US Politics Mega-thread - Page 8147

DOYLESTOWN, Pa. — Five years ago, the Affordable Care Act had yet to begin its expansion of health insurance to millions of Americans, but Jeff Brahin was already stewing about it.

“It’s going to cost a fortune,” he said in an interview at the time.

This week, as Republican efforts to repeal the law known as Obamacare appeared all but dead, Mr. Brahin, a 58-year-old lawyer and self-described fiscal hawk, said his feelings had evolved.

“As much as I was against it,” he said, “at this point I’m against the repeal.”

“Now that you’ve insured an additional 20 million people, you can’t just take the insurance away from these people,” he added. “It’s just not the right thing to do.”

As Mr. Brahin goes, so goes the nation.

When President Trump was elected, his party’s long-cherished goal of dismantling the Affordable Care Act seemed all but assured. But eight months later, Republicans seem to have done what the Democrats who passed the law never could: make it popular among a majority of Americans.

Support for the Affordable Care Act has risen since the election — in some polls, sharply — with more people now viewing the law favorably than unfavorably. Voters have besieged their representatives with emotional telephone calls and rallies, urging them not to repeal, one big reason Republicans have had surprising trouble in fulfilling their promise despite controlling both Congress and the White House.

The change in public opinion may not denote newfound love of the Affordable Care Act so much as dread of what might replace it. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimates that both the House and Senate proposals to replace the law would result in over 20 million more uninsured Americans. The shift in mood also reflects a strong increase in support for Medicaid, the health insurance program for the poor that the law expanded to cover far more people, and which faces the deepest cuts in its 52-year history under the Republican plans.

Most profound, though, is this: After years of Tea Party demands for smaller government, Republicans are now pushing up against a growing consensus that the government should guarantee health insurance. A Pew survey in January found that 60 percent of Americans believe the federal government should be responsible for ensuring that all Americans have health coverage. That was up from 51 percent last year, and the highest in nearly a decade.

The belief held even among many Republicans: 52 percent of those making below $30,000 a year said the federal government has a responsibility to ensure health coverage, a huge jump from 31 percent last year. And 34 percent of Republicans who make between $30,000 and about $75,000 endorsed that view, up from 14 percent last year.

“The idea that you shouldn’t take coverage away really captured a large share of people who weren’t even helped by this bill,” said Robert Blendon, a health policy expert at Harvard who has closely followed public opinion of the Affordable Care Act.

In 2012, when The New York Times talked to Mr. Brahin and others here in Bucks County, Pa., a perennial swing district outside Philadelphia, their attitudes on the law tracked with national polls that showed most Americans viewed it unfavorably.

But now, too, sentiment here reflects the polls — and how they have shifted. Many people still have little understanding of how the law works. But Democrats and independents have rallied around it, and many of those who opposed it now accept the law, unwilling to see millions of Americans stripped of the coverage that it extended to them.

“I can’t even remember why I opposed it,” said Patrick Murphy, who owns Bagel Barrel, on a quaint and bustling street near Mr. Brahin’s law office here in Doylestown.

He thought Democrats “jammed it down our throats,” and like Mr. Brahin, he worried about the growing deficit. But, he said, he has provided insurance for his own dozen or so employees since 1993.

“Everybody needs some sort of health insurance,” Mr. Murphy said. “They’re trying to repeal Obamacare but they don’t have anything in place.”

Five years ago, people here could barely turn on their televisions without seeing negative ads warning that the Affordable Care Act would lead to rationed care and bloated bureaucracy. The law’s supporters, meanwhile, including the president whose name is attached to it, were not making much of a case.

To win support, Democrats were emphasizing that little would change for people who already had coverage; President Barack Obama famously promised that you could keep your plan and your doctor, even as a few million people’s noncompliant plans that did not offer all the law’s required benefits were canceled as the law was rolled out.

“The best way to get something passed was to argue it was small change,” said Stanley Greenberg, a veteran Democratic pollster. “It was only when Republicans got control that people then on their own discovered that this is what the benefits are.”

Jennifer Bell, sitting outside Mr. Murphy’s bagel shop with a friend, was raised a Democrat and always supported the health care law. But it was only after she was injured in a serious car accident in 2013 that she thought to advocate for it. She used to get health insurance through her job as a teacher. Now disabled with extensive neurological damage, and working part-time in a record store, she qualifies for Medicaid, and without it, she said, could not afford her ongoing treatment.

“It’s very, very scary to think about not having health insurance,” she said.

“If the condition doesn’t kill you, the stress of having it does, in this country,” she added. “The fact that people do without health insurance is a sin, in my opinion.”

Ms. Bell, 35, joined about 2,000 others for a women’s march in Doylestown after the inauguration, and now makes calls to Representative Brian Fitzpatrick and Senator Patrick J. Toomey, both Republicans, urging them to protect the Affordable Care Act. She is working to elect a Democrat challenging Mr. Fitzpatrick, who voted against the House bill to replace the law, saying he worried about people losing coverage.

More vigorous support among the law’s natural constituents since Mr. Trump’s election has helped lift public opinion. The Kaiser Family Foundation polls tracking monthly support for the law have shown the greatest gains among Democrats and independents, with an increase of 10 to 12 points among each group over the last year, while Republicans’ opinion has remained as unfavorable as ever.

“When something is threatened to be taken away, people start to rally around it,” said Liz Hamel, the director of public opinion and survey research for Kaiser, a nonpartisan group.

There has been an increase in the percentage of Republicans and Democrats saying that Medicaid is important for them and their families; between February and July the percentage of Republicans saying so had increased 10 points, to 53 percent.

The law still faces hurdles even beyond the debate in Congress. Five years ago, Cindy McMahon, who works at the store on the vegetable farm her family has owned for nearly a century, was not intending to buy health insurance, despite the law’s requirement that people have it or pay a tax penalty. She remains uninsured (and the Trump administration has suggested it may not enforce the penalty).

“If I had to pay a penalty, it’s still less than I have to pay for having health care all year,” Ms. McMahon said. At 52, she has diabetes and says the strips to test her blood sugar are so expensive that sometimes she tests once a month rather than daily. She has not looked into whether she might qualify for the Medicaid expansion; she was not aware Pennsylvania had expanded the program.

Frank Newport, the editor in chief of Gallup, said that the area of biggest agreement in polls is that Americans want the law changed. In the most recent poll, 44 percent of Americans said Congress should keep the law but make “significant changes.” That compares with 23 percent who want to keep it as it is, and 30 percent who support the Republicans’ plan to repeal and replace it.

Mr. Greenberg said the growing belief that the government should make sure people have health coverage was less an outbreak of compassion than a matter of affordability. In focus groups he conducted, Trump voters said they wanted the president and Congress to lower their health insurance premiums; they did not want to lose the Affordable Care Act’s protections against insurers charging more to people with pre-existing conditions, or denying coverage of basic health benefits.

Mark Goracy, an insurance consultant in Langhorne, near Doylestown, calls the coverage he and his wife get through the individual market “a joke.” Their premium is $1,415 a month, with combined deductibles of more than $12,000.

Still, Mr. Goracy, 62, said he nonetheless wants the law’s mandate blocking insurers from charging people more because of pre-existing conditions to survive.

While he once wished for “root-and-branch” repeal of the Affordable Care Act, he is not disappointed about the Republican failure to repeal it.

“Unlike when Democrats passed A.C.A. with not one Republican vote, what the Republicans need to do is get together with 20 or 25 Democrats and pass some kind of reform,” he said. “That, to me, is how legislation is supposed to proceed.”

President Donald Trump seems to be headed for a rude awakening.

Though he has dismissed the special counsel investigation into Russia’s interference in the 2016 election as a partisan “political witch hunt,” new reports on the probe’s progress indicate it could dig into what Trump told the New York Times that he views as a “violation” of its parameters: his and his family’s finances unrelated to Russia.

In just the past 24 hours, Bloomberg reported that special counsel Robert Mueller’s office was investigating a number of Russia-related business transactions Trump has carried out in recent years, from his involvement in a failed SoHo condo development deal with a mob-linked Russian businessman to the 2013 Miss Universe contest he hosted in Moscow.

Separately from the Russia probe, the Times reported that banking regulators were digging through hundreds of millions of dollars in loans Deutsche Bank made to Trump, and that the German financial institution expects to eventually have to provide information to Mueller’s team.

Unfortunately for the President, legal experts and former DOJ officials say, this is just how large-scale government investigations work.

“The problem is you don’t really know what is Russian,” Nick Akerman, a former federal prosecutor who worked on the Watergate investigation, told TPM. “A lot of stuff could be hidden in companies and under names of other people, you just don’t know. You’ve got to look at everything to determine what really relates to the Russia connection here.”

“It’s not up to him as to what the scope of this probe is, that’s for sure,” Akerman added, saying investigators are “not going to ignore stuff that is criminal.”

Financial transactions are well within the wide purview Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein laid out in his May memo appointing Mueller as special counsel, as legal observers have noted.

Susan Hennessey, a former attorney at the National Security Agency’s Office of General Counsel and managing editor of the Lawfare blog, wrote on Twitter that the “Trump family finances are absolutely, 100% fair game.”

“The financial arrangements or dealings, those could be related to why there was collusion or incentive or motive to collude,” Tracy Schmaler, a former Justice Department spokesperson during President Obama’s first term, told TPM. “So I wouldn’t say it’s out of bounds so much as filling in the picture.”

“The relationship with Russia and Russian officials predates his run for the presidency,” Schmaler added.

Rosenstein’s memo granted Mueller sweeping authority to look into any links between the Trump campaign and Russia; “any matters that arose or may arise directly from the investigation”; and any matters within the scope of federal regulation 600.4(a), which includes obstruction of justice and other matters pertaining to efforts to derail the special counsel probe.

Although Trump told the Times that he is “not under investigation” and “didn’t do anything wrong,” the Washington Post previously reported that Mueller’s team had taken control of a federal investigation into whether the President obstructed justice by abruptly firing James Comey as FBI director because of the “Russia thing,” as Trump put it.

And as Comey testified before Congress in June, it’s possible that in the course of its work the special counsel could uncover crimes unrelated to Russia’s interference in the U.S. election or the Trump campaign’s potential coordination with those efforts.

“In any complex investigation, when you start turning over rocks, sometimes you find things that are unrelated to the primary investigation, that are criminal in nature,” Comey told the Senate Intelligence Committee.

Mueller’s powerhouse team of more than a dozen attorneys has experience in national security, fraud, money-laundering, organized crime, espionage, cybercrime and public corruption, offering an indication of just how wide-ranging the investigation may be.

A previous federal probe centered around a president’s private dealings took a winding path of a different sort. Independent prosecutor Kenneth Starr was appointed in 1994 to investigate a decades-old failed Arkansas real estate involving Bill and Hillary Clinton; the impeachment report he filed four years later focused instead on Bill Clinton’s affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky.

All that special counsel investigators are required to do is follow the threads presented to them, wherever they might lead, as Senate Intelligence Committee chairman Richard Burr (R-NC) affirmed Thursday to CNN. Any topic related to Russia, Trump and his campaign associates is fair game.

“If they were investigating Donald Trump when he was five years old and ran a lemonade stand in Queens, I’d say, yeah, that’s probably beyond the scope,” Akerman, the former Watergate prosecutor said. “But if it turns out that the lemonade stand was done a year ago and was in Moscow and related to the same characters who showed up at the meeting with his son [Donald Trump Jr.], well I might feel a little differently about it.”

The looming, unanswered question, then, is whether a President who has fired his FBI director, scorned an attorney general who was his campaign’s most loyal supporter, and offered a national newspaper his view on the acceptable scope of a sprawling federal investigation that now touches on his own business dealings would go as far as to fire the man leading it—again.

Asked by the Times if he would fire Mueller for exceeding what he felt were the boundaries of the special counsel probe, Trump said only, “I can’t answer that question because I don’t think it’s going to happen.”

On July 21 2017 18:19 thePunGun wrote:

Oh, so we're not counting the systematic genocide of Native Americans by almost eradicating the north american buffalo?!
Those are 2 tragedies packed into one giant package of atrocities already....But not as bad as an abortion apparently...
John Bush is a giant jackass!

On a recent morning in Texas, Fort Worth police arrested a man who threatened to burn down his girlfriend's apartment. The officers also detained two Mexican nationals at the apartment complex because they suspected they're in the country illegally.

Then police called ICE Fugitive Operations. Soon men with guns and dark ballistic vests swarmed the parking lot.

Under President Obama, Immigration and Customs Enforcement would not have bothered with either of these immigrants. During the previous administration, ICE agents primarily targeted more serious felons and recent arrivals.

"We would have had to let them go because they did not meet our enforcement priorities at the time," said Chuck Winner, the supervisory detention and deportation officer at the scene.

Asked if that would have been frustrating, he said: "Very."

Under President Trump, ICE agents are told to arrest anyone in the country illegally. Since Trump's executive order in January, calling for more aggressive enforcement of immigration laws, ICE arrests have skyrocketed and the agency plans to hire more agents.

Immigrants without legal status "should be afraid," according to Thomas Homan, the federal agency's acting director.

But that tougher stance has put the agency on the hot seat. Immigrant advocates say ICE agents are fearmongering and arresting people who only broke the law to come to the U.S. for a better life. The agents say they're misunderstood and that they simply want to enforce the law.

"We're not apologizing for what we're doing," said Simona Flores, director of the Dallas ICE field office. "We're trying to do the right thing."

ICE's Dallas operation, which covers nearly half of Texas and all of Oklahoma, is the busiest in nation. In the first four months of 2017, arrests of all unauthorized immigrants nearly doubled to 4,969 compared to 2,586 in the same period last year. Most had criminal records, and many have been deported.

At the same time, ICE arrests of non-criminals have increased dramatically. In Dallas, those arrests more than tripled, from 249 to more than 814.

At the parking lot in Fort Worth, Agent Delfino Saldaña questioned one of the men, a 21-year-old house painter from Guanajuato, Mexico with gang tattoos and facial piercings, and then handcuffed him.

"We're going to go ahead and take him into custody, put him in the vehicle," Saldaña said.

Saldaña said the painter was a confirmed gang member when he was younger. Agent King Cross used an encrypted cellphone app to run the man's fingerprints.

"He's got no criminal history in the U.S., no prior immigration contact," Cross said.

The painter falls into the non-criminal category. The violation for which he will be deported is crossing the border illegally two years ago. Agents ran a record check on the other immigrant and found out that he has been charged several times for re-entering the country after deportation.

"In days past, if we encountered someone in the house who is not a priority, we would let that person walk," supervisory officer Winner said as he drove a white, government-issue Expedition back to Dallas after the bust. Like many agents, he served in the military and the Border Patrol.

"Now if we encounter someone in the house that is illegally in the country, in violation of the law, we will go ahead and arrest that person."

Flores is riding in the back seat. "I would say that the morale has gone up. There is a sense of, 'Ok, I don't need my boss's permission for every decision I make,'" she said.

Under the new enforcement guidelines, ICE operations have stoked outrage. In March, agents apprehended 26 unauthorized immigrants reporting for court-ordered community service in Fort Worth. Some observers thought the roundup was mean-spirited. Flores said the immigrants had drunk driving and drug convictions, and they were deportable.

Immigrant advocates say the dragnet is cast too wide. They say immigrants who pose no threat to the community are being swept up, along with dangerous criminals.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement "is really instilling this sense of fear within our community. And I think that has disastrous effects," said Michelle Garza Pareja, the Dallas-based associate executive director of RAICES, immigrant rights group.

Flores said that over her nearly 30-year career as a federal immigration officer, she always has used discretion. Agents might not detain a single mother, for example, if she's the sole provider for her children. Flores said her decisions are informed by her own difficult upbringing in San Antonio.

"I know what poverty is like. I know what hunger is like," she said, wiping away tears. "I know what physical abuse is like in the household. But I also know what love is like. And I know that personally, professionally, I want this world to be a better place."

She added: "We listen to every case by case when it's brought to our attention that might need special attention."

NPR embedded with Fugitive Operations for two days in early July. In that time, agents spent most of their time sitting in unmarked SUVs parked in working-class Hispanic neighborhoods, drinking coffee and watching houses.

In years past, ICE agents used to knock on doors and ask their targets to come out.

"Lately they don't even open the door for us," Winner said.

Today, immigrant communities are savvier. They spread the word on social media: If an ICE agent knocks, even if he or she has a warrant, don't open the door.

"Now we end up having to sit and do surveillance a lot more, so it definitely makes it a little bit tougher," Winner said.

The officers of Fugitive Operations, a component of ICE Enforcement and Removal Operations, insist they do not do random, indiscriminate sweeps; they only go after specific targets.

"We have a lead on someone that's in the country illegally or is a criminal alien who's been convicted of a crime and is in this country, we target that person for arrest. We don't go set up checkpoints on the highway. We don't do mass raids at employers, we don't do that," deportation officer Gerry Hutt said.

On NPR's two-day ride-along, the team selected eight targets. They included a Mexican found guilty of driving while intoxicated, a Salvadoran who had been deported three times before, a Bangladeshi mortgage broker convicted of a sex crime, and Antonio Jimenez.

"I know I had felonies, and I know that it [deportation] could happen," Jimenez said, sitting disconsolately on a metal bench in an ICE processing room. He has convictions for burglary and heroin possession, and was wanted for parole violations. This means he also would have been a target under Obama's ICE.

"I'm not gonna worry. ... So as long as my wife's okay, my son's okay, I'm good," he said, sniffling.

The heavyset, whiskered 21-year-old was brought to this country illegally by his parents from San Luis Potosi, Mexico, when he was an infant. A couple of hours earlier, ICE had cuffed him and led him out of his house in the Dallas suburb of Mesquite as he told his wife and 15-month-old son goodbye.

But he doesn't blame the agents.

"No, they did their job," Jimenez said. "They weren't mean, they weren't rude or nothin'. Why would I get mad at them?"

When his deportation case is complete, agents will escort Antonio Jimenez to the middle of the international bridge in Laredo, and he will walk to Nuevo Laredo, Mexico, to start his new life.

On that same morning back in Dallas, ICE Fugitive Operations selected four new targets.

On July 21 2017 23:01 TheLordofAwesome wrote:

I actually feel kind of sorry for Tiffany (she did get to benefit a lot from the Trump name so far in terms of lifestyle and schooling and such) and I feel really sorry for Barron.