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Members of the Republican team pray before the annual Congressional Baseball Game at Nationals Park in Washington, D.C., on Thursday. Joshua Roberts / Reuters

"It would've been awful to have what happened yesterday, which was bad enough, and not to be able to get together with your colleagues and do this," Sen. Jeff Flake, R-Arizona., said.

By Thursday evenings first pitch, organizers had sold close to 25,000 tickets and sponsorship doubled overnight, according to the games organizer Meredith Raimondi.

The game raised more than $1.5 million for the Boys and Girls Club of Greater Washington, Washington Literacy Center, the Washington Nationals Dream Foundation and the Capitol Police Memorial Fund in honor of those injured in the line of duty during Wednesdays shooting.

Describing themselves as much tougher and resilient after the attack that united them in the way only survivors of mass shootings know too well, members separated themselves from yesterdays tragedies and zoned in on the game.

The thing about it is the game has always been so raw, so partisan, but in good nature though, Rep. Mike Conaway, R-Texas, said earlier on Thursday. We tease each other and we trash talk.

On the field, it was back to normal partisanship, especially after the Democrat's most valuable player, Rep. Cedric Richmond, D-Louisiana, almost hit a home run.

Conaway said its weird that a game purposely driven by the enthusiasm of a divided fan base is driving a sense of unity, adding that he hopes it can continue off the field.

And it did. Members like Rep. Adam Schiff, D-California, were spotted taking selfies. House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wisconsin, donned a Louisiana State University hat, while Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-California, wore the university's jersey in honor of Scalise's home team.

Scalise staffers wore blue "Team Scalise" shirts and waved a number of signs for their boss. One notably read, "Don't Stop Scalisin."

Jack Barton, Rep. Joe Barton's 10-year-old son, who hid under a car to avoid bullets during the shootout, was seen running into the field to pick up foul balls.

The Democrats' bats overpowered the Republicans, 11-2, to broke the 39-39 series tie.

Though they won the trophy, Democratic manager Rep. Mike Doyle, D-Pennsylvania, gave their opponents the winning prize so it could remain in Scalise's office.

Barton, a Republican from Texas and the team's manager, accepted the trophy and then joked that his players "wouldn't be this nice next year."

Politics aside, the members agreed that, regardless of game play, the country is better off when the nation is united.

Somebody asked me who do you think is going to win tonight?', said Rep. Brad Wenstrup, R-Ohio, who witnessed yesterdays shooting. I said America.

CORRECTION (June 16, 12:09 pm) An earlier version of this article misstated the location of the hospital where Rep. Steve Scalise was transported after he was shot. He was taken to MedStar Washington Hospital Center in the District of Columbia, not to a hospital in Virginia.

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After Shooting, Baseball Brings Democrats and Republicans Together - NBCNews.com

As Republicans have been casting about for legislation to eviscerate the Affordable Care Act, Democrats have offered a consistent message in public: If the GOP drops its demand for repeal, well work with them to improve, or fix, the current law.

Exactly how Democrats would change the bill they enacted seven years ago is less clear. Lawmakers have floated a range of options, from tackling the cost of prescription drugs, to setting up a reinsurance program to shore up Obamacares flagging exchanges, to reviving the idea of a public option that would compete with private carriers and drive down prices.

But party leaders have chosen not to endorse a specific set of reforms, in part because Republicans have shown little interest in considering their ideas and in part to avoid distracting from their more urgent imperative to save Obamacare from destruction. Were not in the majority right now, and our whole focus right now is to keep them from sending us back to a time when insurance companies could sell plans that provided nothing and people found themselves just in a terrible bind, Senator Patty Murray of Washington state, a member of the Democratic leadership, said in an interview.

Are Senate Republicans Really Doomed on Health Care?

Yet the lack of a Democratic alternative also stems from a central disagreement about whether the ACA needs a legislative fix at all. Democrats have accused the Trump administration of sabotaging the law administratively by refusing to guarantee the payment of cost-sharing subsidies to insurers and by sending mixed signals about whether it would enforce the mandate that people buy insurance or pay a tax penalty. If the administration simply implemented the law as intended, they say, Congress could stand down. Theres a very good chance that its sustainable if you just do those things, said Representative John Yarmuth of Kentucky, the top Democrat on the House Budget Committee. Murray told me she absolutely believed the law could stand on its own if the Trump administration implemented it properly.

Other leaders in the party, however, suggested to me the law was not quite as stable. Insurers had been pulling out of the Obamacare exchanges before the November election, and while these Democrats do not agree with Republican characterizations that the law is collapsing, they argue that Congress needs to act at least to stabilize the individual market. The individual market, if youre not buying through an employereven if you do get a subsidyis pretty unstable, Senator Tim Kaine of Virginia, the Democratic vice-presidential nominee last year, said in an interview. I do think some legislative fixes would really send signals to the American public, as well as the stakeholders, that were serious about finding improvements.

Kaine and Senator Tom Carper of Delaware on Wednesday introduced legislation to create a reinsurance program to help insurers offset the cost of covering older, less healthy customers. That type of programwhich provides payments to insurers that enroll high-cost individualswas originally part of Obamacare until it expired last year, and Republican legislators in Minnesota and Alaska have embraced the idea as a way to stabilize insurance markets in those states. Thats something that should have some bipartisan appeal, Kaine said.

The Democratic ideas fall roughly into two categories: proposals that might attract support from Republicans as part of a short-term fix if the repeal effort fails, and those that will only be viable if the party can retake one or both chambers of Congress in 2018. Murrays renewed call for a public insurance option which would compete with private insurance in the marketplacealmost certainly falls in the latter bucket. Democrats fell a few votes shy of including a public option in the 2010 law, but the idea faces staunch opposition from Republicans and insurance companies who see it as a slippery slope to a completely government-run health-care system.

A push to allow the government to negotiate lower drug prices for Medicare and Medicaid would likely run into a similar blockade. But the proposal has had an unlikely ally in President Trump, who earlier this year took meetings with Democrats and pharmaceutical companies after calling for increased competition to bring down prescription costs. Representative Frank Pallone of New Jersey, the top Democrat on the House Energy and Commerce Committee, said the cost of prescription drugs was the biggest complaint hes heard from constituents about health care. Democrats, however, suspect Trump isnt serious about confronting Republicans who have long opposed the idea of allowing the government to negotiate prices. Weve never heard from the president again on this issue, said Representative David Cicilline of Rhode Island, a co-chairman of the partys policy and communications committee.

Pallone said Congress should also consider boosting the subsidies it provides to consumers under the ACA, either by increasing the income level eligible to receive them or adding to the aid itself. We have to make sure that the tax credits or subsidies make insurance affordable, he said. Yet as Pallone is the first to acknowledge, its hard to see Republicans switching from trying to repeal the law to agreeing to make its benefits more generous. Were kind of in this never-never land, he told me as I pressed him for ideas that Democrats could offer. I just want to keep stressing that there are no bipartisan discussions. Its nice to talk about, but I think its really importantand Im sure you are going to stressthat this is not real.

If Republicans were to launch a bipartisan effort, the more difficult decision Democrats might face is whether they would be willing to sacrifice parts of Obamacare in exchange for preserving and possibly strengthening the rest. Sometimes more begrudgingly than not, they have agreed in previous years to delay certain taxes in the law and change or repeal smaller policy provisions that proved controversial or unworkable. On that front, Yarmuth broke with many Democrats by calling for the repeal of Obamacares requirement that large businesses offer insurance to their employees. I dont think its necessary, he told me. He said he thought it was a good idea at the time but that studies have shown that companies had not, as some predicted, opted to pay a fine instead of providing insurance. Instead, many had reduced employee hours to get around the mandate. So its actually hurt working families, Yarmuth said. Scrapping the mandate, he said, would eliminate one of the negative, adverse effects of the Affordable Care Act.

All of these Democratic ideas will be mootat least in the near termif Republicans can pass their own health-care overhaul through the Senate on a party-line vote. But despite reports of progress in the last week, the likelihood of failure is still nearly as high as the likelihood of success. And if Republicans cannot deliver on their promise of repeal, the health-care spotlightand some of the burdenwill return to the Democrats once again.

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How Democrats Would Fix Obamacare - The Atlantic

No presidential nominee has ever received more votes from Americas largest cities than Hillary ClintonHillary Rodham ClintonOPINION: Both sides responsible for fueling political vitriol, not just the left Trump: Why is Clinton not investigated but I am? Pelosi: GOP sanctimonious to blame left for inciting violence MORE did in 2016. The turnout machine her campaign built attracted a massive coalition of younger voters, well-educated voters and minorities.

But even as Americas urban areas grow at a record pace, Clinton proved that blowing out cities and large metropolitan areas is necessary but not sufficient to a Democrats hopes of winning the White House.

This is the second story in The Hills Changing America series, in which we explore the four divergent trends that are shaping the country: the growing importance and impact of urban cores, the slow wilt of rural America, the rise of the most diverse generation in American history and the radically changing behavior of the largest voting bloc within the electorate.

There is little debate among experts that Americas urban cores are growing in importance, both economic and political. The countrys major metropolitan areas have become the engines of the American economy. Today, fully a quarter of the nations economic output comes from just a handful of the largest metropolitan areas: New York City, Los Angeles, Chicago, Dallas, Houston, Washington, D.C., and San Francisco.

Our economy has become more clustered and concentrated, said Richard Florida, a University of Toronto professor who studies cities and co-founded CityLab, which reports on urban trends.

The clustering has spurred an explosive population boom, too, as younger Americans seek out jobs that are no longer available in exurban and rural settings. For the first time since the invention of the automobile, cities are growing faster than suburban areas.

And at the same time, urban areas have fostered islands of cultural and economic liberalism amid a sea of rural conservatism. The nations largest cities have been pioneers in the movement to raise the minimum wage, embrace the alternative energy sector and ban discrimination against LBGT people.

The 2016 election results illustrate the longer-term trend of liberalized cities: About 22 percent of the 65 million votes Clinton received nationwide came from the 25 most populous counties alone, a larger share than any Democratic presidential nominee has won in the last seven elections.

Clinton pulled 1.3 million more votes out of the top 25 counties in 2016 than President Barack ObamaBarack ObamaBoston Globe floats Obama as possible Harvard president Pelosi: GOP sanctimonious to blame left for inciting violence Trumps EPA budget cuts hit strong opposition at House panel MORE did in 2012.

Clintons success is not a product of population increases alone; political changes are evident in the Republican decline in these major metropolitan areas.

Seeking reelection in 1992, George H.W. Bush won 16 percent of his total vote from the 25 largest counties. The Republican share in large metro areas has spiraled downward in every election since: In 2016, President Trump received just 11.4 percent of his total votes from those 25 counties. Trump received fewer actual votes from those counties than Mitt Romney, John McCainJohn McCainSenate overwhelmingly passes Russia sanctions deal Crash Override malware heightens fears for US electric grid Democrats in an urban box MORE and George W. Bush.

In 2000, Bush won seven of the 25 largest counties. In 2016, Trump won just three Maricopa (Phoenix), Tarrant (Ft. Worth) and Suffolk (eastern Long Island).

Trump won the vast majority of counties across the nation. But Clinton won the popular vote, and she won counties where a majority of Americans live making Trump the first candidate in modern times to win the presidency without winning counties where a majority of Americans live, according to an analysis by Brookings Institution demographer William Frey.

While clustering may be good economics, it doesnt make a winning political coalition. Democratic voters are overwhelmingly likely to live in deep-blue congressional districts and less likely to live in swing states critical to both parties paths to winning the Electoral College.

Those voters have also changed the Democratic Partys approach to cultural issues, over which there remain deep divides between urban and rural voters.

The urban voters on which Democrats rely most heavily on average younger, more diverse and better educated than the electorate as a whole demand a party that embraces cultural liberalism. Those voters have pulled the Democratic Party to the left; they were the voters most receptive to a message like Stronger Together, Clintons 2016 slogan.

At the same time, some Democrats fear that those cultural messages carry an implicit rejection of exurban and rural voters outside the mainstream left voters the party needs to win over to capture critical swing states.

We have embraced an urban-centered inclusive diversity worldview that truly embraces all types of diversity and shuns dissent from that, said Matt Canter, a Democratic strategist who has conducted polling on the future of his party.

The metropolitan boom is spurred by a changing economy, one in which commodity prices are plunging and the manufacturing sector struggles to survive. In response, the country has increasingly relied on the finance sector, information technology, education and services for growth, economists say.

Theyre picking up a larger slice of the economic pie, said Mark Muro, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institutions Metropolitan Policy Program.

Those industries are so concentrated in major cities that they have attracted an incredible number of migrants, both from nearby exurban and rural counties and from overseas. In the last five years, the 100 largest counties have added more than 7.3 million people, an average of 5.5 percent of their population, according to U.S. Census Bureau data.

Those moving into urban areas make up the most diverse generation of Americans in the nations history. Just under half of the millennial generation is made up of African-Americans, Hispanics, Asian-Americans and other minorities.

The Clinton counties look more like tomorrows America, Frey said.

Those who live in cities, especially among younger cohorts, are more likely to have earned a bachelors degree, too. Couple diversity with high levels of education, experts say, and it makes for a much more liberal electorate.

Clintons campaign spent heavily to turn out voters in these urban cores, especially in places like Miami, Charlotte, Philadelphia and Las Vegas, according to a senior campaign strategist, who asked for anonymity to discuss internal machinations.

But some both Democrats and Republicans believe Clintons focus on the younger, more diverse electorate came at the expense of its appeal to a broad swath of older white voters who still make up the largest voting bloc within the electorate.

The problem for Democrats is that this plumping up of their urban margins has accompanied or perhaps caused them to take such a radical posture on cultural issues that they no longer can sustain their historical margins in rural and industrial counties, said Brad Todd, a Republican strategist who keeps close tabs on party performance in urban areas.

Whats more, turning out higher percentages of urban voters was insufficient to swing many states. By Todds calculations, only five of the nations 50 largest cities delivered margins for Clinton large enough to swing entire states her way: Denver, Portland, Ore., Las Vegas, Minneapolis and Washington, D.C., which has three electoral votes.

Americas metro areas are growing geographically as well, thanks in large part to fast-rising housing prices. The search for affordable housing now takes people to farther-out suburbs than ever before: The San Francisco Bay Area now extends to Sacramento, where home prices have almost doubled in the last five years. Milwaukee and its southern suburbs are attracting thousands of new residents who once lived in Chicago. The rural hamlets of eastern Pennsylvania are now booming with refugees from expensive and densely packed New York and Philadelphia.

Those who move to those increasingly far-flung exurbs are still voting as if they live much closer to the urban cores.

As the economy picks up, there may be more movement to the suburbs and rural areas. The people moving to the suburbs are more likely to be Democrats, Frey said.

But the pace of change is glacial, in political terms, and likely insufficient to reverse Republican success in exurban and rural areas. Left alone, it would be years before the geographic expansion of major metropolitan areas translates into political victories for Democrats. What has happened in California, where Democrats control a supermajority in both chambers of the state legislature, will only gradually happen in places like Atlanta, or Dallas, or Miami, as those liberal urban enclaves expand.

Demography moves slowly, Muro said, with a shrug.

Owen Eagan, Sara Sirota and Chase Masters contributed research.

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Democrats in an urban box - The Hill

The Trump-Russia investigations may be grabbing most of the headlines and sucking much of the air out of Washington these days, but Democrats continue to try and push President Trump and his administration to end the myriad conflicts of interest that are entangling the president and his family.

While the attorneys general for the District of Columbia and Marylandannounced they're suing Trump for making profit off foreign governments, Democrats are seemingly powerless in their attempts to keep the president in check: They no longer have the keys to the White House, and they don't yield any gavels on Capitol Hill. House Speaker Paul Ryan is refusing to comply with Democrats' requests to investigate Trump and his family, and theWhite House has told federal agencies not to respond to the letters flying from Capitol Hill signed only by Dems which broughta scathing rebuke from even the Republican Senate Judiciary Committee chair, Chuck Grassley.

But Democrats on the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform think they may have found a way around the majority's blockade: They're employing a little known law from 1928 that says if a mere seven members of the panel send a document request to an executive branch agency, the White House must comply with the request.

The so-called seven member rule "is not a regulation or guideline, but a statute that was passed by both houses of Congress and signed by the President," the top Democrat on the Oversight Committee, Rep. Elijah Cummings, and his Democratic colleagues wrote in a letter to acting General Services Administration chief Tim Horne.

"Although you may wish to limit oversight from Democratic Members of Congress through a misguided policy that responds only to Republican Chairmen, compliance with federal law is not an optional exercise that may be overridden by a new Trump Administration policy," the letter continues.

For now, Democrats on the panel are only using the provision to request documents on the federal government's lease for the Trump International Hotel, which sits mere blocks from the White House andhas become the place to be for lobbyists, Trump associates and foreign officials alike in Trump's Washington. Democrats say they've been sitting on the seven member rule, but the silence from the White House has forced their hands.

"It's very rare" that the rule gets used, but "within our committee, within Oversight, it's very widely known," Democratic Rep. Stephen Lynch tells Rolling Stone."We've threatened to resort to that in the past. We've never had to go there before, but in this case we did."

The Democrats have chosen to focus on the hotel in part because Trump still owns it a clear violation of his lease with the federal government, which owns the building though he denies he's involved in its daily operations. He's said he'd donate any money he makes from foreign entities who stay there seemingly his way of addressing potential constitutional violations though the hotel hasinformed Congress it has no intention of doing that.

The hotel has become "the symbol of complete disregard for the lines of ethics, the boundaries of ethics, the conflicts of interest" in the Trump administration, says Democratic Rep. John Sarbanes. "I think it's something that resonates in people's minds, and frankly every day you see people trying to curry favor with the administration booking receptions and other kinds of things at the hotel."

Unlike every other modern president, Trump has refused calls to put his assets in a blind trust. His son, Eric, has also said he plans tokeep giving his father profit reports on the family's sprawling global business enterprise, which Democrats say is the very definition of a conflict of interest for a sitting president whose every tweet, proposed policy and speech can move global markets.

"It's breathtaking," Sarbanes says. The administration passes "an ethical policy that has so many waivers in place that it swallows it up and completely negates it. They say they're going to observe certain lines but in the next breath almost, they demonstrate that they have no concept of what those lines and boundaries are."

Republicans say Democratic complaints are sour grapes that they haven't gotten over Hillary Clinton's stunning loss to a rookie politician known for being a reality TV star and real estate magnate who fathered birtherism and ran a campaign steeped in racism, sexism and xenophobia. They also accuse Dems of highlighting things like the hotel lease because they're merely gearing up for the next election that's why many in the GOP support the White House effort to keep Democrats from conducting oversight on their own.

"Do I think that the White house is correct that 540 House and Senate members and delegates should all get anything their hearts desire? No," Republican Rep. Darrell Issa, who chaired the Oversight Committee when President Obama was in office, tells Rolling Stone. "It's a question of the rules. But during the time when the Democrats were in the majority, they never considered a rule that gave the minority any standing, and President Obama never recognized that standing."

But Democrats say their effort to peer inside the Trump business operations isn't about electioneering, and is rather about basic ethics. They say this White House from its billionaire cabinet members to the lobbyists who are now high up in agencies "overseeing" sectors of the economy they used profit from has shown a stunning disregard for transparency and ethics.

"It's cynical and it's wrong, and importantly it's part of a broader pattern of the darkness with which this administration is progressing toward: removing access to visitor logs, threaten[ing] to cut off daily briefings, failure to keep with modern American history [by releasing his] tax returns," says Democratic Rep. Dennis Heck. "He's headed towards increasing darkness. Sunlight is the best disinfectant, and unfortunately he is slowly but surely shutting out the sunlight."

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Democrats Take on Trump's Conflicts of Interest - RollingStone.com

California Republicans are wrong to try to recall Sen. Josh Newman (D-Fullerton) from office for casting a vote they dont like, and they have compounded the offense by doing it in a dishonest way. Voters in this mostly Orange and Los Angeles County district are being told that signing a recall petition will stop the car tax that they say Newman voted for which it wont.

And besides, thats not what the Newman recall is really about, anyway. The states GOP sees a chance to strip the Democrats of their supermajority in the Senate by forcing this one legislator into a special recall election where turnout might swing more conservative. The so-called car tax (which is really a desperately needed plan to invest $52 billion in Californias aging transportation infrastructure) is just a fig leaf for political power play.

But Democratic lawmakers have responded to this nakedly political act with, were sorry to say, an even more nakedly self-serving political act. They are trying to ram through last-minute changes to the states long-standing recall process that would slow if not stop this one particular recall election. The new provisions include an extension of the time voters have to rescind a signature from a recall petition and a requirement that county registrars verify every single individual signature rather than use the standard sample method of verification, among other changes that collectively would cause the process to drag on for months.

Because the rule changes are in whats known as a budget trailer bill, they will be voted on Thursday without a full public hearing process and, if passed, will go into effect immediately. The new rules would be retroactive, meaning that the Newman recall would have to adjust mid-course.

Democrats say the hastily written rules are justified because of what they say is a new tactic of using recall elections to undo legitimate elections, and because of the unprecedented level of deceit in this campaign. But neither misleading campaigns nor recall attempts are new to California politics. Just two years ago, Sens. Richard Pan (D-Sacramento) and Bill Monning (D-Carmel) were the subject of recall attempt by people furious about the passage of SB 277, a law making it more difficult for children to avoid having public school vaccinations. Over the years, dozens of recalls have been launched against legislators and governors from both parties. The difference is that most of those recalls did not have the money or momentum to qualify for the ballot, and the one against Newman just might.

Were not saying theres no merit to the proposed changes. Perhaps it makes sense to give voters a longer time to retract a signature. Maybe a 3% sampling of signatures on a petition isnt sufficient. But there are many questions that need to be answered before a wholesale rewrite of the election law is approved, and they wont be answered without hearings and public testimony from elections experts, county registrars and voters. This bill is being slipped into law too quickly.

And whats most irksome is that the new law, if approved, would be applied retroactively to the Newman recall. Its simply not fair to change the rules in the middle of the process. Recall proponents in this case followed the legal process that has been in place for years and that few had suggested were problematic until now. If the proponents broke the law by lying about the content of the recall petition and its not clear they did then theres a legal remedy. In fact, Newman's supporters on Wednesday filed a complaint with state and local authorities asking for an investigation into the recall tactics.

For the record, it seems hasty and irresponsible to recall a lawmaker like Newman over a single vote. If an elected official is proven corrupt or incompetent or makes a practice of casting votes at odds with the will of his or her constituents, then, yes, a recall shouldnt be out of the question.

Newman cast a hard vote on the transportation funding package, and it was the right choice. Both Republicans and Democrats have made wrong ones in response.

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The Democrats' cynical move to protect one of their own - Los Angeles Times