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That was not the case for Republicans, who flipped from positive to negative on college education.

In a survey that was conducted from Aug. 23 to Sept. 2, 2016 a month after Trump accepted his partys nomination Republicans positive assessment of colleges and universities fell to 43 percent, while negative assessments rose to 45 percent. By June of this year, 58 percent of Republicans had a negative view of higher education and 36 percent a positive view.

Wariness toward homegrown cognitive elites now parallels suspicion of foreign-born entrepreneurs, including those who generate jobs and wealth for Americans.

On July 10, the Department of Homeland Security proposed the dismantling of a federal regulation that would have encouraged more entrepreneurs to build start-ups and to finance high-tech ventures in the United States.

The otherwise little noticed Homeland Security action on the International Entrepreneurship Rule infuriated the high-tech industry. Bobby Franklin, the president and C.E.O. of the National Venture Capital Association declared in a statement:

At a time when countries around the world are doing all they can to attract and retain talented individuals to come to their shores to build and grow innovative companies, the Trump Administration is signaling its intent to do the exact opposite.

Gary Shapiro, the president and C.E.O. of the Consumer Technology Association, issued a similar statement:

Imagine if we had sent half of Silicon Valleys immigrant entrepreneurs away. The 44 immigrant-founded billion-dollar start-ups now in the U.S. have created an average of 760 American jobs per company. Without these immigrant entrepreneurs, it is unlikely America would stand as the beacon of innovation that it is today.

Countless analyses have demonstrated that Trump won the election by combining support from traditional Republican voters with a surge in backing from constituencies that contemporary economic and cultural developments have left behind.

But Trump did not campaign against economic elites. Instead, he built a fire under animosity toward what has been called the creative class by Richard Florida, the demographer; the plutonomy by three analysts at Citigroup; and the cosmopolitan class by Robert Shiller, an economist at Yale.

In recent decades, this class has become increasingly influential in setting cultural standards and in shaping contemporary values. Its success has provoked deepening resentment, to say the least.

The New Elite marry each other, combining their large incomes and genius genes, and then produce offspring who get the benefit of both, Charles Murray, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and the author of Coming Apart, wrote in the Washington Post:

Far from spending their college years in a meritocratic melting pot, the New Elite spend school with people who are mostly just like them which might not be so bad, except that so many of them have been ensconced in affluent suburbs from birth and have never been outside the bubble of privilege.

Chrystia Freeland, a journalist-turned-politician who is now Canadas minister of foreign affairs, described this class during President Barack Obamas first term as

hardworking, highly educated, jet-setting meritocrats who feel they are the deserving winners of a tough, worldwide economic competition and many of them, as a result, have an ambivalent attitude toward those of us who didnt succeed so spectacularly. Perhaps most noteworthy, they are becoming a trans-global community of peers who have more in common with one another than with their countrymen back home.

Simon Kuper, in a May Financial Times essay, captured the sources of this resentment among the less well educated:

Picture a coffee shop in a big city almost anywhere on earth. It is filled with stylish, firm-bodied people aged under 50 drinking $5 coffees. Fresh from yoga class, they are reading New Yorker magazine articles about inequality before returning to their tiny $1.5 million apartments. This is the cultural elite.

Trump, Kuper explains, labels this constituency

the elite but not all class members are rich. Adjunct professors, NGO workers and unemployed screenwriters belong alongside Mark Zuckerberg. Rather, what defines the cultural elite is education. Most of its members went to brand-name universities, and consider themselves deserving rather than entitled. They believe in facts and experts. Most grew up comfortably off in the post-1970s boom. Their education is their insurance policy and, so almost whatever their income, they suffer less economic anxiety than older or lesser educated people. Their political utopia is high-tax, egalitarian, feminist and green.

The reaction against this class, which found expression in the 2016 election, has proved deeply troubling in some quarters.

Richard Florida, in an email to me, was harsh in his assessment of consequences of the current anti-elite reaction:

The United States is the first advanced nation since Japan and Germany during World War II to turn its back on progress and liberalism.

In doing so, the United States threatens its status as the most innovative, most knowledge driven, most powerful nation on earth, according to Florida:

The political backlash from this divide can kill us. It is the only thing that can hold back our cities and stop talented and ambitious people from coming here.

In a new book, The Road to Somewhere, David Goodhart, the head of demography, immigration and integration at Policy Exchange, a British think tank, describes the political divisions that emerged here and in the Brexit election in Britain. Both became struggles between what he calls somewhere people and anywhere people.

Anywhere folks, according to Goodhart, who is himself a member of the anywhere class (though writing from the perspective of the United Kingdom) dominate our culture and society armed with college and advanced degrees:

Such people have portable achieved identities, based on educational and career success which makes them generally comfortable and confident with new places and people.

The anywhere voter values autonomy, mobility and novelty while giving much lower priority to group identity, tradition and patriotic expression. They view globalization, immigration, self-realization and meritocracy as positive concepts.

Somewhere voters, in Goodharts description, are

more rooted and have ascribed identities Scottish farmer, working class Geordie, Cornish housewife based on group belonging and particular places, which is why they find rapid change more unsettling. One core group of Somewheres have been the so-called left behind mainly older white working class men with little education.

Most are neither bigots nor xenophobes, according to Goodhart, and they generally accept the liberalization of attitudes to race, gender and sexuality, but this acceptance has

been more selective and tentative, and has not extended to enthusiasm for mass immigration or European integration.

One of the more interesting findings that came out of the 2016 election in the United States a finding that reinforces Goodharts thesis is that voters who never left, or remain close to, their hometowns tended to vote for Trump, while those who moved away were inclined to support Hillary Clinton.

Among voters for Clinton, 27 percent lived in their hometown and 43 percent lived 2 hours or more away from their hometown; among Trump supporters, 36 percent lived in their hometown and 37 percent lived 2 or more hours away.

James Stimson, a political scientist at the University of North Carolina, sent me his own critical assessment of this phenomenon:

Give a randomly selected group the choice, stay or go, and those who choose to go will be profoundly different from those who stay. And thus when we observe the behavior of those who live in distressed areas, we are not observing the effect of economic decline on the working class, we are observing a highly selected group of people who faced economic adversity and choose to stay at home and accept it when others sought and found opportunity elsewhere.

Those who choose to leave such communities and find their fortune elsewhere are, in Stimsons view,

ambitious and confident in their abilities. Those who are fearful, conservative, in the social sense, and lack ambition stay and accept decline.

Given that, Stimson says:

I dont see them as once proud workers, now dispossessed, but rather as people of limited ambition who might have sought better opportunity elsewhere and did not. I see their social problems more as explanations of why they didnt seek out opportunity when they might have than as the result of lost employment.

Stimson then poses another question: Should the Democratic Party cater to these voters? His answer is an unequivocal no:

The [rural] working class was once mainstream America, the most common and typical of all of us. It is now the residue of failed social mobility, when most have been mobile. After decades of social mobility, that residue is now more distinctive, it is those who are not willing to grab the ring, but rather to remain in the hometown and fear change and others. These people should be Trump voters.

While Stimsons analysis is harsh criticizing as it does many hardworking men and women whose loyalties to family, friend, community and church may supersede personal ambition he captures a crucial element of contemporary politics. This is the potential of an angry electorate to provide a key base of support to a politician like Trump who capitalizes on resentment, intensifies racial and ethnic hostility and lies with abandon as a means to his ends.

While Trump pulled out an Electoral College victory by mobilizing resentful voters and turning out more traditional Republicans, there are significant questions about the continuing viability of his coalition.

William Frey, a demographer at Brookings who just published a paper Census shows nonmetropolitan America is whiter, getting older, and losing population, wrote in response to my email inquiry:

I think that somewhere people are a fast shrinking sliver of the American population. As the economy changes, Frey argued,

younger people, millennials and upcoming generations are increasingly moving to where the jobs are, and are more comfortable with diversity and global connectivity.

If Democrats have one thing to be grateful for, its Trumps failure to live up to his campaign promises on health care and taxes, at least so far.

In practice, Trump is going in the opposite direction, pressing for a radical alteration of health care policy that directly conflicts with the interests of millions of his supporters, and for legislation catering to the demands of the wealthiest Republicans for reduced tax burdens.

On Nov. 7, 2016, the day before the election, Trump declared:

We will massively cut taxes for the middle class, the forgotten people, the forgotten men and women of this country, who built our country.

As was widely pointed out during the ongoing Congressional debates over legislation to repeal and replace Obamacare, Trump promised at least five times during the campaign that he would not cut Medicaid. These promises included a tweet on May 7, 2015:

Democrats, then, have both demographic trends and Trumps abandonment (for now) of the moderate and lower income wing of his coalition to boost their prospects in 2020 and perhaps in the 2018 midterms. Even where Trump has begun to address the demands of his supporters a reduction in unauthorized southwest border crossings his success is due more to his anti-immigrant rhetoric than any substantive policy initiative.

American politics has become fluid and volatile. Income differences have been supplanted by cultural and social practices closely linked to levels of educational attainment. Political partisanship is now firmly linked to race, with whiteness defining one of the two major political parties. Religiosity has taken on new meaning if one can call it that with devout churchgoers supporting an avowed libertine. In that sense, both sides agree that morality has become a matter of personal discretion. Partisans impute evil to their adversaries, and the meritocratic elect have barred the gates.

Trump has intuitively exploited this chaos. He is not at the end of his string, not by a long shot. His life demonstrates his will to win. His vulnerabilities and his pathologies are also astoundingly clear. While his critics are convinced that Trump the chameleon is masquerading as the protector of the left behind, he has in fact tapped into vast anger over immigration, which has shot up over the past 50 years and there is no good reason to believe that this anger will dissipate by 2020.

The question that remains is whether President Trump can continue to exploit the fissures he opened as candidate Trump. The answers history provides are not altogether reassuring.

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The Closing of the Republican Mind - New York Times

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi and senior Democrats on several key House committees will hold a news conference to announce the strategy. | Getty

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi and other senior Democrats on Friday will announce a new, coordinated strategy to force Republicans to cast votes on issues related to President Donald Trump's and his campaign aides alleged ties to Russia.

Pelosi and senior Democrats on several key House committees will hold a news conference to announce the strategy, which is to introduce a series of so-called resolutions of inquiry, according to a Democratic leadership aide.

Story Continued Below

Resolutions of inquiry are a rarely used tactic for forcing House votes. The resolutions are introduced in the House and request information from the executive branch.

The resolutions are referred to committees, and if the committees do not take up the resolutions within 14 legislative days, any member can request a vote on the House floor.

Democrats used the technique earlier this year to force committee votes requesting Trump's tax returns. One such measure was defeated by Republicans in a February vote in the House Judiciary Committee.

New resolutions of inquiry are set to be introduced in six House committees: Transportation and Infrastructure, Foreign Affairs, Homeland Security, Judiciary, Financial Services, and Ways and Means. The Foreign Affairs resolution will deal with Russia sanctions, the aide said, while the Financial Services one will deal with Trump's and his familys finances.

A daily play-by-play of congressional news in your inbox.

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The plan is designed to draw attention to Democrats frustration with House Republican leaders, who Democrats say are not doing enough to investigate Trumps connections to Moscow.

The Democratic leadership aide said Republican committee chairmen have refused to sign onto letters seeking information from the Trump administration and pointed to a White House policy, reported by POLITICO last month, to ignore requests for information signed only by Democrats.

The aide said more than 300 requests for information from Democrats have gone unanswered.

Instead of defending the integrity of American democracy, instead of holding the Trump White House accountable for its complicity, instead of showing Russia that there will be consequences, the House Republican majority does nothing, Pelosi told reporters on Thursday.

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House Dems plot to force Republicans to cast Russia votes - Politico

News flash: In the era of Trump, institutionsand especially those that are perceived as liberalare unpopular, and opinions divide sharply along party lines, according to a new poll from the Pew Research Center.

Alright, maybe that isnt surprising. But there is one startling result in the survey: a sharp decline in conservative impressions of universities.

Most of the results are about what one would expect. Churches and religious organizations are popular, though more popular with Republicans and Republican-leaning voters than their Democratic counterparts. Banks are somewhere in the middle. Neither group likes the national news media, though the Democrats are more favorable. (We get it, you dont like us.) It used to be that colleges and universities were another one of those institutions that could generate at least theoretical goodwill on both sides of the aisle.

Voters Views on Colleges and Universities

What could possibly account for such a steep drop in trust in universities? Several analysts, including Philip Bump, suggested that this is backlash against the rise of identity politics on college campuses. Bump noted an increase in Google searches for safe space over the time period in which the flip happened.

This has to be a major factor. Conservative media has focused heavily on campus protests, free-speech clashes, and debates over (for example) whether offering ethnic food in dining halls constitutes cultural appropriation. Multiple states have introduced legislation designed to protect unpopular speakers, taking up model legislation circulated by a think tank.

Still, Im skeptical that this explains all of the change. After all, to mix a metaphor, conservative leaders have used the Ivory Tower as a punching bag for decades, at least since William F. Buckley began using his famous quip about preferring government by the first 2,000 names in the Boston phonebook to a regime of Harvard professors, a quip that dates itself by invoking phonebooks (but appears to date to the early 1960s). Campuses have also been battlegrounds for culture wars since then, and no acrimony today can match the battles at Berkeley or Kent State in the 1960s and 1970s, though its true that conservative media is also far stronger now. Unfortunately, theres not a great deal of corroborating evidence to draw on, either. While some pollsincluding Pewhave measured support for hate-speech codes among Millennials, that doesnt tell us anything concrete about the backlash. A steep drop in enrollment at the University of Missouri reached the headlines recently, a ripple effect of huge protests there, but there isnt a corresponding drop in attendance around the country.

So if safe spaces account for only some of the shift, what else might be at work? One theory that seems to make a lot of sense is that the composition of the Republican/Republican-leaning demographic has shifted. (For simplicity, lets just call them the Republicans from here on out. Pollsters and political scientists have long ago shown that while a growing number of Americans identify as independents, most of them vote pretty consistently for one party or the other.)

This is alluring because it fits with the fact that, as Nate Silver has written, it appears as though educational levels are the critical factor in predicting shifts in the vote between 2012 and 2016. If the voters who Trump picked up over Mitt Romney are more likely not to have a college education, it isnt surprising that they would have less attachment to the role of colleges and universities. However, as Pews Jocelyn Kiley pointed out to me, Pew hasnt found a huge shift in partisan identification to match the change. Besides, positive feeling about colleges and universities has slid among all Republican demographics.

Trump might bear closer examination as a driver, though, even if it doesnt come through in changing party composition. Over the period in which Pew measured the enormous switch, the president has been by far the most potent force in Republican politics, showing that he could overcome the party establishment and much of the conservative media. That allowed him to reverse long-held GOP stands on certain issuesnot just in the platform, but in the minds of Republican voters, too. Not long ago, free trade was a bedrock belief of the GOP. Yet consider this Pew result from last August:

Partisan Views on Trade Agreements

An even more dramatic, if less substantive, example is Vladimir Putin, whose net favorability rose a dizzying 56 points from 2014 to late 2016 in a YouGov/Economist poll. (Gallup found a smaller, though still sizable, increase.)

Trump hasnt put much effort into bashing colleges for safe spaces and the like. It was highly unusual when, in February, he tweeted angrily about students trying to prevent Trump-backing provocateur Milo Yiannopoulous from speaking at the University of California at Berkeley:

In fact, whats most striking about Trump is that he barely talks about higher education at all. Sure, there were some desultory boasts about his own attendance at the University of Pennsylvanias Wharton School during the campaign, but Trump never even bothered to produce a higher-education platform (even as Hillary Clinton made a plan for affordable degrees a centerpiece of her stump speech). When he finally did get around to discussing it, in the campaigns closing days, it was mostly to criticize rising tuition and to promise to bring it down.

Trumps innovation maybe wasnt to bash college so much as to ignore it. Previous candidates, in both parties, paid at least lip service to the idea of expanding educational opportunities and retraining workers whose jobs were eliminated by changes in the U.S. economy. The first indications that that was changing came in the 2012 GOP primary, when Rick Santorum (B.A., Penn State; M.B.A, Pitt; J.D., Dickinson Law) accused Barack Obama of being a snob for trying to expand access to education. Trump didnt bother to make the case for retraining or education; he simply promised dispossessed blue-collar workers that their jobs in mills, factories, and especially coal mines were going to come back.

Meanwhile, college is becoming increasingly expensive and therefore out of reach, even at the public universities that have historically been a boon to lower-income citizens. While college enrollment jumped during the recession, as people sought shelter from a poor jobs market, graduation rates fell. And since then, enrollment has fallen, too, especially for lower-income students. A PRRI/The Atlantic poll found that 54 percent of white working-class voters now consider college more a gamble that may not pay off than a smart investment in the future; those who viewed it as a gamble were almost twice as likely to back Trump as those who disagreed.

Regardless of the degree to which each of these factors, along with any others, contribute to the drop in favorable views of colleges and universities, the implications are potentially far-reaching. If more than a third of the country, and six in 10 Republicans, think that institutions of higher education are harming the country, its hard to imagine that wont eventually result in larger drops in enrollment. And since, whatever Trump says, those manufacturing and mining jobs almost certainly arent coming back to their old levels, that could create a drag on the nations economy in the future.

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Why Do Republicans Suddenly Hate College So Much? - The Atlantic

For 31-year-old Sierra Parker, who has worked as a janitor for four years, the impending decrease makes her feel as if Missouris lawmakers have robbed workers of their voices. Parker said that when the wage went up to $10, I was feeling like, Oh finally they are concerned about the citizens of Missouri, the hard-working people. Parker, who is also studying business in school, was hoping to transition from janitorial work to the non-profit sector to fight homelessness, having been homeless herself for many years. If they take the $10 minimum wage, Im right back where I started from, she said.

In St. Louis, wages have gone up for white-collar workers even when factoring in rising housing costs. But they have fallen for blue-collar workers, according to one study. The higher minimum wage would have helped to remedy this.

While the battle over health care repeal and tax reform has taken center stage at the federal level, the scourge of Republican-led preemption bills is a reminder that many of the Democratic Partys biggest problems remain local.

Its a good sign, then, that the Democratic National Committee has finally begun to invest in state parties, as they announced earlier this week. Starting in October, the DNC will give state parties $10,000 a month, while also launching a $10 million State Party Innovation Fund. Its a step that may help turn back the well-funded tide of Republican domination over the past decade. A full 32 state governments are now entirely under Republican control. An even more harrowing stat: Over the course of Barack Obamas two terms, Democrats lost 960 seats at the state legislative level.

But many of those seatseven in deep red districtsare starting to look winnable. Just this week, Democrats achieved a surprise victory, flipping two GOP-controlled state legislature seats in special election races in Oklahoma. The emerging sentiment on the left is that Democrats have to show up and compete everywhere. It is no longer feasible to rely on the partys lopsided strength in big cities, and initiatives like Fight for $15 have to be wrapped in a larger, coordinated program to make inroads in rural areas and win back state legislatures.

For people like Rogers, Straughter, and Parker, who are going to feel in the most intimate way the effects of the partys losses in recent years, this has become a necessity, not a choice.

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Republicans Are Coming for Your Minimum Wage Hike - New Republic

WASHINGTON Senate Republicans are still moving ahead with a vote on their health care bill next week, but barring some sudden changes of hearts, it looks like they will fall short of the votes and no one seems to have a real idea of what to do then.

Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) is expected to release the text of a revised bill Thursday, along with an amendment drafted by Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) that would dramatically undermine protections for people with pre-existing conditions in the name of lowering costs for healthy people. On Wednesday afternoon, Cruz suggested, but did not directly state, that he would vote against the motion to proceed on the bill if his amendment was not attached.

If there are not meaningful protections for consumer freedom that will lower premiums, then the bill will not go forward, Cruz said.

Bloomberg via Getty Images

Pressed on whether that meant he would vote against a motion to proceed, Cruz said the bill would not have the votes to go forward.The Cruz amendment would allow insurers who offer at least one health plan that complies with Obamacare regulations to offer other, cheaper plans that dont.

Regardless of whether Cruzs amendment is included, a vote on the motion to proceed may be going down anyway. Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) told Politico on Tuesdayshe was not optimistic that this would be a bill she could support, and Sen. Dean Heller (R-Nev.) famously expressed a number of issues with the bill in a high-profile news conferencein June issues that would largely be exacerbated or unaddressed with the addition of Cruzs amendment.

Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) has also strongly suggested he would vote against a motion to proceed on the revised bill no matter the status of Cruzs amendment. He called it the same as the old bill, except worse, and, should a motion to proceed fail, he would push Senate GOP leaders to hold a vote on a straight repeal.

I ran on repealing Obamacare, Paul told reporters Wednesday. It doesnt repeal Obamacare. It creates a giant Obamacare superfund. I cant be for that.

If they lose on this vote, Im giving them an alternative, Paul said. The alternative is two bills: clean repeal, and a big government spending bill that they can work with Democrats on for big government-spending Republicans.

Republicans seem to acknowledge that they will, at some point, need to stabilize Obamacare markets. Even in their bill replacing the Affordable Care Act, there are funds that would reimburse insurers for the cost of their most expensive patients, allowing them to hold down premium increases.

But without their bill, many Republicans concede they should do something to bring more certainty to insurers offering plans in 2018.

At a minimum, Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) has suggested Republicans could fund the so-called cost-sharing reductions (CSRs), which subsidize the cost of Obamacare plans for people with incomes up to 400 percent of the poverty level. President Donald Trump has threatened to end those payments, and, in response to that uncertainty, insurers have offered more expensive plans or simply not offered plans at all.

Funding those CSR payments would be a small step that Republicans could take with Democrats to reinforce the Obamacare insurance markets. But that move would almost certainly draw the ire of conservatives, and its unclear what legislative vehicle Congress could use for CSRs.

A budget deal or debt ceiling increase with Democrats would be an obvious choice, but theres little impetus to pass one of those bills at this point, and Republicans would functionally be giving up on their repeal efforts and removing the one negotiating chip they may have to force Democrats to the table on a bipartisan health care bill.

A more likely scenario the actual bare minimum is that Republicans do nothing. The Trump administration could continue to make the CSR payments or could end them and truly throw the Obamacare exchanges into chaos. Trump has the CSR payments as leverage to extract concessions on other priorities, like his wall along the Mexican border in an omnibus spending deal, and he could make the subsidies contingent upon an item like that funding.

It would then be up to Democrats whether they would give in to Trumps demands or gamble that voters will just blame Republicans for the collapse of the insurance market and, perhaps, a government shutdown.

That potential showdown is all the more reason some Republicans are floating the idea of working with Democrats on new legislation.

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) claims to already be working on a bipartisan health care bill a strategy endorsed by more moderate Republicans, such as Collins and Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) but his idea of a bipartisan measure at this point sounds less than half-baked and far short of bipartisan.

Were trying to find consensus among ourselves and at the same time reach out to some Democrats who would be open-minded to the solutions being at the state level, not necessarily in Washington, Graham said Wednesday.

If that sounds like like something Democrats might resist, it probably should. Grahams idea of Democrats jumping aboard seems more aspirational than real.

It is a concept, he said. I hope it can get bipartisanship.

Asked about the basic tenets of his health care bill, Graham declined to provide any real details until Republicans had either passed or dispensed with their current legislation. (Graham said he thought the bill coming to the floor next week would fail.)

But the GOPs best hope of getting a bill through still seems to be this weeks revised legislation. While the health care plan continued to appear short on support Wednesday, McConnell still has more than $400 billion in savings he can dole out to win over reluctant Republicans. Many of Murkowskis concerns for Alaska could be addressed with that money, as could some concerns of other Republicans over the phaseout of the Medicaid expansion and high premiums for low-income seniors, though aides and senators have indicated that the new bill will mostly preserve the current provisions on ending the Medicaid expansion.

McConnell could also get a helping hand from the Senate parliamentarian, as shell have to rule on whether Cruzs open-ended language on coverage options is actually allowable in a reconciliation bill, which requires only 50 votes to pass but limits what senators can do in order to reconcile spending with their budget. While striking down the Cruz language could be the death blow for the health care bill, it could also convince Cruz and other conservatives like Mike Lee (R-Utah) to accept a more incremental approach.

At this point, McConnell seems to need a shakeup, and a parliamentary ruling could be what shifts the current dynamics.

The idea, however, of Republicans going back to the drawing board, perhaps seeking out some Democrats to support their measure, doesnt look like a winning strategy. Republicans are already split over a health care bill for both repealing too much of Obamacare and not enough, and Democrats appear completely united in their opposition to anything resembling the Republican plan.

If the revised bill fails, GOP senators have little idea what Plan B is. Ill leave that up to the leadership to decide what to do, Sen. Richard Burr (R-N.C.) said Wednesday. Youre going to have a health care system that implodes.

As it happens, that part isnt entirely true. The markets appear to be in better shape than Burr and his allies concede or perhaps even realize. Just this week, the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation released a study of insurer financial performance that concluded the individual market has been stabilizing and insurers are regaining profitability.

Premiums or out-of-pocket costs remain a lot higher than many people feel they can afford, and insurer pullouts have left some areas, particularly rural ones, with few or even no choice of insurers. But some carriers are expanding their options, filling in gaps others are leaving, and many industry officials say the biggest source of uncertainty isnt the underlying market weakness that plagued the program in its first few years; its the neglect and sabotage from hostile officials, including the ones working out of the White House.

With a little more money, or at least some assurances that the existing money will continue, the worst outcomes of an Obamacare market collapse could be avoided.

But Republicans dont look all that interested in that white flag approach at least not until theyve demonstrated they cant pass a bill of their own. And even then, Republican leaders see big problems if they cant muscle through this health care legislation.

Asked on Wednesday what Republicans would do if they couldnt pass their bill, GOP Conference Chairman John Thune (R-S.D.) suggested Republicans didnt have a backup plan.

That would be highly problematic, Thune said.

Jonathan Cohn contributed to this report.

Continue reading here:
Republicans Stare Down Failure On Health Care With No Real Plan B - HuffPost