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Congress hanging The Donald out to dry. Making him do everything alone! Despicable. No tax cuts, no Obamacare repeal. NOTHING Republicans kept repealing Obamacare while O was in office [knowing would go nowhere]. Now... NOTHING!

Remember it’s a dual monarchy — it’s an illusion that two parties in both the House and Senate actually exist With just one day away from the Republicans self-imposed deadline to repeal botched Obamacare legislation, we can see that the GOP has no intention of achieving anything in favor of Trump, as both the Democrats and Republicans are wrapped up by the powers-that-be just as Intellihub has reported for years. With high-paid talking heads like Rush Limbaugh claiming that the two party system actually exists, it’s hard for narrow-minded members of the general public to figure out the true pyramid...

The Post’s Mike DeBonis has obtained leaked audio of Republicans at a closed-door session airing serious anxieties about the GOP’s strategy to repeal and replace Obamacare. What’s remarkable is how decisively their specific comments in private undercut the party’s public, carefully-crafted talking points about the battle to come. Now, to be clear, these private comments [] Related: Trump’s secret plan to make Mexico pay for a border wall, revealed Steve Bannon just attacked the media. The correct response: Keep pointing out the lies. Happy Hour Roundup ...

With the repeal of Obamacare gathering a considerable amount of corporate media attention, it is important to remember the UniParty, Democrats and Republicans, have been paid by the U.S. CoC to retain it at all costs. ♦ The U.S. Chamber of Commerce constructed a short list of Wall Street-centric legislative priorities back in 2014 for legislative years ’15 and ’16. Among those priorities was: Retention of Obamacare Implementation of Common Core federal education standards. Passage of the Trans-Pacific Trade Deal (TPP) Comprehensive immigration reform to include amnesty. the-big-club-2 U.S. CoC President Tom Donohue has spent hundreds of millions via K-Street...

Unless something changes, Republican leaders have no intention of repealing Obamacare If Republicans in the brand new 115th Congress want to enrage supporters and destroy whatever grassroots goodwill remains they are off to an excellent start. Daniel Horowitz has the gory details at Conservative Review:

Republicans are just getting started on their years-long dream of repealing Obamacare, and already, there are fears that things are moving too fast. Some Republicans are cautioning against repealing the Affordable Care Act too quickly and urging the party take the foot off the accelerator. The reason: there's no plan on how to replace what they roll back. And while GOP lawmakers are eager to please their base with headlines of Obamacare's repeal, they don't want to be blamed for leaving people without health insurance and chaos in the healthcare market.

Congressional Republicans have long boasted that once they claim the reins of power, they will act quickly and decisively to roll back what they view as the most onerous piece of President Obama’s domestic agenda: the Affordable Care Act. But their actions starting Tuesday to end Obamacare will be far less sweeping, at least initially, than a full-blown repeal of the law.

The nation’s health insurers, resigned to the idea that Republicans will repeal the Affordable Care Act, on Tuesday publicly outlined for the first time what the industry wants to stay in the state marketplaces, which have provided millions of Americans with insurance under the law.The insurers, some who have already started leaving the marketplaces because they are losing money there, say they need a clear commitment from the Trump administration and congressional leaders that the government will continue offsetting some costs for low-income people. They also want to keep in place rules that encourage young and healthy people to sign...

U.S. foreign-policy sage Henry Kissinger used to tell Harvard students that the test of a good statesman was his ability to sense the evolution of an event before it happened. What President Richard Nixon's secretary of state meant was that a successful diplomat had to be able to read the character of his foreign counterpart as well as have the ability to take the pulse of the country he was dealing with

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell says Congress will act early next year to repeal President Barack Obama’s health care law but delay the changes as Republicans try to come up with an alternative. […] Speaking in Louisville, McConnell cautioned that the law’s critics “can’t just snap your fingers and go from where we are today to where we’re headed.” He said a replacement to the health care law will be done in a “phased-in way.” …

The myth that a complete replacement package has to be in place the moment Obamacare is repealed refuses to die First congressional Republicans said they couldn’t repeal Obamacare because they didn’t have full control of Congress. Then when they gained control of both chambers of Congress congressional Republicans said they couldn’t repeal Obamacare because they didn’t control the White House.

A new study by Jonathan Gruber, one of the Affordable Care Act’s (ACA) chief economic architects, suggests that roughly two-thirds of new Medicaid enrollees in 2014 were eligible for the program under previous state eligibility criteria—meaning that they were not made eligible by the ACA. If accurate, then a much smaller share of new Medicaid enrollees were made eligible for the program by the ACA than Washington experts commonly believe. For example, the Congressional Budget Office’s (CBO) most recent projection is that only one of six new Medicaid enrollees were eligible for the program before the ACA. Gruber’s results, combined...

After a dinner meeting with Donald Trump at Jean-Georges restaurant in New York, Mitt Romney delivered a glowing review of the president-elect’s leadership during the transition. Mr. Romney, who was invited to the dinner purportedly for a follow-up interview for the job of secretary of state, described it as a “wonderful evening” and said that he was “impressed” with Mr. Trump’s handling of his upset victory in the election. “We had another discussion about affairs throughout the world and these discussions I’ve had with him have been enlightening, and interesting, and engaging,” Mr. Romney, the 2012 Republican presidential nominee, told...

PARK CITY, Utah — Mitt Romney warned here Friday that Donald Trump’s election as president could change the nation’s moral character and lead to the normalization of racism, bigotry and misogyny. Romney, the 2012 Republican presidential nominee who has been the most vocal leader of the “Never Trump” movement, delivered one of his strongest rebukes yet of Trump’s candidacy in an interview with CNN anchor Wolf Blitzer. “I don’t want to see trickle-down racism,” Romney told Blitzer. “I don’t want to see a president of the United States saying things which change the character of the generations of Americans that...

The Wall Street Journal recently posted that Mitt Romney is emerging as the leading candidate to be Secretary of State in the Trump administration. Obviously we all know Romney is the poster child for GOPe, and that for whatever reason he threw his debates against Obama in 2012. Personally, I would like to see him lead a task force to eliminate vast numbers of Federal regulations, but it is not up to me. In this thread I am concerned with Foreign Policy and nothing else. Where can we expect Romney to differ from what we expect from President Trump on...

Say what you will about Donny Deutsch, but the man-about-Manhattan and the Hamptons moves in the Trump social circle and is well-connected there. So attention must be paid to Deutsch’s declaration on today’s With All Due Respect. Asked by Mark Halperin whether the talk about Romney being considered for Secretary of State is “real, whether Romney might end up with the job,” Deutsch responded: “somebody very, very, very high up in the inner [Trump] circle yesterday told me it was very, very real,” and that this person was “very excited about it.” View the video here.

Kicks of mules ObamaCare is in big trouble. With the election of a Republican president and the survival of Republican majorities in both the House and Senate, ObamaCare should be history. But ObamaCare is not dead yet. The effort to repeal and replace it is going to face some serious obstacles - some of which are policy-related, like the problem of how you deal with people with pre-existing conditions, or of how you transition people who have signed up for subsidized policies. The left wants you to think that repealing ObamaCare means ripping people’s health care away from them. The...

Several of the Republican Party’s most generous donors called on the Republican National Committee on Thursday to disavow Donald J. Trump, saying that allegations by multiple women that Mr. Trump had groped or made inappropriate sexual advances toward them threatened to inflict lasting damage on the party’s image. To an elite group of Republican contributors who have donated millions of dollars to the party’s candidates and committees in recent years, the cascade of revelations related to Mr. Trump’s sexual conduct is grounds for the committee to cut ties with the party’s beleaguered standard-bearer, finally and fully. “At some point, you...

On Friday, former Gov. Gary Johnson offered a guarantee. “If Mitt Romney wants to be a part of the administration, that would be a guarantee.” The comments came at Friday’s joint Deseret News-KSL editorial board meeting with Johnson and Bill Weld. I asked Johnson what role, if any, Romney might play in a Johnson-Weld administration. Although the Libertarian nominee seemed to doubt whether Romney would really be interested, he said the former Republican presidential nominee would be free to, in essence, choose his own adventure. “I think [the position] would be for Mitt Romney to decide … and I say...