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Three Republican senators said Tuesday that they would oppose a procedural vote to advance the Senate's efforts to overhaul Obamacare, once again plunging into chaos Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell's latest efforts to make good on the GOP's seven-year campaign promise to gut the Affordable Care Act.

Sens. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia and Susan Collins of Maine announced that they could not support any plan that would roll back significant parts of Obamacare without a replacement plan in place.

McConnell told reporters at a news conference that it is "pretty clear there are not 50 Republicans at the moment for a replacement", saying he still wants to hold a repeal-only vote "in the very near future." McConnell did not specify when that vote would be but Senate GOP whip John Cornyn told reporters a vote is expected some time this week.

That legislation was approved by a GOP-controlled Congress in 2015 and vetoed by then-President Barack Obama.

And the opposition that trickled out into the public Tuesday reinforced a painful reality for many Republicans to swallow -- that after years of railing against Obamacare, there is now not enough will within the party to pursue wholesale repeal of the law.

"My position on this issue is driven by its impact on West Virginians," Capito said in a statement. "With that in mind, I cannot vote to repeal Obamacare without a replacement plan that addresses my concerns and the needs of West Virginians."

She later tweeted she would not vote to move forward on a motion to proceed to repeal Obamacare without a replacement.

Murkowski called for Republicans to develop a new proposal in committees, a step that has thus far been skipped by GOP leadership in the chamber.

"I think what has to happen is the Republicans have to admit that some of the things in the ACA, we actually liked, and the Democrats have to admit that some of the things they voted for in the ACA are broken and need to be fixed," Murkowski told reporters.

White House deputy press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said Tuesday that the White House's message to Congress is "do their job."

"At this point, inaction is not a workable solution so they need to come to the table and figure out how to reform the system and fix it," she said.

The weight of the most recent development quickly cast a shadow over Republicans on Capitol Hill Tuesday afternoon.

Sen. Ron Johnson, a Wisconsin Republican and a key vote, reflected that it might be time for Republicans to move on from repealing and replacing Obamacare "pretty quickly."

"I think we need to move on probably pretty quickly," Johnson said. "I mean, we've been at this. It did not, unfortunately, end in success."

Meanwhile, with some GOP lawmakers' key priorities like boosting funding for the opioid crisis now also stalled, Republicans who were planning to vote for the Senate health care bill are looking at their colleagues bewildered by the latest state of play.

"It was not the best possible bill, but it was the best bill possible," said Sen. Pat Roberts of Kansas. "When you can't even get to a motion to proceed, you're in pretty bad shape."

Asked what it said about the Republican Party's ability to govern, Roberts candidly replied "not much."

Amid the news of McConnell's latest defeat, President Donald Trump told reporters during a luncheon with Afghanistan veterans at the White House that he was "very disappointed" by Senate Republican's inability to pass health care. He added that his new plan is to "let Obamacare fail and then the Democrats are going to come to us."

Even still, Trump said Tuesday that he doesn't think the Republican plan "is dead" but it "may not be as quick as we had hoped but it is going to happen."

CNN's Ted Barrett, Daniella Diaz and Dan Merica contributed to this report.

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Mitch McConnell's Obamacare repeal plan stalled - CNN

The House is mad at the Senate. The Senate is mad at the House. Various factions in the House and Senate are mad at each other or mad at their leaders.

Republican lawmakers have yet to turn on President Trump in any meaningful way. But theyre starting to turn on each other.

Obamacare Repeal-Only Effort Falters

On Monday, the Republicans tortured health-care effort hit a seemingly permanent snag. But that was only the latest blow; after half a year of consolidated GOP control, not a single major piece of legislation has been enacted. With other priorities similarly stalled, legislators frustration is mounting.

Were in charge, right? We have the House, the Senate, and the White House, one GOP member of Congress told me. Everyones still committed to making progress on big issues, but the more time goes by, the more difficult that becomes. And then the blame game starts.

The House blames the Senate: At a press conference last week, Kevin McCarthy, the majority leader, waved a chart of 226 House-passed bills that the Senate hasnt taken up. We will continue to do our work here, and we hope the Senate continues to do their work as we move forward, McCarthy said pointedly.

Some new members blame their elders. A freshman congressman from Michigan, Paul Mitchell, got a dozen of his fellow newbies to co-sign an op-ed that urges the Senate to get moving, implicitly calling out their senior colleagues for forgetting what they were sent to Washington to do. Failure to do so is a failure to follow the will of our voters, the freshmen wrote in their article published Tuesday.

For its part, the Senate blames the House. A Russia sanctions bill passed the upper chamber with 98 votes a month ago, but it has yet to come to the floor in the House. That prompted Senator Bob Corker, the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, to accuse the House of dilly dallying and a ridiculous waste of time.

House leaders say procedural issues and Democrats have tied up the legislation, which the White House opposes. Some members, however, suspect that House leadership is purposely slow-walking the bill to avoid embarrassing the president. A spokesman for House Speaker Paul Ryan denied that was the case, telling me the White Houses position on the issue was not a factor in the bills fate.

Though little heralded, the sanctions bill could mark a moment of truth for White House-congressional relations. If sent to President Trumps desk, the bill would amount to a rebuke of the presidents Russia policy, one he would surely be loath to sign. But given the Russia scandal swirling around Trump, a veto would be explosive. And if the GOP Congress overrode such a veto, the presidents clout would be severely diminished.

Meanwhile, many senators are annoyed with Majority Leader Mitch McConnell for the rushed, secretive process that produced the health-care bill, and for threatening to cancel their August vacation for a potentially fruitless legislative session. And everyone is annoyed with the House Freedom Caucus, which has also demanded that lawmakers spend next month in D.C.

But everyone is always mad at the Freedom Caucus. Divisions between Republican factions are nothing new; nor is friction between the House and Senate. In an oft-repeated fable, a new Republican member of Congress, eager to go after the enemy Democrats, is corrected by an old bull: The Democrats are the opposition, he says. The Senate is the enemy.

Still, some wonder whether the current sniping isnt better directed to Pennsylvania Avenue, where the scandal-mired president creates new headaches with every passing day. Were a big-tent party, so of course there are divisions, the member of Congress told me. But the only thing that could unite the clans is consistent and engaged leadership from the president. And its fair to say weve gotten mixed signals.

A House Republican staffer described the fractious mood on Capitol Hill as Republican-on-Republican violence. As for why lawmakers dont train their ire on the real root of their problems, the staffer shrugged: Maybe its just easier to attack people without 13 million Twitter followers.

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Republicans Aren't Turning on TrumpThey're Turning on Each Other - The Atlantic

Sen. Ted Cruz is surrounded by members of the media after viewing the details of a new health care bill on Thursday at the Capitol in Washington.

Alex Wong/Getty Images

To Democrats, the case against the Republican health care bill is simple. The Congressional Budget Office has found, on more than one occasion in assessing more than one version of the proposal, that it will leave far fewer Americans with insurance coverage than under the Obamacare status quo. Republicans have countered that the CBO has been wrong before and that its assessment of the bill is way too harsh, mostly because it greatly overstates the effectiveness of Obamacares individual mandate. Lets assume for the moment that Republicans are right and that the Better Care Reconciliation Act will cover more people than the CBO projects. In that hypothetical world, we would know one thing for certain: The GOP effort to replace Obamacare would also cost far more than the CBO projects.

Consider that Obamacare wound up costing considerably less than the CBO assumed when it was first proposed, mostly because it wound up covering fewer people than expected. Obamacares true believers werent exactly thrilled that the Supreme Court stepped in to make it easier for states to refuse to accept the Obamacare Medicaid expansion or that large numbers of healthy young people chose not to sign up for coverage on the exchanges. Nevertheless, both developments meant the federal government wound up spending fewer dollars subsidizing health coverage than would have been the case otherwise. If you care first and foremost about expanding coverage, this is small comfort.

As a general rule, most Republicans are not primarily motivated by a desire to expand coverage partly because conservatives are more skeptical about the benefits of doing so. The problem with Obamacare is that it made big government bigger. If it turns out the GOPs Obamacare replacement doesnt lead to a steep drop in federal spending, well, what was the point?

This underscores the problem facing Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell as he tries to corral 50 votes for the BCRA. Faced with moderate and conservative senators who are inches away from jumping ship, hes being forced to plow the budgetary savings scored by the CBO into sweeteners like extra funding to combat opioid abuse or to help low-income households afford their coverage. Again, if the CBO is underestimating the number of people the BCRA will cover, the savings the BCRA will supposedly bring are already illusory. The more sweeteners McConnell throws in, the more likely it is that the bill will actually increase the deficit.

I see two ways forward for the GOP. The first would be to go all-in on Texas Sen. Ted Cruzs consumer freedom option. The basic idea behind Cruzs proposal is that as long as insurers sell Obamacare-compliant insurance policies, theyd also be free to sell non-Obamacare-compliant policies. McConnell has incorporated a version of Cruzs proposal in the latest version of the BCRA, but its caused more confusion than anything else. The fear is that Cruzs approach would lead younger healthier consumers to flee Obamacare-compliant policies for cheaper non-Obamacare-compliant policies, which would drive premiums on those non-Obamacare-compliant policies through the roof. Cruz is trying to allay the fears of GOP senators by telling them this isnt sothat everyone would be included in a single risk pool. But its not clear how this would work in practice.

Republicans could just accept that Cruzs consumer freedom option would fragment the risk pool. Over time, Obamacare-compliant plans sold on the exchanges would be a safety net for the poor and the sick, whod receive the subsidies they need to afford their (expensive) coverage, while the rich and the healthy would buy unsubsidized non-Obamacare-compliant plans. Theres only one problem here, which is that the subsidies for the poor and the sick on the exchanges would have to be very large to ensure their coverage is affordable. The BCRAs cuts to cost-sharing subsidies would have to be reversed. Short of that, Cruzs safety net wouldnt be much of a safety net at all. Over the long run, this safety net approach might save money, especially if the unsubsidized market succeeds in lowering costs and winning over a growing share of consumers. But its also possible this approach will cost just as much money, if not more. Either way, a deregulatory approach wedded to a reasonably strong safety net could bridge the gap between GOP conservatives and moderates.

The second way forward would be to give up on uniting Senate Republicans and instead try to woo Senate Democrats.

The second way forward would be to give up on uniting Senate Republicans to pass a bill through reconciliation and instead try to woo enough Senate Democrats to win a filibuster-proof majority. Over the past few days, South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham and Louisiana Sen. Bill Cassidy have been touting their GrahamCassidy amendment, which would preserve almost all of Obamacares taxes and then block grant the money to the 50 states to expand insurance coverage and otherwise shore up their insurance markets. In theory, liberal states could push further in the direction of single-payer while conservative states could embrace more market-friendly approaches.

Its hard to imagine that GrahamCassidy would pass muster under the rules of budget reconciliation, as it does much more than just tweak how the federal government spends money. Moreover, GrahamCassidy is exceedingly vague in its current form, and its not at all clear what it would do to federal Medicaid spending, which is one of the most contentious aspects of the current health policy debate. It is, however, a politically palatable approach that dovetails with the conservative fondness for federalism. And its vagueness on Medicaid might help peel off a handful of red-state Democrats. For example, Republicans could adopt the blended rate approach to Medicaid spending first proposed by the Obama White Housethis would be less effective at reining in federal Medicaid spending than the per-capita caps proposed in the BCRA, but it would also be less polarizing.

Honestly, neither of these ways forward are all that promising. It just so happens that McConnell is running out of options.

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How the Republicans Can Get Health Care Passed - Slate Magazine

Editors Note: This piece originally appeared in the July 31, 2017 issue of National Review.

Republicans dont have many legislative wins to show for their control of the House, Senate, and White House. They have, it is true, confirmed Justice Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court. His confirmation, along with the thought of how Hillary Clinton would have used executive power, is enough to make a lot of conservatives happy about voting for President Trump last fall.

But Republicans hoped to have enacted major conservative changes in government policy by now. Congressional Republicans have complained over the years that their grassroots supporters have exaggerated expectations of what they can achieve. This time, though, the congressmen themselves have been disappointed. After the election, they too believed that Congress would quickly repeal Obamacare and then move ahead on tax reform.

That didnt happen. Action on health care has been repeatedly delayed, and the current betting in Washington, D.C., is that no major change to Obamacare will pass. Congress has barely begun to take up taxes. Legislation on infrastructure, which the president has consistently described as a priority, does not exist.

Republicans have been productive, at least, in coming up with competing explanations for their failure to change the laws. Many Republicans, especially those outside the capital and those who strongly support Trump, blame the congressional party for being weak and disloyal to the president. (A smaller number of strong Trump supporters insist that a few deregulatory moves by Congress, the Gorsuch confirmation, and Trumps executive actions, especially his planned withdrawal from the Paris climate-change accord, mean that everything is going well.) Often this criticism is couched as a defense of the president: If hes not signing laws, its the fault of Congress for not sending them for his signature.

Those Republicans who are more sympathetic to Speaker of the House Paul Ryan than to Trump most Republicans in D.C., in other words tend to blame Trump. In particular, they blame his tweets. When one of them becomes a big news story, it drowns out any other Republican message. Many Republicans in Congress complain that this White House is better at providing drama than direction.

Speaker Ryan has not himself pointed a finger at Trump: not in public, and not, to my knowledge, in private, either. He has noted that congressional Republicans spent ten years in opposition, first to Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi in the last two years of the George W. Bush presidency, then to President Obama. Many members of his conference therefore have no experience of passing federal laws. The partys stumbles, he suggests, are part of its transition to being a governing party.

Yet Ryans own ambitious schedule for 2017 underestimated the difficulties. Congressional Republicans arent just out of practice at governing: They face a fundamentally new situation. From 2001 to 2007, they were very largely pursuing the agenda set by a Republican White House. The last time they were setting an agenda themselves, as they are now doing by necessity, was during the Clinton administration. They have not set an agenda that they had a responsibility to turn into law with the assistance of a Republican president since before the Great Depression.

At one tricky moment in the Houses consideration of health care, Trump tweeted a few attacks on members of the House Freedom Caucus. The controversy that ensued might obscure the fact that he has generally taken a very hands-off approach to the Congress. He has said that congressional Republicans, not he, decided to tackle health care first. Ryan has pushed for tax reform to include a border-adjusted tax to offset some of the revenue losses other portions of the reform will cause. Trumps aides have not taken a unified line on the matter, pro or con.

Trumps management style, unusual in a president, does not require public unity from his subordinates. Budget director Mick Mulvaney and Treasury secretary Steve Mnuchin have taken opposing views in interviews about how much revenue a reformed tax code should raise. Mulvaney has also said that the administrations budget does not reflect its policy proposals which left some observers a bit flummoxed, since putting its proposals into budgetary form has historically been considered the point of the document.

The president does not engage or seem familiar with the details of policy, either. Many jobs in his administration remain unfilled, in many cases with no nominees yet submitted. For these and other reasons, his administration has provided his congressional allies with much less guidance than is typical.

Usually, a presidential candidate runs on a fairly detailed list of proposals and communicates to his party, the public, and relevant interest groups that he intends to achieve something close to its top items. That list reflects, adjusts, and solidifies the partys existing consensus. When the candidate comes from the party that controls Congress but not the White House, the list includes many of the priorities that the incumbent president beat back. If the candidate wins, his party defers to his list.

In the run-up to 2016, congressional Republicans decided to rely even more than before on their presidential nominees policy preferences. Senate Republicans made a conscious decision not to put forward a comprehensive agenda, so as to leave the nominee free to develop his own plans. Ryan tried to supply some content, devising a list of policies that he called A Better Way. But the lack of Senate buy-in, and the expectation that the presidential nominee would have a more authoritative platform, limited the seriousness with which House Republicans took it.

When Trump won, though, congressional Republicans could not defer to his proposals, even if they had been inclined to do so for a man many of them regarded as an interloper, because his campaign was so light on policy. His health plan consisted of a few pages of boilerplate, much of it dated. (The plan endorsed health savings accounts, for example, without taking any notice of the fact that President Bush had already gotten them enacted.) His own administration has not drawn on those pages. He ran on one tax plan during the primaries and another during the general election; reportedly instructed his White House staff to come up with a new plan that mimicked a New York Times op-ed he had read; and then oversaw the release of a plan that could fit on a 35 card.

During the last few decades our political system has come to rely ever more heavily on strong presidential leadership, and a shift away from this model of an overbearing executive may be salutary. It has, however, also been abrupt. Congressional Republicans have been left scrambling to figure out their own role.

Perhaps theyre blaming his tweets for their travails as a form of displaced anger over their new obligations. The proposition that the tweets are undermining congressional work does not really hold up. Nobody in Congress is going to vote against a tax bill because of something Trump tweeted about Mika Brzezinski. And its not as though the president would make a compelling case for Republican health-care legislation whether to the public or to holdout senators if only he could keep himself from using social media to boast and settle scores.

Whether anyone could make a compelling case for that legislation is a contested question. The health-care bill is hated by many and loved by almost no one, in part because it does not reflect any coherent understanding of what our health policy should be. That may be the kind of legislation one should expect when neither the Congress nor the president has thought through a policy agenda. The health debate has shown that moderate Republicans, especially, never worked out the implications of the partys loud opposition to Obamacare, which they joined with gusto. If they had, they might have realized that it was impossible to repeal Obamacare while also refusing to modify in any way its protections for people with preexisting conditions.

The same lack of forethought is already undermining tax reform. Republicans think they have a clear idea of tax reform because they share certain goals, such as lower tax rates and better treatment of investment. But those goals can be pursued in many different ways. How large should tax cuts be? Is it more important to cut corporate or individual tax rates? Or would the economy be better served by changing the definition of the corporate tax base? Should concerns about the trade deficit affect our tax policy? How should Trumps promises about child care be integrated with tax reform, if they should be at all?

Passing tax legislation will not require starting out with a consensus on all these questions, let alone on the more detailed ones that have to be answered after them. But Republican lawmakers are quite far away from a consensus on them, and the vast majority of individual congressmen do not yet have a strong sense of their own answers.

It is a mistake, then, to ask why Trump, Ryan, and the rest are not making more rapid progress on the Republican agenda. That question assumes that Republicans have a clear sense of what they want and are confronting an obstacle to the realization of their desires: that theyre not getting their way because [blank], which could be filled in with Trump is being a maniac on Twitter or Ryan is a weakling. But the problem is more basic. The main reason theyre not doing much is that they havent figured out what they want to do.

Ramesh Ponnuru is a senior editor of National Review.

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Why Can't Republicans Get Anything Done? - National Review

Would somebody please help me out here: Im confused, read the email to me from a conservative Republican activist and donor. The Russians are alleged to have interfered in the 2016 election by hacking into Dem party servers that were inadequately protected, some being kept in Hillarys basement and finding emails that were actually written by members of the Clinton campaign and releasing those emails so that they could be read by the American people who what, didnt have the right to read these emails? And this is bad? Shouldnt we be thanking the Russians for making the election more transparent?

Put aside the factual inaccuracies in this missive (it was not Hillary Clintons controversial private server the Russians are alleged to have hacked, despite Donald Trumps explicit pleading with them to do so, but rather those of the Democratic National Committee and her campaign chairman, John Podesta). Here, laid bare, are the impulses of a large swathe of todays Republican Party. In any other era, our political leaders would be aghast at the rank opportunism, moral flippancy and borderline treasonous instincts on display.

Instead, we get this from the president of the United States, explaining away his sons encounter with Russian operatives who were advertised as working on behalf of the Kremlin: Most politicians would have gone to a meeting like the one Don jr attended in order to get info on an opponent. Thats politics! And from elected Republicans, we get mostly silenceor embarrassing excuses.

Never mind that Trump Jr. initially said the meeting was about adoption, not a Russian offer of ultra sensitive dirt on Hillary Clinton. Weve gone from the Trump team saying they never even met with Russians to the president himself now essentially saying: So what if we did?

None of this should surprise anyone who paid attention during last years campaign. Trump Sr., after all, explicitly implored Russia to hack Clintons private email server. He ran as the most pro-Russian candidate for president since Henry Wallace helmed the Soviet fellow-traveling Progressive Party ticket in 1948, extolling Vladimir Putins manly virtues at every opportunity while bringing Kremlin-style moral relativism to the campaign trail. Worst of all, GOP voters never punished him for it. This is what they voted for.

My message for todays GOP is to paraphrase Barack Obama when he mocked Romney for saying precisely that: 2012 calledit wants its foreign policy back.

Nor was Trump Jr. the only Republican to seek Russian assistance against Clinton. In May, the Wall Street Journal reported that a Florida Republican operative sought and received hacked Democratic Party voter-turnout analyses from Guccifer 2.0, a hacker the U.S. government has said is working for Russias intelligence services. The Journal has also reported that Republican operative Peter W. Smith, who is now deceased, mounted an independent campaign to obtain emails he believed were stolen from Hillary Clintons private server, likely by Russian hackers.

Amid a raft of congressional and law enforcement probes into Russian meddling during the 2016 presidential election, its still unclear whether members of Trumps campaign actively colluded with Moscow. But we now know that they had no problem accepting the Kremlins helpin fact, Trump Jr. professes disappointment that his Russian interlocutors didnt deliver the goods. Forty-eight percent of Republicans, meanwhile, think Don Jr. was right to take the meeting. During the campaign, as operatives linked to Russian intelligence dumped hacked emails onto the internet, few Republicans stood on principle, like Florida Senator Marco Rubio, and condemned their provenance. I will not discuss any issue that has become public solely on the basis of WikiLeaks, Rubio said at the time. And he issued a stark warning to members of his party who were looking to take advantage of Clintons misfortune: Today it is the Democrats. Tomorrow it could be us.

Unfortunately, the vast majority of Rubios GOP colleagues completely ignored his counsel. Suddenly, Republican leaders and conservative media figures who not long ago were demanding prison time (or worse) for Julian Assange were praising the Australian anarchist to the skies. Every morsel in the DNC and Podesta emails, no matter how innocuous, was pored over and exaggerated to maximum effect. Republican politicians and their allies in the conservative media behaved exactly as the Kremlin intended. The derivation of the emails (stolen by Russian hackers) and the purpose of their dissemination (to sow dissension among the American body politic) have either been ignored, or, in the case of my conservative interlocutor, ludicrously held up as an example of Russian altruism meant to save American democracy from the perfidious Clinton clan.

Contrast Rubios principled stand with that of current CIA Director Mike Pompeo, who, while now appropriately calling WikiLeaks a hostile intelligence service that overwhelmingly focuses on the United States while seeking support from antidemocratic countries, was more than happy to retail its ill-gotten gains during the campaign. Today, just one-third of Republican voters even believe the intelligence community findings that Russia interfered in the 2016 election, no doubt influenced by the presidents equivocations on the matter.

I was no fan of Barack Obamas foreign policy. I criticized his Russian reset, his Iran nuclear deal, his opening to Cuba, even his handling of political conflict in Honduras. For the past four years, I worked at a think tank, the Foreign Policy Initiative, that was bankrolled by Republican donors and regularly criticized the Obama administration. Anyone whos followed my writing knows Ive infuriated liberals and Democrats plenty over the years, and I have the metaphorical scars to prove it.

What I never expected was that the Republican Partywhich once stood for a muscular, moralistic approach to the world, and which helped bring down the Soviet Unionwould become a willing accomplice of what the previous Republican presidential nominee rightly called our No. 1 geopolitical foe: Vladimir Putins Russia. My message for todays GOP is to paraphrase Barack Obama when he mocked Romney for saying precisely that: 2012 calledit wants its foreign policy back.

* * *

I should not have been surprised. Ive been following Russias cultivation of the American right for years, long before it became a popular subject, and I have been amazed at just how deep and effective the campaign to shift conservative views on Russia has been. Four years ago, I began writing a series of articles about the growing sympathy for Russia among some American conservatives. Back then, the Putin fan club was limited to seemingly fringe figures like Pat Buchanan (Is Vladimir Putin a paleoconservative? he asked, answering in the affirmative), a bunch of cranks organized around the Ron Paul Institute and some anti-gay marriage bitter-enders so resentful at their domestic political loss they would ally themselves with an authoritarian regime that not so long ago they would have condemned for exporting godless communism.

Today, these figures are no longer on the fringe of GOP politics. According to a Morning Consult-Politico poll from May, an astonishing 49 percent of Republicans consider Russia an ally. Favorable views of Putin a career KGB officer who hates America have nearly tripled among Republicans in the past two years, with 32 percent expressing a positive opinion.

It would be a mistake to attribute this shift solely to Trump and his odd solicitousness toward Moscow. Russia has been targeting the American right since at least 2013, the year Putin enacted a law targeting pro-gay rights organizing and delivered a state-of-the-nation address extolling Russias traditional values and assailing the Wests genderless and infertile liberalism. That same year, a Kremlin-connected think tank released a report entitled, Putin: World Conservativisms New Leader. In 2015, Russia hosted a delegation from the National Rifle Association, one of Americas most influential conservative lobby groups, which included David Keene, then-president of the NRA and now editor of the Washington Times editorial page, which regularly features voices calling for a friendlier relationship with Moscow. (It should be noted here that Russia, a country run by its security services where the leader recently created a 400,000-strong praetorian guard, doesnt exactly embrace the individual right to bear arms.) A recent investigation by Politico Magazine, meanwhile, revealed how Russian intelligence services have been using the internet and social networks to target another redoubt of American conservativism: the military community.

The entire Trump-Russia saga strikes at a deeper issue which most Republicans have shown little care in examining: What is it about Donald Trump that attracted the Kremlin so?

Today, its hard to judge this Russian effort as anything other than a smashing success. Turn on Fox News and you will come across the networks most popular star, Sean Hannity, citing WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange as a reliable source of information or retailing Russian disinformation such as the conspiracy theory that murdered DNC staffer Seth Richwho police say was killed during a robbery attemptwas the source of last summers leaks, not Russian hackers. Foxs rising star Tucker Carlson regularly uses his time slot to ridicule the entire Russian meddling scandal and portray Putin critics as bloodthirsty warmongers. On Monday night, he went so far as to give a platform to fringe leftist Max Blumenthal author of a book comparing Israel to the Third Reich and a vocal supporter of the Assad regime in Syria to assail the bootlicking press for reporting on Trumps Russia ties. (When Blumenthal alleged that the entire Russia scandal was really just a militarist pretext for NATO enlargement, Carlson flippantly raised the prospect of his son having to fight a war against Russia, as he did in a contentious exchange earlier this year with Russian dissident Garry Kasparov. At the time, I asked Carlson if his son serves in the military. He didnt respond).

Meanwhile the Heritage Foundation, one of Washingtons most influential conservative think tanks and a former bastion of Cold War hawkishness, has enlisted itself in the campaign against George Soros, the billionaire philanthropist whose work promoting democracy and good governance in the former Soviet space has made him one of the Kremlins main whipping boys.

And its not just conservative political operatives and media hacks who have come around on Russia. Pro-Putin feelings are now being elucidated by some conservative intellectuals as well. Echoing Kremlin complaints that Russia is a country which has been frequently humiliated, robbed, and misled a self-pitying justification for Russian aggression throughout history Weekly Standard senior editor Christopher Caldwell extolls Putin as the pre-eminent statesman of our time.

How did the party of Ronald Reagans moral clarity morph into that of Donald Trumps moral vacuity? Russias intelligence operatives are among the worlds best. I believe they made a keen study of the American political scene and realized that, during the Obama years, the conservative movement had become ripe for manipulation. Long gone was its principled opposition to the evil empire. What was left was an intellectually and morally desiccated carcass populated by con artists, opportunists, entertainers and grifters operating massively profitable book publishers, radio empires, websites, and a TV network whose stock-in-trade are not ideas but resentments. If a political officer at the Russian Embassy in Washington visited the zoo that is the annual Conservative Political Action Conference, theyd see a movement that embraces a ludicrous performance artist like Milo Yiannopoulos as some sort of intellectual heavyweight. When conservative bloggers are willing to accept hundreds of thousands of dollars from Malaysias authoritarian government to launch a smear campaign against a democratic opposition leader they know nothing about, how much of a jump is it to line up and defend what at the very least was attempted collusion on the part of a brain-dead dauphin like Donald Trump Jr.?

Surveying this lamentable scene, why wouldnt Russia try to turn the American right, whose ethical rot necessarily precedes its rank unscrupulousness? It is this ethical rot that allows Dennis Prager, one of the rights more unctuous professional moralists, to opine with a straight face that The news media in the West pose a far greater danger to Western civilization than Russia does. Why wouldnt a religious right that embraced a boastfully immoral charlatan like Donald Trump not turn a blind eye towardor, in the case of Franklin Graham, embracean oppressive regime like that ruling Russia? American conservatism is no better encapsulated today than by the self-satisfied, smirking mug of Carlson, the living embodiment of what Lionel Trilling meant when he wrote that the conservative impulse is defined by irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas.

* * *

The entire Trump-Russia saga strikes at a deeper issue which most Republicans have shown little care in examining: What is it about Donald Trump that attracted the Kremlin so?

Today, most Republicans evince no shame in the fact that their candidate was the clearly expressed preference of a murderous thug like Vladimir Putin.

Such an effort would be like staging an intervention for a drunk and abusive family member: painful but necessary. One would have thought a U.S. intelligence community assessment concluding that the Russians preferred their partys nominee over Hillary Clinton would have introduced a bit of introspection on the right. Moments for such soul-searching had arrived much earlier, however, like when Trump hired a former advisor to the corrupt, pro-Russian president of Ukraine as his campaign manager last summer. Or when he praised Putin on Morning Joe in December of 2015. Republicans ought to have considered how an America First foreign policy, despite its promises to build up the military and bomb the shit out of ISIS, might actually be more attractive to Moscow than the warts-and-all liberal internationalism of the Democratic nominee, who, whatever her faults, has never called into question the very existence of institutions like the European Union and NATO, pillars of the transatlantic democratic alliance. Now that hes president, Trumps fitful behavior, alienating close allies like Britain and Germany, ought give Republicans pause about how closely the presidents actions accord with Russian objectives.

But alas there has been no such reckoning within the party of Reagan. Instead, the Russia scandal has incurred a wrathful defensiveness among conservatives, who are reaching for anything paranoid attacks on the so-called American deep state, allegations of conspiracy among Obama administration holdovers to distract attention from the very grave reality of Russian active measures. To be sure, the Republican Congress, at least on paper, remains hawkish on the Kremlin, as evidenced by the recent 98-2 Senate vote to increase sanctions against Russia for its election meddling and other offenses. But in no way can they be said anymore to represent the GOP party base, which has been led to believe by the president and his allies in the pro-Trump media that the Russia story is a giant hoax. It wasnt long ago that the GOP used to mock Democratic presidential candidates for supposedly winning endorsements from foreign adversaries, like when a Hamas official said he liked Barack Obama in 2008. Today, most Republicans evince no shame in the fact that their candidate was the clearly expressed preference of a murderous thug like Vladimir Putin.

If Republicans put country before party, they would want to know what the Russians did, why they did it and how to prevent it from happening again. But that, of course, would raise questions implicating Donald Trump and all those who have enabled him, questions that most Republicans prefer to remain unanswered.

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