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As the new Congress is set to convene Tuesday, Democrats are mounting an aggressive messaging campaign against Republican efforts to repeal Obamacare.

Democrats are warning that repealing President Obamas signature healthcare law would lead to tens of millions of Americans losing their healthcare coverage and affect Medicare and Medicaid. Since Republicans will have the power to dismantle the major pillars of the law, Democrats are trying to protect it by touting all of its benefits.

This is not just about the 20 million previously uninsured who now have health security, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-California, said during a call with reporters Monday. But this is about the 75 percent of American people who get their health benefits through their workplace -- not through the ACA.

Mr. Obama is scheduled to to make a rare visit to Capitol Hill Wednesday morning to huddle privately with House and Senate Democrats to strategize how to preserve Obamacare. Vice President-elect Mike Pence is also heading to Capitol Hill that day to meet with Republicans about their plans.

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President-elect Donald Trump has vowed to repeal parts of the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare. President Obama is huddling with Demo...

Early this year, Republicans are planning to immediately begin work on repealing Obamacares major parts through the budget reconciliation process, which only requires a majority for passage in the Senate and not a supermajority. Last year, the GOP-controlled House and Senate sent a bill that would have repealed the law to President Obama, which he quickly vetoed. That effort could now become reality with Donald Trump as president, who promised repeatedly during his campaign that he would scrap the law.

Republicans have argued that Obamacare has led to rising premiums and a lack of choices in the healthcare market. Democrats say the purpose of the law was to lower healthcare costs, increase access and increase benefits for all Americans.

If the ACA were to be repealed, tens of millions of Americans lose their coverage, House Democratic Whip Steny Hoyer of Maryland said Monday during the press call. And tens of millions of others will see their healthcare costs skyrocket.

Hoyer bashed a plan that was recently floated by Republicans that would involve Congress passing a repeal plan, but delaying its effective date for at least a few years while a replacement plan can be developed.

Republicans so-called repeal and delay plan is code for repeal without an alternative, Hoyer said.

Rep. Richard Neal of Massachusetts, top Democrat on the powerful tax-writing Ways and Means Committee, defended the law by arguing that it has led to 137 million Americans now having access to preventive services without cost-sharing, it has addressed chronic conditions like obesity and diabetes and it has expanded Medicaid eligibility.

The repeal bill Congress passed last year would have repealed the health-care laws tax hikes, insurance exchange subsidies and the Medicaid expansion. The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimated that the plan would lead to 22 million people losing their healthcare insurance.

While Mr. Trump has made it clear hes in favor of repealingthe law, he suggested after the election that they wouldnt dismantle the law without a replacement plan ready and would do it simultaneously.

Were not going to have, like, a two-day period and were not going to have a two-year period where theres nothing, he said on 60 Minutes when asked if people would lose their coverage.

Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wisconsin, told 60 Minutes Scott Pelley in an interview in December that they want to repeal the law as soon as possible.

We have to bring relief as fast as possible to people struggling under Obamacare, said Ryan, who was then asked what it would be replaced with. Patient-centered healthcare that gets everybody access to affordable healthcare coverage, so that they can buy whatever they want to buy.

To cap off the first week of the new congressional session, Pelosi is calling on her Democratic colleagues to hold press events in their respective districts Saturday to highlight the risks of repeal of the ACA and of ending the Medicare guarantee. House Democrats are also coordinating a Our First Stand: Save Health Care day of action on Jan. 15 with their counterparts in the Senate including Chuck Schumer, D-New York, and Bernie Sanders, I-Vermont.

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The House Speaker tells 60 Minutes he wants to bring relief to those "struggling under Obamacare." Here's how he plans to replace it

Democratic governors are also voicing their concerns about a repeal. In a recent letter to Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wisconsin and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Kentucky, they argued that reversing the law would throw millions of our residents off their insurance coverage.

Repealing the Affordable Care Act (ACA), including its Medicaid expansion, would be a financial and health disaster for states. Repeal would throw millions of our residents off their health coverage, shift enormous costs to state governments blowing a hole in state budgets and cause economic uncertainty for our states businesses, hospitals, and patients, the letter said.

Without a replacement plan, repealing the law would risk making 30 million people uninsured, according to a study released last month from the nonpartisan Urban Institute. Of that total, it predicted 22.5 million would become uninsured because of the laws subsidies being repealed and 7.3 million would become uninsured because of the near collapse of the nongroup insurance market.

Mr. Trump, for his part, has chosen a key Obamacare opponent as his nominee for secretary of Health and Human Services: Rep. Tom Price, R-Georgia, who was part of crafting previous legislation to undo the law.

Price is among eight people Mr. Trump has nominated to his Cabinet who Senate Democrats plan to target as congressional committees hold their confirmation hearings early this year, according to a report Monday by The Washington Post.

Pelosi, meanwhile, admitted Monday that if she could have done one thing differently on Obamacare, she said Democrats could have messaged it in a much stronger way.

Originally posted here:
Democrats mount aggressive messaging campaign against ...

Ross K. Baker 12:28 p.m. EST December 27, 2016

The U.S. Capitol(Photo: Pablo Martinez Monsivais, AP)

There really is a swamp in Washington, D.C. It's located on the western side of Delaware Avenue, NE right across the street from the Russell Senate Office Building. It's a space of an acre or so where small rallies are held that typically involve speeches by members of Congress unable to get a proper congressional hearing for causes they espouse.

It is not, however, the swamp that President-elect Donald Trump wants to drain. That swamp is the permanent establishment of the nation's capital Congress, the bureaucracy, and the lobbyists. Oh yes, and the high-end restaurants, one of which just opened in the Trump International Hotel.

History endowed the Democratic Party with the ownership of Washington, D.C. Beginning in 1933with the inauguration of Franklin D. Roosevelt and his vow to deliver a "New Deal" to the American people, FDR's party has held a more-or-less permanent easement of the city. To be sure, there have been Republican presidents who inhabited the town uneasily as tenants, but the traces they have left have been largely symbolic: National Airport re-named for Ronald Reagan and a large federal office building bearing his name. But the stately edifices lining Independence and Constitution Avenues and the National mall all have a distinct Democratic architecture; from the art decobuilding of the Federal Trade Commission to the neoclassical home of the Federal Reserve. Throw in for good measure the Supreme Court building, a Roosevelt-era structure.

But the Democrats' claim to ownership of the capital city is broader and more complex than simply the New Deal and its vast expansion of government and broadening of regulatory authority. The federal government was looked to as the hope of African Americans trapped in the Jim Crow states of the South. And while that gaze was a forlorn one as anti-lynching bills failed to pass Congress in the 1940s, a small break came in 1948 with Democrat Harry Truman's Executive Order 9981 that desegregated the armed forces of the United States. More important still was the U.S. Supreme Court located on 1st Street, NE that issued the order desegregating schools in 1954 and a Democrat-dominated Congress prodded by Democratic president Lyndon Johnson that enacted the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964.

USA TODAY

Why Democrats made Harry Reid their leader: Ross K. Baker

USA TODAY

Make D.C. a swamp again: Glenn Reynolds

POLICING THE USA:Alook at race, justice, media

Post-Depression-era Democrats, if they were honest with themselves, would admit that they havean uneasy relationship with federalism. They saw the states were the bastions of segregation that yielded only to the power of the government in Washington. States gave birth to the right-to-work laws so detested by the labor unions, and the restrictions on the right to abortion that came in the aftermath of Roe v. Wade. The core Democratic constituencies blacks, women, union members almost always looked more kindly on Washington than on the states.

One unfortunate result of this belief in the innate benevolence of the federal government was to turn the Democrats into a kind of "court party" that disdained the states as benighted appendages of an enlightened federal government. They became politically blind to the importance of state legislatures and ceded control of them to the Republicans, who gladly took on the role of congressional redistricting that gave the GOP a virtual easement on the House of Representatives. Topeka, Harrisburg, and Augusta might not be as interesting or as grand as Washington, D.C., but it is there that the Democrats need to plant their flag.

Now, in light of the ambition of the new president to "drain the swamp,"they may need to seek the high ground in unlikely places that boast fewer good restaurants than Washington.

Ross K. Bakeris a distinguished professor of political science atRutgers Universityand a member of USA TODAY'sBoard of Contributors.

You can readdiverse opinions from ourBoard of Contributorsand other writers ontheOpinion front page,on Twitter@USATOpinionand in our dailyOpinion newsletter.To submit a letter, comment or column, check oursubmission guidelines.

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Democrats own the D.C. swamp: Ross K. Baker

Senate Democrats are approaching the January confirmation battle over Donald Trumps Cabinet as a chance to launch their political comeback and expose the president-elect as a fraud.

Lawmakers know theyre unlikely, at best, to stop any of Trumps Cabinet picks from being installed. But they still see major opportunity in the confirmation hearings. The goal, according to lawmakers and aides: to depict Trumps chosen inner circle of billionaires and conservative hard-liners as directly at odds with the working-class Americans he vowed to help.

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His campaign, based on his nominations, was a charade. [H]e sold the American public on a story that is a false story. It is a scam, said Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.), who was recently promoted to chief deputy whip. He said: Im for working people and for taking on Wall Street, Im for draining the swamp. And his nominees say the exact opposite.

Senate Democrats want to force Trumps picks to lay down markers on specific policies that can be used to build a case against the incumbent as his administration unfolds and the next election approaches, insiders said. More immediately, they want to begin to make the case to Trump voters that what they voted for is a far cry from what theyll be getting with the next president.

Democrats believe they have a target-rich environment. Trumps selections to run the Transportation Department and Small Business Administration, Elaine Chao and Linda McMahon, will probably move quickly. But the other selections, they say, have serious vulnerabilities to exploit whether its Rex Tillersons ties to big oil and Russia, Steven Mnuchins Wall Street career, Betsy DeVos antipathy toward public schools or Tom Prices past support for overhauling Medicare.

Youve got a woman whose mission in life for the Department of Education is to privatize the public education system. Youve got this secretary of HHS designee whose mission has been to raise the eligibility age for Medicare, said Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio), who will help oversee Ben Carsons confirmation as housing secretary on the Banking Committee. You need a scorecard to keep up with the attack on American values.

Republicans predict the Democratic plan will flop.

Senate Democrats spent the last eight years explaining the need for a president to have the team he nominates, said Don Stewart, a spokesman for Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. Surely it wasnt simply partisan posturing.

Democrats need time and ammunition to execute their case. So theyre laying the groundwork to draw out the confirmation process not for the sake of delay, they say, but to train attention on each of the nominees.

Theyre planning to press for lengthy in some cases multiday committee hearings for most of Trumps nominees, followed by a floor debate. On Thursday, the top Democrats on 16 committees issued a "statement of principles" arguing that nominees should not receive committee votes until they've cleared an FBI background check, completed financial disclosure forms and provided other requested material.

Youre talking at least a month-and-a-half, a couple of months to get [through] all the Cabinet nominees, Merkley said.

Republicans have other ideas. They want to mow through the confirmation process and move on to repealing Obamacare and reforming the tax code. If Democrats delay, a senior GOP aide said, we will make them vote at 3 in the morning.

As for the ammunition, Democratic committee staffers and outside groups such as the Center for American Progress are digging into the records of Trumps Cabinet selections in search of embarrassing skeletons.

American Bridge is coordinating with Senate leaders and rank-and-file Democrats on opposition research, a task that most Senate staffers were not preparing to do before Trumps surprise win. The group is digging around on Tillerson, Mnuchin, DeVos, attorney general nominee Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) and Environmental Protection Agency pick Scott Pruitt.

Trump clearly hasn't vetted his nominees, so it's up to us to do the work and expose his Cabinet as a group of billionaires looking out for their own interests, said Kevin McAlister, a spokesman for American Bridge. Our goal is to help Senate Democrats keep Trump historically unpopular throughout his administration, starting with these nomination fights.

Democrats are also demanding new disclosures of all Cabinet nominees tax records, to bolster their case that they and the president-elect are out to enrich themselves. Just three committees generally receive nominees' tax returns.

Trump and Republicans are unlikely to acquiesce. But Democrats believe they already have enough to go after Cabinet selections like Mnuchin, whose record purchasing distressed loans, they say, is one of their strongest rebuttals to Trumps drain the swamp rhetoric.

My view is, based on what Ive learned this far, is that he was profiting off predatory loans, said Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon, the top Democrat on the Finance Committee. This is something that we were told wasnt going to happen in the campaign.

Another established attack line is on DeVos, whom Democrats want to pay a years-old election fine of more than $5 million. DeVos has fought back, employing a spokesman who regularly blasts out refutations of any critical reporting about the prospective education secretary.

Democrats privately concede that Sessions is likely to win confirmation. But they want to make the vote as painful as possible for Republicans in states with large Hispanic populations, such as Dean Heller (Nev.) and Jeff Flake (Ariz.). Sessions has one of the most conservative records in the Senate on immigration.

That vote will be brutal, said a senior Democratic aide.

Similarly, Democrats want to make Republicans squirm when it comes time to vote on Tillerson, who has a personal relationship with Russian President Vladimir Putin from his role atop ExxonMobil.

It was more than just a business relationship. Theres a personal relationship there we need to drill down on whether he will put U.S. interests ahead of personal friendship, said Sen. Ben Cardin of Maryland, the top Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

The Trump transition team did not respond to a request for comment for this story. And not all Democrats are on board with the tactics.

Incoming Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) has unleashed a blistering attack on Republicans for pushing changes to Medicare. Thats been augmented by the nomination of Price, who has previously pushed for an overhaul to the entitlement program.

But Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) doesn't see the connection.

Ive heard President-elect Trump say hes not for privatizing Social Security and hes not for privatizing Medicare, Manchin said. I would think Tom Price has mellowed out.

The elimination of the filibuster for Cabinet nominees is forcing Democrats now to adapt their strategy and end game. Before they could have zeroed in on one Cabinet selection to block, and then allowed select Democrats to vote against individual nominees based on their parochial political interests, while still allowing the picks to be confirmed.

Lacking that leverage, Democrats will be liberated to launch an all-out rhetorical assault on Trump and congressional Republicans. The result is expected to be a much more partisan and political confirmation process.

Weve never seen the kind of radical nominees that Trump has put up. And frankly, weve never seen nominees with this little experience, said Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.). We need some time to talk to the American public about what the consequences are.

Republicans argue that the GOP swallowed almost all of President Barack Obamas nominees within the first couple weeks and that Democrats plans to mount a sustained attack on Trumps Cabinet belies Senate tradition.

But given the chambers rules, Democrats could drag out the process well into February or possibly beyond.

Every one of these nominees has to be scrutinized closely and exactingly," said Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.). "One by one."

Read the original here:
Democrats aim to launch comeback with Cabinet showdown - POLITICO

President Obama claims he could have won a third term if he had been allowed to run but even if he's right,his coattails havent done much for the rest of his party.

While Obamas tireless campaigning, broad demographic appeal and message of hope and change helped propel him to two terms in the White House, his skills on the stump havent translated down the ballot.

The Democratic Party suffered huge losses at every level during Obamas West Wing tenure.

The grand total: a net loss of 1,042 state and federal Democratic posts, including congressional and state legislative seats, governorships and the presidency.

The latter was perhaps the most profound example of Obama's popularity failing to translate to support for his allies. Hillary Clinton, who served as secretary of state under Obama, brought the first family out for numerous campaign appearances. In September, Obama declared that his legacys on the ballot.

Less than two months later, Americans voted for Donald Trump.

OBAMA: I COULD HAVE WON THIRD TERM

But 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue wasnt the only locale to see a big partisan change since Obama took office in January 2009, according to figures from Ballotpedia.

Democratic U.S. Senate seats fell from 55 to 46. Their share of the House plummeted from 256 seats to 194. Republicans still control both chambers going into the next session.

Democratic governerships also became a rarity during this eight-year period, slipping from 28 to 16.

The Obama years, which saw the rise of the Tea Party as well as a new movement form around Trump that is still being defined, coincided with a loss of 958 state legislative seats for Democrats.

Still, Obama said in an interview which aired Monday that, if he were allowed to run for a third term, he would have been victorious.

I am confident in this vision because Im confident that if I had run again and articulated it, I think I couldve mobilized a majority of the American people to rally behind it, Obama told ex-adviser David Axelrod for The Axe Files podcast.

Trump responded, "no way!"

While Obama and others note that Clinton still won the popular vote last month, and Democrats shaved down the Republican majority on Capitol Hill, others in the party have voiced concerns about where Democrats go from here.

Were not even a national party at this point, Rep. Tim Ryan, D-Ohio, said last month as he made a failed run at the House minority leader position. We have some support on the coasts, but weve lost the support of middle America, and weve got to make some changes. So Im pulling the fire alarm here, because the house is on fire.

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Democrats lost over 1,000 seats under Obama | Fox News

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