White House officials, led by Vice President Pence, jump-started negotiations on a stalled health-care bill Monday, raising hopes that the closely watched legislation could pass the House as soon as this week.

Pence, Chief of Staff Reince Priebus and Budget Director Mick Mulvaney came to Capitol Hill late Monday to attend a meeting of the hard-right House Freedom Caucus, days after President Trump launched a remarkable intraparty attack on the staunch conservatives who helped block the bill last month.

Early in the day, the three men hosted members of the Tuesday Group, a caucus of about 50 moderate House Republicans, at the White House for a health-care-focused discussion.

Rep. Mark Meadows (R-N.C.), the chairman of the Freedom Caucus, told reporters Monday night that the administration officials offered a “solid idea” that could form the basis of an intraparty compromise.

That idea, he said, would allow states to apply for federal waivers exempting them from some health insurance mandates established under the Affordable Care Act — including “essential health benefits” requiring coverage of mental-health care, substance abuse treatment, maternity care, prescription drugs and more, as well as a provision that bars insurers from charging the sick more than the healthy.

“We’re certainly encouraged by the progress that we seem to be making,” Meadows said, although he cautioned reporters that no legislation had yet been drafted reflecting the proposal and that there was no deal in place to modify and proceed with the bill that was pulled from the House floor last month.

But the flurry of activity Monday from White House officials and top House Republicans reflected an ongoing willingness to wrestle with the difficulties of winning a GOP consensus on health care — an issue that helped drive much of the party’s electoral gains over the past eight years since the Affordable Care Act was passed.

It remained unclear whether moderate Republicans could swallow the proposals on offer Monday. Similar changes were presented Monday to Tuesday Group members at the White House, to a warm, if cautious, reception.

Two attendees of the White House session said afterward that they were optimistic, but not certain, that an intra-GOP accord could be reached.

“Anything’s possible,” said Rep. Tom MacArthur (R-N.J.), a co-chairman of the Tuesday Group. “I’m not saying I think it’ll happen — I don’t know — but I think it’s possible.”

A major sticking point could be allowing insurers to vary their prices according to a person’s health — a Freedom Caucus demand that was rejected last month and helped stall the bill.

The Affordable Care Act instituted a “community rating” requirement for insurers — meaning that they could not segregate healthy subscribers from sick ones and charge the latter higher prices. Instead, insurers can only vary their prices based on age, geographical area and tobacco use, allowing the premiums paid by the healthy to subsidize the sick.

But many conservatives argue that the community rating requirement has driven up premiums too high for healthy individuals and should be rolled back. Many GOP lawmakers, however, fear doing so could make insurance unaffordable to the sick and would represent a betrayal of pledges made by Trump and congressional leaders not to discriminate against those with preexisting medical conditions.

Rep. Chris Collins (R-N.Y.), who attended the Tuesday Group meeting, said discussions about community rating waivers were “to be continued” but said other policy provisions discussed could get moderates on board with the bill.

The previous version of the bill gave states the choice whether to keep the essential health benefit mandates. Creating a system where the states could apply for a waiver that would be reviewed by the Department of Health and Human Services could convince some to sign on, he said, as well as more state aid to subsidize coverage for the very sick.

Trump took aim at the Freedom Caucus in a series of tweets Thursday, pledging to “fight them” at the polls in the 2018 midterms. The move appeared to be a last-ditch attempt to jolt the hard-liners into supporting the Trump-backed American Health Care Act, which was pulled from the House last month.

Trump remained active on Twitter over the weekend, suggesting the situation was still fluid — and that he is looking at way to move forward with the help of either moderate Democrats or conservative Republicans.

He also played a round of golf Sunday with Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), the libertarian-oriented former presidential candidate who has been a sharp critic of the House bill and praised its failure less than two weeks before.

On Monday, Paul summoned reporters to his office and positioned himself as a potential broker of a compromise, floating a proposal that he suggested could win broad GOP support.

“If conservatives want 100 percent repeal, let’s say moderates want 80 percent repeal,” he said. “Let’s vote on 90 percent repeal, and be done with it.”

With Congress heading into a two-week recess at the end of the week and Trump meeting this week with three foreign leaders, there was little expectation within the White House earlier Monday that there would be significant movement on a health-care bill in coming days. But several key players on the Hill and at the White House said that talks have progressed.

“It’s on the back burner, but the boil is still going,” said a senior administration official familiar with the Trump administration’s strategy, who requested anonymity to speak more candidly.

The official characterized Trump’s Sunday golf outing with Paul as an opportunity to kick around ideas for moving forward. Trump also brought Mulvaney, a former House Freedom Caucus member, to the outing at Trump National Golf Club in Sterling, Va.

“We continue to feel optimistic in the sense that there’s a lot of constructive ideas that are coming to the table to get us to a way forward,” White House press secretary Sean Spicer told reporters Monday, adding that Trump “has made clear that he intends to work with anyone who wants to help him get to the number of votes.”

On Sunday, Trump told his followers in a tweet that “Talks on Repealing and Replacing Obamacare are, and have been, going on, and will continue until such time as a deal is hopefully struck.”

In another tweet, Trump declared: “Anybody (especially Fake News media) who thinks that Repeal and Replace of Obamacare is dead does not know the love and strength in R Party!”

Trump aides said such tweets are intended partly to keep the conversation about health care going, in the hope of achieving enough consensus to move forward. A senior White House official acknowledged Monday that lawmakers have yet to coalesce around a particular proposal.

“It’s more of a sentiment than a policy people can hang their hat on right now,” said the official, who requested anonymity to speak more candidly about the state of play. “There are a lot of people who were disappointed in how it ended and collectively think we can do better.”

“Some of this has to be Congress taking the lead and putting this back together,” the official added.

But Pence’s meetings with lawmakers Monday indicate that the Trump administration continues to play a central role in trying to broker a compromise between conservatives and moderates on Capitol Hill.

“We’re just talking,” Priebus told reporters as he left the Freedom Caucus meeting with Pence after about 45 minutes.

Several Freedom Caucus members said afterward that they were newly optimistic that a deal could be struck.

“It’s progress, and it’s promising,” said Rep. Scott DesJarlais (R-Tenn.). But he said the group was waiting to see the administration’s proposals put in writing.

“We’re anxious to see the legislative text,” he said, adding that it would be “a stretch” for the House to pass the bill before week’s end.

Read more at PowerPost

Paige Winfield Cunningham contributed to this report.

TOKYO — President Donald Trump is suggesting ahead of his meeting later this week with Chinese President Xi Jinping that he can handle Washington’s North Korea problem with or without Beijing’s help — “totally.”

Is the self-proclaimed master of the deal doing what he does best — talking up his game?

Even Trump said going it alone is not his Plan A. While declaring the U.S. is ready to deal with Pyongyang on its own, Trump stressed in an interview with the Financial Times that he’d rather — much rather, actually — have Beijing on board. China, he noted, has the most influence over the North economically and politically.

But can he sway Beijing into doing more of what Washington wants? The big meeting is set to take place at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in South Florida on Thursday and Friday.

Here’s a closer look at some of the rhetoric being tossed around, by Trump in the interview released Sunday, and by a top U.S. official:

___

TRUMP: “China has great influence over North Korea. And China will either decide to help us with North Korea, or they won’t. And if they do that will be very good for China, and if they don’t it won’t be good for anyone.”

THE CONTEXT: China is without doubt a lifeline for North Korea. It accounts for about 90 percent of the North’s trade and is a key supplier of fuel and many of the other necessities that keep the North’s economy running. If Beijing were to aggressively clamp down on all its trade with Pyongyang, North Korea would certainly feel the pain — and possibly collapse.

The question, however, is what Trump means by “help.”

Sanctions advocates in the U.S. believe that with just the right amount of pressure, North Korea can be coerced into giving up its nuclear weapons. But that’s not a certainty. Too much pressure could also lead to open conflict with a tremendously high cost in casualties and deaths, wreaking havoc on the Chinese, South Korean and Japanese — and by extension U.S. — economies. A North Korean implosion, meanwhile, could be even more problematic, causing a massive refugee crisis. As Beijing well knows, that would impact China far more dramatically than the faraway U.S.

___

TRUMP: According to the Financial Times report, when pressed on whether the U.S. really could resolve the North Korean denuclearization problem without China, he said, “Totally.”

“I don’t have to say any more. Totally.”

THE CONTEXT: So there it is, the tease.

If Trump does have a dramatic solution to this problem, it will have to be pretty clever. And the stakes are extremely high.

Back in 1994, President Bill Clinton considered a pre-emptive strike to take out North Korea’s nuclear weapons’ building capability. That was ruled out as too risky. He chose negotiations, and those failed, too, after George W. Bush took over.

Fast forward to today, and North Korea has a nuclear arsenal. It may already be able to hit Japan and the tens of thousands of U.S. troops based there with nuclear warheads. It could be just a few years — if that — away from having an intercontinental ballistic missile capable of hitting the U.S. mainland.

Whatever Trump has in mind, any change in the status quo that comes about without China’s participation, or Russia’s, is likely to antagonize North Korea’s two nuclear-armed neighbors.

Trump may not need to tell a newspaper what his plan is. But if he’s got one, leaders across Asia are all ears.

___

AND P.S., FROM YOUR U.N. AMBASSADOR: Trump’s ambassador to the United Nations, Nikki Haley, also had some tough talk over the weekend — but it conflicted with the president’s.

She said on ABC’s “This Week” that China needs “to show us how concerned they are … They need to put pressure on North Korea. The only country that can stop North Korea is China, and they know that.”

THE CONTEXT: If Haley is right and China is the only country that can stop North Korea, it stands to reason the U.S. can’t resolve this issue alone. And no one expects it to.

U.N. resolutions and unilateral sanctions imposed on North Korea have so far failed to deter it from conducting nuclear and missile tests. Last year, the North conducted two nuclear tests and two dozen tests of ballistic missiles. During his swing through Asia last month, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said the past 20 years of U.S. policy toward North Korea have been a failure. In fact, that could be extended all the way back to President Truman and the Korean War, which — thanks to China’s decision to back the North — ended not in a peace treaty in 1953 but in an armistice.

So what would the U.S. actually do if China doesn’t cooperate?

“China has to cooperate,” Haley said.

Copyright 2017 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Senate Democrats secured enough votes Monday to filibuster the nomination of Judge Neil Gorsuch to the U.S. Supreme Court, increasing the likelihood that Republicans will enact a rules change to ensure his confirmation and pushing the battle into its climactic final act.

Four more Senate Democrats confirmed they will support a filibuster of Gorsuch’s nomination, giving the minority party the requisite 41 votes to maintain their procedural roadblock under pressure from Republicans.

The announcements came as members of the Senate Judiciary Committee gathered to vote on the high court nomination. While the outcome of the panel’s vote is not in doubt — Republicans hold a majority of seats on the committee — the testy hearing foreshadowed what is likely to be a combative debate over Gorsuch on the Senate floor this week.

Sens. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.), Christopher A. Coons (D-Del.) and Mark R. Warner (D-Va.) indicated they would vote “no” to end debate on the Senate floor and would oppose Gorsuch in a final vote.

[Watch live: Senate Judiciary Committee votes on Gorsuch]

Judge Neil Gorsuch prepares to testify during the third day of his confirmation hearings before the Senate Judiciary Committee last month. (Ricky Carioti/The Washington Post)

[How many votes Democrats need to block Neil Gorsuch’s Supreme Court nomination]

“We are headed to a world where you don’t need one person from the other side to pick a judge,” Graham said. “And what does that mean? That means the judges are going to be more ideological, not less. It means that every Senate seat is going to be a referendum on the Supreme Court … The damage done to the Senate is going to be real.”

The judiciary panel is expected to approve Gorsuch without issue on Monday. This would allow debate on the nomination to begin in the full Senate, probably on Tuesday morning.

Republicans have vowed to confirm Gorsuch by Friday, when a two-week recess is set to begin, meaning the process will consume the Senate’s floor schedule this week. That timeline would give the 49-year-old federal appellate judge a chance to join the high court in late April and to participate in the final cases of this year’s term, which will end in June.

Also on Monday, Sen. Michael F. Bennet (D-Colo.), became the fourth Senate Democrat to oppose the filibuster, though he did not clarify whether he supports or opposes Gorsuch as a Supreme Court justice.

“Changing the Senate rules now will only further politicize the Supreme Court and prevent the Senate from blocking more extreme judges in the future,” he said in a statement.

Bennet is the only Senate Democrat not up for reelection in 2018 to oppose the filibuster.

Gorsuch’s nomination to replace the late justice Antonin Scalia, whose “originalist” philosophy of constitutional interpretation he shares, would be unlikely to tip the ideological balance of the Supreme Court. And Gorsuch’s three days of confirmation hearings last month never captured the national attention afforded to previous nominees.

But the final round of debate on his nomination could be bitter. And although the Republican-controlled Senate is likely to confirm him, that will happen only if the chamber’s rules are changed.

[Home stretch for Trump’s Supreme Court nominee could forever alter the Senate]

Eliminating the filibuster for Supreme Court nominees would extend a rule change, known as the “nuclear option,” that Democrats made in 2013 that punished Republicans for years of attempts to block President Barack Obama’s nominees by ending filibusters for all executive branch appointments and lower-court picks.

Last year, Republicans refused to hold hearings or votes for Judge Merrick Garland, Obama’s choice to replace Scalia, arguing that the next president should get to pick the replacement. The move infuriated Democrats — and has been a major factor in generating such unified opposition to Gorsuch.

Gorsuch was nominated by President Trump on Jan. 31 and spent weeks privately meeting with senators and preparing for his confirmation hearing. He was questioned by the Judiciary Committee last month for almost 20 hours over three days, answering nearly 1,200 questions and later sending about 70 pages of answers to written follow-up questions, according to a team of White House officials assisting with his nomination.

As of Friday, Gorsuch had met with 78 senators — all but some of the most conservative and liberal senators whose votes are more likely to be for or against him. But three first-term Democratic senators, Catherine Cortez Masto (Nev.), Tammy Duckworth (Ill.) and Kamala D. Harris (Calif.), said that they had been unable to get a face-to-face meeting with the nominee or were never offered the opportunity.

[Schumer: ‘Virtually impossible’ to avoid a filibuster fight on Gorsuch next week]

The fact that the three senators are women, with one Hispanic, one Asian and one African American, was not lost on some progressive groups that highlighted the perceived snub over the weekend.

Gorsuch aides insisted privately that difficulties scheduling time with the senators was the only reason they never met.

At the Judiciary Committee, the final outcome has never been in doubt, given that no Republican ever expressed concerns with Gorsuch and no Democrat on the committee ever signaled any favor for him.

Instead, Democrats have complained that on issues ranging from abortion rights to whether the nominee agreed with Supreme Court rulings in key privacy and racial segregation cases, Gorsuch repeatedly demurred, citing a concern that speaking too specifically on such matters might affect his ability to render fair decisions in future cases.

Gorsuch’s refusal to get specific mirrors what previous court nominees have done dating back to Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. But critics noted that despite 10 years as a member of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit, Gorsuch had never ruled on issues such as abortion rights or some environmental matters.

[The two big, misleading statements senators can’t stop making in the Neil Gorsuch battle]

In interviews before Gorsuch’s confirmation hearings last month, several Republican senators agreed that he was a safe conservative choice who would maintain the balance of the court and make future fights to fill vacancies even more critical.

“I have no doubt that from the Democrats’ perspective, the next vacancy will be Armageddon. They will fire every attack they can marshal at whoever the nominee is,” said Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.).

Sen. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.) agreed, saying that the next confirmation fight will be “a bloodbath.”

The predictions by Cruz and Flake assume that the next Supreme Court vacancy will be caused by the departure of older liberal justices, such as Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen G. Breyer or Anthony M. Kennedy, the court’s most frequent swing vote.

The Gorsuch battle has not generated as much interest or concern among liberal organizations as among conservative groups, which have spent nearly $10 million on a television ad campaign designed to pressure moderate Democrats.

A multimillion-dollar ad campaign from the pro-Gorsuch Judicial Crisis Network appeared to help persuade two moderate Democratic senators, Heidi Heitkamp (N.D.) and Joe Manchin III (W.Va.), last week to say they will support Gorsuch. On Sunday, Sen. Joe Donnelly (Ind.), also targeted by JCN’s effort, became the third Democrat to announce support for Gorsuch. But another moderate, Sen. Jon Tester (D-Mont.), announced he would vote against Gorsuch and support the filibuster because, “I cannot support a nominee who refuses to answer important questions.” In all, 10 Democrats facing reelection next year in states that Trump carried in the November election have been targeted by the ad campaign backing Gorsuch.

The decisions by Heitkamp and Manchin earned swift rebukes from liberal organizations. That pressure may have been a factor for Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.), who has also been targeted by JCN but said on Friday that she will vote against Gorsuch. In an essay to constituents, she said it had been “a really difficult decision for me.”

Another potential “yes” vote, Sen. Angus King (I-Maine), said Sunday that he will not announce his decision until Tuesday or Wednesday, but suggested that he is leaning against Gorsuch.

Amber Phillips contributed.

Read more at PowerPost