimumto simply appear democratic. This allows Western governments to accept deeply flawed counterfeit democracies so that they can work with them in seemingly good conscience. I call this the curse of low expectations.

In Madagascar, a few years ago, I met with the head of a political party who told me:

Unlike the other parties, we are a party of values.

Okay, I responded, which values?

A look of panic crossed his face.

I left the values in the car. Someone go get the values for the American.

This was a carefully choreographed charade gone wrong. He was trying desperately to play the part of an ostensibly committed democrat. He was expecting me to play the part of the Westerner waiting eagerly to see just enough glimmers of democracy. The problem, though, is that the more than 100 regimes around the world trapped between pure dictatorship and genuine democracy have no meaningful political competition, and no meaningful input from the people.

Nonetheless, the West often calls elections free and fair when they are not (which I saw firsthand in Madagascar) and often labels countries as democracies when they are not. In Azerbaijans 2013 election, US Congressional representatives even praised an election where the results were accidentally released on an iPhone app before voting took place.

Counterfeit democrats get foreign aid and political legitimacy that should only be conferred to genuine democrats. Yet that low bar for what counts as democracy, paradoxically, ensures that leaders in the developing world have absolutely no incentive to ever build a real democratic government.

The last issue is the botched Western military interventions that purported to be in support of democracyparticularly in Iraq, Afghanistan, and, most recently, Libya. These misguided efforts have given despots a gift of plausibility when they crack down on pro-democracy activists, foreign NGOs, and human rights organizations. Because America and its closest allies claimed to be invading those countries in the name of democracy, despots use those examples as a pretext to purge pro-democracy reformers.

Despots often falsely claim that any pro-democracy agenda is a Trojan horse, a ploy to craftily achieve the Wests true goal: regime change by force. Paradoxically, then, misguided and failed interventions in countries like Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya have given anti-democratic forces key rhetorical ammunition to justify their authoritarian rule. And in the West, the risks of pushing hard for democracy has also reinforced the emerging consensus in Brussels, Washington, London, and Paris that the dictatorial devil we know is better than the democratic devil we dont.

Those three aspects of Western foreign policy coincided catastrophically with the rise of illiberal populism across the globe and a crisis of confidence in the concept of democracy in the West. This was the perfect storm necessary to halt democracys advance and transform it into a retreat back toward authoritarianism.

President Trump is already accelerating this retreat. Several authoritarian regimesincluding Chinaare already using his 2016 election as anti-democratic propaganda, arguing that Trump is clear evidence of the bad decision-making ushered in by democratic government.

More substantively, Trumps early foreign policy decisions (and especially his America First rhetoric) has sent a clear signal that the United States will be shifting its focus away from global human rights to focus exclusively on its narrow conception of self-interest. Indeed, his budget proposal would gut the State Department budget, axe pro-democracy foreign aid, and make it far more difficult for the United States to promote democracy generally. Thats not the right approach, even though there is room to improve the strategies that the United States uses to boost democracy across the globe.

Beyond the budget, US secretary of state Rex Tillerson bucked longstanding tradition and did not unveil the State Departments annual human rights report personally, thereby signaling the United Statess diminishing focus on human rights.

Such signals matter. The United States and its Western allies used to be an important referee on the global stage, blowing the whistle on the most egregious abuses of democracy and human rights. Certainly, America has been a biased refereeturning a blind eye to countries like Saudi Arabia and only lightly penalizing others that deserved harsher treatment. But its important that the referee exists. After just a month, Trumps rhetoric suggests that hes not even going to watch the game.

Follow Brian on Twitter at @brianklaas. Learn how to write for Quartz Ideas. We welcome your comments at ideas@qz.com.

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Democracy is dying around the worldand the West has only itself to blame - Quartz