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Remember back in July when Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) abruptly adjourned the House of Representatives for summer recess? The quick exit gave Republicans an escape from headlines about the Trump administration’s refusal to release files on Jeffrey Epstein, the deceased sex offender.
Now, Congress is about to return. And the Epste...
Opinion
Buttigieg has a flip-flop problem that could hurt in 2028
No one can deny that Pete Buttigieg is a highly skilled and articulate politician. While mayor of South Bend, Indiana’s fifth-largest city with a population of 100,000, he became a major contender for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination, narrowly winning the Iowa caucuses and finishing a strong second in the New Hampshire primary.
Buttigieg’s swift political rise catapulted him into President Joe Biden’s Cabinet, where he served as Transportation secretary for four yea...
Trump is cutting Medicaid based on a flawed study
Our country is poised to take health coverage away from millions of low-income Americans largely based on the findings of a flawed and flagrantly misleading study.
President Trump’s budget reconciliation bill recently produced the largest cut to Medicaid health insurance in its 60-year history.
Claiming to reduce “fraud and abuse,” it will cut essential medical services for at least 12 million low-income people through unachievable work requirements, unaffordable out...
Obamacare faces a subsidy cliff — don’t bail it out without reform
The controversy over the 2010 Affordable Care Act dominated Barack Obama’s presidency. The implementation of ObamaCare caused health insurance premiums to soar and nearly collapsed the market entirely. The Biden administration responded by flooding the system with expanded federal subsidies, which are set to expire at the end of 2025.
To stop premiums for older workers with pre-existing conditions from suddenly leaping by $10,000, Republicans will need to extend part of this a...
Republicans are making boogeymen of their own voters on Medicaid
Republicans love their boogeymen; the grotesquely exaggerated villains they use to justify their worst policy ideas. President Trump loves to parade his favorite boogeymen: the “criminal aliens,” the dishonest media, the Democrats, and so on. These dehumanizing caricatures help him rile up his base and lead them to back his cruelest initiatives.
As the GOP-controlled Congress argues the merits of the cuts included in Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” act — which is deeply&nb...
Trump wants to make the census count
The 2020 U.S. census faced multiple challenges during the pandemic. A good case can be made that it should be redone — which President Trump says he will do. The problem is that Trump can be so divisive that Democrats and the media will denounce his census-retake efforts as just another partisan political ploy.
On Aug. 7, Trump wrote on Truth Social that he had instructed the Department of Commerce (which oversees the census) to “begin work on a new and highly accurate CENSUS...
We need more budget bipartisanship, not less
The director of the Office of Management and Budget, Russ Vought, was recently quoted saying that “the appropriations process has to be less bipartisan.”
While it’s easy to think this would lead to less of the frustrating gridlock that can overtake the budgetary process, Vought is both procedurally and substantively wrong: The answer is more bipartisanship.
If this sounds naïve, consider the alternative.
The first and most obvious issue is realism. Thanks ...
Kennedy is gutting health advisory panels to weaken the Affordable Care Act
The famous thumbs-down by Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) in 2017 resulted in the notorious failure to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act. Subsequent legislative attempts also crashed and burned, teaching Republicans the importance of discretion in their efforts to sabotage that law.
Consequently, both congressional Republicans and Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. have instead turned to subtler tactics to undermine the Afford...
Trump’s dangerous health care policies will be on the ballot in 2026
Six months into Trump’s second term, is there any issue where Democrats have traction?
“The only issues on which voters prefer congressional Democrats to Republicans,” a Wall Street Journal poll recently found, “are health care and vaccine policy.”
That fits with a late July Fox News poll that found 53 percent disapproval for Trump’s call for increased work requirements for Medicaid as part of the tax and spending bill passed by Republicans in Congress.
The...
Election 2028 is on — Democrats see opportunity and a wide open primary
The big field in the race for the 2028 presidential sweepstakes is already off and running. Two of the top Democrats vying for the job are former Vice President Kamala Harris and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.). The election of either one would address the urgency of putting a woman in the White House for the first time.
Harris’s decision not to run for governor in her home state of California indicates she will make another White House run. But that’s not the only sig...