The Senate As A Savior For Health Care Holdouts, Trump’s Latest Twitter Attacks, And Government Shutdowns As Solutions

May 3, 2017 9:59 a.m.

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May 3, 2017

The Gist: Rep. Tom Cole (R-OK), the vice chair of the powerful Rules Committee, said his message to GOP moderates—who are hesitant to back the bill due to its deep cuts to Medicaid and rollback of protections for people with pre-existing conditions—is: “If you want the pressure off, kick it over to the Senate and let those guys deal with it for a while.”

Trump To Meet With Two Key House GOPers Opposed To O’care Repeal Bill

The Gist: President Donald Trump on Wednesday will meet with two House Republicans, Rep. Billy Long (R-MO) and Rep. Fred Upton (R-MI), two key Republicans who said this week that they cannot support the Obamacare repeal bill, CNN reported Wednesday morning.

Trump Goes After Clinton, Comey In Late-Night Twitter Attack

The Gist: President Donald Trump on Tuesday night bashed his FBI director, James Comey, and Hillary Clinton, after Clinton placed some blame on the FBI for her loss in the 2016 election.

From The Reporter’s Notebook

The Director of the Office of Management and Budget on Tuesday endorsed President Donald Trump’s assertion that a “good” government shutdown could knock some sense into Washington, TPM’s Matt Shuham reported. After saying at a press conference that he shared the President’s frustration with the appropriations process, Mick Mulvaney said a “good shutdown” would “be one that fixes this town. One that drives the message back home to people that it really was as broken as they thought that it was when they voted for Donald Trump, and they trusted him — If that’s what is necessary to do to fix Washington, D.C., that would be a good shutdown.”

Agree or Disagree?

Josh Marshall: “We are living in a new era of monopolies and one in which anti-trust enforcement is all but doesn’t exist. Monopolies provide bad service at high costs. They stifle innovation. We’re used to this kind of anti-sclerosis, anti-bigness rhetoric coming out of the tech world and Silicon Valley. But two of the biggest monopolists are Google and Facebook. Their monopoly power shows up in different ways. But they’re ways that are no less negative for the economy in general. As we’ll discuss in the coming days, there is also a growing body of hard evidence that the growth of monopolies is one of the drivers of wealth and income inequality.”

Say What?!

“People can go to the state that they want to live in.”

– Rep. Robert Pittenger (R-NC) told reporters Tuesday morning when asked if people with pre-existing conditions could be charged much more under the American Health Care Act.

BUZZING: Today in the Hive

From a TPM Prime member: “Without an acceptable replacement plan, Obamacare is not going away. Pushing repeal through reconciliation would be voting to literally take away money used by Americans to buy insurance forcing 20 million to lose their coverage. They don’t have 60 votes to change the insurance regulations in Obamacare, so the private insurance market would collapse and another 10 million would lose coverage. On top of that, hospitals across the country will be closing down. This would be a national disaster on the scale of the 2008 financial crisis. It would be the worst policy decisions in US history and the GOP would take 100% responsibility. It is economic and political suicide.”

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What We’re Reading

Too Scared to Report Sexual Abuse. The Fear: Deportation. (New York Times)

How ESPN Became A Conservative Cause (BuzzFeed News)

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