Mediaboss Marketing

HARI SREENIVASAN: We are now on the eve of seeing a Senate proposal for health care, including replacing the Affordable Care Act.

Republican leaders plan to release their bill tomorrow, after working on it behind closed doors for weeks. Late today, The Washington Post reported a draft bill largely mirrors the Houses version, but with some notable changes. It will end Medicaid expansion more gradually, but cut it deeply in the long term. It also removes language that restricts federally subsidized health plans from covering abortions.

Lisa Desjardins joins me now.

Lisa, considering the process here, tomorrows going to be an unveiling of this draft, not just to the public, but even to a lot of Republicans.

LISA DESJARDINS: Thats right. Most Republican senators have not seen the language yet, Hari.

They tell me that they will see it tomorrow around 9:30 a.m. Eastern time. Thats when Republican senators will gather for this exact reason. When will we see it? When will the public see it? Republicans tell me that is at the same time, 9:30 a.m. Eastern, online. Not clear exactly where yet.

Hari, even as we wait for the exact bill, today, were hearing from some key senators that they have alarm bells ringing in their heads. Remember, Republicans can only lose two Republican senators and still have this bill pass. Well, today, Rand Paul told me he sees what he hears as Obamacare-lite.

And another senator, Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, told me hes concerned. He asked for more time to review this bill. He said a vote next week, as is planned, is too soon. He said hes not getting more time and hes not sure he can get to yes without it.

HARI SREENIVASAN: Speaking of health care, today was also an important day, a deadline for insurance companies to figure out whether they were going to participate in some of the exchanges or not.

LISA DESJARDINS: This is critical for what kind of options people will have on the individual markets.

And so far, today, Hari, we have learned some news from some insurers pulling out of markets, in fact, Anthem and Blue Cross/Blue Shield pulling out of markets in Wisconsin and Indiana.

But its really a mixed story, Hari, because were also seeing new insurers enter in places like Tennessee, which will have three more options for insurance than it did last year. And also I spoke to a company called Medica. They plan on offering insurance throughout Iowa. That will be new for them this year, adding another option for Iowans.

But heres comes the catch, Hari, in a way. Medica says, to do that, theyre planning to increase premiums by 43 percent. So we will get more news here, but its a really mixed picture, all of these insurers saying theres instability in the market.

HARI SREENIVASAN: All right, Lisa Desjardins joining us from Capitol Hill, many thanks.

Continue reading here:
Will the Senate's health care proposal sway key Republicans? - PBS NewsHour

North Carolina Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper

North Carolina Department of Transportation/Flickr

Shortly after Roy Cooper, a Democrat, won the North Carolina governorship, the GOP-dominated General Assembly launched an all-out assault on his office. Legislative Republicans, bolstered by an unconstitutional racial gerrymander, stripped the governor of various powersmost critically, his ability to restore voting rights and appoint certain judges. Cooper sued to block the new laws, and the state judiciary has mostly sided with him, striking down a slew of measures that restricted his ability to govern the state.

Mark Joseph Stern is a writer for Slate. He covers the law and LGBTQ issues.

Now, the state GOP believes it has devised a solution: stop Cooper from filing suit against unconstitutional laws in the first place. This week, the General Assemblys Republican leaders released their final budget, which includes a brazen plan to thwart the governor in several ways. First, the budget prevents Cooper from using the governors office attorneys without the General Assemblys permission. Second, the budget prevents Cooper from using lapsed salary savingsmoney saved when the state pays an employee less than it had budgetedto hire outside counsel. These provisions effectively prevent Cooper from suing the legislature to halt unconstitutional laws. In order for him to do so, the General Assembly would have to give its permission to be sued, or Cooper would have to pay private lawyers out of pocket.

The budget also takes aim at another office of the executive branch, the attorney general. Currently, Democrat Josh Stein serves as AG, which has caused problems for the GOP. After a federal court struck down the states draconian voter ID law, Republicans wanted to appeal the decision to the Supreme Court. But Stein refused to defend the law, prompting a confusing legal maelstrom that ultimately spurred the justices to reject the appeal altogether. The budget aims to avoid this problem by forcing the attorney general to defend the legislature any time it is sued. (If the AG recuses himself, he must select another lawyer at the state Justice Department to replace him.) This unusual requirement deprives the attorney general of his traditional discretion and raises grave constitutional concerns about legislative interference in executive affairs.

Republicans also added a provision to the budget mandating that the legislature participate in any suit challenging a North Carolina law. That means the General Assembly can always step into a lawsuit against the state and defend the challenged statute, even though the governor cannotunless the General Assembly allows him to, and permits him to use his attorneys. Finally, just for good measure, Republicans slashed funding for the Department of Justice by nearly 40 percent, kneecapping Steins entire agency.

On Wednesday, I asked Coopers office what the governor made of the proposals.

Since gaining a legislative majority, North Carolina Republicans have had more than a dozen unconstitutional laws overturned by the courts, Ford Porter, a Cooper spokesman, told me. In response, they appear intent on dismantling checks and balances in state government. In addition to a legislative assault on the courts, Republicans are now attempting to rig the system by limiting the Executive Branchs ability to challenge unconstitutional laws.

If the General Assembly passes the budget in its current form, Cooper will likely veto it. The legislature will then promptly override his veto, at which point Cooper will probably sue before the new provisions take effect. He will have a strong case: North Carolina courts have already found that the legislatures intrusions into executive affairs violates the states constitutional command of separation of powers. But if Cooper loses, he may never be able to sue the General Assembly again.

The legislatures chicanery here is especially galling given its recent losses in court. Earlier this month, the Supreme Court ruled that the states legislative districts were unlawfully gerrymandered along racial lines. This gerrymander gave Republicans their current supermajoritiesmeaning their power is ill-gotten and, arguably, illegitimate. Yet the GOP has not hesitated to use this power to incapacitate the executive in probable contravention of the constitution. The Republican-led breakdown of democracy in North Carolina continues apace.

See the rest here:
North Carolina Republicans Are Trying to Strip the Governor of His Power to Challenge Laws - Slate Magazine (blog)

'Stop the violent left' supporting Karen Handel's congressional bid in a special election for Georgia's sixth congressional district aims to tie Democrats to the shooting at a congressional baseball practice on June 14. The Washington Post has chosen to blur a portion of this ad. (Principled PAC)

The culture war is alive and well even where you might not expect it. Thats one of the most overlooked lessons of yesterdays special election in Georgia. While a lot of was made of the absurd amounts of money spent on the race, the question of Donald Trumps effect down-ballot or which voters would turn out, Republicans won by going back to a playbook theyve used a thousand times before, one based on fear and contempt of culturally alien liberals.

In many ways, this race was unique its not as though in 2018 there will be a national spotlight and $50 million poured into all 435 House districts. But if you werent watching closely, you may have missed the scorched-earth culture war campaign that Republicans ran against Democrat Jon Ossoff. They barely attempted to make a case for Karen Handel; instead, their argument was that Ossoff is basically a Hollywood San Francisco radical hippie anarchist lunatic controlled by cover the childrens ears Nancy Pelosi.

That was the running theme of the television ads and direct mailers that flooded the district, convincing Republican voters that whatever misgivings they had about the Trump administration and however much Ossoff portrayed himself as a mainstream technocrat whose biggest priority was bringing high-tech jobs to metro Atlanta, nothing mattered more than their tribal hatred of liberals. You might think Karen Handels brand of extreme social conservatism (among other things she would outlaw not only same-sex marriage but also gay couples adopting children) would be a liability in a highly educated district like the Georgia 6th, but it wasnt.

As Nate Cohn pointed out a few days ago, 13 of the 15 congressional districts with the highest levels of education in the country are safe Democratic districts; only Georgias 6th and a suburban Virginia district are in Republican hands. Thats why Democrats saw an opening in this election. They hoped that with this electorate, which was far more comfortable with Mitt Romney than with Donald Trump (Trump won the district by 2 points, while Romney won it by 23), a mainstream, non-threatening Democrat could win.

But he couldnt. Which isnt to say Ossoff wasnt a candidate without plenty of weaknesses, but if Republicans can win on the culture war in Georgias 6th, they can do it almost anywhere.

Thats partly because they have so much practice. For half a century, theyve been telling voters that Democrats are alien radicals who indulge criminal minorities and bring chaos and violence wherever they go. Richard Nixon rode that message to the White House in 1968 (just check out this ad), and Republicans have been doing it ever since. So Ossoff, Republicans said, was not one of us, the ultimate distillation of the culture war attack. As one ad from the National Republican Congressional Committee said over pictures of anarchists smashing windows and Kathy Griffin holding up Trumps severed head, D.C. liberals, Hollywood elites, this is who supports Jon Ossoff. Because Jon Ossoff is one of them. Childish. Radical. Theyve targeted Georgia, but we can stop them.

In the wake of yesterdays result, a lot of people have advised the Democrats that the solution to this problem is for Nancy Pelosi to resign, which would supposedly prevent Republicans from demonizing her. Some of that advice is coming from people who obviously dont have the Democrats best interests at heart, but a lot of it is sincere. Unfortunately, it misreads not just that attack but also the way the GOP does business. While there may be legitimate reasons to ask whether Pelosi should remain the leader of House Democrats we probably should debate whether the current Democratic leadership is making good strategic and investment decisions thats a separate topic from whether she has become a liability as a cultural symbol.

Its certainly true that Pelosi is a villain for rank-and-file voters. Is that because of her politics? Of course not her positions on issues are basically those of the entire Democratic Party. Is it because shes from San Francisco? Of course Republicans have been using San Francisco as a symbol for conservative baby boomers resentments for decades, a representation of all the drug-taking and free love and fun that the hippies had while the buzzcut squares seethed with jealousy and contempt. Is it because Pelosi is an older woman? Oh, you bet it is. Just like Hillary Clinton, she has been the target of a nakedly misogynistic campaign of vilification for years, one that is now baked deep into Republican politics.

And if youre not a regular consumer of conservative media, you might not realize just how relentless that campaign has been, how often Pelosi is held up by Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity and the rest of the talk radio/Fox News nexus as everything that good honest Americans should hate. Which is why nothing Pelosi does actually matters. She barely appears on TV, but shes as potent a symbol for Republicans as ever. She could retire tomorrow, and I promise you, Republicans would still run a thousand ads with her face in them in 2018.

That wouldnt last forever, but by the time it faded, the conservative propaganda machine would have replaced her with a different villain. Weve seen again and again how effective that machine can be: One Democratic politician after another has begun with a profile as an inoffensive, hardworking, substantive public servant (think Dukakis, Gore, Kerry), then quickly turned into a monster who threatened everything Republican voters hold dear.

What that means is that the one mistake Democrats cant make again the one theyve made so many times before is to say, If we find the right person, Republicans wont be able to attack him. They will, no matter who that person is. Democrats need to take that culture war attack as a given and find more potent attacks in response the way they did with Mitt Romney, but didnt with Donald Trump. Or with Karen Handel.

See original here:
The culture war is alive and well. And Republicans will keep fighting it. - Washington Post (blog)

By late Tuesday night, the answers were rolling in. Prominently mixed into this dog's breakfast of recriminations, mostly from the party's activist left, there is at least one recurring thread: Democrats do not have, either by omission or commission, a cohesive economic message. Operatives and consultants peddle tactics, electoral "paths" to power, but after eight years of riding President Barack Obama, mistaking his talents for their own, the brain trust is unable to drive the party.

Still, as it relates to Georgia's 6th Congressional District, a number of caveats apply. Jon Ossoff, the 30-year-old former congressional staffer and documentary filmmaker, entered the race facing long odds. No Democrat had won the seat in his lifetime. Hillary Clinton came close to nicking the vote there from Donald Trump last November, but fell short. Tom Price, whose departure to join the Trump administration set off the months-long contest, won re-election a little more than six months ago by more than 20 points. Ossoff, despite losing, ate substantially into that margin.

And for the left flank of activists, that's a problem. For now and going forward into 2018 and beyond.

Most of the more prominent progressive objections look back further than the beginning of this race. Ossoff's particular strategic failures or flawed messaging were panned, but the most convincing criticism has been trained on the institutional aimlessness that guided him. This analysis by some progressives questions the fundamental assumption that Georgia's sixth was a national bellwether, instead presenting it as a lagging indicator of Democratic rot.

Not that Ossoff isn't catching his share of the blame. He ran, as much as anything else, as a Democratic cipher and seemed, in interviews and public appearances, to be physically straining himself to avoid any contentious comments. Disinclined to define himself, Handel and the Republicans wisely lashed him to a muddling party. (Hence the resurgence of House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, more than seven years' removed from the speakership, as the chosen bogeyman. She at least represents something.)

"Until we take a risk as a party in offering a bold economic platform, we're not going to break through in some of these elections," California Rep. Ro Khanna said on the phone late Tuesday night. "When you try to target things to a lowest common denominator, you run the risk of not having an inspiring message."

Other critics, many less preternaturally diplomatic than Khanna, were unsparing. Democracy for America Chair Jim Dean unburdened himself in a press release delivered soon after Ossoff's loss was confirmed. But like the congressman, Dean zeroed in on the failures of the party's high level strategists.

"Defeating Republicans in districts that they have traditionally held requires doing something drastically different than establishment Democrats have done before," he said, listing among those priorities "heavily (investing) in direct voter contact to expand the electorate."

Questions about the theories that guided how Ossoff and his campaign spent their windfall were a recurring theme.

In an email, Robert Becker, who ran Sen. Bernie Sanders campaign in Iowa (and later, as deputy national field director, helped author its most famous win, in Michigan), was openly disdainful of what he suggested had been wasteful party management.

"Well, seems we spent $30 million to get 48% in Georgia ... and next to nothing to get 48% in South Carolina. One has to wonder what impact $30 million would have if it was directed to state Democratic parties instead of a gazillion TV ads," he wrote. "Maybe try standing for something and investing in grassroots instead would be the lesson?"

Other progressive activists asked why the district had become such an obsession for Democrats. Yes, Clinton did well there. But the logic, they insisted, was faulty. She might have overperformed in areas that went for Romney, like Georgia's sixth, but that was because her campaign targeted them -- not because they are naturally ripe to shed the GOP.

The strategy recalled a now infamously misguided prediction put forth by Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer ahead of the 2016 election, when he posited that "for every blue-collar Democrat we lose in western Pennsylvania, we will pick up two moderate Republicans in the suburbs in Philadelphia, and you can repeat that in Ohio and Illinois and Wisconsin."

Enter here a close cousin of Schumer's theory, the "Panera Bread path." Former top Clinton aide and Democratic strategist Brian Fallon, in a tweet on the night of the first round of voting in Georgia, held up the caf casual dining franchise -- typically located in comfortable suburban precincts -- as a rough guide for where Democrats should dedicate their resources ahead of the 2018 midterms.

"Even if he doesn't hit (50% and win outright) tonight, Ossoff is showing us the path to retaking the House," Fallon wrote. "It runs through the Panera Breads of America."

Progressives bristled, as much at the message as the messenger.

"We won't defeat Trumpism by courting moderate Republicans in wealthy suburbs," Max Berger, a co-founder of #AllOfUs, the millennial progressive group, told CNN. "Trumpism will be defeated by mobilizing voters who feel left behind -- young people and working class people of all races -- to take on the billionaires and the ruling class. The Democrat consultant class thinks a Panera strategy is their path back to power, but the left will no longer be led by those who offer no alternative."

What the desired agenda looks like remains a rolling question. As the Sanders campaign slowly broke up, the activists and organizers who drove its success mostly scattered, seeking to grow the new coalitions brought together by the Vermont independent's progressive populist platform.

Anna Galland, executive director of MoveOn.org, hit this vein in her post-election message.

"Ossoff and the (Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee) missed an opportunity to make Republicans' attack on health care the key issue, and instead attempted to portray Ossoff as a centrist," she said in a statement, "focusing on cutting spending and coming out opposition to Medicare for All."

It was hardly the "sweeping change," Galland argued, "that the American people are clamoring for."

The string of defeats, going back to the 2014 midterms, provides further evidence, progressives and leftists say, that -- without a uniquely talented group of candidates on the horizon -- the party will no longer be able to paper over decades of either bland or, in the case of trade deals like NAFTA, destructive economic policies.

"I don't think many (national Democrats) have the charisma of Obama, the weird likability and material language of Sanders, or the conniving ability of Harry Reid," said Felix Biederman, co-host of the "Chapo Trap House" podcast. "It's time for them to stop ratf-----g even the hint of a left in their party and activate those voters who usually don't vote."

Read more here:
Progressives already thought Democrats were aimless. The special election wipeout might prove their point - CNN

Peter Beinart has an excellent essayin The Atlantic on how the American Left has shifted on immigration. Just a decade ago, he writes, progressive intellectuals such as Glenn Greenwald, Paul Krugman, and even Barack Obama at least acknowledged the costs of immigration. In fact, Krugman outright stated that, Realistically, well need to reduce the inflow of low-skill immigrants.

I would add to those examples the New York Times editorial from 2000, Hasty Call for Amnesty, which declares, Amnesty would undermine the integrity of the countrys immigration laws and would depress the wages of its lowest-paid native-born workers. Far from sounding progressive to our 2017 ears, this is the kind of statement that might get a speaker disinvited from a college campus these days.

The strange marriage of progressivism and mass immigration has always puzzled me. Last month, I wrote an articlefor RealClearPolicy showing that progressive and high-immigration California is failing by progressives own standards. California has the nations highest poverty rate, its math and reading scores rank near the bottom, and its communities suffer from low levels of social trust. These problems have many causes, but mass low-skill immigration has clearly exacerbated them. Two questions for progressives follow. First, if the nations leader in blue-state governance cannot mitigate the problems related to mass immigration, which state will? Second, and more broadly, how does immigration move us closer to the egalitarian, cooperative, and science-loving society that progressives envision?

I never received any answers to these questions, but maybe the Beinart article points to one: Immigrants and the organizations that lobby for them are now an important Democratic-party constituency. As a result, boosting immigration has itself become a progressive cause, even if it means the old-fashioned vision of egalitarian communities has to be permanently set aside. This is a major political realignment, and yet another example of how mass immigration fundamentally changes nations.

Follow this link:
Immigration Has Changed the Progressive Movement - National Review