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Marylands Republican Party is trying to break the veto-proof majority Democrats have held in the state legislature for nearly a century, hoping to use the popularity and fundraising prowess of Gov. Larry Hogan to oust a handful of Senate incumbents and increase the governors ability to block legislation he opposes.

Republicans are targeting six seats representing Anne Arundel, Baltimore and Frederick counties and the Eastern Shore, all areas Hogan (R) won by wide margins in 2014.

An increase of five GOP seats in the 47-person chamber would mean Democrats would lack the 29 votes needed to override vetoes, which are one of the main ways a Republican can influence lawmaking in a deep-blue state with strong Democratic majorities in both legislative chambers.

Party leaders have dubbed the effort Drive for Five and are recruiting candidates, raising money and counting on Hogan, who plans to seek a second term, to campaign in down-ballot races as well.

If the Republicans can prevent vetoes from being overridden, it gives Hogan considerably more power than he has now, said Donald F. Norris, director of the School of Public Policy at University of Maryland Baltimore County.

Administration officials say removing the threat of overrides would force Democratic leaders to compromise more on issues like paid sick leave, which was proposed by Hogan and Democratic legislative leaders this year.

Hogans measure, which required sick leave for businesses with at least 50 employees and offered tax incentives for smaller companies to provide the benefit, died in committee.

The legislature instead approved a bill that forces businesses with at least 15 employees to offer sick leave. Hogan has until the end of the month to decide whether to veto it. If he does, Democrats would probably override the veto and enact the law once the legislature reconvenes.

Democratic lawmakers have reversed numerous Hogan vetoes in the past two years, including his attempts to block a renewable-energy bill that he said would increase electricity prices, a bill that sets up a system to rank transportation projects to determine which should get funding priority and legislation to restore voting rights for felons on parole or probation.

Party leaders say that opposition to President Trump should translate into high Democratic turnout in 2018 that will enable them to protect the veto-proof margins they have held in both chambers since 1922.

But Republicans point to splintering within the Democratic Party as a sign that the GOP can build on its 2014 successes, which included picking up nine additional legislative seats seven in the House of Delegates and two in the Senate and capturing the governorship in an upset victory over then-Lt. Gov. Anthony G. Brown (D).

The state GOPs last concerted push to end the veto-proof majority came in 2006, during the administrations of former governor Robert L. Ehrlich (R) and former president George W. Bush (R). It ended with the GOP losing six House seats and the governorship.

Republican officials say they will focus this time on the Senate because the party picked off most of the low-hanging fruit in the House during the last election, and because the GOP would need to win seven House seats to end the supermajority in that chamber.

They are targeting seats held by Sens. John C. Astle and James E. DeGrange Sr., both of Anne Arundel; James Brochin and Katherine A. Klausmeier, of Baltimore County; Ronald N. Young, of Frederick; and James N. Mathias Jr., of Worcester.

Those Democrats won in 2014 by an average of 8.6 points, while voters in their districts backed Hogan by an average of 30.4points.

Young, who said he hasnt decided whether to run for reelection, won by the slimmest margin, defeating Republican Corey Stottlemyer by 1.8 points even as Hogan won the district by more than 15 points.

Restaurant franchise owner Craig Giangrande is seeking the Republican nomination this time. He says his profile is similar to Hogans in 2014, noting that both are businessmen and neither previously held elected office.

The state GOP has run radio, billboard and social-media ads suggesting Young is too liberal for the district he represents. But the 76-year-old former Frederick mayor stands firmly behind his record, which includes votes to override the governors veto of the renewable-energy bill and support for same-sex marriage, stricter gun-control laws and protections for undocumented immigrants.

I feel I can vote the way I feel is right and win, Young said. If that makes me more vulnerable, I can handle that.

Klausmeier, 67, won reelection by 22.6 points in 2014, the widest margin among the six Democrats. But Hogan won that district by 36.8 points.

Del. Christian Miele (R-Baltimore County), a first-term lawmaker, is considering a run for Klausmeiers seat. He plans to hold a fundraiser with Hogan in June.

State party chairman Dick Haire said the governor will be far more actively engaged in legislative races than he was during the 2016 election cycle, when his campaigning for congressional candidates was limited.

The governors interests and our targeted seats are 100 percent aligned, Haire said.

Mathias, a former Ocean City mayor who has served in the legislature since 2006, said he is absolutely running for reelection. He defeated Republican Mike McDermott by 3.4 points in 2014, but Hogan won the district by 41 points.

The 65-year-old lawmaker stood with the governor when he issued a controversial executive order requiring schools to start after Labor Day. He also voted to override Hogans veto of the renewable-energy bill, a move that drew attacks from the state GOP.

First-term Del. Mary Beth Carozza (Worcester) said she might seek the Republican nomination to challenge Mathias.

I believe real and lasting change only comes with two terms for the governor and reinforcement from the House and Senate, she said.

During the state GOPs spring convention in late April, Haire played part of a radio interview in which Senate President Thomas V. Mike Miller Jr. (D-Calvert) said he thinks Republicans are going to pick up a couple of seats in his chamber next year and that Brochin appeared to be especially vulnerable.

Itll be hard for a Democrat to hold onto that seat, Miller said in the interview.

Millers office did not respond to a request for comment for this article.

Democrats say the narrow Senate victories in 2014 proved that incumbents can withstand a challenge even in a down year for the party, which at the time lacked a strong ground game and a gubernatorial candidate who generated widespread voter enthusiasm.

Party chairwoman Kathleen Matthews said grass-roots activists will be united and focused this cycle on challenging the Trump-Hogan agenda.

But GOP officials are convinced that they can win the targeted seats with strong turnout among Republicans and independents. They hope to energize those voters with issue-related advertising during and around the next legislative session, a practice that is allowed under language added to state regulations in 2013.

The Republicans didnt have enough money for such efforts during the 2014 election cycle. This year, thanks to a burst of fundraising that began after Hogans election, the party was able to do things like sponsor billboards encouraging residents to tell Astle and Klausmeier to stop opposing Governor Hogan and his priorities.

The GOP says it is organizing rapid-response teams to hold rallies and counter-demonstrations throughout the state and is aggressively growing its social-media presence.

More than 16,600 people shared, liked or commented on the state partys Facebook page during the last week of the legislative session, giving it 17 times the level of engagement as the state Democrats page and making it the most successful state-party page in the country during that span, according to Facebook analytics data provided by party officials.

Howard Ernst, a political-science professor at the U.S. Naval Academy, said the success of the GOP effort will hinge largely on the size of Governor Hogans coattails.

The wild card in the race is the anti-Trump backlash, he said. Governor Hogan has successfully insulated himself from Trump so far, but time will tell if he can continue.

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How Md. Republicans plan to break the state Senate's supermajority ... - Washington Post

New York Times

A Republican Principle Is Shed in the Fight on Health Care - The ... New York Times Members of Congress left for recess after passing the health care bill at the Capitol in Washington last week. Credit Gabriella Demczuk for The New York Times. and more »

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A Republican Principle Is Shed in the Fight on Health Care - The ... - New York Times

House Republicans voted Thursday to pass the American Health Care Act their answer to ObamaCare.

The bill has gone through some changes since an earlier version was pulled from the floor in March in the face of flagging support.

Heres whats the bill does:

-Ends tax penalties, under the original Affordable Care Act, for individuals who dont buy insurance coverage and larger employers who dont offer coverage. Instead, insurers would apply a 30 percent surcharge to customers who've let coverage lapse for more than 63 days in the past year.

-Ends tax increases on higher-earning people and a range of industry groups including insurers, drug makers and medical device manufacturers.

-Cuts the Medicaid program for low-income people and lets states impose work requirements on Medicaid recipients. Forbids states that haven't already expanded Medicaid to do so. Changes Medicaid from an open-ended program that covers beneficiaries' costs to one that gives states fixed amounts of money annually.

-Overhauls insurance subsidy system from one based largely on incomes and premium costs to a system of tax credits. The credits would rise with customers ages and, like the subsidies, could be used toward premium costs.

-Lets states get federal waivers allowing insurers to charge older customers higher premiums than younger ones by as much as they'd like. Obama's law limits the difference to a 3-1 ratio. States also can get waivers exempting insurers from providing consumers with required coverage of specified health services, and from Obama's prohibition against insurers charging higher premiums to people with pre-existing health problems, but only if the person has had a gap in insurance coverage.

-States could only get the latter waivers if they have mechanisms like high-risk pools that are supposed to help cover people with serious, expensive-to-treat diseases. A newly added provision would give another $8 billion over five years to help states finance their high-risk pools. Despite criticism that the waivers strip protections, House Speaker Paul Ryans office maintains that since states that take the waivers would have to set up the high-risk pools, insurance companies cannot deny you coverage based on pre-existing conditions.

-Blocks federal payments to Planned Parenthood for a year.

-Retains requirement that family policies cover grown children to age 26.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

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Republican health care bill: What's in it? | Fox News

Berkshire Hathaway Chairman and CEO Warren Buffett visits the exhibit floor in Omaha, Neb., Saturday, where company subsidiaries display their products during the annual shareholders meeting. Nati Harnik/AP hide caption

Berkshire Hathaway Chairman and CEO Warren Buffett visits the exhibit floor in Omaha, Neb., Saturday, where company subsidiaries display their products during the annual shareholders meeting.

Billionaire investor Warren Buffett fielded questions at the annual shareholders meeting for his company Berkshire Hathaway. He offered thoughts and insights on everything from Republicans voting to repeal Obamacare, to the Wells Fargo scandal, to how artificial intelligence and technology might reshape America. Here are some highlights:

Repealing Obamacare is "a huge tax cut for guys like me"

When asked about the bill Republicans in Congress just voted to pass to repeal and replace Obamacare, Buffett signaled his distaste for a tax cut provision. Obamacare pays for health care for Americans in part by taxing wealthier people. The Republican bill scraps that tax on the wealthy.

And Buffett has apparently done the math here. If the Republican bill had been law last year, he said, "my federal taxes would have gone down 17 percent last year, so it's a huge tax cut for guys like me."

"That is in the law that was passed a couple days ago," he added. "Anybody with $250,000 a year of adjusted gross income and a lot of investment income is going to have a huge tax cut."

In the past, Buffett has bristled at tax policy that he sees as favoring the wealthy famously saying it's not fair that he pays taxes at a lower rate than his secretary.

The medical cost "tapeworm"

Buffett said at the meeting that health care costs have become a bigger issue for American businesses than taxes.

He said if you go back to about 1960, corporate taxes were about 4 percent of GDP and now they're about 2 percent of GDP. At that time, healthcare was 5 percent of GDP and now it's 17 percent of GDP. "So when American business talks about taxes strangling our competitiveness," he said, "they're talking about something that as a percentage of GDP has gone down from 4 to 2." Meanwhile, medical costs have exploded. "So medical costs are the tapeworm of American economic competitiveness," he said.

He argued against the tax system crippling competitiveness "or anything of the sort." He also noted that other developed countries appear to have found better ways to contain medical costs.

Wells Fargo's "big mistake" in its banking scandal

Wells Fargo had a sales structure that clearly led employees to do bad things, according to Buffet. "But the main problem was that they didn't act when they learned about it," he said. "It's bad enough having a bad system, but they didn't act."

Former Wells Fargo workers have told NPR that they called the bank's ethics line and the bank did nothing. Buffett's company ethics line is actively used by workers, he says, so he's sure that Wells Fargo got reports of wrongdoing. He said it's true that an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, but "a pound of cure promptly applied is worth a ton of cure that's delayed. Problems don't go away."

Wells Fargo responded to Buffett's remarks before the end of the day's meeting, saying in a statement that the bank has taken "decisive action to fix the problems." Wells Fargo also said it's created a new "Office of Ethics, Oversight and Integrity to centralize the handling of internal investigations, complaints oversight, and sales practices oversight."

Why geckos don't like driverless cars

In response to a question about the impact of driverless cars, trucks and trains, Buffett said they'd not only be a threat to trucking and railroad businesses, but the insurance industry too.

"If driverless cars became pervasive, it would only be because they were safer and that would mean that the overall economic cost of auto-related losses had gone down and that would drive down the premium income of Geico," Buffet said referring to the auto insurance company owned by Berkshire.

"Autonomous vehicles widespread would hurt us." But, he added, "I think they may be a long way off."

Life lessons

When asked about reflections and lessons learned in his long life, Warren Buffett referenced Charlie Munger, the 93-year-old vice chairman of Berkshire Hathaway, who says, "All I want to know is where I'm going to die so I'll never go there."

But on a more serious note, Buffett says he's gotten a lot of joy in life out of teaching other people things. So, he said, if people remembered him as being a good teacher, he would be OK with that.

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The 'Oracle of Omaha' Condemns Republican Health Care Bill At Berkshire Meeting - NPR

A congressman who voted in favor of the American Health Care Act, the partys best hope for repealing Obamacare, infuriated constituents and audience members at a town hall event Friday night after declaring that nobody dies because they dont have access to health care.

Rep. Ral Labrador, a four-term Idaho Republican who is considered a potential candidate for the governors mansion next year, made the comment roughly 24 hours after the House of Representatives passed the bill with only a single vote to spare, in response to a question from a constituent concerned that the bill would harm recipients of Medicaid.

You are mandating people on Medicaid to accept dying, the audience member said at a town hall meeting at Lewis-Clark State College in Lewiston, Idaho. You are making a mandate that will kill people.

Labrador interrupted the woman, calling her allegations indefensible.

No one wants anybody to die," Labrador said. You know, that line is so indefensible. Nobody dies because they dont have access to health care.

Labrador, a member of the conservative House Freedom Caucus, was immediately met with a chorus of boos.

Although the relationship between insurance coverage and overall health is more complicated than one might thinkaspects of class, lifestyle, age, genetics, and ZIP code represent major confounding variablesa 2009 study published in the American Journal of Public Health found that working-age uninsured Americans face a 40 percent higher risk of dying than those with insurance. The study linked roughly 45,000 deaths annually to a lack of access to health care.

Under the terms of the proposed bill, states would be allowed to apply for waivers from coverage of a wide range of essential health benefitsincluding pre-existing conditionsin order to offer lower-cost plans.

Until the Congressional Budget Office releases an analysis of the AHCAs potential impactheretofore considered a customary, if not necessary requirement before voting on major legislationits difficult to say how many people would lose their insurance coverage under the Republican plan. When the first iteration of the bill was scored in March, the CBO found that 24 million would become uninsured within a decade of that bills passage.

In a statement to The Daily Beast, Labrador admitted that his answer wasn't very elegant.

During ten hours of town halls, one of my answers about health care wasnt very elegant, Labrador said. I was responding to a false notion that the Republican health care plan will cause people to die in the streets, which I completely reject. In a lengthy exchange with a constituent, I explained to her that Obamacare has failed the vast majority of Americans. In the five-second clip that the media is focusing on, I was trying to explain that all hospitals are required by law to treat patients in need of emergency care regardless of their ability to pay and that the Republican plan does not change that.

Labrador also posted on Facebook that it was a privilege to attend the town hall.

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It was my privilege to spend two hours today in Lewiston fielding questions from my constituents, many of them about our efforts to provide quality health care to all Americans at an affordable and sustainable cost.

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Republican Congressman: 'Nobody Dies' From Lack Of Access to Health Care - Daily Beast