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Dave Helling: Mainstream Republicans may have had enough of GOP extremists Kansas City Star (blog) Moderate Republicans and Democrats joined together to override Gov. Sam Brownback and rescue the state from his tax cut experiment. That same coalition almost expanded Medicaid in the state, an extraordinary rebuke to the conservative governor. and more »

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Dave Helling: Mainstream Republicans may have had enough of GOP extremists - Kansas City Star (blog)

Republicans relished criticizing congressional Democrats when they fumbled or flat-out didnt try to approve a budget.

They took particular joy in upbraiding former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nevada, when he didnt shepherd a budget through the Senate, piously preaching the virtues of congressional budgeting.

Certainly the struggle to OK a budget doesnt look good for Republicans, who now control the House and Senate.

There was a plan a few weeks ago to advance a budget through the House Budget Committee. But that effort crumbled when Republicans fought over defense spending. Republicans fractured again when they fought over slashing some $50 billion in entitlement spending.

The law says the House is supposed to adopt a budget in April.

But the Houses collapse when it comes to budgeting threatens to imperil the most holy of Republican agenda items: diminishing federal spending and tax reform.

Lets go subterranean for a moment.

Congress doesnt approve money annually for costly federal entitlement programs such as Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security.

Those dollars just fly out the door automatically. Its known as mandatory spending.

Now, Congress doesnt have to spend it. Lawmakers voted decades ago against deciding each year how much money to allocate to those programs. The federal Treasury directs about 70 percent of all federal spending to that trio of entitlements. An increasingly large chunk of mandatory spending is interest on the debt.

The rest of the money -- about 30 percent -- constitutes discretionary spending.

Congress wields discretion over spending everything else. How much goes to the National Park Service. How much to run the Federal Reserve. How much to operate the State Department. How much it allocates to itself.

By the way, the chunk of change devoted to the legislative branch is on the rise after the shooting at the Republican congressional baseball practice. A few million more dollars are in the pipeline for security improvements and to hire additional U.S. Capitol Police officers.

So, if you truly wanted to harness federal spending and the nations $21 trillion debt, from which side of the ledger would you cut? From mandatory spending or discretionary spending?

You cannot address long-term debt without looking at the mandatory side of the budget, said White House budget Director Mick Mulvaney. You would be hard pressed to be able to balance the budget without looking at mandatory spending.

But thats where the problem lies for House Budget Committee Chairwoman Diane Black, R-Tenn.

True budget savings would come from slashing entitlement spending.

Black and other GOPers would like to reduce $200 billion in entitlement (mandatory) spending. But a coalition of 20 moderate Republicans pushed back. They argue that Blacks plan isnt practical and that they are reticent to vote for such a deep cut. Losing those 20 Republicans doesnt quite kill the vote count for the budget. But its close.

President Trump wants to spend more on defense in this budget. Defense hawks demanded somewhere north of $640 billion for the Pentagon. Of late, the defense target has fallen between $617 and $623 billion.

Technically, defense spending isnt supposed to exceed $549 billion. Thats the ceiling imposed by sequestration, the mandatory set of spending cuts created by the 2011 Budget Control Act, which raised the debt limit.

One senior Republican close to the discussions suggested they should have started with a defense number around $603 billion and negotiated up to lure defense-minded Republicans.

Keep in mind that Republicans would first have to engineer a budget that wouldnt collapse in committee to say nothing of getting nuked by GOPers on the floor.

So, theres a stalemate.

Failing to adopt a budget would certainly be a blow to Republicans -- especially former House Budget Committee Chairman and now House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis.

The House didnt advance a budget last year on Ryans watch, either. No budget means theres no way to mine the federal coffers for major cuts essential to contracting the deficit.

But a bigger problem lurks for Republicans.

No budget could imperil the GOP plan to approve tax reform.

Ryan insists Republicans will approve tax reform.

Tax reform is happening, not next year or next Congress, he said recently. It is happening now, in 2017.

Heres the issue: Republicans would face a filibuster in the Senate from Democrats and probably some Republicans on tax reform.

The GOP leadership in both bodies wants to use a special process called budget reconciliation for tax reform to avoid a filibuster. This is the same parliamentary scheme Republicans are now using to deal with ObamaCare.

Otherwise, the sides must round up 60 votes just to break the filibuster to start debate on the tax bill and 60 votes a second time to wrap things up.

However, theres a reason the process is called budget reconciliation. The House must first adopt a budget to give the Senate something with which to work.

No budget, and any effort at tax reform could be in trouble.

Certainly the House could approve a skeleton budget, designed expressly as a shell for the Senate to use when handling tax reform.

In other words, its a budget in name only. Only the framework. The House essentially followed that path in January to set up the legislative vehicle to repeal and replace ObamaCare.

Meantime, look at the raw dollars. The biggest standoff among congressional Republicans in settling the budget impasse is waged between defense advocates and Republicans who want to fund everything else -- yet cut spending.

This is where things get interesting.

The House Appropriations Committee wrote a defense spending bill totaling $658.1 billion. Thats $68.1 billion more than last year and $18.4 billion more than Trump requested. When the House Armed Services Committee wrote this years defense authorization bill -- which is different from the appropriations legislation -- Republican lawmakers found themselves all over the map.

Washington Rep. Adam Smith, the top Democrat on the Armed Services panel, took note.

We do not have $600, $700, $800, $900 billion to spend on defense unless we pretty much completely eliminate all non-defense discretionary spending, which there isnt support for doing, he said. Twenty trillion dollars in debt, a $706 billion deficit, trying to find $50 billion in mandatory savings, and the majority cant even do that, all right?

Smiths remark crystalizes the entire debate about the GOP attempting to complete a budget.

As a result, Kentucky Rep. John Yarmuth, the leading Democrat on the House Budget Committee, says that the GOP shell budget is looking more and more likely.

And theres a reason behind that. The faux budget would not be so much to actually alter the nations spending trajectory. But if the House approves a budget, it will serve as a contrivance to help tax reform navigate the U.S. Senate.

The rest is here:
House Republicans stymied in their efforts to adopt a budget - Fox News

Local Democratic officials on Thursday panned the Republican state Senate leaders threat to halt the Long Island Rail Roads third track project.

The Metropolitan Transportation Authority resubmitted an amendment to its Capital Program that would fund the $2 billion plan to a state review board last Friday, reportedly because state Senate Majority Leader John Flanagan (R-East Northport) threatened to have it blocked.

Nassau County Democratic Chairman Jay Jacobs, state Sen. John Brooks (D-Seaford) and county Legislator Laura Curran (D-Baldwin) said Flanagans move will only exacerbate commuters transportation woes.

Senate Republicans are stopping a necessary modernization and they should be ashamed of throwing away almost $2 billion for major improvements to the LIRR, Jacobs said in a statement. Our commuters and our economy cannot continue to suffer while they play politics.

The joint statement from Jacobs, Brooks and Curran who is running for Nassau County executive infuses politics into the debate more than before as funding it hinges on political considerations.

The LIRR wants to add a third track to a key 9.8-mile stretch of its Main Line between Floral Park and Hicksville. Project officials say it would take three to four years to build and would improve service by increasing capacity and giving trains a route around delays.

The project would also modernize LIRR signals along the stretch, remove seven street-level railroad crossings and build noise-deflecting walls, among other improvements.

State Sen. Martin Golden (R-Brooklyn), who reportedly takes direction from Flanagan, is one of four members of the Capital Program Review Board, which must approve any amendments to the MTAs 2015-2019 Capital Program. The MTA Board of Directors approved the amendment that would provide $1.95 billion for the third track in May.

The withdrawal and resubmission of the funding plan gave the MTA 30 more days to address lingering questions about the project before another possible veto.

Jacobs, Brooks and Curran argued the project is more desperately needed now, as the MTA is under a state of emergency and LIRR commuters deal with for two months of disruptions due to repairs at Penn Station in Manhattan.

We desperately need to increase our transportation options and modernize the LIRR but unfortunately, once again, Albany politicians are fighting for themselves rather than for whats best for Long Islanders, Curran said in the statement.

But Republican state Sen. Elaine Phillips of Flower Hill said resetting the clock gives MTA officials more time and flexibility to develop a comprehensive solution to the LIRRs systemic service problems.

The decision by the Governor and the MTA to resubmit the amendment and provide more time for the process is the right one, Phillips said in a statement Friday.

Since Democratic Gov. Andrew Cuomo introduced it in January 2016, local officials, residents and interest groups have argued about the projects possible benefits and the potential damage it could do to affected communities, including Floral Park, New Hyde Park and Mineola.

Phillips and Republican Sen. Kemp Hannon of Garden City have been two of the projects most vocal critics.

Flanagan, Phillips and Hannon have been pushing Cuomo to grant other requests in exchange for approving the funding, such as more money for hospitals and involvement in a dispute between Nassau and New York City over Queens water wells, Newsdays The Point newsletter reported Friday.

While many in New Hyde Park and Floral Park still strongly oppose the project, the villages mayors signed memoranda of understanding with the LIRR last week that they say will give their communities extra benefits and protection during the construction period.

Those agreements should remain in place regardless of whether the Capital Program amendment proceeds in its current form, Phillips said Friday.

New Hyde Park Mayor Lawrence Montreuil said he thinks it could be good for officials to consider whether the money is better spent on more immediate infrastructure needs.

If there is that question in peoples minds I think maybe a 30-day delay is not the end of the world, Monetruil said.

Nassau County Comptroller George Maragos, another Democrat running for county executive, agreed that the third track is critical, but said Democrats and Republicans should work together to get the needed funding to fix the LIRRs problems.

E. OBrien Murray, a spokesman for Jack Martins, Phillips state Senate predecessor and the Republican county executive, praised Cuomo the MTA for resubmitting the amendment. But he condemned the Nassau Democrats for making empty political statements.

Instead of being truthful about the Third Track project, which does nothing to solve the immediate commuter crisis but is a long term capital project, Jacobs, Curran and Brooks are dishonestly attempting to confuse these two important issues, Murray said in a statement.

Read more from the original source:
Local Dems slam state Republicans on 3rd track funding - The Island Now

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell speaks in Elizabethtown, Kentucky, on June 30.

Bryan Woolston/Reuters

What happens if Senate Republicans cant get the votes they need to pass the Better Care Reconciliation Act, the latest GOP effort to partially repeal and replace Obamacare? Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, the chief architect of the BCRA, has been hinting that if he cant unite the GOP caucus, hell have no choice but to work with Senate Democrats to shore up topsy-turvy insurance markets, which have been destabilized by all the uncertainty around whether Obamacares subsidies and regulations will survive. This could just be a scare tactic McConnell is using to keep Republicans in linea way to tell GOP hardliners that if they dont get on board with the BCRA, hell pivot to cutting a deal with moderates in both parties that would leave them out in the cold. Or it could be a frank acknowledgment that if Obamacare is here to stay, Republicans will have to take ownership of it. Either way, if the BCRA goes down, the GOP will have to do a lot of soul-searching.

The Republican fight against Obamacare has always been about more than Obamacare. It was, from the very beginning, more of a symbolic struggle about the size and role of the federal government. I say symbolic because while Obamacare was always expected to cost meaningful amounts of money, the real drivers of federal spending in the decades to come are public insurance programs that were established long before Obamacare, like Medicaid and Medicare. Though Obamacare greatly expanded Medicaid, it also sought to restrain future increases in Medicare spending. There was some irony in the GOPs anti-Obamacare zeal, as many Republicans voted for the expansion of the Medicaid rolls and the creation of the Medicare prescription drug benefit in the early 2000s, among other measures that greatly expanded governments footprint. But these expansions of public insurance programs could always be characterized as modest and incremental ways to patch up the safety net, which posed no real ideological threat.

Had Democrats proposed yet another expansion of Medicaid, its possible they would have peeled off a few more Republican votes and sparked less of a backlash. But Obamacare was all about Democrats getting out of the defensive ideological crouch theyd been in since the Reagan era. To its champions, the Affordable Care Act represented the culmination of decades of hard work by liberal politicians stretching back to Harry Truman, if not further into the past. At long last, the federal government would take responsibility for ensuring that every American, or almost every American, had health insurance. As Joe Biden put it, Obamacare was a big fucking deal, and Republicans agreed with him.

Opposing Obamacare meant believing the expansion of government was not inevitablethat if Republicans stuck to their ideological guns, they could reverse the growth of federal spending and the federal bureaucracy. GOP victories in the midterm elections of 2010 and 2014 reinforced the sense that voters could be mobilized by calls for smaller government and more freedom. The trouble is that GOP victories in 2010 and 2014, like Democratic victories in 2006 and 2008, were less about swing voters deeply held ideological convictions than a desire to punish the party in power. More broadly, what Republicans failed to understand is that while many voters oppose big government as a matter of abstract principle, they tend to embrace expansions of government in practice, especially when they hear horror stories about what happens when the safety net shrinks.

To reverse the growth of government, Republicans would have to do more than win majorities in both houses of Congress. Theyd have to reverse much deeper shifts in public opinion. Consider cigarette smoking. In How Change Happensor Doesnt, political scientist Elaine Kamarck notes that a half-century ago most Americans didnt see smoking as a public problem. They might acknowledge that smoking is bad for you, and they might go even further and accept that widespread tobacco use caused problems for society at large by, say, increasing health care costs that would eventually have to be borne by taxpayers. Nevertheless, most people believed smoking was at worst a private vice and that it wasnt the governments business to paternalistically nudge people into quitting the habit. As time went by, activists and policy entrepreneurs succeeded in changing how people perceived smoking, transforming it in the public mind into an epidemic that threatened societys collective well-being. The same Americans who once believed that an individuals predilection for smoking was none of the governments business came to believe government can and should aggressively tax and regulate cigarettes with an eye toward liberating smokers from their addiction. An idea that was once seen as obscenely intrusive eventually became the conventional wisdom.

Similarly, a century ago the fact that some young people struggle to pay back their student loans might have been seen as a private tragedy rather than a priority for the federal government, not least because the number of young people going to college was minuscule. The same goes for highway deaths or job losses due to technological innovation or air pollution. All of these things might have been seen as bad or unpleasant, but they werent really issues anyone expected the federal government to take on. The federal government concerned itself with regulating the railroads and tariffs and national defense, not the fact that someone somewhere in Akron, Ohio, was facing sky-high medical bills. When small-government conservatives look back longingly to the days of Calvin Coolidge, when Americas central government was comparatively tiny, what theyre really doing is lamenting that in the decades since, an endless cavalcade of problems that were once seen as purely private have come to be seen as public.

If the GOP is going to sell a repeal and replace plan, it must offer universal coverage in some more attractive package.

Blame this transformation of private problems into public ones on the Great Depression or World War II. Blame it on savvy political entrepreneurs who figured out how to make every problem governments problem. Blame it on anyone or anything youd like. The fact remains that once a problem gets governmentalized, it is extremely difficult to degovernmentalize it. When you dont degovernmentalize a given problem in the public imagination, the only way you can oppose an expansion of government power is to propose an alternative that you can sell as cheaper or more effective. Otherwise, any policy victories will be short-lived.

Which leads us back to Obamacare. To convince voters that we ought to repeal and replace it, Republicans need to recognize that most of the country now believes that providing all, or almost all, Americans with health insurance is the responsibility of the federal government. That wont change even if McConnell manages to threaten and cajole enough Republican senators into passing unpopular health reform legislation. All it will mean is that voters will revolt, and the BCRA will wind up paving the way for single-payer.

To be truly effective, small-government conservatives need to operate on parallel tracks. In the short term, they need to recognize that the deck is stacked against them and that they need to fight for incremental reforms that nudge government in the direction of greater cost-effectiveness and transparency. At the same time, they need to do the long-term cultural and political work of fostering a world in which public problems grow small enough and manageable enough to become private problems once again. Doing these two things at once will be challenging. But its a hell of a lot smarter than just beating your head against a wall.

If the GOP is going to sell a repeal and replace plan, it has little choice but to offer universal coverage in some more attractive package. Selling a plan that promises anything less than that will require convincing people that guaranteeing universal coverage isnt the federal governments business. Thats not an impossible task over a long enough time horizon. I can imagine a world in which years of robust wage growth leave families feeling so flush that they feel they can take responsibility for their own health needs and that they can get by with less of a safety net. Alas, thats not the world were living in now.

See the rest here:
Why Republicans Are Losing the Health Care Fight - Slate Magazine

Its my party now. Photo: Pool/Getty Images

One of the more remarkable political developments of the last six months the culmination in some ways of the last 18 months is the transformation of the Republican Party into the Party of Trump.

Think back toearlylast year. Close to every major Republican politician regarded Trump as an excrescence that would eventually go away. Today, the GOP owns Trump completely and Trump owns the GOP. In Gallup, he receives around 85 percent support of Republicans, with only some minor softness around the edges. At his inauguration, he had 86 percent support. Thats the key reason why his general approval ratings have leveled off at around 40 percent. That seems to be the floor.

Think back over what we have learned these past six months, and let that sink in. This solid 85 percent is despite a deeply unpopular Obamacare replacement, which clearly targets Trumps core voters, and would wreak real havoc in their lives. Its despite fading prospects for any kind of tax cut. Its despite a failureto make tangible progress in building theborder wall,boostingeconomic growth, orbringingback any manufacturing jobs. This is despite almost complete legislative failure while controlling both House and Senate. Neil Gorsuch is his only solid victory. And that came only becauseRepublicanstrashed the judicial filibuster for the Supreme Courtand, prior to that, Senate tradition by denying Merrick Garland a hearing.

But the loyalty endures even deepens. For now, theres no way out, only through, and through it together, writes Rich Lowry, explaining why he, and his magazine, National Review, are now in favor of party over country. Lowry was, you may recall, a prominent Never Trumper, throwing the entire Buckley legacy against the parvenu narcissistduring the Republican primaries. This was not just because, as Bret Stephens notes, Trump represented the death rattle of anything that might be called a conservative intelligentsia, although he did. It was because it was hard for any Republican to back a candidate and now a president who equivocated on NATO, morally equated Russia with the U.S., preferred autocracies to democratic allies, embraced America First as a rallying cry, and was threatening to slap a crude tariff on all steel imports. Can you imagine if Clinton ran on that? And yet Trumps chief propagandist, Sean Hannity, is now being honored with the William F. Buckley Award for Media Excellence.

How did Trump manage this takeover? First, he demagogued the base, simply deploying the anti-establishment lines that had been honed and tuned to perfection in the GOP for years, against thepartyitself. Second, in an amazing stroke of luck, the Democrats gave him an opponent only slightly less despised than he was, and infinitely less talented. Now, in his latest twist, Trump is usingthe mainstream media as his foil to cement party loyalty behind him. In other words, he picked three things every Republican hates the D.C. Establishment, Hillary Clinton, and the MSM and made himself the only alternative to each. Brilliant when you think about it.

And in his latest war against the media, he is clearly winning. Close to 90 percent of Republicans believe the most patently mendacious president in history over the flawed, but still generally earnest, CNN. More to the point, as one new paper suggests, they support himeven when they know hes lying. And he has used this near-blind support to construct, in just six months, the close equivalent of a disciplined state-run media, across various platforms, from Fox toTMZ, to Sinclair and One America,fromthe National Enquirer to talk radio across the country, and potentially even Time Inc. in the future. In some ways, this media complex operates for Trump the way RT does forPutin. Yes, in America, unlike Russia, theres a vibrant alternative, but, in some parts of America, that alternative barely peeks through, as this report from rural Iowa notes:

Most people here watch Fox News, and have for a generation. Fox News is always on the TV in diners and other restaurants. In bars, if there isnt a game on, Fox News is there. If there are a couple of televisions or more, one will most likely be tuned to Fox. And its not only TV. Its radio. Our big blow torch conservative radio station out of Des Moines blasts conservative indignation and self-righteousness for hours a day and serves up Sean Hannity for hours every night.

The point of Trumps otherwise super-stupid tweets is clear: to signal the new party line which his internet underlings and media flacks then repeat. This can, of course, require them to contradict themselves in no time at all, as Trumps moods shift. But the willingness to say black is white when party discipline requires this, as Orwell noted, is key to authoritarian success.

The Republican Party elites defense of all this their only faintly honest argument is usually along the lines of: Stop going nuts. Yes, its all pretty appalling, but not a big deal. We can ride this tiger, and dismount when necessary. As Ben Shapiro argued: Themedia are wrong that their liberties are under some sort of existential assault from a president who is merely mouthing off the way he has his entire career.

Which is to say: Theres no difference between a New York mogul mouthing off and the president of the United States. Im sorry but I beg to differ. This decadent insouciance is recklessly complacent about democratic norms, dangerous in what it is prepared to tolerate, and, at best, a form of collective denial.

A president can come and go. But when he remakes one of the two major political parties into a threat to liberal democracy, its a far deeper and more durable shift. Let us just note for the record that, in this first Trump summer, the mainstream conservative Establishment has, like conservative Establishments in other countries before it, averted its eyes from or openly endorsed this transformation every single step along the way.

Heres a book review I just came across that seems to me an intellectual shift. Its a review of a new book by Fordham law professor John Pfaff, Locked In, about mass incarceration in America, and it upends a plank of conventional wisdom on the left. The book argues strongly against the notion that our vast and indefensible prison-industrial complex was deliberately created by an explicitly racist war on drugs that swept up nonviolent drug offenders, primarily black, from the 1980s on. The data dont back it up:

All told, low-level, nonviolent drug offenders, the focus of much reform rhetoric and effort, make up only about 1 percent of all inmates in state prisons. If we released every prisoner who has been sentenced solely for a drug crime, we would still be the world leader in incarceration. Most strikingly, the racial disparities of our inmate population would barely budge: in state prisons, the percentage of white inmates would go up one point, the percentage of black inmates would go down one point, and the Hispanic percentage would remain the same.

The War on Drugs was not, in other words, a decision by white supremacists to respond to the end of segregation by rounding up random black men on the streets and creating a new archipelago of racial separatism behind bars (see Michelle Alexanders 2010 book, The New Jim Crow) or to construct a new system of modern slavery (seeAva DuVernays 2016 documentary13th). The War on Drugs was a terrible, awful idea but it didnt create mass incarceration. Neither did theoretically longer prison sentences (which Pfaff shows were, in reality, mostly reduced to one to three years).

So what did? Heres the emotionally unsatisfying answer: unsupervised and unaccountable prosecutors seeking tougher sentences all over the country, and given many more options, under the law, to do so. Heres the gist (my italics):

Consider, for example, the period from 1994 to 2008, when per capita incarceration rose every year. Over that period, reports of violent and property crimes fell steadily. So, too, did the number of arrests. The probability that a felony case, once charged, would lead to incarceration did not change. And the average time actually served stayed pretty much the same. What changed was the number of cases that prosecutors charged as felonies in state court: the likelihood that an arrest would lead to a felony chargedoubledover that time. In other words, it was not crime rates, arrests, or sentence lengths, but admissions to prison, driven by decentralized prosecutorial decisions, that accounted for most of the growth in incarceration.

No racist conspiracy; just tougher prosecution. And no top-down policy shift; a bottom-up change in felony charges. And then another key factor from James Forman Jr.s new book, Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America: the insistence by African-American communities and civil-rights leaders in the 1970s and 1980s that the police protect them from the ravages of drug-related violence which began with heroin in the late 1960s. DuVernay lightly touched on this but only to minimize it. But it was a core factor in a shift in policing: Among those who embraced a war on drugs in response to crack cocaine were D.C. mayor Marion Barry who called drug dealers the scourge of the earth Jesse Jackson, who bragged that he would out-tough George H.W. Bush and Michael Dukakis in fighting the war on drugs; and Harlems congressional representative, Charles Rangel. Honorable mention: Eric Holder. They were responding understandably to black democratic pressure not caving to white supremacy. Yes, there was racism in many whites enthusiasm for a crackdown. But you also tend to find that members of communities destroyed by heroin and crack are also serious prohibitionists and fans of law and order on the streets.

In case you think Im just rehashing a conservative critique of the excesses of todays racial left, I should let you know that this review was written by David Cole, the national legal director of the ACLU. Its published by The New York Reviewof Books. And its aim is toward prosecutorial reform, rather than racial grandstanding. It seems to me we need more of the former, and a good deal less of the latter.

The Democratic Party is the lamest political organization in the West. But you knew that. It was briefly saved and given some coherence by the genius of Obama, but is now in its default state of listless mediocrity. People keep asking me if I see anyone out there who might be able to offer a clear and appealing message in a manner that could win over the center. The answer is no. Worse, its inability to face why it lost last year suggests an eight-year term for this nutjob. The other night I was talking to a solid Democrat who, when asked to defend Clinton, still actually said that whatever her faults, she was, at least, competent. A party that can still be this deluded deserves to be doomed.

But even I could not have come up with their attempts this week to create a new 2018 bumper sticker. Only months after running a campaign whose only real message was Trump is a nightmare, and Shes your only real option, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee offered: Democrats 2018: I Mean, Have You SeenThe Other Guys? After a dreadful campaign that began with the toe-curlingly smug Im With Her, theyre now proposing: She Persisted; We Resisted. For fucks sake. And please understand please that Elizabeth Warren, for all her virtues, is Trumps dream opponent. Another inspiration: Make Congress Blue Again. Seriously, guys. Thats all you got?

If you are reassuring yourself that next year will be a wave election, just remember: Never, ever underestimate the Democratic Partys capacity to screw it up. A much larger anti-Trump coalition has to make sure they dont.

See younext Friday.

The nine nations that possess nuclear weapons did not participate in the treaty negotiations.

Congressman Mike Conaways family bought stock in UnitedHealth the same day that a bill repealing Obamacares taxes on insurers advanced in committee.

A viral moment from the G20 summit.

An op-ed co-authored by Clinton strategist Mark Penn tells Democrats to emulate a 1996 strategy the actual candidates did not pursue.

The First Lady was sent in to interrupt them during the G20 summit.

One Democrat in Trenton wants to make sure Beachgate stays in the news.

Rioters mixed with peaceful protesters as world leaders gathered in the German city.

At a meeting than ran 90 minutes longer than expected, Trump and Putin discussed Russian interference in U.S. elections, the secretary of State says.

The definition of the Supreme Courts bona fide relationship is the new battleground.

The vice-president ignored some very large instructions on NASA equipment labeled Do Not Touch.

Competitors in 43 sports from 80 countries have gathered in Tel Aviv for the Maccabiah Games.

At a meeting with Enrique Pea Nieto, Trump returns to the topic that drove a wedge between the two leaders.

The German chancellors husband is shady.

In June, there were an impressive 222,000 new jobs created. How much does Trumps agenda have to do with it?

They may be looking for ways to disrupt the U.S. electric grid, but DHS and the FBI said there is no indication of a threat to public safety.

There were no injuries, but the minor derailment caused more even delays at the troubled station.

Doctors said the congressman, who was shot last month, tolerated the procedure well.

Original post:
Why Republicans Let Trump Take Over Their Party - New York Magazine