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President Trump alternately cajoles and berates Congress as he struggles to find legislative wins in key issues he campaigned on. (Jenny Starrs/The Washington Post)

They more or less kept it behind closed doors for a couple of weeks, but Republicans are no longer holding back their frustration that they couldn't repeal Obamacare. The blame game has started, and it's open warfare. Here's President Trump, blaming the Senate majority leader, on Twitter, in front of his 35 million followers:

Let's back up. After Republicans' attempt to undo some of Obamacare fell one vote short in July, Trump got out in front by not-so-subtly threatening Republicans with the label total quitters and hammering them at every public opportunity.

Get them to have the guts to vote to repeal and replace Obamacare, Trump told a West Virginia crowd on Thursday.

The normally reserved Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) kept his head down. But on Monday, while speaking to constituents in Kentucky, he basically said it's not fair to blame Congress. It's the president's excessive expectations that are out of whack.

Our new president, of course, has not been in this line of work before. And I think he had excessive expectations about how quickly things happen in the democratic process. So part of the reason I think people feel were underperforming is because too many artificial deadlines unrelated to the reality of the complexity of legislating may not have been fully understood.

In other words: Don't judge if you don't know what's going on, Mr. President.

By Wednesday morning, McConnell's marks had infiltrated the White House. Trump aide Dan Scavino fired back that McConnell was just making excuses for his poor leadership.

Trump allies in the media piled on. They are phony baloney, said Fox Business host Lou Dobbs on Tuesday night. Ditch Mitch. Same from Fox News host Sean Hannity.

Then, a couple hours later, the president himself joined in the McConnell bashing.

As that was catching fire, another parallel blame game was forming. On Tuesday,Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.),suggested on talk radio that Sen. John McCain's (R-Ariz.) brain cancer diagnosis may have influenced how the senator voted. McCain, along with Sens. Susan Collins (Maine) and Lisa Murkowski (Alaska) voted against the bill in a late-night series of votes. He later said he didn't appreciate how Republicans rushed through the legislation.

Again, I'm not going to speak for John McCain. You know, he has a brain tumor right now, that vote occurred at 1:30 in the morning some of that might have factored in, Johnson told Chicago's Morning Answer. The host, caught off guard, asked Johnson directly if he thought the tumor affected McCain's judgment, and Johnson backed off some: I don't know exactly what we really thought and again I don't want speak for any senator. I really thought John was going to vote yes to send that to conference at 10:30 at night. By about 1, 1:30, he voted no. So you have talk to John in terms of what was on his mind.

Damage, done, though. McCain's office fired back in a statement:

It is bizarre and deeply unfortunate that Senator Johnson would question the judgment of a colleague and friend. Senator McCain has been very open and clear about the reasons for his vote.

What's going on here?

For one, it's pretty clear Republicans blame themselves for failing to repeal Obamacare, not, as some of them say publicly, Democrats.

Two: There's a split in the party about who was least helpful in trying to corral 50 ideologically diverse Republican senators to support an unpopular piece of legislation.

From the beginning, Senate GOP aides privately said that Trump wasn't helping much. He gave them little to no direction on what kind of legislation he wanted and absolutely no comfort that he'd have their backs once they passed something. Trump celebrated House Republicans' controversial health-care bill with them in the Rose Garden, then called it mean.

But from the White House's perspective, Republicans in Congress had seven long years to come up with a plan to repeal Obamacare. When Barack Obama was in the Oval Office, Congress managed to pass a repeal bill. How could they finally have total control of Washington and not send one to Trump's desk?

Obamacare repeal, for now, is probably shelved. But a war over who is to blame for that can only drag down Republicans as they try to tackle the next major thing on their to-do list, tax reform.

Tax reform posesas many challenges for Republicansas health care, if not more.

Timing isone big one.Their initial planto get it done this fall is extremely optimistic. When Congress returns in September, it also has to lift the debt ceiling and pass a budget all things it has been unable to do in the past without Democratic help. And the closer it gets to the 2018 midterm elections, the less likely some vulnerable Republicans are to take tough votes for the sake of the party.

Even if they dodge a debt ceiling fight and shutdown, as The Washington Post's Damian Paletta and Kelsey Snell report, Republicans haven't yet figured out how they want to reform the tax code. The Trump White House has released a one-page handout, and that's about it.

Senate Republican leaders also say they're likely to follow the same procedural trickas they did tryingto pass health care toavoid a Democratic filibuster, which means they'll need at least 50 of 52 Republican votes. That alone will be a major challenge, because tax reform covers just as wide of an ideological spectrum as health care. (Should the tax cuts last a year? Adecade? Forever? Is it okay if they raise the deficit? And on and on.)

In other words, Republicans have a lot of problems facing them this fall. And fighting over who's to blame for not repealing Obamacare will only exacerbate them. But Republicans are doing it anyway, and they're doing it publicly.

Read more:
Republicans are airing their dirty laundry on Obamacare - Washington Post

President Trump and many of his top aides have expressed skepticism about climate change, while others say human activity is to blame for global warming. So what's the administration's real position? (Peter Stevenson/The Washington Post)

For at least the past decade, Republican Party leaders' position on climate change has evolved inverse to scientific evidence.

As scientists have spent the past decade firming up their conclusion that climate change is a real threat, Republican politicians have solidified their doubt about it. In fact, the party's past three presidential nominees have all backed off their prior assertions that climate change is a threat caused by humans.

Not only that, but each successive nominee has started out less convinced of the realities of human-driven climate change than the last. In 2008, Republicans nominated someone who ran an ad featuring a smoke stack and promising smart solutions to climate change. In 2012, climate change wasn't mentioned in the presidential debates. Now, the nation has a president who refuses to clarify if he still thinks climate change is a hoax put on by the Chinese and who may not accept a new report from his own scientists that says climate change is happening now.

Here are key climate change moments in the conservative world since Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth came out a decade ago, as told by Republican presidential nominees and the research.

Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) could be considered the most pro-climate-change-action Republican to ever win the nomination. When he launched his campaign for president, McCain was a leader in the Republican Party on climate change.

He ran an ad that actually tried to out-climate-change the Democrats. It featured smokestacks, congested highways and a not-so-subtle setting sun, with news clips declaring: McCain climate views clash with GOP, scrolling across.

I believe climate change is real, he said on his campaign website. I think it's devastating. I think we have to act and I agree with most experts that we may at some point reach a tipping point where we cannot save our climate.

But as the campaign went on, McCain slowly and subtly backed away from his act-or-else position. Ultimately, he picked an open climate change skeptic, Sarah Palin, as his running mate.

After he lost the election and was back in the Senate, McCain's evolution as a climate change skeptic was complete. He started calling cap-and-trade something he hadsupported since at least 2003 a cap and tax.

Key climate change moments: Al Gore and the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change win the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007 for their efforts to build up and disseminate greater knowledge about man-made climate change, and to lay the foundations for the measures that are needed to counteract such change.

The 2007 report declares warming of the climate system is unequivocal.

If McCain's position after the presidential race was confusing, GOP nominee Mitt Romney's position was hard to track during the presidential race. He fudged or switched his position on the degree to which humans contribute to climate change several times, and he never offered any specific policy proposals.

Let's start from before he got the nomination. He wrote in his 2010 book, No Apology, that he believes humans are playing a role in climate change, but he wasn't sure to what degree.

I believe based on what I read that the world is getting warmer, he told the New Hampshire Union-Leader in 2011.

Like McCain, as the campaign went on, Romney's skepticism toward climate change grew: We dont know whats causing climate change on this planet. And the idea of spending trillions and trillions of dollars to try to reduce CO2 emissions is not the right course for us, he said at one point.

Finally, Romney used Barack Obama's support for climate change action as an attack against the president: President Obama promised to begin to slow the rise of the oceans and heal the planet. My promise is to help you and your family, he said in his nominating speech.

After the election Romney appeared to switch his positions this time, back to his original assertion that climate change is a problem.

I'm one of those Republicans who thinks we are getting warmer and that we contribute to that, he told the Associated Press in 2015.

Key climate change moments: A prominent climate-change skeptic scholar, Richard Muller, writes in the New York Times that, after research (funded by the Koch Brothers, climate change skeptics), he has decided climate change is real, and humans are the main cause.

And a Brookings Institution study finds that public opinion about whether climate change is real is rebounding, after dropping from a high of 78 percent in 2008 to a low of 52 percent in 2010. In the spring of 2012, 65 percent of Americans believe there is solid evidence that human activity is warming the planet.

When Donald Trump won the nomination for president, he was on record denouncing climate change as a hoax (before he ran for president, but he refuses to this day to clarify or elaborate).

He fit right into the GOP primary. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) denied the planet is warming, and Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) said he doesn't think humans are causing dramatic changes to our climate the way these scientists are portraying it.

And, as The Washington Post's Philip Bump documents extensively, Trump took just about every position possible on climate change when he got into the race. But the overriding theme was skepticism.

I am not a great believer in man-made climate change. Im not a great believer, he told The Post as he was on his way to the nomination.

The New York Times reports that Trump's advisers saw an applause line and a political opening with blue-collar coal and mine workers in the Rust Belt by questioning climate change.

This time, the Republican presidential candidate won. And this time, the politician didn't veer from his position. In fact, you could argue that since Trump has become president, he's increased his skepticism by pulling out of the Paris climate change accord that all but two countries are a part of and putting in place climate change skeptics into Cabinet positions, like Rick Perry at the Energy Department and Scott Pruitt at Environmental Protection Agency.

Key climate change moments: Reporters get hold of a government climate change report in August that says it is extremely likely that half of the rise of temperatures over the past 40 years are thanks to humans. In other words: man-made climate change is very real, and it's happening now: There are no alternative explanations, and no natural cycles are found in the observational record that can explain the observed changes in climate.

Also, a 2015 Gallup poll found that only the most conservative Republicans think climate change won't affect them in their lifetime.

The Trump administration is reviewing the Climate Science Special Report, and it's not clear if it will accept the findings.

See the rest here:
Republicans' inverse evolution on climate change, as told by 3 presidential candidates - Washington Post

Al Sharpton, Opinion contributor Published 5:00 a.m. ET Aug. 9, 2017 | Updated 7:18 a.m. ET Aug. 9, 2017

Hillary Clinton in 2016.(Photo: Carlos Osorio, AP)

When Jesse Jackson ran for president during the 1980s, as when I ran in 2004, there were progressives in America just like there are today. Those progressives were well meaning individuals and politicians who shared our views and strongly believed in what we believed in. Despite this progressive political presence, our presidential campaigns were so important and necessary because the voices of black, brown and poorer white voters were not heard by the elites in American politics and government. Our agendas were not getting carried out. There was a great deal of talk back then, but no real action. That same dynamic holds true today.

The press speaks a great deal about the supposed fact that the Democratic base is riled up and activated by the state of play in America. This assessment ignores the most important segment of that base: the African-American voter. We are not motivated by anyone right now. While Sen. Bernie Sanders did a remarkable job in the 2016 presidential primaries and went further than anyone thought possible, he did so without the African-American vote, losing among African-American voters by more than 50 percentage points.

More: Democratic 'Better Deal' robs from the future

More: Rep. David Cicilline: A Better Deal is a bold agenda

While that progressive coalition purported to speak FOR the African-American voter, it did not talk TO African Americans. The so-called Hillary Clinton base of the party, while crushing Sanders, attracted substantially fewer black voters to turn out than in recent presidential primaries, and in the general election, running against a novice, the black voter turnout rate declined for the first time in 20 years in a presidential election, falling 7 percentage points compared to 2012. Arguably, that disinterested black vote cost Clinton the presidency.

It would be unfair to claim that leaders like Clinton and Sanders do not care about issues that are important to people of color. They do. However, it is equally inaccurate to claim that the current progressive movement is fueling African-American participation or interest in our political process. It is not. Blacks largely sit on the sidelines while the game of politics is being played around us. In the post-Obama era there is the sense that Democrats feel people of color African Americans in particular have had their chance and that we should now take a back seat to new leadership and let them handle the politics of today. However, such a sentiment is both foolhardy and wrong.

More: Jeff Sessions' Justice Department goes after affirmative action's institutional racism

POLICING THE USA: A look atrace, justice, media

The 21st century version of the rainbow coalition lacks vision and color. Remarkably, blacks still need to fight for a seat at the table and are too often simply stage props for allied elected leaders to make their points. Consider this: In 2016, when the officially independent Sanders ran for president as a Democrat, there were more black chiefs of staffin the Senate working for Republicans (1) than for Sanders (0) or the Democrats (0).

Talk is not enough anymore to be on the righteous path for justice and black political participation. Nor is caring about, or sympathy over, unjust policies. An effective progressive movement is more than an intellectual exercise espousing policy goals: it requires action and results. And people of color need to be at the table in large enough numbers to help make that difference. We cannot depend upon action from well-meaning progressives or others who want to fight our fight for us. History proves that change comes too slowly when we rely on that model.

Perhaps it is time for another African-American presidential campaign to fuel black voter interest. Perhaps its time to remind people that progressive politics cannot be advanced without results and a fully vibrant rainbow of colors working to make that difference. Two things are certain: African Americans will not be taken for granted again and progressives invite failure yet again if they try.

Reverend Al Sharpton is president of the National Action Network.Follow him on Twitter: @TheRevAl

You can read diverse opinions from ourBoard of Contributorsand other writers on theOpinion front page, on Twitter@USATOpinionand in our dailyOpinion newsletter. To respond to a column, submit a comment to letters@usatoday.com.

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More:
Al Sharpton: 'Progressives' are shortchanging African Americans ... - USA TODAY

Look at the latest report by the nonpartisan Commonwealth Fund, comparing health care performance among advanced nations. America is at the bottom; the top three performers are Britain, Australia, and the Netherlands. And the thing is, these three leaders have very different systems.

Britain has true socialized medicine: The government provides health care directly through the National Health Service. Australia has a single-payer system, basically Medicare for All its even called Medicare. But the Dutch have what we might call Obamacare done right: individuals are required to buy coverage from regulated private insurers, with subsidies to help them afford the premiums.

And the Dutch system works, which suggests that a lot could be accomplished via incremental improvements in the A.C.A., rather than radical change. Further evidence for this view is how relatively well Obamacare, imperfect as it is, already works in states that try to make it work did you know that only 5.4 percent of New Yorkers are now uninsured?

Meanwhile, the political logic that led to Obamacare rather than Medicare for all still applies.

Its not just about paying off the insurance industry, although getting insurers to buy in to health reform wasnt foolish, and arguably helped save the A.C.A.: At a crucial moment Americas Health Insurance Plans, the industry lobbying organization, and Blue Cross Blue Shield intervened to denounce Republican plans.

A far more important consideration is minimizing disruption to the 156 million people who currently get insurance through their employers, and are largely satisfied with their coverage. Moving to single-payer would mean taking away this coverage and imposing new taxes; to make it fly politically youd have to convince most of these people both that they would save more in premiums than they pay in additional taxes, and that their new coverage would be just as good as the old.

This might in fact be true, but it would be one heck of a hard sell. Is this really where progressives want to spend their political capital?

What would I do instead? Id enhance the A.C.A., not replace it, although I would strongly support reintroducing some form of public option a way for people to buy into public insurance that could eventually lead to single-payer.

Meanwhile, progressives should move beyond health care and focus on other holes in the U.S. safety net.

When you compare the U.S. social welfare system with those of other wealthy countries, what really stands out now is our neglect of children. Other countries provide new parents with extensive paid leave, provide high-quality, subsidized day care for children with working parents and make pre-K available to everyone or almost everyone; we do none of these things. Our spending on families is a third of the advanced-country average, putting us down there with Mexico and Turkey.

So if it were up to me, Id talk about improving the A.C.A., not ripping it up and starting over, while opening up a new progressive front on child care.

I have nothing against single-payer; its what Id support if we were starting fresh. But we arent: Getting there from here would be very hard, and might not accomplish much more than a more modest, incremental approach. Even idealists need to set priorities, and Medicare-for-all shouldnt be at the top of the list.

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What's Next for Progressives? - New York Times

Over the last two weeks, the failures and scandals and incompetence and general chaos of the first seven months of the Trump administration have become manifest and undeniable: the inability to advance even the slightest health care reform, despite Republicans controlling both houses of Congress; the hiring of loudmouthed hedge-funder Anthony Scaramucci as communications director and the subsequent resignation of press secretary Sean Spicer and firing of chief of staff Reince Priebus, followed by the firing of Scaramucci by new chief of staff John Kelly; the leaking of embarrassing transcripts of phone calls between Trump and world leaders, in which the president begged the Mexican president not to tell the media he wouldn't pay for the wall and behaved like a petulant preteen while talking to the Australian prime minister; a story in The New York Times suggesting that Vice President Pence is quietly readying a White House bid for 2020, should President Trump be unavailable; and the president's rock-bottom approval ratings, despite a decent economy and an unemployment rate at 4.3 percent.

Perhaps most alarming for Team Trump, last week brought news that special counsel Robert Mueller has convened a grand jury in Washington, D.C., to investigate the Trump campaign's possible collusion with Russia during the 2016 election, and subpoenas have started going out.

A grand jury was an inevitable and logical next step. But there's nonetheless an unavoidable sense that the noose is tightening. The president, meanwhile, is reduced to holding rallies in the friendliest of territories to prop up his fragile ego.

Congress is now in recess for the summer, having left town without delivering any major legislative victories for the new president. When it returns, GOP leaders are promising to tackle an overhaul of the tax system, a task no less complicated or daunting than health care. Soon, the midterm election season will be upon us, and Congress will be more interested in self-preservation than in passing controversial legislation at the behest of an unpopular president.

In other words, if you thought that first two hundred days were a godawful muddle, just wait; it's not going to get any easier for Trump. And if Democrats retake the House in 2018a distinct possibilitythe president can expect to be mired in investigations into Russia and God knows what else, all leading into 2020.

All of which is to say, Trump's window for effecting big, lasting change is closing, and he's done precious little with it.

The resistance, those who took to the streets and besieged senators with angry phone calls, succeeded. The question now is whether progressives can keep their feet on the administration's throat and turn anger and action in the first half of 2017 into victories over the next fifteen monthsand just as important, whether they can recruit and fund and propel a next generation of progressives into elected office.

That I'm less sure of.

People voting against Trump may be enough for Democrats to succeed. That's how Republicans gained power, by being against Obama and then against Clinton, not on the strength of their own agenda. But as Republicans are learning, if you want to stay in power, and if you want to get things done, you need to give voters something to support, a proactive agenda. And you need to develop a new, inspiring generation of leaders to champion it.

The Dems' recently unveiled "Better Deal" agenda marks a turn toward economic populism (antitrust regulations, $1 trillion for infrastructure, $15-an-hour minimum wage), a naked appeal to the suburban and Rust Belt whites who supposedly abandoned the Dems for Trump because they were "economically anxious." It's also a recycling of shopworn, incremental-minded Democratic policy ideas from the last twenty yearshardly exciting stuff.

Then there's the question of who's going to be selling it. Barack Obama was a singularly talented politician, but under his presidency the Democratic bench was eviscerated. Democrats lost statehouses all over the country, including in North Carolina, where our recently elected moderate Democratic governor's power is checked by the legislature's Republican supermajority.

Even as the progressive movement continues to resist a flailing Trump agenda, it needs to also focus on the state and local levels. In the Triangle, there are a number of smart, engaging progressives worthy of promotion: Wake County commissioners Jessica Holmes, John Burns, and Matt Calabria, as well as Durham City Council member Jillian Johnson come to mind. (There are certainly others.)

The point is, after Trump's inevitable collapse, progressives must have the infrastructure, ideas, and leaders in place to pick up the pieces and move forward. And that work should begin now. As the saying goes, you don't beat something with nothing.

jbillman@indyweek.com

See the rest here:
The Trump Presidency Is a Train Wreck. Progressives Must Be Ready to Capitalize. - The Independent Weekly