[AMV] Amerikaanse politiek #334 Worstelend door het Capitool

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Op woensdag 5 juli 2017 10:30 schreef Verfassungsschutz het volgende:

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Hij heeft het er maar druk mee, die linkse boef.

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Op woensdag 5 juli 2017 10:37 schreef Boze_Appel het volgende:

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Er is nergens bekend dat hij 15 is. Hoeveel 15-jarigen ken jij die hun 'morning coffee' drinken?

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HanAssholeSolo has identified as as a fan of the Half-Life series of video games, an ex-smoker and a military veteran. The user appears to live in Tennessee and to have a permit to carry a concealed weapon.

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Op woensdag 5 juli 2017 10:48 schreef klappernootopreis het volgende:

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ik kan me indenken dat hij dit een geweldig filmpje vind, dit soort "humor" heeft Donald wel van zijn politiek erg schimmige vader Fred meegekregen.

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What Tom Perriello’s Loss in Virginia Can Teach Democrats

first encountered Tom Perriello, who lost the Virginia Democratic gubernatorial primary, on June 13th, almost twenty years ago. I had written an article about Bill Clinton’s disastrous foreign policy in West Africa, which bolstered one of the region’s worst war criminals, President Charles Taylor, of Liberia, and strengthened his grip on neighboring Sierra Leone. Perriello read the piece and shared some of my outrage at American policy there. He called me and we chatted about the yin and yang between realism and moralism in American foreign policy. While I had written the piece entirely from a desk in Washington, Perriello was inspired to move to West Africa and work as an adviser to the prosecutor for the Special Court for Sierra Leone. The tribunal, established jointly by the U.N. and the government of Sierra Leone, was charged with prosecuting war criminals in the region’s long-running conflicts. In an audacious and controversial move, the prosecutor for whom Perriello worked unsealed an indictment against Taylor while he was visiting Ghana, making him the first sitting head of state since Yugoslavia’s Slobodan Milosevic to be indicted by an international court. Taylor fled back to the safety of Liberia, but, thanks to pressure from the Bush Administration, he stood trial and was convicted at the Special Court, in 2012. He will spend the rest of his life in jail in the U.K.
Perriello played a crucial role in bringing one of the worst murderers of the twenty-first century to justice. The next time I heard from Perriello was in late 2008, just after he won an upset victory—by less than a thousand votes—over a longtime Republican congressman from Virginia, where Perriello grew up. Perhaps being overly generous because he was an incoming member of Congress who needed media contacts, he called and reminded me that his career in public service all started with that article I had written. As a journalist, you tend not to forget those kinds of calls, and I’ve always followed his career with interest.
Perriello was swept out of office two years later, when midterm voters turned ferociously against Obama and the House of Representatives flipped into Republican hands. Obama and many of his aides retained a special affection for Perriello as someone who championed much of their ambitious early agenda despite the difficult politics of his district. He worked briefly at the Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank, before Secretary of State John Kerry brought him into the State Department, where Perriello had a notable—and under-covered—achievement late last year. He helped broker an agreement that could lead to the Democratic Republic of the Congo's first peaceful transition of power.
As he was wrapping up that work, Donald Trump was preparing to become President. Perriello decided to run for governor of Virginia—one of only two states that elects its governors in the odd year after each Presidential election and so, along with New Jersey, is often seen as the first real referendum on an incumbent President.

“The election of Donald Trump was not just some transfer of power from Democrats to Republicans,” Perriello, who is forty-two, told me earlier this week, as we discussed the lessons of his losing campaign to secure the Democratic gubernatorial nomination. “It was really the rise of at least a wannabe racial demagogue on U.S. soil. The response to that was going to be extremely important, and it was going to start in Virginia. So we closed up the peace deal in Congo at 11:00 p.m. on New Year’s Eve and launched the campaign for governor January 5th.”
Perriello lost the primary by almost twelve points. His main lesson of running for office in the era of Trump is a little surprising. “The single biggest thing that I took away from this campaign,” he said, “is that whichever party ends up figuring out how to speak about two economic issues—automation and monopoly—will not only be doing right by the country but will have a massive electoral advantage.”
In many ways, Perriello’s race in the Virginia primary was as much of a long shot as the Congo peace deal. His opponent, Ralph Northam, the lieutenant governor, was older and more established in the state. (He attended the Virginia Military Institute, while Perriello went to Yale as both an undergraduate and for a law degree.) Northam already had the backing of most top Virginia Democrats, including Governor Terry McAuliffe, one of Bill and Hillary Clinton’s closest friends, and the two Democratic senators—Tim Kaine, Hillary’s 2016 running mate, and Mark Warner.
Perriello had some other big problems. He had trouble distinguishing himself ideologically from Northam, who moved to the left on a host of issues, including adopting a minimum wage of fifteen dollars per hour, two years of free community college, and comprehensive criminal justice reform. But Northam also pilloried Perriello from the left on abortion, because Perriello once voted on an amendment during the Obamacare debate that would have prevented the use of federal funds for insurance coverage of abortions.
Perriello was also outspent and outraised. He won the backing of Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, and thirty former Obama staffers, and the primary was cast in the media as a fight between the Democratic Party’s populist and establishment wings. But the national fundraising networks of the left never adopted Perriello as a priority. (Northam had a four million dollar spending advantage.) Instead, most of the Netroots energy and dollars focused on the special congressional election in Georgia, where Democrat Jon Ossoff raised an astounding twenty-three million dollars but still lost. There are no limits on donations in Virginia, and Perriello relied on a few wealthy donors—or “angel investors,” as Perriello prefers to call them—who wrote six-figure checks, which was slightly awkward for the populist candidate.
Perriello also ended up losing his anti-Trump edge over Northam, an Army veteran who was originally reluctant to run as a fierce voice of #TheResistance. But in a TV ad on which he ended up spending the most money, Northam, who is a neurologist, looked straight to camera and, in a weirdly matter-of-fact way, called Trump a “narcissistic maniac.” (The ad was in heavy rotation on D.C. television, especially the cable news channels, and Trump himself, who watches hours of cable news, almost certainly would have seen it.)
Finally, the Washington Post, which endorsed Northam late in the campaign, had an enormous impact on the race. Perriello’s internal polls showed a fifteen-point swing against him in the last ten days of the race after the endorsement.
Despite the loss, Perriello thinks there are some lessons for progressive Democrats who believe that anti-Trumpism is enough to win. “I think it’s important for Democrats to keep a couple of things in mind right now,” Perriello said about what he learned. “One is not to assume that all anti-Trump energy is pro-Democratic energy. We have to go out and earn those votes. And I think, related to that, it’s important for us not just to be addressing Trump, but the forces that gave rise to Trump.”
Trump, he believes, has been the result of “a coming collision course between the rise of economic anxiety due to the disappearance of work and the persistence of structural and overt racism. One of the silliest conversations we’re having in Democratic politics is whether the Presidential election was about economic anxiety or racism. My answer to that is, ‘Yes.’ Those two have always gone hand in hand. So for us to not speak out forcefully about the structural and overt racism would be to not be doing our job as progressives, but we can’t miss the implications of a genuine shift in the economics of the United States.”
Despite being cast as the candidate of the populist left, Perriello did better with less-traditional Democratic constituencies. “We did really well with all the groups that Democrats are struggling with,” he said, “young voters, rural voters, diaspora, communities of color, voters below the age of sixty-five. And we did terribly with all the people that are going to vote with Democrats no matter what.”
He found a major disconnect between how the economically struggling parts of the state understood the big economic trends in the country, compared with voters in the more upscale areas.
“When I talked to Trump voters, I talked about the fact that he’s half right about 5.7 million manufacturing jobs being lost in the last decade, and that that’s devastating communities,” Perriello said. “But then I’d ask that room, ‘Can anyone tell me where eighty-five per cent of them went? And when I was in red parts of the country, every hand went up and said, ‘technology and automation.’ And when I was in the blue parts, say, at a donor meeting, and it might be one or two hands that got that.”
Perriello announced this week that he will run a new pac to focus on helping Democrats win seats in the Virginia House of Delegates. Ideally, he said, the group will serve as “an innovation hub for testing better strategies for campaigning, which could then be useful to candidates across the country in 2018, both in terms of messaging and how Democrats run in the Trump era.”
His main insight on that front so far is that his party needs to harness the revulsion to Trump that exists in many quarters with an economic message that has been lacking. “If Democrats lazily think that anti-Trump energy is pro-Democratic Party energy,” he said, “we’re going to miss a generational opportunity to realign people’s political identities.”

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Op woensdag 5 juli 2017 10:59 schreef Monolith het volgende:
Stukje over Tom Perriello:

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bron

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What Can Trump Do About North Korea? His Options Are Few and Risky

When President-elect Donald J. Trump said on Twitter in early January that a North Korean test of an intercontinental ballistic missile capable of reaching the United States “won’t happen!” there were two things he still did not fully appreciate: how close Kim Jong-un, the North’s leader, was to reaching that goal, and how limited any president’s options were to stop him.

The ensuing six months have been a brutal education for President Trump. With North Korea’s launch on Tuesday of what the administration confirmed was an intercontinental ballistic missile, the country has new reach. Experts said the North Koreans had crossed a threshold — if just barely — with a missile that could potentially strike Alaska.

Mr. Kim’s repeated missile tests show that a more definitive demonstration that he can reach the American mainland cannot be far away, even if it may be a few years before he can fit a nuclear warhead onto his increasingly powerful missiles. But for Mr. Trump and his national security team, Tuesday’s technical milestone simply underscores tomorrow’s strategic dilemma.

A North Korean ability to reach the United States, as former Defense Secretary William J. Perry noted recently, “changes every calculus.” The fear is not that Mr. Kim would launch a pre-emptive attack on the West Coast; that would be suicidal, and if the North’s 33-year-old leader has demonstrated anything in his five years in office, he is all about survival. But if Mr. Kim has the potential ability to strike back, it will shape every decision Mr. Trump and his successors make about defending America’s allies in the region.

For years, the North’s medium-range missiles have been able to reach South Korea and Japan with ease, and American intelligence officials believe the missiles are capable of carrying nuclear warheads.

But this latest test suggests that the United States may already be in range as well, and that, as one former top American intelligence official noted recently, would put enormous pressure on American missile defenses that few trust to work.

On Tuesday, Mr. Trump’s secretary of state, Rex W. Tillerson, called for “global action” and for the United Nations Security Council to “enact stronger measures” against the North’s government in Pyongyang. He added that the United States would consider nations that provide economic or military help to North Korea to be “aiding and abetting a dangerous regime.”

Mr. Trump still has some time to act. What the North Koreans accomplished while Americans focused on Independence Day celebrations was a breakthrough, but not a vivid demonstration of their nuclear reach.

Their missile traveled only about 580 miles, by itself no great achievement. But it got there by taking a 1,700-mile trip into space and re-entering the atmosphere, a flight that lasted 37 minutes by the calculation of the United States Pacific Command (and a few minutes longer according to the North Koreans).

Flatten that out, and you have a missile that could reach Alaska, but not Los Angeles. That bolsters the assessment of the director of the Missile Defense Agency, Vice Adm. James D. Syring, who said at a congressional hearing last month that the United States “must assume that North Korea can reach us with a ballistic missile.”

Perhaps that is why Mr. Trump has not issued any “red lines” that the North Koreans cannot step over.

He has not even repeated the policy that President George W. Bush laid out in October 2006 after the North’s first nuclear test: that he would hold the country “fully accountable” if it shared its nuclear technology with any other nation or terrorist group. Mr. Trump’s advisers say they see little merit in drawing lines that could limit options, and they would rather keep the North guessing.

So what are Mr. Trump’s options, and what are their downsides?

There is classic containment: limiting an adversary’s ability to expand its influence, as the United States did against a much more powerful foe, the Soviet Union. But that does not solve the problem; it is just a way of living with it.

He could step up sanctions, bolster the American naval presence off the Korean Peninsula — “we’re sending an armada,” he boasted in April — and accelerate the secret American cyberprogram to sabotage missile launches. But if that combination of intimidation and technical wizardry had been a success, Mr. Kim would not have conducted the test on Tuesday, knowing that it would lead only to more sanctions, more military pressure and more covert activity — and perhaps persuade China that it has no choice but to intervene more decisively.

So far, Mr. Trump’s early enthusiasm that he had cajoled China’s president, Xi Jinping, to crack down on the North has resulted in predictable disappointment. Recently, he told Mr. Xi that the United States was prepared to go it alone in confronting North Korea, but the Chinese may consider that an empty threat.

He could also take another step and threaten pre-emptive military strikes if the United States detects an imminent launch of an intercontinental ballistic missile — maybe one intended to demonstrate the potential reach to the West Coast. Mr. Perry argued for that step in 2006, in an op-ed in The Washington Post that he wrote with a future defense secretary, Ashton B. Carter. “If North Korea persists in its launch preparations, the United States should immediately make clear its intention to strike and destroy” the missile on the pad, they wrote.

But Mr. Perry noted recently that “even if you think it was a good idea at the time” — and he now seems to have his doubts — “it’s not a good idea today.”

The reason is simple: In the intervening 11 years, the North has built too many missiles, of too many varieties, to make the benefits of a strike like that worth the risk. It has test-flown a new generation of solid-fuel missiles, which can be easily hidden in mountain caves and rolled out for quick launch.

And the North Koreans still possess their ultimate weapon of retaliation: artillery along the northern edge of the Demilitarized Zone that can take out the South’s capital, Seoul, a city of approximately 10 million people and one of the most vibrant economic hubs of Asia.

In short, that is a risk the North Koreans are betting even Mr. Trump, for all his threats, would not take. “A conflict in North Korea,” Defense Secretary Jim Mattis said on CBS’s “Face the Nation” in May, “would be probably the worst kind of fighting in most people’s lifetimes.”

Which leads to the next option, the one that South Korea’s new president, Moon Jae-in, talked about in Washington on Friday when he visited Mr. Trump: negotiation. It would start with a freeze on North Korea’s nuclear and missile tests in return for an American agreement to limit or suspend military exercises with South Korea. Mr. Xi has long urged that approach, and it won an endorsement on Tuesday from President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, after he met with the Chinese leader.

That, too, carries risks. It essentially achieves the North Korean and Chinese goal of limiting American military freedom of action in the Pacific, and over time it would erode the quality of the American-South Korean military deterrent.
Negotiating with the North is hardly a new idea: President Bill Clinton tried it in 1994, and Mr. Bush in the last two years of his term. But both discovered that over time, once the North Koreans determined that the economic benefits were limited, the deals fell apart.

Moreover, a freeze at this late date, when the North is estimated to have 10 to 20 nuclear weapons, essentially acknowledges that the North’s modest arsenal is here to stay.

Mr. Tillerson said as much when he visited Seoul in mid-March and told reporters that he would probably reject any solution that would enshrine “a comprehensive set of capabilities” in the North. He has since softened his public comments. Administration officials now suggest that a freeze would not be a solution, but a way station to a nuclear-free Korean Peninsula — in other words, an agreement that Mr. Kim would give up all his nuclear weapons and missiles.

But it is now clear that Mr. Kim has no interest in giving up that power. As he looks around the world, he sees cases like that of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi of Libya, an authoritarian who gave up his nascent nuclear program, only to be deposed, with American help, as soon as his people turned against him. That is what Mr. Kim believes his nuclear program will prevent — an American effort to topple him.

He may be right.

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Op woensdag 5 juli 2017 11:17 schreef KrappeAuto het volgende:
Ik heb ook nooit goed begrepen waarom Monolith dit topic gebruikt voor willekeurige linkdumps.

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Op woensdag 5 juli 2017 11:17 schreef KrappeAuto het volgende:
Ik heb ook nooit goed begrepen waarom Monolith dit topic gebruikt voor willekeurige linkdumps.

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Op woensdag 5 juli 2017 11:19 schreef clumsy_clown het volgende:

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God behoede dat je een discussie voert met verschillende breed uiteengezette argumenten, informatie en inzichten.

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Op woensdag 5 juli 2017 11:20 schreef Monolith het volgende:

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Er is weinig willekeurig aan. Dit topic gaat over de Amerikaanse politiek. Ik post nieuwsartikelen en opiniestukken over de Amerikaanse politiek. Daar is dit topic ook voor bedoeld naast inhoudelijke politieke discussies. Als het je niet bevalt, dan lees je het niet. Veel users waarderen het wel.

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Het lijkt me handiger dat er een zandbakversie van POL komt waar jij, Elzies, Ulx en andere users lekker op kleuterniveau kunnen discussiëren.

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Op woensdag 5 juli 2017 11:24 schreef KrappeAuto het volgende:

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De keren dat Monolith's linkdumps hebben geleid tot een brede discussie zijn <10%.

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Op woensdag 5 juli 2017 11:30 schreef Freak188 het volgende:

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Omdat met feiten niet te discussiëren is. Dus daar kan geen complottheorie op losgelaten worden.

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The Narrow Path Forward For The GOP Health Insurance Bill

Despite a setback last week, the outlines of a Republican health care bill that could pass the Senate are emerging. But senior Republican aides and strategists on and off Capitol Hill told FiveThirtyEight that they are not optimistic and that they see clear challenges with the bill’s path forward, largely because of differences between the party’s more moderate wing and its conservatives.

In a clear illustration of those tensions, Senate Republicans missed two self-imposed, informal deadlines last week. A scheduled vote on a “motion to proceed” to start the formal process of passing the bill was postponed after members said they would oppose even this procedural step. Then senators failed to reach an agreement on the bill that would have allowed the party to move forward. Majority Leader Mitch McConnell reportedly sent at least two draft bills to the Congressional Budget Office to have them scored at the end of last week, but that’s only a partial step forward; Senate leaders routinely ask the CBO to score bills that will never be brought to the floor.

At the same time, Republicans, including President Trump, seem determined to pass some form of health care legislation to repeal and replace parts of the Affordable Care Act. So here are the three main steps to passage, according to interviews with people close to the process and details that have emerged publicly.

Step 1: Adopt Ted Cruz’s amendment to win over Cruz, Ron Johnson and Mike Lee.

Only hours after McConnell unveiled his draft bill on June 22, Sens. Ted Cruz of Texas, Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, Mike Lee of Utah and Rand Paul of Kentucky released a joint statement criticizing the bill as insufficiently conservative.

Cruz has proposed a major amendment to the bill. You might remember that the House version of the health care bill was changed, at the request of the conservative House Freedom Caucus, to allow states to waive some Obamacare rules, a shift that could allow insurers to charge people with pre-existing conditions more than other enrollees and to cover fewer services. McConnell’s bill, called the Better Care Reconciliation Act, had a similar provision. But Cruz wants to take this a step further.1 How would this work? Under Obamacare, all health care plans must cover at least 10 designated benefits, including maternity care, mental health care and emergency services. Cruz is proposing to allow insurance companies in each state to sell policies that don’t comply with this and other regulations, as long as the insurer is also selling some plans that do meet the full list of requirements.

The proposal aligns with conservatives’ anti-regulation stance. Conservatives such as Cruz argue that premiums are too high under Obamacare because health insurance has too many requirements. And if you are relatively healthy, Cruz’s proposal could save you money, since you could buy a cheaper insurance plan that didn’t cover benefits that you thought you were unlikely to need. But the provision could dramatically increase costs for people who already have illnesses. Why? People who don’t have specific health care needs are likely to choose a cheaper plan with less coverage. That would leave people with health issues or pre-existing conditions buying into the plans that met the Obamacare regulations. In turn, the cost of those more comprehensive plans could skyrocket. (A possible exception would be if the risk were pooled between the two kinds of plans; it’s not yet clear how this would work under Cruz’s amendment.)

Whatever its pluses and minuses, Cruz’s idea seems to have legs. Both Axios and the Washington Examiner reported that Republicans sent the proposal to the CBO for evaluation. And in an interview on Fox News Sunday, Marc Short, Trump’s director of legislative affairs, confirmed that the Cruz idea had been sent to the CBO and suggested that the Trump administration backed the proposal.

All of this should sound familiar. During the House health care bill process, the Freedom Caucus balked — but then added provisions that moved the bill to the right and helped get the legislation passed. You could imagine Cruz, Lee and Johnson doing something similar in response to Cruz’s amendment. Notice that I don’t necessarily include Paul in this group; more about him later.

McConnell may have to overcome one additional obstacle that House Speaker Paul Ryan did not face, however. There are questions about whether the Cruz provision follows the Senate’s reconciliation rules, the process by which senators hope to pass their bill with 51 votes rather than 60. The Senate parliamentarian could kill the Cruz amendment or force a substantial rewrite.

Step 2: Target additional spending — and perhaps reduce tax cuts — to win over Shelley Moore Capito, Rob Portman and Lisa Murkowski.

There’s a big, obvious potential problem with changing the bill in the way that Cruz wants: It could irritate moderates who are already wary of the legislation. Senators including Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia, Susan Collins of Maine, Dean Heller of Nevada, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Rob Portman of Ohio already view McConnell’s legislation as too harsh in several respects, such as in its substantial cuts to Medicaid, the insurance program for low-income people.

The Cruz amendment would make matters worse with these moderates, especially if it gets an unfavorable CBO score. In December, the CBO stated that it might not count health care plans as “insurance” if they don’t offer enough financial protection or cover enough services. If the CBO feels that way about the bare-bones plans that Cruz’s amendment would allow, that could bump the projected number of uninsured higher than the 22 million additional uninsured that the CBO says would result if McConnell’s draft bill became law. Also, the CBO could conclude that the costs of insurance for people with pre-existing conditions would vastly increase under this legislation. The moderates would not greet these changes warmly.

So what’s the path forward for moderates? Let’s assume the CBO does not report a major increase in the number of uninsured people under the Cruz amendment. (If the CBO did report such an increase, McConnell might never bring the amendment to the floor.) Let’s also assume that McConnell’s primary focus is on winning over Capito, Portman and Murkowski and that Collins and Heller — who come from states won by Hillary Clinton in 2016 — will be harder to flip.

The CBO scored the original McConnell draft, with its Medicaid cuts and tax cuts, as saving the government $321 billion through 2026. By contrast, the House’s bill was scored as producing $119 billion in deficit reduction. Under reconciliation rules, the Senate’s bill must reduce the deficit by at least as much as the House’s. So the Senate has about $200 billion over 10 years to work with to make the bill more enticing to some members.

That gives McConnell room to create new provisions in the legislation or to add money to existing parts of it to appeal to moderates. There was only $2 billion in funds in his original bill specifically designated to deal with opioid abuse, for example. Drastically boosting that money — Republicans are considering putting in an additional $45 billion — could help win the votes of Capito and Portman, whose states have been hit hard by the opioid epidemic.

Alaska, where health care is exceptionally expensive to deliver, has its own issues. But congressional leaders have never lacked for creative solutions to local problems when they’re seeking to get key votes on board — such as the so-called “Louisiana Purchase” that Democrats used to secure Sen. Mary Landrieu’s vote on Obamacare, or the “Buffalo Buyoff” that Ryan used to win votes from upstate New York for the House’s version of the Republican bill. Perhaps McConnell could appease Murkowski by adding provisions to increase Medicaid funding for states that have very low population densities, for example.

Republicans are also considering keeping in place a 3.8 percent tax on investment income for couples who earn more than $250,000 a year. (The tax, which was introduced as part of Obamacare, would be repealed in McConnell’s draft bill.) The funds from that tax could be put toward Medicaid — thereby reducing the proposed cuts to the program — or toward slightly increasing subsidies for people who buy insurance on the exchanges set up by Obamacare.

Rolling back the tax cuts has some political risks. It could annoy anti-tax conservative groups such as Heritage Action for America and senators such as Cruz. It could also irritate conservatives in the House, which will have to vote on and approve any bill that passes the Senate. (Both chambers must pass the same version of any bill, and the House probably couldn’t pass the Senate’s version if the House Freedom Caucus opposed it.)

But again, there is a history here that should encourage Republicans and worry Democrats. On the eve of the health care vote in the House, GOP leaders were simultaneously able to add provisions that placated moderates — such as $8 billion of funding aimed at helping people with pre-existing conditions — and keep the Freedom Caucus on board.

Step 3: Appeal to party loyalty to get Rand Paul and other reluctant Republicans on board.

There’s another bloc of members who have not been as specific about their concerns about the bill but are not enthusiastic about it; Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, Jeff Flake of Arizona, Cory Gardner of Colorado, John McCain of Arizona, Ben Sasse of Nebraska and Bob Corker of Tennessee are among the leading figures in this group. But if more difficult votes such as Murkowski and Cruz fall in line, these members probably will do the same. Most represent relatively conservative states, making the prospect of being the person who voted down the Obamacare repeal somewhat unappealing politically.

Gardner is a somewhat more complicated case, since he is up for re-election in 2020 in a blue state, but he’s also been highly loyal to Trump and the Republican leadership, having voted with Trump’s position 95 percent of the time so far this year.

Paul could be a bigger problem. His positioning has been somewhat different from Cruz and Lee’s in that he has been criticizing the legislation for months and doing so more sharply than his colleagues. He has laid out a series of proposals for the McConnell bill that are to the right of even Cruz — proposing to get rid of all of the subsidies in the bill that would help people pay for insurance, for example. He developed something of a rivalry with Trump during the GOP primary debates, and he’s been comparatively willing to defy him so far; Paul’s Trump agreement score of 88 percent is the lowest of any GOP senator but Collins.

Nonetheless, Trump won overwhelmingly in Kentucky in 2016, and he’s personally lobbying Paul. And McConnell, Paul’s fellow Kentuckian, was the only senator to endorse Paul’s presidential bid. So Paul may be a potential “yes” vote, despite his public posture.

If Paul holds firm, Republicans will have to turn to Heller or Collins instead. Neither vote is impossible to imagine — Collins usually seeks out compromise, and Heller usually votes with party leadership; Republicans are still pressuring him to reconsider. But both senators have much stronger electoral incentives to vote against the bill than Paul does.

To conclude, what we’ve described here is a realistic scenario for Republicans, but also a very hard one. Fifty of the 52 Senate Republicans would have to agree to change the already unpopular health care bill in ways that could deepen the public’s concerns about it, such as by weakening protections for people with pre-existing conditions. At least 12 members would have to move from “having reservations” to “yes.” And the Republicans are trying to make these changes and vote by July 28, after which they leave for summer recess. Getting this bill passed would show that McConnell is a great strategist, but he doesn’t have an easy hand to play.

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I would also like to apologize for the posts made that were racist, bigoted and anti-Semitic. I am in no way this kind of person, I love and accept people of all walks of life ... I do not advocate violence against the press. This has been an extreme wake up call to always consider how others may think or feel about what is being said before clicking the submit button anywhere online that an opinion is allowed...[t]rolling is nothing more than bull yin g a wide audience.

twitter:

KFILE twitterde op woensdag 05-07-2017 om 04:42:52 FYI "HanAssholeSolo" just called me."I am in total agreement with your statement. I was not threatened in anyway." https://t.co/7se1B8Z29D reageer retweet

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Op woensdag 5 juli 2017 11:33 schreef ExtraWaskracht het volgende:
Dit had de betreffende gebruiker btw gepost

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En een update @ twitter:

twitter:

KFILE twitterde op woensdag 05-07-2017 om 04:42:52 FYI "HanAssholeSolo" just called me."I am in total agreement with your statement. I was not threatened in anyway." https://t.co/7se1B8Z29D reageer retweet