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Senate Majority Leader Sen. Mitch McConnell and Speaker of the House Paul Ryan.

Photo illustration by Slate. Photos by Alex Wong/Getty Images and Win McNamee/Getty Images.

Last September, in a classified briefing, the CIA told senior lawmakers that Russia was working to elect Donald Trump president. In that meeting, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell expressed skepticism of the intelligence and questioned its veracity. And he made a threat of sorts. At the time, the Washington Post reported that McConnell made clear to the administration that he would consider any effort by the White House to challenge the Russians publicly an act of partisan politics. Put simply, if President Obama spoke out on Russian interference, McConnell would turn it into a partisan football. The president kept quiet.

Jamelle Bouie isSlates chief political correspondent.

Of the turning points that brought us to our present crisis, this is among the most consequential. McConnells stance in that briefing didnt just enable Russian hacking, it precluded official scrutiny and criticism of that hacking and effectively gave cover to key members of Team Trump as they sought information to use against Hillary Clinton. McConnell downplayed Russian interference for what were likely partisan reasons, with little knowledge of the scope of and even less fear for the far-ranging implications of what he was covering up. And in that, he presaged the response of the entire Republican Party, which didnt just utilize the hacked and leaked information but has looked the other way at every sign of something untoward involving Donald Trump and the Russian government.

Republicans are still looking the other way, even as that stance becomes more and more untenable. And they are looking awayas well as downplaying the seriousness of the issuedespite the real chance that the truth is more damning than what we know at the present, and that it may damage our country more than we want to believe. This see no evil response is especially egregious given recent revelations around Donald Trump Jr. and his efforts to obtain favorable information for his fathers campaign. We now know Trump Jr. responded enthusiastically to what was communicated as part of Russia and its governments support for Mr. Trump and arranged a meeting between himself, the lawyer in question, Jared Kushner, and thencampaign manager Paul Manafortas well as, weve just learned, a former Soviet intelligence official.

The Trump Jr. meeting is just the latest revelation in a kaleidoscope of connections that, even if not illegal (that were aware of as yet), should be alarming to anyone regardless of party. We know of a GOP operative who said he had contacted Russian hackers in an effort to find deleted emails from Hillary Clintons private server, and we know the operative said he was coordinating with Trump loyalist (and later short-time national security adviser) Michael Flynn. We know that Jared Kushner and Attorney General Jeff Sessions have had several contacts with Russian officialsincluding Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyakthat they omitted from official documents, and we know of various contacts and meetings and relationships between various Trump associates and assorted Russian business. It is true we have no concrete evidence of direct cooperation between Team Trump and the Russian government. There is no fire, so far. But there are thick bellows of smoke. We at least know that Trumps campaign was receptive to Russian help, even if they didnt coordinate or collude.

Its an implicit statement that foreign interference is an acceptable path to partisan gain.

There is a response to this, increasingly popular among Trumps defenders: Collusion isnt illegal. But thats almost beside the point. Democracy is only possible if there is confidence in the process, and foreign interventionpotentially solicited by one campaignis deeply damaging to that confidence. It threatens the legitimacy of the entire enterprise. For our system of government, the question of Russian interferenceand the extent of Trumps awareness and involvementis existential.

But that fact, and the steady stream of damning revelations, has not kept GOP lawmakers from giving Trump and his team the benefit of the doubt. Utah Sen. Orrin Hatch called the Donald Trump Jr. story overblown, praising the 39-year-old as a very bright young man, a very nice young man. North Carolina Sen. Thom Tillis called the Trump Jr. emails a distraction. House Speaker Paul Ryan has been subdued, declaring it absolutely unacceptable that Russia has meddled in our elections but also refusing to say if he would have accepted a similar meeting with Russian intermediaries. McConnell punted, deferring to the Senate Intelligence Committee investigation when questioned on recent revelations.

And while other Republicans, like South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham, used harsher language when referring to Team Trumps dalliances with Russia, theres no indication that any Republicans have wavered in their overall support for the Trump administration. There have been no calls for an even deeper investigation, no sense from GOP lawmakers that this is an urgent affair. Republicans are playing a dangerous game: covering up a scandal, without knowing the full scope of the offense.

What if future revelations detail actual collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russian government? Though there is currently no proof, do Republicans really believe the chances are zero that thisor even worse possibilitiesare true? What if strategic use of hacked information gave Trump a critical edge in the election? What if we learn that Russia actually influenced the results? Even if its actions didnt determine the eventual outcome, the resulting doubts would still be real and potent. By allowing the collapse of trust, the Republican Party will have abetted a wholesale subversion of American democracy.

If nothing else, Republican behaviorthe extent to which the party is still powering through a hyper-partisan agenda, even as evidence of something untoward mountsis an implicit statement that foreign interference is an acceptable path to partisan gain. At the risk of clich, it normalizes outside meddling in American democracy. And the 2016 election wont even be the end of Russian interference in our elections. There is real potential for further, more damaging hacking aimed at often-obsolete local election infrastructure. Preventing this is of national concern and requires cooperation from both sides at all levels of government. It requires both parties to show a commitment to the ideals of American democracy.

Unfortunately, its not clear that both parties have that commitment. The GOPs recent enthusiasm for voter ID laws (and the voter suppression they cause) has long since thrown that issue of commitment into question. But the institutional indifference to foreign intervention is something different. It signals a dangerously zero-sum attitude, where any priceincluding subversion from outside forcesis worth paying if it clears a path to partisan and ideological victory. Perhaps the worm will turn and Republicans will join Democrats in demanding real answers from President Trump and his associates. For now, at least, we have a Republican Party that values its success above the integrity of our system.

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The Most Dangerous Game - Slate Magazine

In last Sundays Denver Post, John Ingold wrote a front page story entitled The Faces of Medicaid. In this story he compassionately described a little girl who was disabled, a boy with severe autism and a senior suffering from the Alzheimers disease. Ingold highlighted their dependence on Medicaid, a shared federal/state partnership that provides a health care safety net for the poor and disabled. The Republican-led Congress is now considering significant reforms to Medicaid due to its sky-rocketing costs as part of efforts to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act (ACA), better known as Obamacare.

Historically, Medicaid is a shared costs program with the states and the federal government each paying about half its expenses. The Republican proposal moves Medicaid from its current archaic fee-for-service system to one where states can choose to either accept a fixed capitated amount per enrollee, increased annually by a formula of medical inflation plus one percent per year, or a block grant. Under the block grant, states would receive much more flexibility in how they manage the delivery of care for their Medicaid population and provide relief to their budgets by reducing the cost of delivering medical care. However, for vulnerable patients, like the ones highlighted in The Post story last Sunday, there remains the uncertainty of how changes to Medicaid may impact their access to care. Not surprisingly, the uncertainty of how changes to their care will affect them and their families has created an environment of anxiety and fear of the unknown.

The irony of this is that none of the programs described by Ingold were part of the ACA. What the ACA did was to create the Medicaid expansion program. Medicaid expansion added an entirely new class of recipients to Medicaid by making eligible able-bodied individuals, without dependent children, who earn up to 138% of the federal poverty level. The ACAs Medicaid expansion program has increased the number of Medicaid enrollees across the country by almost a third and is the main driver of Medicaids dramatic increase in spending.

On Tuesday, I sent a letter to Speaker of the House Paul Ryan and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell suggesting that Republicans revisit their approach to ACA reform and break it into three separate initiatives. The first would limit changes to Medicaid to only the ACA-created Medicaid Expansion program and apply any savings as an offset for the taxes and penalties that impact working and middle class families; the second bill would move all other ACA-related taxes out of the health care debate and into the pending tax reform bill; and the third would address the failing health insurance exchanges where individuals not eligible for Medicaid and who do not have employer provided health insurance now go for coverage. This part should be negotiated in a bipartisan manner outside of the filibuster-proof budget reconciliation process.

Medicaid expansion:As noted above, the traditional Medicaid program is a shared responsibility with costs divided about evenly between the federal government and the states. Under the ACA, the Medicaid expansion program has the federal governments share starting at 100% and phasing down to 90% by 2020. It makes no sense to me that the federal government would favor able-bodied adults over all other Medicaid recipients, such as disabled children, whose costs are reimbursed at 50% by the federal government.

The ACAs Medicaid expansion needs to revert to the standard Medicaid cost shares that the states receive for all other Medicaid enrollees. This could be done by phasing it into effect by allowing all Medicaid expansion enrollees up to January 2020 to remain at the 90/10 split indefinitely while all new enrollees from January 2020 are at the standard reimbursement rate for each respective state (50% in Colorado).

Tax reform:There are 21 taxes and penalties in the ACA, many of which have nothing to do with health care. The ACA taxes on higher income Americans, such as the 3.8% surtax on net investment income, are better addressed in the impending tax reform bill, not during the health care debate.

Health insurance reform: The ACA promised lower health insurance rates but we all know that never materialized. Now the health care exchanges, created under the ACA, are failing as health insurance carriers are losing money on the plans offered through the exchanges with more and more of them dropping out of the program. When there are no carriers willing to provide policies for a certain state or region serviced by an exchange, the program collapses and consumers lose the ability to buy income-adjusted subsidized policies. I believe this is an area where Republicans and Democrats can come together to find a bipartisan solution that works to lower health insurance costs while maintaining consumer protections such as preexisting conditions.

Right now we in Congress have a bipartisan opportunity to fix the many problems Americans have in obtaining access to affordable health care and to responsibly address the unsustainable cost of the ACAs Medicaid Expansion.

Mike Coffman, a Republican, represents Colorados 6th Congressional District.

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Three ways Republicans could better reform the ACA - The Denver Post

Make America Great Again was the battle cry of the Republican Party. After five months of pursuing greatness, this is what Republicans have come up with: Gutting the EPA (boiling water is OK). Making America the laughing stock of the world (yeah, that's right, we're crazy). Getting rid of health care (who needs it?). Restricting voter rights (it's OK, Russia will help us). Attacking the free press (that's only for democracies, all hail our dictator). And on and on and on.

Donald Trump as president has broken all the rules of human decency. He lies (daily), cheats, demoralizes and is a womanizer. He is a racist and bigot who exhibits extreme arrogance and pathological insecurities. The religious right is his base (see, we're crazy). But seriously, he is not the big player. Republicans are in their pockets so deep they've sold their souls. The sad thing about all this is his supporters. They still think there is something in it for them. Sorry, Republicans, you've been screwed and you're taking our country down with you.

Read this article:
Letter: Republicans are taking our country down - Salt Lake Tribune

WASHINGTON House Republicans voted Thursday to block an effort aimed at revoking the security clearance of White House senior adviser Jared Kushner.

Several members of Congress have questioned the appropriateness of Kushner maintaining a security clearance following bombshell reports that he met with a Kremlin-linked lawyer who promised incriminating information about 2016 Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clintonduring last years campaign. The presidents son-in-law failed to disclose the meeting, as well as several other meetings with Russian officials, on the security clearance form he submitted before the Trump administration took office.

Knowingly omitting such information is a crime. Kushners lawyers, however, maintain the omissions werean errorand have amended the form.

Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Fla.), who chaired the Democratic National Committee during much of last years campaign cycle, proposed an amendment targeting Kushner during a House Appropriations Committee markup session Thursday. It was voted down, 22-30, along party lines.

The measure would have barred the government from issuing or maintaining a security clearance for any White House individual under a criminal investigation by a Federal law enforcement agency for aiding a foreign government.

Wasserman Schultz also attempted to introduce an amendment that would bar the government from issuing or maintaining a security clearance for White House staff who deliberately fail to disclose meetings with foreign nationals. It was voted down by the same margin.

In addition to the revelations from the past week,The New York Times reported in May that federal and congressional investigators are looking into a December meeting between Kushner and a Russian banker with ties to Russian intelligence. McClatchyalso reported this week that investigators in Congress and the Justice Department are looking into whether the Trump campaigns digital team, which was led by Kushner,directed Russian operatives to key U.S. states.

This amendment is an important step in protecting the American people from the threat of hostile foreign interference. That is not a controversial or a political goal, Wasserman Schultz said during the hearing.

Revoking Jared Kushners security clearance would send a clear signal to anyone who would consider aiding and abetting a foreign enemy state to affect the outcome of a U.S. presidential election that they will not be entrusted with our nations most sensitive information, she added.

Republicans called the move a stunt, arguing that it is unnecessary and unproductive under current federal regulations.

This is already the law, Rep. John Culberson (R-Texas) said. The use of funding prohibitions to deny or remove security clearances is simply a political stunt and utterly unnecessary because security clearances can already be revoked because of criminal conduct.

Reports of Kushners failure to disclose meetings with Russian officials also drew the ire of Democrats in the Senate this week.

There is a crisis of trust that the White House has to deal with, Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) said Wednesday, adding that Kushner ought to resign.

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Republicans Block Effort To Revoke Jared Kushner's Security Clearance - HuffPost

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