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By David Morgan | WASHINGTON

WASHINGTON Republican efforts to overhaul the U.S. tax code have hit a snag in the House of Representatives, where infighting over spending cuts is delaying adoption of a legislative tool they need to move a tax bill forward.

The House Budget Committee canceled plans to send a budget resolution for fiscal 2018 to the floor this week, lawmakers said on Tuesday, as conservative Republicans pushed to add hundreds of billions of dollars in mandatory spending cuts to the blueprint.

House and Senate passage of a budget resolution is vital to President Donald Trump's pledge to deliver on tax reform this year because the document would free Republicans to circumvent Democratic opposition in the Senate. But the push to cut programs including Medicaid and food stamps, which benefit the poor, could lead to a stalemate.

Trump administration officials and Republican leaders in Congress are working separately to agree on a tax bill that can be unveiled in September.

"No budget, no tax reform," said Representative Mark Walker, who chairs the Republican Study Committee, a group of more than 150 conservative lawmakers. "That's why there should be a sense of urgency to get this done pretty quick."

Their aim is to cut mandatory programs that are required by law and viewed as principle drivers of deficit spending. The result could be legislation containing lower taxes for the wealthy and corporations alongside reduced benefits for the poor.

Lawmakers say there is Republican agreement on topline discretionary spending levels of $621.5 billion for defense and $511 billion for non-defense programs.

Representative Jim Jordan, a leading member of the conservative House Freedom Caucus, is pushing to cut as much as $400 billion over a decade from a range of programs that benefit the poor. Freedom Caucus Chairman Mark Meadows said he wanted another $295 billion in cuts on top of that.

"It has to be linked to tax reform, because we believe tax reform is going to happen," Jordan said in an interview.

The budget committee canceled its plans this week after the chairmen of several other panels pushed back against efforts to include $250 billion in spending cuts.

"The end game is to get a budget out of the committee," House Budget Committee Chairwoman Diane Black told reporters. "I do see a viable path. And I am going to continue to push."

(Reporting by David Morgan; Editing by Lisa Von Ahn and Andrew Hay)

WASHINGTON Hillary Clinton's campaign chairman, John Podesta, on Tuesday appeared before the U.S. House of Representatives Intelligence Committee, which has begun interviewing witnesses in its probe of how Russia may have influenced the 2016 election.

BEIJING Newly appointed U.S. Ambassador to China Terry Branstad said on Wednesday the United States would like to see Nobel Peace Prize-winning activist Liu Xiaobo treated elsewhere for cancer, and that the two countries must work together on human rights.

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Republican tax code revamp hits House budget obstacle - Reuters

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Tax cuts in the Republican health care plan are the 'central' issue MSNBC If Republicans were serious about identifying and addressing the Affordable Care Act's real shortcomings, they could work out a deal with Democrats, stabilize the marketplaces, offer incentives to insurers, and make meaningful improvements to the system. and more »

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Tax cuts in the Republican health care plan are the 'central' issue - MSNBC

The resistance movement against President Donald Trump and his Republican allies has increasingly pinned its hopes on the Russia investigations. If these probes are the panaceas many believe, they will not only remove Trump from officebut also restoresome decorum and decency to our politics.

But while Moscow clearly meddled in our electionwhether by hacking Hillary Clintons emails or collaborating with the Trump campaignblaming the Kremlin for destroying our democracy absolves those who broke it long before November.

Trumps lie that millions of illegal immigrants voted in the election is only the most recent and public effort to thwart majority rule. As that majority has become younger and browner, a core group of conservatives has done everything in its power to stop them from heading to the polls.

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Indeed, small d democracy has been under siege for decades. Vladimir Putin and company just dropped in to pick over the bones.

Heres how it happened.

President Donald Trump delivers remarks at Kirkwood Community College in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, on June 21. Jonathan Ernst/Reuters

THE CONSTITUTION

Some of this un-democracy is built into the Constitution. The Electoral College enabled Trump to win the 2016 election with 3 million fewer votes than Clinton received. And because the small states demanded equal representation in the Senate as a condition of signing onto the Constitution, we have a system under which a majority of Americans live in nine statesbut that majority has only 18 votes in the Senate, while the minority has 82.

Californians now have one-sixth the amount of representation in the Senate as people who live in Wyoming, according to calculations byjournalist Zachary Roth, author of The Great Suppression: Voting Rights, Corporate Cash, and the Conservative Assault on Democracy. This imbalance has a racial componenttoo: Nonwhites make up 44 percent of the 10 largest statesbut 18 percent of the smaller ones.

GERRYMANDERING

After the election of Barack Obama, the Republican State Leadership Council began plotting to elect GOP lawmakers to state-level offices to control the redistricting process. When the Republicans won those legislatures in 2010, they also won the right to rejigger congressional boundaries in their favor. The following year, they redrew twisted district lines across the nation, all but guaranteeing GOP control of the U.S. House of Representatives until the next redistricting process, in 2021. The gambit was audacious, and though the Democrats have gerrymandered in the past, the scale of the 2011 effort was like nothing seen before in this country.

VOTER SUPPRESSION

As Roth explains, Republicans have also tried to suppress the vote. Their targets: poor people and nonwhites, who are more likely to live in areas where voting facilities are not well maintained or are difficult to get to. Republicans in control of states such as Wisconsin, Ohio, Florida, Kansas and North Carolina have purged voters who have changed residencies or have failed to vote in previous elections, according to the Center for Public Integrity.

The head of Trumps commission to investigate voter fraud, Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, has been battling the American Civil Liberties Unionover his states requirement that voters show birth certificates or passports to register. The young and poor are less likely to have easy access to such documents, or to have photo IDs. The powerful American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), which receives significant funding from billionaire conservatives, as well as oil, gas, tobacco and telecom corporations, has provided cookie-cutter voter ID laws to state legislators for sponsorship.

THE COURTS

In 2013, the U.S. Supreme Court decided that states no longer have to submit to federal oversight or pre-clearance of changes when they want to modify voting laws. The clearance requirement had been law since the 1960sand was designed to assert federal control over Southern states that were trying to suppress the black vote. The decision in this case, brought by an Alabama county, now effectively allows states to alter their voting requirements in ways that disenfranchise potential nonwhite voters.

PRE-EMPTION

David Koch arrives at the Metropolitan Museum of Art Costume Institute Gala Benefit in New York on May 5, 2014. Carlo Allegri/Reuters

When the right gained control of state legislatures, progressives turned to local governments to pass restrictionsfor instance, on smoking indoors or polluting local water supplies. There, too, some on the right have squashed democracy, by devising and advocating for pre-emption laws that forbid locals from passing their own legislation. Communities in Oklahoma and Texas that tried to ban fracking, for example, have been forced to give up after state lawmakers prohibited those bans.

Wisconsin turned into a pre-emption hot spot according to Roth, in part because Governor Scott Walkera recipient of major funds from Charles and David Koch, the right-wing billionaire activistswas trying to crush local government unions. Nowindustry lobbyists find it easier to manipulate state legislatures that have passed bans on everything from community public health rules to local regulations on Uber.

DARK MONEY

President Barack Obama meets with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Los Cabos, Mexico, on June 18, 2012. REUTERS/Jason Reed

Decades ago, a small group of right-wingers with billions of dollars in disposable income banded together to wrest power away from the rabble. With a president and a House of Representatives in thrall to a minority of the population, they have succeeded.

Related: Russian hackers attacked the 2008 Obama campaign

After Obamas victory in the 2008 election, these men, led by the Koch brothers, feared socialism was on the horizon and ratcheted up their efforts. Creating the anti-government, anti-tax Tea Party to win the House in 2010 was only part of the plan. The Supreme CourtsCitizens United ruling that same year amplified their efforts, allowing untold amounts of so-called dark money to flow into new corners of American politics.

The libertarian Koch brothers were reportedly unhappy with the candidacy of Trump, whose allegiance to conservative principles was still in doubt. But by spending nearly a billion dollars on lower races in the 2016 election, they were also aiding the man at the top of the ticket by bringing more Republican voters to the polls.

This year, they have been more muted on Trump. And why not? The presidents disdain for government, his desire to slash regulations and lower taxes, is a Koch brothers dream. Theyre probably happy with the way things have turned out. But when you have endless amounts of money, it is always possible to be a little happier.

TRYING TO AMEND THE CONSTITUTION

Many conservatives profess a deep love for liberty and the Constitution. They use it in rhetoric. They apply it in legal theories to crush liberal economic policies, roll back modern attitudes toward women and minorities and ignore multicultural demographic realities.

But some on the right also want to rewrite the great document. The Kochs, along with other billionaires and their big corporate allies, have been bankrolling a move to hold a convention to amend the Constitution and write a Balanced Budget Amendment into it.

The Kochs and their Balanced Budget Amendment Task Force have been pushing for the amendment since 1995. ALEC, their right-wing legislative policy farm,has a model law that the states have been passing. The Balanced Budget Amendment would, of course, give wealthy people and corporations another tool with which to pay fewer taxes or resist financing projects, like publicly funded or subsidized health care.

Under Article V of the Constitution, amendments can be proposed either by two-thirds of both the House and Senateor through a convention called for by two-thirds of state legislatures, which would be 34 states. Then38 states would have to ratify it before it could become part of the Constitution.

Twenty-seven states have passed the call for a constitutional convention to consider the Balanced Budget Amendment. In response to the movement, more than 200 organizations opposed to the amendment signed a letter in April denouncing an Article V convention at this time as a dangerous threat to the U.S. Constitution, our democracy, and our civil rights and liberties.But the groups behind the convention drive are focused on getting support from at least seven more states is 2018 (Kentucky, Maine, Minnesota, Montana, South Carolina, Virginia and Washington).

The Kochs and ALEC are behind an even more radical effort as well. The Convention of States Project,run by the Texas-based Citizens for Self-Governance, is pushing for a convention to drastically restrict the powers of the federal government to tax, regulate and make decisions that apply to individual states. Last election, they introduced their bid in 24 states. Arizona, Missouri, North Dakota and Texas passed it.

THE RESISTANCE

Women protest against Donald Trump at a demonstration organized by the National Organization for Women outside Manhattan's Trump Tower on October 26. Mike Segar/reuters

As a committed core of conservatives have been fighting against small d democracy, progressives and Democrats have lacked the abilityor the imaginationto fight back. In one of his last interviews in the White House, Obama acknowledged his role in this failure. Some of this was circumstances, he told ABC News. But I think that what is also true is that partly because my docket was really full hereso I couldnt be both chief organizer of the Democratic Party and function as commander in chief and president of the United Stateswe did not begin what I think needs to happen over the long haul, and that is rebuild the Democratic Party at the ground level.

Obama and former Attorney General Eric Holder created the National Democratic Redistricting Committee last year to coordinate campaign strategy, direct fundraising, organize ballot initiatives and put together legal challenges to state redistricting maps. Holder has joked,Part of my job is to make redistricting sexy for Democrats.

Beside that effort, the Supreme Court just accepted a challenge to Republican gerrymandering in Wisconsin. The court last dealt with the issue in 2004, but the current case, which it will hear in the fall and rule on before the 2018 election, proposes a different framework. Plaintiffs are basing their challenge on new political science that uses voting data to assess bias against one party or another in the maps.

The Great Suppression author Roth says all the Republican-backed voting restrictions definitely played a role in the election, but he doesnt think that completely absolves the Russians, who hacked into and possibly disseminated politically damaging email correspondence from the Democratic National Committee. For example, Wisconsins voter ID law gave Trump an advantage in the Cheese State, but Clinton also lost Pennsylvania and Michigan, where voter suppression shenanigans were less of a factor.

After the Democratic loss in Georgias 6th Congressional District on June 20, some Democrats began noticing that the Russia probes wont guarantee success in 2018. The day after the vote, New York Representative Joseph Crowley, the chairman of the House Democratic Caucus, told colleagues during a private meeting that voters in the midterm elections will be more concerned about domestic issues than the Trump-Russia investigation.

The shiny object which is Russia and the Trump administration is in many ways a smokescreen for Mitch McConnell and the Senate to do things they probably wouldnt be able to get away with if the public and media were paying more attention, Crowley later told reporters. Were all guilty of that to some degree.

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Vladimir Putin Didn't Break American Democracy, We Broke the System Ourselves - Newsweek

The few liberal commentators left standing after the saffron tsunami has swept India bemoan the fact that there is no formal Opposition worth the name to stymie the sangh parivars strategy of uprooting India from its constitutionally entrenched secular and pluralist foundations and turning it into an exclusivist Hindu Rashtra, with little or no place in it for minorities, particularly the Muslims.

The ragtag Opposition looks like a comedy team, with Rahul playing the lead clown.

So who or what is to stop the Republic from keeping a second tryst with destiny, this time with a trishul in one hand and the laws of Manu in the other?

Some have suggested that it is the larger part of the Indian electorate who did not vote for Modi and the BJP which won only 31 per cent of the vote in the last general elections who will prove to be the bulwark against the rising tide of fiercely aggressive Hindutva.

According to this view, a large if not major part of the Indian electorate still adheres to the idea of India as a democracy that celebrates diversity, and which believes in what has been called Constitutional patriotism as opposed to the parivars cultural nationalism.

Such faith might be misplaced. For it rests on the premise that democracy is another not word for majoritynariasm, that democracy is much more than the mere winning of elections but subsumes a whole set of values and institutions which protect the rights of the individual.

But today Indian democracy along with that other British legacy, cricket has become nothing more or less than electoral victory, by whatever means achieved.

T20 has totally supplanted Test cricket as the preferred game of choice, where winning is the only thing that matters. The fans of T20 are not aficionados of sport, who care about how the game is played. All they want is victory, at all costs, particularly when its an India-Pakistan match.

Similarly, democracy has come to mean nothing but the winning at the ballot box and forming a government. The preservation of democratic institutions like the independence of the judiciary, the armed forces, and other organs of the state doesnt matter a hoot.

Modi and his Hindutva cohorts have won the T20 match of Indian democracy, and thats all that seems to count.

And theyre all set to win their coveted trophy of a Hindu Rashtra thats a saffron mirror image of Islamic Pakistan.

Howzzat.

DISCLAIMER : Views expressed above are the author's own.

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Democracy, T20 cricket and the making of the Hindu Rashtra - Times of India (blog)

While almost no one expects China to become a democracy now, that was at least a hope in 2008.

When Charter 08 was signed, there was a yearning for more open dialogue and talk about a peaceful societal transition, said one of the signatories, Ai Xiaoming, a scholar and documentary filmmaker in the southern Chinese city of Guangzhou. But now there is even more strict social control, and the room for civil society has shrunk significantly.

Ms. Ai, who met Mr. Liu before his imprisonment, also expressed guilt that he alone among the organizers had been convicted and sentenced so harshly to 11 years in prison for inciting subversion of state power though many others also faced harassment that forced them underground or out of the country.

International attention Mr. Liu was awarded the Nobel in 2010 gave Ms. Ai and others hope of protecting him, but the world moved on, even as China tightened its controls over nonprofit organizations and moved to arrest lawyers.

Its sad to see hes no longer the center of attention, Ms. Ai said in a telephone interview. We had a kind of illusion that the government would be nice to him given his international influence. Now I doubt that was the case.

Mr. Lius wife, the poet and photographer Liu Xia, has been under strict house arrest in Beijing since his Nobel Prize was announced. Friends circulated a cellphone video on Monday in which a crying Ms. Liu said doctors cant operate, cant use radiotherapy, cant use chemotherapy to treat her husbands cancer.

Mr. Lius Nobel Prize in recognition of his long and nonviolent struggle for fundamental human rights in China focused attention on his fate, but over the years he was sidelined if not forgotten by the pragmatic needs of countries that felt no choice but to work with China, not criticize it.

Chinas response to the prize illustrated the risks of going against it. Norways government has no say in who wins the prize, but it is awarded by a five-person committee chosen by the Norwegian Parliament. China swiftly cut imports of Norwegian salmon, depriving Norway of its largest market.

China wields those sorts of economic levers with great effect, Graham T. Allison argues in a new book, Destined for War, about the potential collision of the United States and a rising China.

Few governments have had the capabilities or will to resist, Mr. Allison, director of the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard, said by email from Dalian, China, where he was attending the World Economic Forums annual summer meeting.

In the case of Norway, its diplomats persuaded China to restore full relations after making a series of conciliatory gestures that dismayed human rights campaigners there and in China.

For the United States, the focus on Chinas record of human rights has become increasingly muted, especially under President Trump, reflecting the conflicting goals of doing business with China.

China is very smart about this, said Hu Jia, a rights advocate in Beijing. He noted how Greece, which is courting Chinese investment, recently thwarted a European Union effort to make a statement about human rights abuses in specific countries to the United Nations Human Rights Council.

Because of issues like economic cooperation, security, North Korea and terrorism, leaders arent as willing to raise human rights problems with China, Mr. Hu said.

Charter 08 was signed in the twilight of the administration of President George W. Bush, who used his second term to advance what the White House promoted as a Freedom Agenda in the aftermath of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. President Barack Obama vocally championed human rights around the world, but he pursued the issue less vigorously when it came to China.

Mr. Obama praised Mr. Lius Nobel Prize, but when the Senate passed legislation that would have renamed a street in front of Chinas embassy in Washington after him, the administration signaled that Mr. Obama would veto it. The bill quietly died in the Republican-controlled House after Mr. Trumps election last fall.

Mr. Trump and his advisers have clearly indicated that human rights are less important on the presidents agenda than security and trade matters.

Human rights has retreated in terms of peoples interest in China, said Jerome Cohen, director of the U.S.-Asia Law Institute at New York Universitys School of Law.

The fear of being excluded from Chinas market is palpable. Everybody is under pressure from constituents to have a piece of the action, Mr. Cohen said. Of course, the U.S. no longer asks other countries to do anything, because we decided its not important for our purposes.

Secretary of State Rex W. Tillerson, going against tradition, did not introduce his departments annual human rights report in March, though he appeared with Ivanka Trump at the department on Tuesday to introduce a similar report on human trafficking. For the first time, the department reduced Chinas rating to the lowest tier of countries, signaling that it has exerted minimal effort to combat trafficking.

On Wednesday morning, the new American ambassador to China, Terry Branstad, said that the Trump administration would like to help arrange medical treatment for Mr. Liu abroad, a day after the American Embassy said it had called on China to release him and his wife.

Were interested in doing what can be done to see if it is possible, Mr. Branstad said in brief remarks to reporters outside the embassy residence in Beijing. We as Americans would like to see him have the opportunity for treatment elsewhere, if that could be of help.

As news of Mr. Lius illness emerged, Chinas beleaguered democracy advocates issued a new petition, one that was far more modest than Charter 08. It simply called for Mr. Liu and his wife to be unconditionally released and urged that he be given the medical treatment he needed. Within hours it had more than 400 signatures.

Steven Lee Myers reported from Beijing, and Austin Ramzy from Hong Kong.

A version of this article appears in print on June 28, 2017, on Page A9 of the New York edition with the headline: A Crusader and His Cause, Both Ailing in China.

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Liu Xiaobo Embodied Hope for China's Democracy. Now He's Sick. - New York Times