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In a 52-47 vote, the Republican-controlled Senate approved a resolution to eradicate a rule requiring companies such as Exxon Mobil and Chevron Corp. to publicly state taxes and other fees paid to foreign governments like Russia.

The House of Representatives already passed the measure. President Donald Trump is expected to sign it within days. On Thursday, the Senate repealed a rule that would have limited coal companies from dumping waste into streams.

After a number of legal battles, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission in June 2016 completed the regulation, which supporters said could help expose questionable financial ties U.S. companies may have with foreign governments.

Senate Democrats raised concerns that Exxon's chief executive during those legal fights was Rex Tillerson, who was recently confirmed as U.S. secretary of state and has worked extensively in Russia.

"It should be lost on no one that in less than 48 hours, the Republican-controlled Senate has confirmed the former head of ExxonMobil to serve as our secretary of state, and repealed a key anti-corruption rule that Exxon Mobil and the American Petroleum Institute have erroneously fought for years," Sen. Ben Cardin of Maryland said, referring to the oil industry's trade group.

Exxon and other major energy corporations fought for years to block the rule, required by the 2010 Dodd-Frank Wall Street reform law.

Cardin, the senior Democrat on the foreign relations committee, wrote the Dodd-Frank section on the payments to foreign governments with Richard Lugar, a former Republican senator.

Critics of the rule said it duplicated existing regulations, was too costly and burdensome for companies to implement and that it put U.S. companies at a competitive disadvantage with state-owned companies in other countries that do not have to divulge such information.

The change could give American companies an edge over Canadian and European companies that face some of the toughest transparency rules in the world.

Republicans have taken advantage of a seldom-used law known as the Congressional Review Act to overturn recently enacted rules with simple majorities in both chambers, denying senators the opportunity to filibuster and stall a vote.

Democrats said Republicans were using the review act to help companies not the public.

"When it comes to giving public resources to private interests and gutting our nation's health, environmental and financial standards, the Republicans can't seem to act fast enough," said Rep. Raul Grijalva. "Whoever they're doing this for, it isn't the American public."

Excerpt from:
Republicans ax disclosure, emissions rules on energy - Grand Forks Herald

Which Country Is America's Strongest Ally? For Republicans, It's Australia New York Times Comparing the new survey with a nearly identical YouGov survey conducted about three years ago, the scatterplot below shows the shifting in Democratic and Republican views. In the previous survey, for example, Democratic and Republican views on ...

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Which Country Is America's Strongest Ally? For Republicans, It's Australia - New York Times

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Donald Trump has only been president for two weeks. In that time, he has created untold chaos with hyper-aggressive use of executive authority, and seriously destabilized relations with several nations, including at least one very close ally, Australia. He's unstable, incompetent, and a clear and present danger to the security of the United States and the world.

Donald Trump must be impeached and removed from office. Not because his policy is bad, though that is very true, but because he is so erratic and unstable as to be a threat to all life on Earth. And it will be up to Congressional Republicans to do it.

They are the only ones with the power to impeach Trump at this point (which requires a majority vote in the House to impeach and a two-thirds vote in the Senate to convict and remove from office). The reason they should is not to advance liberal political goals if anything Vice President Mike Pence would be a more effective policymaker and a more formidable candidate in 2020 but because of Trump's actual danger to American society.

Let's roll the tape.

Trump, on the close counsel of Stephen Bannon and Stephen Miller (who are, it seems, the real power behind the throne), has rammed through a probably illegal order banning Muslim immigration from seven countries, even for people with legitimate visas and desperately ill refugees; he reportedly directed federal law enforcement to ignore federal court orders staying the act, creating an instant constitutional crisis. Over the weekend, Trump and his national security team ordered a raid in Yemen which was epically botched, killing at least 30 people including one U.S. soldier and 10 women and children among them an 8-year-old American girl.

This week, Trump reportedly threatened to invade Mexico to deal with "bad hombres" (though the constantly bullied Mexican government later denied it); and he got in a bizarre, heated argument with Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull over an agreement to take in some refugees. On Wednesday night, after a handful of anti-fascist protesters disrupted a Milo Yiannopolous event at the University of California, Berkeley, Trump threatened to withdraw all federal funding from the entire school:

On Thursday, Trump put Iran "ON NOTICE" because they carried out a ballistic missile test. That same day, it came out that Trump had hired Michael Anton, author of a widely-read pseudonymous essay supporting Trump, to work in national security. His article is overtly racist and authoritarian in its reasoning; it casts any Democratic victory as presumptively illegitimate because "the ceaseless importation of Third World foreigners with no tradition of, taste for, or experience in liberty means that the electorate grows more left, more Democratic, less Republican, less republican, and less traditionally American with every cycle."

In related news, Trump is also reportedly considering altering a Department of Homeland Security anti-terrorism program to focus solely on Islamist terrorism mere days after a white nationalist terrorist shot up a mosque in Quebec City. Oh, and Bannon says we'll be at war with China within 10 years.

I wrote many articles predicting that Trump was a racist and an incipient fascist, that he would be the worst president in American history, and on and on. But I did not think it would get quite so bad this fast. If you ever wanted to see a presidency run by an unstable numskull who gets 100 percent of his news from Fox News broadcasts, here we have it.

And all this doesn't even touch the background issue of Trump's immense network of business ties which he was already exploiting for his own enrichment before he was inaugurated. That alone a clear-cut violation of the Emoluments Clause is probably grounds enough for impeachment, if we needed any more.

Trump is popular among Republican voters. But he is very unpopular overall, and his antics are creating a massive popular backlash. And while congressional Republicans are hawkish on Iran, they weren't much for war with China last time I checked. Trump has been president for literally two weeks and he has already caused one major international crisis and several serious diplomatic flaps for no reason at all. What will happen when he faces a real problem? The United States has about 1,900 strategic nuclear warheads that can be fired anywhere on the sole discretion of the president. The man is quite literally a threat to human life on this planet. He has to go.

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Republicans: You must impeach President Trump - The Week Magazine

Congressional Republicans: We will not form a select committee to investigate Russian interference in the election. That can be handled through existing committees, no need to create one centralized body for it.

Also congressional Republicans: Oh no, too many different committees are investigating Russian interference in the election.

The jurisdictions pretty fragmented, and thats kind of a problem, Senate Majority Whip [John] Cornyn said, so I think there needs to be sort of a concerted effort, and I think most of thats going to be coming through the Intelligence committee. The Texan, who is second in Republican Senate leadership, said the other committees might not have access to the necessary classified information.

You know what would deal with fragmented jurisdiction and the need for a concerted effort? A select committee.

What apparently spurred this round of fretting is that Sens. Lindsey Graham and Sheldon Whitehouse announced theyd be using theSenate Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime and Terrorism to investigate. Since Graham is one of the few Republicans who seems to actually want to know what happened and to be disturbed by the prospect that Russia influenced the U.S. elections to help get its preferred candidate elected, you can see why Republicans who prefer a little bit more of a sham investigation would be concerned. (Though lets not oversell Grahams effectiveness, here.) The Senate Intelligence Committee, led by Sen. Richard Burr, can deliver that image of an investigation without too much uncomfortable reality.

But anytime a Republican suggests its a problem that there are too manyfragmented investigations, theres the answer: Why not a select committee?

Also, did you think there were too many Benghazi investigations? Because Russian election hacking has to pick up a few more committee investigationsanda select committee before its at Benghazi levels.

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Republicans worry about too many investigations of the Russian hacking that hasn't been investigated - Daily Kos

Two top Republicans long expected to lead the Senates role in repealing the Affordable Care Act said publicly this week that they are open to repairing former president Barack Obamas landmark health-care law ahead of a wholesale repeal, which has been a GOP target for eight years.

Coming one week after a closed-door strategy session in which Republicans expressed frank concerns about the political ramifications of repealing the law and the practical difficulties of doing so, statements this week by Sen. Orrin G. Hatch (R-Utah) and Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.) brought into public view the political and policy challenges the GOP is facing.

Alexander, chairman of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, said at a hearing Wednesday: I think of it as a collapsing bridge. ... You send in a rescue team and you go to work to repair it so that nobody else is hurt by it and you start to build a new bridge, and only when that new bridge is complete, people can drive safely across it, do you close the old bridge. When its complete, we can close the old bridge, but in the meantime, we repair it. No one is talking about repealing anything until there is a concrete practical alternative to offer Americans in its place.

And Hatch, chairman of the Senate Finance Committee another panel with a crucial role in the effort to repeal the ACA said Thursday that he could stand either repealing or repairing the law. Im saying Im open to anything. Anything that will improve the system, Im for, he said.

The comments come one month after Republicans in Congress first set out to immediately repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act. While an increasing number of them have expressed concern about how feasible it is, many others, including House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.), remain committed to a wholesale repeal and replacement.

On Thursday, Ryan tried to right the partys message on health care by insisting that repair is the same thing as replace.

Theres a miscommunication going on, he said Thursday morning on Fox & Friends. If were going to repair the U.S. health-care system ... you must repeal and replace Obamacare.

Although Alexander has advocated a go-slow approach for weeks, Hatch has aggressively pushed to repeal the ACA, including the tax provisions that help pay for subsidies that help low-income individuals pay for insurance.

His comments Thursday seemed to contradict a statement the day before, when he told an audience at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce that he wanted to quickly repeal as much of the law as possible.

I believe that we need to repeal Obamacare immediately, and provide for a stable transition period, Hatch said. In my view, we need to advance replacement policies in tandem with the repeal process. And then we can keep working on the other parts of the system.

Yet Hatch has also consistently warned conservatives that there are limitations to what Congress can do to unwind the law. The Senate has chosen to use a special budget process to walk back as many provisions as possible, but they will be limited to tackling the parts of the ACA that deal with spending, taxes and the deficit.

Concerns over those limitations have created frustration and consternation within the GOP, as was clear on a recording obtained last week by The Washington Post and other news outlets.

(Obtained by The Washington Post)

[Behind closed doors, Republican lawmakers fret about how to repeal Obamacare]

On the recording, made last week at a GOP retreat in Philadelphia, a number of Republicans worried that they would be blamed if the health-care system implodes in the wake of their repeal plans.

Among those most concerned was Alexander, who said: The word repair is a lot better than the word repeal. ... Saying were going to repair the damage is more accurate.

Other Republicans in the House and Senate besides Ryan have tried to regain control of the message in recent days by saying that repair is just another way to explain their replacement plans. Whats less clear is whether concrete plans are underway to dismantle the law.

Sen. John Cornyn (R-Tex.), the No. 2 Republican leader, said Thursday that the procedural process in the Senate and the words used to describe it can be complicated but goal is still the same: getting rid as much of the Affordable Care Act as they can.

It gets a little confusing, Cornyn said. I dont think even if we wanted to repair Obamacare we could do it. Thats why I believe were going to do repeal and replace.

In the House, the messaging has been no less complicated. While the word repair has held appeal for moderates who are wary of repealing Obamacare root and branch, it has raised alarms among fervent conservatives who see in it a potential betrayal of their campaign promises.

If youre talking about repairing the Affordable Care Act, its unrepairable, said Rep. Mark Meadows (R-N.C.), chairman of the hard-right House Freedom Caucus. We need to repeal it. We need to replace it. If you want to call that a repair, so be it, but I dont know that that makes it any more palatable to the folks back home.

Ryan later told reporters on Capitol Hill, Our job is to repair the American health-care system and rescue it from the collapse that its in. And the best way to repair a health-care system is to repeal and replace Obamacare. Its not an either/or.

Rep. Greg Walden (R-Ore.), chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee and a key architect of GOP health-care plans, has favored yet another R-word in recent days: rebuild.

Working with the Trump administration, well take a multi-step, multi-pronged approach to deliver relief and rebuild our health care system so it works for patients, he wrote with fellow committee member Rep. Michael C. Burgess (R-Tex.) in an op-ed published by Morning Consult on Tuesday.

Meanwhile, the Trump administration is working on its initial changes in federal rules under an executive order the president signed his first night in office to ease the ACAs regulatory impact on consumers and segments of the health-care industry.

The possible rule changes, under review by the Office of Management and Budget, would be aimed at helping health insurers keep the laws marketplaces functioning while Congress and the White House try to design new health policies.

According to Edmund Haislmaier, a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation and member of the Trump transition team for the Department of Health and Human Services, the proposed rules being considered could further restrict Americans ability to sign up for ACA health plans outside of the annual open-enrollment season.

They also could require more extensive checks of applicants eligibility for marketplace coverage and prohibit consumers from enrolling in health plans for another year if they are behind on their premium payments.

Amy Goldstein contributed to this report.

Read more at PowerPost

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Two top Republicans open to repairing Obamacare ahead of repeal - Washington Post