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Republicans on Capitol Hill spent last week fending off mobs of reporters who rarely asked a question about the GOP agenda.

Instead they wanted to know how Republicans feel about the escalating problems bubbling up from the Trump administration.

Drowned out were the talks about GOP's efforts to reform the tax code and repeal Obamacare, which led some to speculate that the Republican agenda has essentially been sidelined, perhaps permanently.

That's not true, say GOP lawmakers, who blame the Capitol Hill media for downplaying coverage of their agenda in favor of round-the-clock reporting of Trump's troubles.

"Today, I have dealt with healthcare, we've started to wade into actual tax reform," Sen Jim Risch, R-Idaho, told the Washington Examiner. "We can't make headlines, though. How can you make headlines when there is already a headline: Trump did fill in the blank."

Republicans are indeed working intensively on plans to make major reforms to the tax code as well as repeal and replace Obamacare.

The House Ways and Means Committee held its first major public hearing on tax reform on Thursday and has been meeting privately for weeks with lawmakers as well as key players in the Trump administration, including Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin.

House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis., denied the problems at the White House are interfering with completing tax reform.

"Our goal, and I feel very confident we can meet this goal, is calendar year 2017 for tax reform," Ryan said last week. "And I think we're making good progress."

In the Senate, Republican lawmakers meet daily to discuss how to write legislation to repeal and replace Obamacare, while two separate working healthcare groups are holding several meetings each week.

"We are doing stuff all the time," said Don Stewart, a spokesman for Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky. "All the press wants to cover is whatever is going on at the White House."

A new study backs up the GOP's complaint.

Harvard Kennedy School's Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy issued a report last week that found Trump was the topic among all news stories 41 percent of the time during his first 100 days in office. That's triple the level of coverage for previous presidents.

Almost all of the media coverage of Trump was negative, Harvard's analysis found, "setting a new standard for unfavorable press coverage of a president."

Trump's problems have literally migrated to Capitol Hill.

A half-dozen committees in the House and Senate are delving into allegations that Trump campaign officials colluded with Russian operatives ahead of the November election.

Investigative committees are also digging for information about Trump's decision to fire FBI Director James Comey and whether Trump tried to pressure Comey to drop his probe into ousted national security adviser Mike Flynn.

Nearly every day key lawmakers fire off requests to the White House for documents and information relating to the various congressional investigations.

On Thursday, only a smattering of reporters lurked around a closed-door GOP meeting on healthcare reform. Most of the media were elsewhere in the Capitol staking out a private briefing by Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, who was summoned to explain to senators how Trump went about firing Comey.

This week, much of the attention will swing back to the House, where Comey has been invited to testify before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee.

Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman John McCain, R-Ariz., said he has been misquoted by media who report he believes Trump's difficulties hobble the agenda.

"I'm saying it has diverted our attention," McCain told the Washington Examiner. "I have not seen it slow down the agenda."

McCain said he anticipates producing a major defense bill in June and Republicans are spending their daily meetings "going over certain aspects of healthcare reform," not talking about Trump's problems.

"It's sucking the oxygen out of the room because it is dominating the media," McCain said.

The true threat to the GOP agenda, Republicans argue, is the Democrats who have so far moved to slow down or stop legislation and executive branch appointments.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., told NBC after Trump's election that for most of the president's agenda, "we're going to have to fight him, and we'll fight him tooth and nail."

Sen. Pat Roberts, R-Kansas, said Democrats are upholding Schumer's pledge as they employed yet another delaying tactic on a Trump nominee, this time former Iowa Gov. Terry Branstad, who is awaiting a Senate vote to be confirmed as the ambassador to China.

Instead of simply voting on the nomination, Democrats are forcing Republicans to hold a cloture vote that follows a two-day delay.

"Here we have cloture on an Iowa governor, who everybody knows and everybody likes," Roberts said. "So we just burn two days."

Excerpt from:
Trump coverage drowns out Republicans' agenda - Washington Examiner

Top Republican lawmakers have expressed concerns about the cuts President Trump plans to make for the 2018 budget year, which is due out Tuesday.

The blueprint is certain to include a wave of cuts to benefit programs such as Medicaid, food stamps, federal employee pensions and farm subsidies. The fleshed-out proposal follows up on an unpopular partial release in March that targeted the budgets of domestic agencies and foreign aid for cuts averaging 10 percent -- and made lawmakers in both parties recoil.

The new cuts are unpopular as well.

We think it's wrongheaded," Rep. Mike Conaway, R-Texas, chairman of the House Agriculture Committee, said about the looming cuts to farm programs. "Production agriculture is in the worst slump since the depression -- 50 percent drop in the net income for producers. They need this safety net.

The House had a bitter debate on health care before a razor-thin 217-213 passage in early May of a GOP health bill that included more than $800 billion in Medicaid cuts over the coming decade. Key Republicans are not interested in another round of cuts to the program.

"I would think that the health care bill is our best policy statement on Medicaid going forward," said Rep. Greg Walden, R-Ore., chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee.

The presidents budget plan promises to balance the federal ledger over the next 10 years, even while exempting Social Security and Medicare retirement benefits from cuts. To achieve balance, the plan by White House budget director Mick Mulvaney relies on optimistic estimates of economic growth, and the surge in revenues that would result, while abandoning Trump's promise of a "massive tax cut."

Instead, the Trump tax plan promises an overhaul that would cut tax rates but rely on erasing tax breaks and economic growth to end up as "revenue neutral."

Trump's earlier blueprint proposed a $54 billion, 10 percent increase for the military above an existing cap on Pentagon spending, financed by an equal cut to nondefense programs.

Trump's full budget submission to Congress is months overdue and follows the release two months ago of an outline for the discretionary portion of the budget, covering defense, education, foreign aid, housing, and environmental programs, among others. Their budgets pass each year through annual appropriations bills.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

Original post:
Hill Republicans wary of cuts in Trump's 2018 budget plan out Tuesday - Fox News

Blue slips. Remember those? They are actual slips of paper, and they are actually blue. Senators sign them to indicate their approval of judicial nominees from their home states. There is no actual rule about this, however, so whoever's chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee can play games with them pretty easily.

Here's how it works. If you require only one blue slip to proceed, that makes it easier for a president to get his nominees confirmed. If you require two blue slips, it's harder.

So when do you want to make it easier? When the president comes from your own party. When do you want to make it harder? When the president is from the other party. Here's how that's worked:

Patrick Leahy, the Democratic Judiciary Committee chairman from 2007-2014, applied the blue-slip rule impartially regardless of who was president. This was despite a vast level of obstruction from Republicans to all of Obama's nominees. On the one hand, good for Grassley. We could use more displays of integrity like this. On the other hand, Democrats lost out on a whole bunch of judges that they otherwise would have gotten confirmed.

By contrast, Republicans have a two-decade history of flipping the blue-slip rule whenever it conveniences them. Is there really much doubt that Grassley is going to nuke it just as soon as a single Democratic fails to return a blue slip on a Trump nominee and Fox News starts screaming about obstruction? I don't think so.

Read more:
Republicans Are Laying the Groundwork For Their Normal Blue Slip Hypocrisy - Mother Jones

New York Times

Republicans Watch Their Step in a Slow Retreat From Trump New York Times WASHINGTON Republicans on Sunday inched away from President Trump amid mounting evidence that he may have sought to interfere in the federal investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 election. In a sign of growing anxiety, several important ... and more »

See the article here:
Republicans Watch Their Step in a Slow Retreat From Trump - New York Times

By Julie Rovner May 22, 2017

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Back in January, Republicans boasted they would deliver a repeal and replace bill for the Affordable Care Act to President Donald Trumps desk by the end of the month.

In the interim, that bravado has faded as their efforts stalled and they found out how complicated undoing a major law can be. With summer just around the corner, and most of official Washington swept up in scandals surrounding Trump, the health overhaul delays are starting to back up the rest of the 2018 agenda.

One of the immediate casualties is the renewal of the Childrens Health Insurance Program. CHIP covers just under 9 million children in low- and moderate-income families, at a cost of about $15 billion a year.

Funding for CHIP does not technically end until Sept. 30, but it is already too late for states to plan their budgets effectively. They needed to know about future funding while their legislatures were still in session, but, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures, the local lawmakers have already adjourned for the year in more than half of the states.

If [Congress] had wanted to do what states needed with respect to CHIP, it would be done already, said Joan Alker of the Georgetown Center for Children and Families.

Certainty and predictability [are] important, agreed Matt Salo, executive director of the National Association of Medicaid Directors. If we dont know that the money is going to be there, we have to start planning to dismantle things early, and that has a real human toll.

In a March letter urging prompt action, the Medicaid directors noted that while the end of September might seem far off, as the program nears the end of its congressional funding, states will be required to notify current CHIP beneficiaries of the termination of their coverage. This process may be required to begin as early as July in some states.

CHIP has long been a bipartisan program one of its original sponsors is Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah), who chairs the Finance Committee that oversees it. It was created in 1997, and last reauthorized in 2015, for two years. But a Finance hearing that was intended to launch the effort to renew the program was abruptly canceled this month, amid suggestions that Republicans might want to hold the programs renewal hostage to force Democrats and moderate Republicans to make concessions on the bill to replace the Affordable Care Act.

Its a very difficult time with respect to childrens coverage, said Alker. Not only is the future of CHIP in doubt, but also the House-passed health bill would make major cuts to the Medicaid program, and many states have chosen to roll CHIP into the Medicaid program.

Weve just achieved a historic level in coverage of kids, she said, referring to a new report finding that more than 93 percent of eligible U.S. children now have health insurance under CHIP. Now all three legs of that coverage stool CHIP, Medicaid and ACA are up for grabs.

But its not just CHIP at risk due to the congested congressional calendar. Congress also cant do the tax bill Republicans badly want until lawmakers wrap up the health bill.

That is because Republicans want to use the same budget procedure, called reconciliation, for both bills. That procedure forbids a filibuster in the Senate and allows passage with a simple majority.

Theres a catch, though. The health bills reconciliation instructions were part of the fiscal 2017 budget resolution, which Congress passed in January. Lawmakers would need to adopta fiscal 2018 budget resolution in order to use the same fast-track procedures for their tax changes.

And they cannot do both at the same time. Once Congress adopts a new budget resolution for fiscal year 2018, said Ed Lorenzen, a budget-process expert at the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, that new resolution supplants the fiscal year 2017 resolution and the reconciliation instructions in the fiscal year 2017 budget are moot.

That means if Congress wanted to continue with the health bill, it would need 60 votes in the Senate, not a simple majority.

There is, however, a loophole of sorts. Congress can start the next budget resolution before they finish health care, said Lorenzen. They just cant finish the new budget resolution until they finish health care.

So the House and Senate could each pass its own separate budget blueprint, and even meet to come to a consensus on its final product. But they cannot take the last step of the process with each approving a conference report or identical resolutions until the health bill is done or given up for dead. They could also start work on a tax plan, although, again, they could not take the bill to the floor of the Senate until they finish health care and the new budget resolution.

At least thats what most budget experts and lawmakers assume. Theres no precedent to go on, said Lorenzen, because no budget reconciliation bill has taken Congress this far into a fiscal year. So nobody really knows.

Link:
Republicans Race The Clock On Health Care But The Calendar Is Not Helping - Kaiser Health News