One of the key features of the American Health Care Act, the Republican plan to repeal Obamacare, is the conversion of the Medicaid program into a block grant for the states. Disguised as choice and flexibility for governors, the real-world effect of this idea would be to reduce the program’s funding, limiting its current ability […]

House Speaker Paul Ryan finally passed the health care bill he and Donald Trump have been pushing for weeks, after backroom deals with the Freedom Caucus and a series of amendments that only made it worse. It now heads to the Senate. The repeal bill, which Republicans call the American Health Care Act, kicks over 24 million […]

One of the many disturbing themes of the Republican health care repeal vote was the repeated scenes of GOP members either refusing to say whether they had even read the bill they were voting on, or flatly admitting they had not. One member even told a reporter he hadn’t read the bill because he had been […]

Democrats have historically been chided for the speed of their response to breaking news. No such critique will be valid this time. Even before the end of the GOP’s disgraceful beer-soaked celebration of their vote to take health care away from millions of Americans, Democrats jump-started their national, regional, and local campaign to hold every last one of them […]

Senators Richard Burr (R-NC) and Mark Warner (D-VA), who lead the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee, previously issued a statement slapping down Trump’s lie about Obama wiretapping Trump Tower, noting, “Based on the information available to us, we see no indications that Trump Tower was the subject of surveillance by any element of the United States government either […]

House Republicans callously voted to repeal Obamacare and dismantle its work to improve the lives of millions of Americans. They ignored the thousands of individual pleas expressed at town halls, even as those constituents pushed back against lies from members of Congress and the right-wing media calling their legitimacy into question. Indeed, Republicans voted against […]

In the face of public pressure over his unethical secret meeting with the White House, and an Ethics Committee investigation into his possible exposure of classified information, House Intelligence Chair Devin Nunes (R-CA) has reluctantly agreed to recuse himself from the investigation into Russia’s efforts to swing the presidential election for Donald Trump. This is a […]

House Republicans have been busy engaging in beer-soaked celebration of their razor-thin passage of a cruel and wasteful health care repeal plan. But their Senate colleagues were much more muted in their reactions, to say the least, with only seven GOP senators tweeting tepid reactions to the bill in the two hours following its passage. […]

Republicans celebrated stripping health insurance from 24 million Americans with a delivery of beer to the United States Capitol. As Republicans were voting to repeal Obamacare and make it harder and more expensive for Americans to access life-saving health care, they were apparently already looking forward to knocking back beers in celebration. “Looks like House Republicans are gearing […]

The past couple of weeks in the runoff for Georgia’s 6th Congressional District have seen continued escalation between Democrat Jon Ossoff and Republican Karen Handel. Democrats are increasingly hopeful that Ossoff, a charismatic young filmmaker and former congressional staffer, can flip a district that has been red for nearly 40 years. Republicans, for their part, are […]

By a strictly partisan vote of 217-213, House Republicans passed their second attempt to repeal Obamacare since Donald Trump became president. The bill, which Speaker Paul Ryan rushed through without even waiting for the Congressional Budget Office to score it to calculate how much it will cost, is a disaster for the American people, especially those […]

Congressman Steve King (R-IA) is easily one of the most racist members of the House of Representatives. He has stated that most young Mexican-Americans are drug mules with “calves the size of cantaloupes.” He called a woman sitting with Michelle Obama at a State of the Union Address a “deportable.” He has said he wants America to […]

The latest Republican bill to repeal Obamacare is an unpopular disaster. And it turns out the very people who voted for Donald Trump could suffer the most if it becomes law. The repeal bill removes the current ban on excluding patients with pre-existing conditions from health insurance coverage, one of the most popular provisions of Obamacare. A […]

As Republicans changed Senate rules to ram through the nomination of right-wing extremist Neil Gorsuch, Senate Democrats held firm and refused to be complicit in the theft of a Supreme Court seat. But some people, like Eric Segall of the Daily Beast and law professor Noah Feldman, argued it was politically stupid for Democrats to filibuster Gorsuch. It […]

On the cusp of a rushed vote on the Republicans’ health care repeal plan, one GOP lawmaker summed up his party’s utter disregard for the harm the bill would do in just 64 seconds of a cable news segment. In an interview with MSNBC’s Stephanie Ruhle, Rep. Thomas Garrett (R-VA) displayed both the carelessness and the cruelty […]

On the very same day that Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia died in February 2016, Republicans declared they would block any nominee President Obama named to take his place — and for a better part of a year, they did just that. They even said they would block any nominee by Hillary Clinton, if she […]

While the world was focused on Donald Trump’s relentless stream of foibles and failures, the otherwise stagnant House of Representatives quietly passed legislation broadening Trump’s power over matters of intellectual property. In a bipartisan, 378-48 vote, the House passed the Register of Copyrights Selection and Accountability Act (H.R. 1695), which wrests the librarian of Congress’ ability […]

Rep. Mike Conaway (R-TX) is one of three Republicans taking over for Rep. Devin Nunes since he finally recused himself from the House Intelligence Committee’s investigation of Russian interference in the presidential election. But Conaway’s ascension, along with fellow Republican Reps. Trey Gowdy and Tom Rooney, means the investigation is still in compromised hands and […]

Conservative supporters of Donald Trump like Newt Gingrich and Sean Hannity have been promoting a long debunked conspiracy theory, alleging that the death of DNC staffer Seth Rich was connected to a now-deceased investigative reporter’s leaks to WikiLeaks. Fox News had published a salacious and falsehood-ridden report linking Rich’s death to internal DNC messages allegedly found […]

Rep. Devin Nunes (R-CA), chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, is stepping down from the investigation of Russian meddling in the 2016 election, and he’s blaming “leftwing activist groups” for forcing him out. In a statement, Nunes claimed the left “filed accusations against me with the Office of Congressional Ethics” and called the charges “baseless.” He said […]

Rep. Glenn Grothman, a tea party Republican from Wisconsin, has some terrible and terribly ignorant ideas about how American families get by. And about grocery stores. At a town hall in 2015, Grothman encouraged shoppers to be on the look out for anyone they might suspect of fraudulently using government assistance, claiming that “some people are arranging their life to […]

Despite Donald Trump’s oft-repeated campaign promise that he would repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act, possibly on “day one” of his presidency, the law is still on the books, and the efforts to dismantle it have gone nowhere. To give Trump something substantive to point to as an accomplishment — so to speak — […]

Donald Trump’s budget includes plans to cut the vital Medicaid program by $800 billion, as he once again targets the most vulnerable to absorb the brunt of the pain during his tenure. The administration confirmed the figure to CNN. The cuts at the budget level would form a two-front assault on the program and those who […]

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) used his time during the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing with FBI Director James Comey to rehash the agency’s closed investigation of the IRS’ supposed — and debunked — mistreatment of the the tea party, rather than deal with Russia and Donald Trump. Cruz’s failed presidential campaign was a target of malicious smears […]

Donald Trump and his fellow Republicans have shown a shocking and reprehensible callousness toward Americans, perfectly captured in a shocking statement Trump’s budget director actually made in public. At a White House briefing, Mick Mulvaney, director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), spent half an hour trying to spin Trump’s crushing defeat on the […]

The Republican plan to repeal Obamacare was already poorly received before the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) revealed that the bill would throw 24 million people off of their insurance. The Trump administration and Republicans tried to preempt that conclusion by attempting to discredit the CBO, and also by moving the very goalposts of reform. Last week, Office of […]

At a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing titled “Responses to the Increase in Religious Hate Crimes,” Sen. Al Franken (D-MN) quizzed Eric Treene, the Department of Justice’s special counsel for religious discrimination, about the racism and xenophobia of Donald Trump’s administration, and particularly about white nationalist and senior strategist Steve Bannon. Treene deflected the questions multiple times, but […]

One of the silver linings of the 2016 election was the defeat of Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio. The six-term Arizona Republican law enforcement chief — a mutual admirer of Donald Trump — spent his career careening from one controversy to the next. He put women in chain gangs, called President Obama’s birth certificate a […]

House Republicans are frantically trying to whip votes for their latest version of Obamacare repeal, after their first attempt failed dismally. The newly amended American Health Care Act, which strips protections for pre-existing conditions and would weaken coverage requirements for employer-provided health plans, appears to be in jeopardy again, with key Republicans coming out against it, and […]

Rep. Joe Barton (R-TX) lost his cool during a town hall meeting in Frost, TX, yelling at a constituent to “Shut up!” Barton’s outburst came after a voter challenged Barton for opposing legislation pertaining to violence against women. Asked why he voted against a bill regarding such crimes, Barton claimed that it was a state […]