THE TICKER
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell knows a lengthy process sours public support for a major legislative undertaking. People don’t like to watch the ugly horse-trading necessary to build consensus in Congress. The longer lawmakers engage in it, the more they postpone the public marketing campaign that follows. The Kentucky Republican harnessed that principle eight years ago, marshaling his then-meager minority in the Senate to do everything possible to string out the Democratic-led project of assembling the Affordable Care Act.
As McConnell tries to undo that law with a bare majority this week, he may be demonstrating an equal and opposite principle: Speed kills. The accelerated schedule he adopted for forging the Senate GOP’s repeal-and-replace measure cut not just Democrats but also most of his own conference out of the drafting. So Monday night, after the Congressional Budget Office said the measure would cost 22 million people their insurance coverage over a decade, Republicans previously confined to the sidelines declared sufficient opposition to throw its future into doubt.
That may be precisely the point. As the old business wisdom goes, sometimes a « fast no » is better than a « slow maybe. » And investors have been losing patience with an all-GOP government’s inability to execute on its first priority, mostly because it has stalled progress on its second one. That is, the stuttering health-care debate is holding up action on a wholesale rewiring of the tax code, which, if successful, could translate into an immediate economic boost.
Deep-pocketed conservative donors gathered for a Koch network retreat in Colorado over the weekend expressed their frustration over so-far fruitless tax talks directly to Republican lawmakers. “More than anything else, the network wants a comprehensive rewrite of the tax code completed while Republicans have unified control of government,” my colleague James Hohmann writes in a dispatch from the confab.
The network is primed to put grass roots muscle into the effort. Americans for Prosperity, the Koch’s political arm, plans to mobilize in 36 states over the summer to press Members of Congress for a tax overhaul.
Meanwhile, at least one donor at the conference declared his intention to hit lawmakers where it hurts. Doug Deason, a donor from Texas, said he’s refusing to do any more fundraising for congressional Republicans until they start delivering some results, and he’s encouraging fellow conservative moneymen to follow suit. « Get Obamacare repealed and replaced, get tax reform passed, » Deason said, according to the Associated Press. « You control the Senate. You control the House. You have the presidency. There’s no reason you can’t get this done. Get it done and we’ll open it back up.”
Given the mounting pressure from the donor crowd — and the toxic politics of the health-care repeal drive — Congressional watchers are speculating that McConnell wants the package to collapse so he can move on:
Adds another congressional reporter:
The New York Post’s opinion editor is all but rooting for the outcome:
After they don’t pass this bill this week can we move on to something like tax reform
— Seth Mandel (@SethAMandel) June 26, 2017
The view underestimates McConnell’s aversion to losing a high-stakes fight. Consider this peek behind the veil of a programmatically reticent leader, courtesy of Josh Holmes, his former chief of staff: “He absolutely refuses to lose. It’s that Michael Jordan-like intensity that just keeps him charging ahead when almost everyone else would throw up their hands.”
Plus, McConnell was the architect of the Republican strategy to oppose Obamacare at every turn. He first convened GOP senators to rally them against it back in late November 2008 — just weeks after Obama won the presidency, two months before he was even inaugurated, and in the midst of an economic crisis that demanded a bipartisan emergency response. McConnell has doubled down with each election since, organizing congressional Republicans’ electoral message around a renewed pledge to dismantle the law. Back in March, he said with Republicans fully in power, the time had come to deliver.
“When you have a president of a different party, you can freelance all you want to,” McConnell told Politico at the time. “But now we have an actual chance to change the country. We have somebody who will sign legislation that we pass. We need to get into a governing mode and start thinking about actually achieving something rather than just kind of sparring.”
It’s easier to block than to build. But as McConnell knows well, too, a tax rewrite presents it’s own challenges. If Republicans can’t figure how to work together now, changing the subject may not fix what ails them.
Read more from my colleague Paige Winfield Cunningham in The Health 202 today.
— The health-care debate continues to all but blot out the sun in Washington this week. At least four Senate Republicans have declared their opposition to even starting debate on the health-care measure. Others in the GOP are training their fire on the Congressional Budget Office, the nonpartisan agency that produced the analysis of the bill.
The budget scorekeeper found that under the Senate bill, a poor person in 2026 could face a deductible that costs more than half their income. And Senate Republican leaders added a provision Monday that would force consumers to wait six months before re-enrolling if they let their insurance lapse, eliciting new objections from patient advocates.
My colleagues Bob Costa and Sean Sullivan write that the issue will test the durability of the McConnell-Trump alliance.
— BREAKING this morning: The E.U. just slapped Google with a record $2.7 billion fine, saying it illegally steering users toward its comparison shopping site. Google is expected to appeal.
— The White House is hung up filling three empty slots on the Federal Reserve board because it can’t find a pick with community banking experience who wants job, the Wall Street Journal reports. The Trump administration wants to move the nominees as a package, but a divestiture requirement is turning off would-be candidates. The situation is keeping Trump from installing a vice chair for supervision, a key to advancing his deregulatory agenda.
A traditional dhow floats in the Corniche Bay of Doha, Qatar. (AP Photo/Saurabh Das, File)
— More on the study linked here yesterday that showed Seattle’s minimum wage hike is hurting worker pay: Max Ehrenfreund writes, in short, that it looks credible. But the research has not been peer reviewed yet and won’t end the debate over pay mandates.
— The Post’s Ana Swanson writes that the trade embargo with Qatar could cause destabilizing shortages of helium, used in medical imaging, technology manufacturing and nuclear reactors. In 2015, the country provided 27.2 percent of the global supply of helium, and is the second largest source of the ultralight gas, tied with Iran, and trailing the United States, which has more than a third of the global resources for helium. But the oil and gas fields mostly in Kansas and Oklahoma will not be able to increase production in order to meet the need created by the halt in production in Qatar.
Senate Finance Chairman Orrin Hatch (R-UT) is surrounded by reporters. (REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque)
— Senate Finance Chairman Orrin G. Hatch (R-Utah) tells Fox Business News that the Trump administration is willing to accept a higher corporate rate than the 15 percent target they’ve proposed. He said a rate between 20-25 percent would provide a meaningful economic lift. His comments come as some tax experts now think a 28 percent corporate may be the best that congressional Republicans can muster from a tax rewrite, given how little progress toward a fundamental overhaul of the code they’ve made so far.
In the House, Ways and Means Chairman Kevin Brady (R-Texas) says he’s planning two more hearings on the subject in July, focused on the benefits of a rewrite for small businesses, individuals and families.
— More than half of American voters would blame both Republicans and Democrats for a government shutdown, according to a new Harvard-Harris Poll.
The poll’s findings, published Monday by The Hill, show that 58 percent of voters would blame both parties equally, 20 percent would blame just Democrats and a slightly higher 23 percent would blame just Republicans. And a large majority of the respondents are against Congress raising the debt ceiling.
— The Supreme Court has decided to consider whether corporate whistleblowers are protected by anti-retaliation laws if they report misconduct internally rather than to the Securities and Exchange Commission.
The high court will hear an appeal of San Francisco-based company Digital Realty Trust Inc., in October, Reuters reported. The company argues that the 2010 Dodd-Frank Act did not protect a fired former employee who reported misconduct because he did not report the wrongdoing to the Securities and Exchange commission. The fired employee did report the misconduct internally.
A ruling in favor of the company could mean corporate whistleblowers would have to contact the SEC before reporting issues internally in order to be protected by the law.
From The Post’s Philip Bump: Tip for saving money under the Senate health-care bill: Don’t be old
Today
- The Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Labor, Health and Human Services, Education and Related Agencies will hold a hearing with Labor Secretary Alexander Acosta on the department’s budget request.
- The Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Financial Services and General Government will hold a hearing on the 2018 budget request for the SEC and CFTC.
- The House Financial Services Committee will have a hearing on equity market structure.
- The USTR will hold a hearing on NAFTA renegotiation.
Coming Up
- The House Financial Services Committee will have a hearing on “The Federal Reserve’s Impact on Main Street, Retirees, and Savings” on Wednesday.
- The Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation will hold a nomination hearing Wednesday for Steven Gill Bradbury to be General Counsel of the Department of Transportation and Elizabeth Erin Walsh to be Assistant Secretary of Commerce and Director General of the United States Foreign Commercial Service.
- The Senate Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs will have an open session hearing on housing finance reform on Thursday.
What’s in the CBO report on the Senate health-care plan:
‘Pharma bro’ Martin Shkreli is on trial for securities fraud:
The Post’s Robert Barnes explains the Supreme Court decision to consider whether gerrymandered election maps in Wisconsin violate the Constitution:
What are McMansions, the houses that people love to hate:
Seth Meyers on the CBO score for the Senate GOP’s health plan: