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No Wonder the Republicans Hid the Health Bill New York Times Republican House leaders have spent months dodging questions about how they would replace the Affordable Care Act with a better law, and went so far as to hide the draft of their plan from other lawmakers. No wonder. The bill they released on Monday ... Republicans' Obamacare Replacement Just Got A Powerful EnemyHuffington Post Some congressional Republicans speak out against "Trumpcare"CBS News Conservatives rebel against Trump-backed Republican healthcare planReuters Washington Post -NPR -New York Post -Energy and Commerce Committee all 2,155 news articles »

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No Wonder the Republicans Hid the Health Bill - New York Times

It would have been impossible to imagine a year ago that the Republican Party's leaders would be effectively serving as enablers of Russian interference in this country's political system. Yet, astonishingly, that is the role the Republican Party is playing.

U.S. intelligence services have stated that the Russian government interfered in the 2016 presidential election with the intention of swinging it to one side. Knowing how cautious the intelligence community is in making such judgments, and given the significance of this particular finding, the evidence must be compelling. At the very least, any reasonable person would have to conclude that there is enough evidence to warrant a serious, wide-ranging and open investigation. Polls suggest that a majority of Americans would like to see such an investigation carried out.

It's important at this time of intense political conflict to remain focused on the most critical issue. Whether certain individuals met with Russian officials, and whether those meetings were significant, is secondary and can eventually be sorted out. The most important question concerns Russia's ability to manipulate U.S. elections. That is not a political issue. It is a national security issue.

If the Russian government did interfere in the United States' electoral processes last year, then it has the capacity to do so in every election going forward. This is a powerful and dangerous weapon, more than warships or tanks or bombers. Neither Russia nor any potential adversary has the power to damage the U.S. political system with weapons of war. But by creating doubts about the validity, integrity and reliability of U.S. elections, it can shake that system to its foundations.

The United States has not been the only victim. The argument by at least one former Obama administration official and others that last year's interference was understandable payback for past American policies is undermined by the fact that Russia is also interfering in the coming elections in France and Germany, and it has already interfered in Italy's recent referendum and in numerous other elections across Europe. Russia is deploying this weapon against as many democracies as it can to sap public confidence in democratic institutions.

The democracies are going to have to figure out how to respond. With U.S. congressional elections just 20 months away, it is essential to get a full picture of what the Russians did do and can do here, and soon. The longer the American people remain in the dark about Russian manipulations, the longer they will remain vulnerable to them. The longer Congress fails to inform itself, the longer it will be before it can take steps to meet the threat. Unfortunately, the present administration cannot be counted on to do so on its own.

There's no need to ask what Republicans would be doing if the shoe were on the other foot if the Russians had intervened to help elect the Democratic nominee. They would be demanding a bipartisan select committee of Congress, or a congressionally mandated blue-ribbon panel of experts and senior statesmen with full subpoena powers to look into the matter. They would be insisting that, for reasons of national security alone, it was essential to determine what happened: what the Russians did, how they did it and how they could be prevented from doing it again. If that investigation found that certain American individuals had somehow participated in or facilitated the Russian operation, they would insist that such information be made public and that appropriate legal proceedings begin. And if the Democrats tried to slow-roll the investigations, to block the creation of select committees or outside panels, or to insist that investigations be confined to the intelligence committees whose inquiries and findings could be kept from the public, Republicans would accuse them of a coverup and of exposing the nation to further attacks. And they would be right.

But it is the Republicans who are covering up. The party's current leader, President Donald Trump, questions the intelligence community's findings, motives and integrity. Republican leaders in Congress have opposed the creation of any special investigating committee, either inside or outside Congress. They have insisted that inquiries be conducted by the two intelligence committees. Yet Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Calif., the Republican chairman of the committee in the House has indicated that he sees no great urgency to the investigation and has even questioned the seriousness and validity of the accusations. The Republican chairman of the committee in the Senate, Sen. Richard Burr (R-N.C.) has approached the task grudgingly. The result is that the investigations seem destined to move slowly, produce little information and provide even less to the public. It is hard not to conclude that this is precisely the intent of the Republican Party's leadership, both in the White House and Congress.

This approach is not only damaging to U.S. national security but also puts the Republican Party in an untenable position. When Republicans stand in the way of thorough, open and immediate investigations, they become Russia's accomplice after the fact. This is undoubtedly not their intent. No one in the party wants to help Russia harm the United States and its democratic institutions. But Republicans need to face the fact that by slowing down, limiting or otherwise hampering the fullest possible investigation into what happened, that is what they are doing.

It's time for the party to put national security above partisan interest. Republican leaders need to name a bipartisan select committee or create an outside panel, and they need to do so immediately. They must give that committee the mission and all the necessary means for getting to the bottom of what happened last year. And then they must begin to find ways to defend the nation against this new weapon that threatens to weaken American democracy. The stakes are far too high for politics as usual.

Washington Post

Robert Kagan is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and a contributing columnist for The Washington Post.

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Republicans are becoming Russia's accomplices - Chicago Tribune

Republicans took the first step toward reversing the Federal Communication Commissions internet privacy rules today, with 25 senators introducing legislation that would reverse the rules and forbid the commission from passing anything similar to them in the future.

The privacy rules were introduced last year as an addendum of sorts to the 2015 net neutrality order. That order required the FCC to take over enforcement of privacy protection from the Federal Trade Commission, but the FCC needed to pass clear rules in order to effectively do that.

This is largely about sharing your web browsing habits

The FCCs rules mostly align with the FTCs privacy framework, but they differ in two key ways: the FCC makes internet providers protect your web browsing history, and the FCC has much more leeway to actually enforce its rules.

Of course, neither of those distinctions are things that internet providers like. So theyve been fighting to overturn them.

For the most part, Republicans just want to see the FCC scale back its rules to more closely match the FTCs. At a minimum, thatll mean letting internet providers share your web browsing history so that they can make more ad money.

Its not clear how quickly Republicans intend to move on this, but, one way or another, these privacy rules are probably going down. Republicans can move forward with this legislation, which would require a majority vote in both houses and a signature from the president. Or they could wait around for the FCC to kill the rules on its own commission chairman Ajit Pai has already indicated his plans to do that.

Senator Flake wants the FCC to follow the FTC on privacy

In Congress, Republicans are relying on the Congressional Review Act to reverse the rules. The act allows recently enacted rules to be reviewed and reversed by a new Congress, and its getting thrown around regularly as a way for Republicans to quickly undo many Obama administration actions from last year.

The big question, if the privacy rules are overturned by Congress, is what the FCC will do next. The law would prevent the FCC from passing any rules that are substantially the same as the ones overturned, but its not clear whatll qualify as different enough to clear that bar, especially since the changes Republicans are pushing for arent very dramatic.

At the very least, Republicans have made it clear what they want the FCC to pass. In a Wall Street Journal op-ed published earlier this month, Senator Jeff Flake (R-AZ), who authored the resolution introduced today, said he wanted to scrap the current privacy rules in the hope that [the FCC] would follow the FTCs successful sensitivity-based framework.

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Republicans introduce resolution to kill FCC's internet privacy rules - The Verge

WASHINGTON Employers who cheat their workers or endanger their lives now have one less thing to worry about, courtesy of the GOP Congress.

Senate Republicans voted Monday to kill an executive order issued by former President Barack Obama known as the Fair Pay and Safe Workplaces rule. The 49-48 vote, with all Democrats opposed, eliminates a regulation issued late in Obamas presidency that would have made it harder for companies to secure federal contracts if they have a documented history of wage theft or workplace hazards.

Following in the footsteps of House Republicans, GOP senators used whats known as a resolution of disapproval under the Congressional Review Act. The obscure procedural maneuver requires only a simply majority, meaning Senate Democrats had no hope of stopping it through a filibuster. In passing the resolution, Republicans not only killed the rule, but also made sure the Labor Department never puts forward a similar rule again, unless Congress tells it to.

President Donald Trump is expected to sign off on the resolution, peeling back yet another regulation on employers.

Its insane, said Debbie Berkowitz, a workplace safety expert at the National Employment Law Project, a nonprofit that advocates for low-wage workers. This is really a vote against working families. Theres been a big misinformation campaign by big business.

Obamas rule would have required companies seeking federal contracts to disclose violations of labor law including minimum wage, overtime, and health and safety statutes over the previous three years. Federal agencies would have been able to consider those violations when doling out contracts.

Backers of the rule, which included Democrats and worker groups, said it would have helped assure that the nations most unscrupulous employers arent rewarded with taxpayer dollars. Republicans and business groups claimed it would have unfairly punished companies without giving them due process. They dubbed it the blacklisting rule.

But even a record of violations wouldnt have precluded a company from receiving contracts. Under the rule, firms bidding for contracts would have had the opportunity to explain mitigating circumstances and steps they took to address the problem. The Obama White House said the goal of the rule was to get companies in compliance with the law.

Studies have shown that many federal contractors routinely break workplace laws, and many continue to receive contracts regardless of violations.

The Labor Department estimated that the rule would have applied toroughly 14,000 contractorseach year. Only a small share of these companies is expected to have reportable violations, and even fewer are expected to have serious, repeated, willful, or pervasive violations to report, the department noted.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) released a report ahead of Mondays vote that found 66 of the governments 100 largest contractors have broken labor laws.

As Republicans and the Trump White House race to kill regulations, the Labor Department has become a top target. Last week, House Republicans used the Congressional Review Act in an effort to undo a different labor rule, one that would require employers to keep better record of workplace injuries. The Senate has not yet voted on that measure.

Passed in 1996, the Congressional Review Act enablesCongressto dismantle a regulation within 60 days of it being finalized, while also forbidding agencies from rolling out a similar regulation in the future. In general, it could only be used successfully when one party holds both chambers of Congress and takes control of the White House.

Any regulations that Obama did not finalize early enough before he left office could now be wiped out through the Congressional Review Act.Republicans have successfully used the act to repeal more than a dozen regulations in the first few weeks of Trumps tenure. Until this year, the act had only been used successfully once, in 2001, when Republicans blocked a workplace safety rule put forth at the end of the Clinton administration.

The most interesting and troubling thing about this is that it may very well be the ultimate block on modernizing workplace standards, Celine McNicholas, labor counsel for the Economic Policy Institute, recentlytold The Huffington Post.

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Republicans Just Made It Easier For Companies To Exploit Workers ... - Huffington Post

President Donald Trump's weekend allegations of a "Nixon/Watergate" plot to wiretap his 2016 campaign confused intelligence analysts, befuddled members of Congress and created fresh work for fact-checkers. Within 24 hours of his allegations, made on Twitter, the administration conceded that the president was basing his claim not on closely held information, but on a Breitbart News story quoting the conservative radio host and author Mark Levin.

But in conservative media, where the claim originated, Trump has gotten credit for cracking open a plot by a "deep state" of critics and conspirators to bring down his presidency. And the perpetrator is former president Barack Obama.

"It would [seem] that the 'Russia hacking' story was concocted not just to explain away an embarrassing election defeat, but to cover up the real scandal," wrote Breitbart's senior editor-at-large Joel Pollak.

"Trump confounds these people because he's always a step or two ahead," Rush Limbaugh told his listeners on Monday. "It's a direct line to the Democrat Party and Obama and members of the Obama administration that Trump is signaling, 'You don't face the usual feckless bunch of opponents who never fight you back.'"

Trump's wiretap allegations completed a feedback loop that started during the presidential campaign and has gotten sturdier since. The president's media diet includes cable television news shows, like "Fox and Friends," where guests and hosts regularly defend him. On Twitter, he frequently elevates stories that grew in conservative talk radio, or on sites like Breitbart News and InfoWars, out of view of a startled mainstream media. Monday's news cycle demonstrated just how strong the loop was, as Levin himself appeared on Fox News for 12 barely interrupted minutes to share his theory that the alleged wiretapping was a political hit job.

"Donald Trump is the victim. His campaign is the victim," said Levin, as a Fox News "alert" scrolled over the screen. "These are police state tactics. If this had been done to Barack Obama, all hell would break loose. And it should."

A spokesman for the former president denied that Obama or a White House official requested surveillance of a U.S. citizen. And FBI Director James Comey asked the Justice Department to issue a statement refuting President Trump's charge (it has not thus far).

Republicans in Congress tend to give the president the benefit of their doubt. In interviews and comments since Saturday, they have suggested that Trump overstated what was known - conflating, for example, media reports on wiretapping with a growing theory that the Obama administration seeded operatives throughout the government to undo his presidency. But they have paired that critique with promises to study what he's alleged.

"The president has at his fingertips tens of billions of dollars in intelligence apparatus," said Rep. Jason Chaffetz, R-Utah, the chairman of the House Oversight Committee, in a Monday interview with CBS News. "I think he might have something there, but if not, we're going to find out."

"The good news is there's a paper trail, there's a warrant, there's an application, there's judicial review," said Rep. Trey Gowdy, R-S.C., in a Monday interview with radio host Laura Ingraham, a die-hard Trump supporter. "And right now the Justice Department is not controlled by President Obama. It's controlled by Jeff Sessions."

Rep. Steve King, R-Iowa, in a tweet to the president, went even further, saying that Trump "needs to purge Leftists from executive branch before disloyal, illegal and treasonist (sic) acts sink us."

That story line was building long before Trump embraced it. Its origins were relatively banal. One week after the 2016 election, Obama told members of his campaign group, Organizing for America, that the Trump years would be boom times for activism.

"Now is the time for some organizing," Obama said, according to a transcript published by the White House at the time. "An election just finished, so it's not going to be straight political organizing, but it is going to be raising awareness; it's going to be the work you're doing in nonprofits and advocacy and community-building. And over time, what's going to happen is, is that you will reinvigorate and inform our politics in ways that we can't anticipate."

Since then, OFA, which has spent years as a punching bag for Democrats who thought it diverted resources from the party, has earned surprising new status as a boogeyman. The rebuilt group has helped promote and organize protests and raucous town hall meetings to pressure Republican members of Congress. On Feb. 18, New York Post columnist Paul Sperry tied together what was publicly known to pin the protests on Obama and OFA.

"It's a radical [Saul] Alinsky group," Sperry told Fox News's Sean Hannity after the story ran. "It's got a lot of money. And they're training an army of agitators to sabotage Trump and his policies, while at the same time protecting Obama's legacy, like 'Obamacare' and the DREAMers. And here is OFA listed prominently on Obama's new Web site, OFA Organizing for Action."

In the days after that broadcast, as OFA watched, its Facebook page started to receive angry comments and threats.

"If they ever come to my town I'll be eagerly awaiting with my 12 gauge loaded with ball and buck," wrote one commentator, Gary Whitson.

"This site is an American Terrorist site degrading our intelligence with misinformation," wrote a critic named Don Whitehall. "No shadow government in America"

"OFA is a nonprofit group dedicated to grassroots organizing, which is exactly what we've been doing since 2013," said communications director Jesse Lehrich. "We have volunteer-led chapters around the country who are working to engage their friends and neighbors to enact positive change in their communities. These conspiracy theories swirling through the conservative media-verse aren't just perplexing, they're dangerous."

The former president has given his blessing to the National Democratic Redistricting Committee, a project created to help his party undo Republican-drawn legislative maps. He made calls to help his former Secretary of Labor Tom Perez become chair of the Democratic National Committee, and congratulated him when he won. And he recorded a video for his post-presidential foundation, telling supporters "true democracy is a project that's bigger than any one of us."

Apart from that, Obama has maintained a low profile in the post-election world, with allies acknowledging that he's been absent as protests have built against his successor. At a Tuesday media briefing, former Attorney General Eric Holder said that the former president was ready to become a "more visible" supporter of the project.

"It's coming. He's coming," said. "And he's ready to roll."

That comment caused a minor frenzy with the online right. InfoWars, the conspiracy news site run by Alex Jones, republished a story about the comment, and followed it with rumors about the new activity. "Obama's goal to 'oust' Trump from presidency via impeachment or resignation," wrote InfoWars commentator Paul Joseph Watson on Thursday. On Friday, the site blew up a report about banks settling with nonprofit groups after fraud lawsuits to tell readers that Obama had "funneled billions to liberal activist groups."

More mainstream sites have also stoked theories that Obama was pulling strings. Last Wednesday, the Daily Mail published an interview with an unnamed "close family friend," who claimed that former White House adviser Valerie Jarrett had moved into Obama's D.C. home to help "mastermind the insurgency" against Trump.

"The Daily Mail story is completely false," said Kevin Lewis, a spokesman for the former president.

But the Jarrett story went viral on the right; on a Fox Business segment over the weekend, the radio host Tammy Bruce cited as an "under-covered" revelation that demonstrated the forces arrayed against Trump. In her Monday interview with Gowdy, Ingraham argued that a Watergate-level scandal was building - but at one point, she suggested, hopefully, that the president was not simply basing his rhetoric on what was in conservative media.

"He must know something beyond what's on Breitbart," Ingraham said.

"I would hope," said Gowdy, "given the fact that he's the leader of the free world."

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Trump and Republicans see a 'deep state' foe: Barack Obama - Chicago Tribune