The New York Times has its Trumpiest headline ever.

Here's the article: "Trump Asserts a Muscular Vision of Presidential Power on First Day Back/In a flurry of unilateral executive actions, Mr. Trump revived disputed claims of broad presidential authority from his first term — and made some new ones. Court battles seem likely."

That's by Charlie Savage. Excerpt:

"Biden’s Catholic faith should make him a natural middle-grounder..."

"... but his personal qualms about abortion have zero policy substance since he abandoned his support for the Hyde Amendment, and he’s planted himself to the left of secular Europe on transgender issues.... Biden is only now considering a Trump-like executive order on border crossings....  [T]he White House is reluctant to put any clear distance between itself and climate activists.... 'If you like your gas-powered car, you can keep your car' is a simple, politically effective formulation. Yet somehow the Biden administration has ended up with 'If you like your gas-powered car, you’re a clueless antiquarian' instead. One explanation for this pattern is that Biden’s White House is staffed by progressive ideologues.... The greater freedom that Trump enjoys has roots in some dark places — cynicism, conservative tribalism, a populist indifference to policy detail...."

Writes Ross Douthat in "Why Can’t Biden Triangulate Like Trump?" 

I clicked on that headline as soon as I saw it, so I'm surprised to see it's dated April 13th. Since I scan the front-page headlines at the NYT every day, I have to think Biden's failure to "triangulate" is something the editors wanted buried. By the way, "triangulate like Trump" is funny, considering that Bill Clinton was the original triangulator. No mention of Clinton in Douthat's column.

"Court tosses suit by Republican states challenging Affordable Care Act."

"The justices ruled 7-2 that Texas and 17 other states lacked standing to argue that the individual mandate to purchase health insurance is unconstitutional" — SCOTUSblog reports.  

Here's the opinion.

BREYER, J., delivered the opinion of the Court, in which ROBERTS, C. J., and THOMAS, SOTOMAYOR, KAGAN, KAVANAUGH, and BARRETT, JJ., joined. THOMAS, J., filed a concurring opinion. ALITO, J., filed a dissenting opinion, in which GORSUCH, J., joined.

Looking at that, I'm most interested in why Justice Thomas concurred: 

"The Supreme Court will hear a third challenge to the Affordable Care Act, this time at the request of Democratic-controlled states that are fighting a lower court decision..."

"... that challenged the constitutionality of the law. The court’s review will probably come in the term that begins in October, which would not leave time for a decision before the November election. The law remains in effect. The court earlier had turned down a motion by the House of Representatives and Democratic-led states to hear the case this term."

Reports Robert Barnes in WaPo.

SCOTUSblog explains the legal issue like this:

In 2012, Chief Justice John Roberts agreed with the court’s four more liberal justices that the mandate was constitutional because the penalty imposed on individuals who did not buy health insurance was a tax, which the Constitution allows Congress to impose. But in 2017, Congress enacted an amendment to the ACA that set the penalty for not buying health insurance at zero – but left the rest of the ACA in place. That change led to the dispute that is now before the court: A group of states led by Texas (along with several individuals) went to federal court, where they argued that because the penalty for not buying health insurance is zero, it is no longer a tax and the mandate is therefore unconstitutional. And the mandate is such an integral part of the ACA, they contended, that the rest of the law must be struck down as well....

That is, the thing that is now nothing has become everything, because Congress would not have passed the ACA without the element that used to be something.

I liked the 2 times at yesterday's Las Vegas rally when Trump talked about computers — first, to say what's wrong with movies and second, enacting a scene between him and Barron.

1. Explaining his "Bring back 'Gone with the Wind'":



"What I say is: Make great movies. Not this computerized crap. Computerized garbage."

2. Talking about the bad $5 billion Obamacare website:



"I have a son at home — he's a genius with computers" — mimes typing on a keyboard, does his Barron voice — "'Hi, Dad. What's up, Dad? Get outta here'/'Hey, listen, I'm the President of the United States, Barron, don't talk to your —'/'Dad, can't you see I'm playing with my computer?' The guy talks to me, he's working with his computer. These guys are genius. You know, they grow up with that. It's like walking. But he's looking at me. I could have given him their health care site. He would have done it for nothing, and it would have been better than what they have there..." — mimes typing and does the Barron voice again — "'Come on, Dad. I'm busy, Dad. Whatdya want? Whatdya want, Dad?'" — the crowd cheers, chants "Barron, Barron!" — "Whoa! Wow!... He's gonna like — he's a good boy. He's a tall boy. He's up there. Just turned 13. I say" — looks up — "'Hi, Barron. How ya doin'?"

I love the father-son interaction where the father tries to use his I'm the President of the United States,  in the classic don't talk to your father like that format.

And I totally agree with him that computerized movies are crap.

"Your insurance is like a bad boyfriend."

Elizabeth Warren (played by Kate McKinnon) is questioned by a pretty young woman (played by new SNL cast-member Chloe Fineman):

"Elizabeth Warren swatted back at Joe Biden’s criticism of her $21 trillion Medicare-for-All plan Friday, accusing him of 'running in the wrong presidential primary.'"

"'Democrats are not going to win by repeating Republican talking points,' the Massachusetts senator said in Des Moines, Iowa. 'So, if Biden doesn’t like that, I’m just not sure where he’s going.'"

Bloomberg reports.

"Option 1: Maintain our current system, which will cost the country $52 trillion over ten years... Option 2: Switch to my approach to Medicare for All, which would cost the country just under $52 trillion over ten years."

Elizabeth Warren explains the math.

ADDED: I don't know — and don't believe anyone could know — if the numbers will work out that neatly. Even if you pick an option and let the 10 years pass, you couldn't know, because you don't run the real-world experiment on the other option. Of course, everyone knows this. You still have to pick.

But let's assume for the sake of analysis that the 2 options cost roughly the same. Another way of putting this, is let's imagine the thought processes of an American voter who completely accepts the premise that the 2 options consume the same amount of money. Why would this person pick Option 1?

I think it would go something like this: I and my loved ones are on track to get a pretty decent share of the $52 trillion in health care services that will be provided in the next 10 years. I know everyone deserves access to health care, but I think there might some big groups of needy people — including people who are migrating to our country — who will be taking a lot more if we switch to Option 2, and my hopes and expectations, which I've built up over a lifetime, will not be met.

That is, even if the same amount of money is spent either way, there's an instinctive fear that if the money is amassed centrally and redistributed, you'll be worse off.

I'm not an economist or an expert on health care, and I haven't read the entire Elizabeth Warren document, and I probably never will. I loathe the subject of finance, and I respect it enough to refrain from offering half-assed opinions on the subject. All I am attempting to discuss is the instinctive emotional reaction to "socialized" medicine. And I'm saying that as someone who has always assumed that a single-payer system would be better and would save money.

ADDED: My thought experiment, above, includes wondering about health care for all the migrants who are continually arriving in the country and who would, presumably, arrive in greater numbers in a Warren administration. Warren's plan does say something about immigration.

I support immigration reform that’s consistent with our values, including a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants and expanded legal immigration consistent with my principles. That’s not only the right thing to do – it also increases federal revenue we can dedicate to Medicare for All as new people come into the system and pay taxes. Based on CBO’s analysis of the 2013 comprehensive immigration reform bill, experts project that immigration reform would generate an additional $400 billion in direct federal revenue.

That is, the immigrants won't cost more. They'll provide more revenue.

Judging Kamala Harris and Bernie Sanders, WaPo's fact-checker Glenn Kessler — instead of giving a Pinocchio rating — concludes "Readers have to view these proposals mostly as political messaging statements."

I'm reading "Bernie Sanders vs. Kamala Harris on taxes for Medicare-for-all." Here's the whole conclusion:

Readers have to view these proposals mostly as political messaging statements.

Sanders acknowledges that he will raise taxes on most Americans, but argues that all but the wealthy will experience a net gain in income. Harris is trying to one-up him by saying that she would not impose additional taxes on the middle class, even though Sanders’s pitch is exactly the opposite — that the middle class will experience higher incomes and lower health-care costs. She sidesteps the issue of whether most Americans should pay some kind of premium to get their health care, as they do currently under both Medicare and Obamacare.

Her proposal to impose a financial transactions tax would roughly make up for the lost revenue from not imposing premiums on people making less than $100,000 — but there could be gaping holes elsewhere.

You can see that doesn't say he's avoiding the usual Pinocchios (so, of course, there's no explanation of this deviation from the usual). Has Kessler ever before silently eschewed Pinocchios and substituted a line like "Readers have to view these proposals mostly as political messaging statements"?

I'm a reader, is he telling me what I "have" to do, what point of view I must take? And look at that weasel word: "mostly." Even if I accept his instruction and mostly think That's a political messaging statement, what about the rest of my thoughts? In that part, should I think Bernie and Kamala are somewhat shading the facts (1 Pinocchio), committing significant factual errors or obvious contradictions (2 or 3 Pinocchios), or telling whoppers (4 Pinocchios)? (See the fact checker's own description of the ratings here).

On my own, not following anyone's instructions, I already tend to view everything politicians say as "political messaging statements." So I wonder what's so special about Sanders and Harris that they emerge from a fact checking without experiencing judgment? We, the readers, are told that we shouldn't be so judgmental! Why am I slogging through a fact-checker column when it's perfectly easy to relegate everything candidates to the category "political messaging statements"? I could become the cynic who mutters "It's all politics!" It would save me a lot of time.

I checked the WaPo archive to see if Glenn Kessler had ever used the phrase "political messaging" before. He has not. This is a new exit route for him, it seems. I give it one Pinocchio. I don't know if he's favoring Harris and Sanders or if the straightforward answer is that no one can speak accurately about something as complex as restructuring the financing of health care.

But if the truth is the candidates can't do more than make political messaging statements, then a fact-checker, to be truthful, needs to say that these facts cannot be checked. Ah, but then you see the way in which Harris and Sanders deserve at least 1 Pinocchio: They're making statements about things they cannot know, offering assurances where there is, necessarily, insecurity.

The NYT struggles to cheer up the anti-Trumpsters with "Bad Times in Trumpville."

Bad times? How can that be?

Gail Collins writes:

I know some of you were very sad about the way the Mueller report let Donald Trump off the hook. Even if you secretly doubted that he was actually well-organized enough to run an international conspiracy, it made you depressed to see him looking so happy.

But then he took off on the worst victory lap since — well, do you remember that baseball player who celebrated his grand slam home run by leaping in the air and fracturing a leg?

“We’re not talking about health care right now, but I will,” Trump told reporters on Wednesday.

He also vowed to make the Republicans “the party of health care.” Great strategy!

And here we go again, presuming Trump does everything wrong... because you so much want him to be wrong. What if those thoughts he's causing you to have — thoughts about what an utter screw-up he is — are part of his genius way of winning?

I scrolled quickly through 5 of the Sunday morning talk shows.

For many years, I've DVR'd "Meet the Press," "Face the Nation," "State of the Union," "Fox News Sunday," and "This Week with George Stephanopoulos," and I used to watch nearly all of all of them and carefully select things to blog. I'd jot down key words so I could find things in the transcript, and I'd talk about them at length here. In the Trump years, however, I've gotten to the point where I won't watch at all, and I will leave the room if someone else even starts to watch. But I did choose to look today, because I wanted to see if Bill Kristol was on and if so, if he's finally lost his big supercilious smile (The Weekly Standard having been murdered the other day).

Answer: No, he was not on. But this did give me a chance to test my aversion. I did stop to watch Amy Klobuchar, because, as you may have noticed, 3 days ago, I wrote, "Why aren't the Democratic candidates better? I'm just going to be for Amy Klobuchar." I got about halfway through it. Here's the transcript and video, so you can check my work. But I completely lost hope that she could be the nominee. This was precisely the occasion for her to show her stuff. This was an easy showcase, at exactly the right time, with a made-to-order Democratic Party issue: A court found the what's left of Obamacare unconstitutional, and people with pre-existing conditions are threatened with losing their health insurance coverage.

Now, it was a little unfair that the interviewer — CBS News's Margaret Brennan — was wearing an neon-bright yellow jacket while Klobuchar wore a dull shade of blue, but this was a softball interview, with no challenging questions, no surprising topics. And Klobuchar was mush-mouthed and dull. I was wondering out loud, why doesn't she have that crisp Sarah Palin style of Minnesotan speech? Where's the spirit and style? She seems like a student who shows up prepared and ready to do the assignment, but with no love of the game, no interest in lighting us on fire, nothing. Now, I personally am happy with nothing and would like a boring President. I don't need lighting up. I don't like political fervor. The main reason I don't watch these news shows is I hate the fervor. But you've got to look alive. You've got to come across as a real person who seems to be saying the words that are coming out of you. There's an art to being successfully boring.

Let me quote the place in the transcript where I lost hope:

MARGARET BRENNAN: Senator Barrasso who was just here said that he does think there's room for legislation to protect preexisting conditions, one of the things that would get thrown out with this ruling if it's upheld. Would you--

SEN. KLOBUCHAR: But I just mentioned a number of other things that would also have to be done. So the best thing here--

MARGARET BRENNAN: But is there room for Democrats to work on those sort of issue specific things with Republicans?

SEN. KLOBUCHAR: There's always room to work on things but the best way - and what I believe will happen - is this will be stayed in court. So it continues to take effect. Then it will go up on appeal. It will be upheld.

Klobuchar has a law degree (from the University of Chicago), but she spoke so unclearly about law. Brennan had just spoken about what might happen "with this ruling if it's upheld." Then Klobuchar said "It will be upheld" when she meant that Obamacare will be upheld. When you say that a ruling goes up on appeal, the word "upheld" should mean that the court below was affirmed. Not the opposite! I could see what she meant, but I was so disappointed by the garbling when she had every reason to be absolutely prepared to nail this interview.

Here's the argument... in a nutshell.

15/ J. O'Connor cites NFIB and King v. Burwell to show that "Individual Mandate is inseverable from the entirety of the ACA" (with a citation to @RandyEBarnett) pic.twitter.com/5EmePfTqAe

— Josh Blackman (@JoshMBlackman) December 15, 2018

This won't hold up, but in case you're fired up to talk about it.

"Federal judge in Texas rules Affordable Health Care Act unconstitutional/Ruling comes on eve of the deadline for Americans to sign up for coverage in the federal insurance exchange created under the law."

ADDED:

As I predicted all along, Obamacare has been struck down as an UNCONSTITUTIONAL disaster! Now Congress must pass a STRONG law that provides GREAT healthcare and protects pre-existing conditions. Mitch and Nancy, get it done!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 15, 2018

MORE: Continue the discussion at this new post which briefly shows how the judge's argument worked. The key issue is severability.

"Let’s hear it for pre-existing conditions!"

I know what you mean, but...

Trump calls McCain "a man — I won’t mention his name. But a man..."

From the transcript of Trump's call-in to Rush Limbaugh's show today:

We had Obamacare repealed and replaced, and a man — I won’t mention his name. But a man at 2 o’clock in the morning went thumbs down, and he campaigned for years on repeal and replace. We had the chance. Nobody even spoke to him about it, because it was something that was unthinkable what he did, and because of that… But still, I have just about ended Obamacare. We have great health care. We have a lot of great things happening right now. New programs are coming out....

I thought it very interesting, that almost-phobia about saying the name — as if the name has mystical power, or perhaps a sense that's it's wrong to speak ill of the near-dead.

It was Rush's 30th anniversary show today, and Trump called in to congratulate him. Here, you can watch Rush react. He seems genuinely surprised to get the call:

Fake news: Preventive care will, in the long run, save money.

Now that we've been hooked into to paying for everyone else's routine maintenance, the truth comes out: "Preventive Care Saves Money? Sorry, It’s Too Good to Be True/Contrary to conventional wisdom, it tends to cost money, but it improves quality of life at a very reasonable price" (NYT).

I guess we're not supposed to be mad about all the preventive care that got built into Obamacare, because it's just a nice thing to do anyway. But we don't generally pay to improve each other's quality of life. We expect you to work and pay for your own quality-of-life improvements.

From the article:

Let’s begin with emergency rooms, which many people believed would get less use after passage of the Affordable Care Act. 

We believed it, because the fake-news press and the lying politicians told us so.

The opposite occurred. It’s not just the A.C.A. The Oregon Medicaid Health Insurance experiment, which randomly chose some uninsured people to get Medicaid before the A.C.A. went into effect, also found that insurance led to increased use of emergency medicine. Massachusetts saw the same effect after it introduced a program to increase the number of insured residents.

Emergency room care is not free, after all. People didn’t always choose it because they couldn’t afford to go to a doctor’s office. They often went there because it was more convenient. When we decreased the cost for people to use that care, many used it more.....

ADDED: It is so irritating that this article blames us the believers — "Sorry, It’s Too Good to Be True," "many people believed...." This is the same newspaper that will turn and blame us for doubting what it tells us, as though we're a bunch of yokels when we don't adopt the beliefs it serves up as true.

"The Senate voted 51 to 48, with no Republican defections and no Democratic support."

I'm up at 5 a.m. reading the NYT about the big tax bill that passed the Senate at 1 a.m.

Did you stay up for the drama — for the exultations and lamentations?

The approval of the bill in the House and Senate came over the strenuous objections of Democrats, who have accused Republicans of giving a gift to corporations and the wealthy and driving up the federal debt in the process.

As the final vote approached in the Senate, Chuck Schumer of New York, the Democratic leader, gave his closing argument against the bill and scolded his Republican colleagues for talking during his remarks on the floor.

“This is serious stuff,” Mr. Schumer said. “We believe you’re messing up America. You could pay attention for a couple of minutes.”

What a turnabout from 8 years ago, when the Senate voted on Obamacare:

With the supermajority... the Senate moved rather quickly to pass the ACA – or ObamaCare – on Christmas Eve 2009 in a 60 – 39 vote.... Everyone assumed that the Christmas Eve 2009 Senate bill would be tweaked considerably to conform more with the House bill passed two months previously. But now that strategy wouldn’t work, because [after the Republican Scott Brown won the special election in Massachusetts] the Democrats no longer had the 60th vote in the Senate to end debate. What to do? They decided to have the House take up the identical bill that the Senate passed on Christmas Eve. It passed on March 21, 2010, by a 219 – 212 vote. This time, no Republicans came on board, and 34 Democrats voted against. President Obama signed the ACA legislation two days later on March 23.

The rancor has not abated since, as we all know. Republicans invoked Thomas Jefferson’s observation that “great innovations should not be forced on a slender majority – or enacted without broad support.” They cited broad legislative innovations like Social Security and Medicare, both of which enjoyed bipartisan support. They complained that one fewer vote in the Senate or a change of four votes in the House would have been enough to defeat ObamaCare. Democrats responded just as vociferously and passionately that this healthcare reform package was too important and overdue to delay or compromise.

And now the Republicans have their big achievement, too important and overdue to delay or compromise.

The NYT ends its story with a quote from — of all people — Bob Packwood:

Bob Packwood, the former Republican senator from Oregon who helped lead the 1986 tax effort, said that this year’s bill was at least as sweeping as the one that Ronald Reagan signed into law 31 years ago, even though the bills had different goals.

“They have achieved things that I was unable to achieve,” Mr. Packwood said.

Dredging up Bob Packwood feels like a desperate/poignant effort to make the GOP look bad. Packwood was driven from the Senate in 1995. He was the face of sexual harassment in the crucial interval between the unsuccessful effort to keep Clarence Thomas off the Supreme Court and the unsuccessful effort to oust Bill Clinton from the presidency.

"President Donald Trump plans to cut off subsidy payments to insurers selling Obamacare coverage..."

Politico reports.

“Based on guidance from the Department of Justice, the Department of Health and Human Services has concluded that there is no appropriation for cost-sharing reduction payments to insurance companies under Obamacare,” [Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders] said. “In light of this analysis, the Government cannot lawfully make the cost-sharing reduction payments. …The bailout of insurance companies through these unlawful payments is yet another example of how the previous administration abused taxpayer dollars and skirted the law to prop up a broken system.”...

While Republican lawmakers complained the subsidies were never properly appropriated by Congress, many were wary of ending them suddenly....

"It's time for Congress to fix this bill. That's what needs to happen. Congress has got to get together," [Attorney General Jeff Sessions] said. "Republicans and the Democrats, they've got to come on board and they've got to develop a plan that will actually work. It can not continue in this fashion. It's in a death spiral it seems to me."

Trump is carrying on the Obama tradition of doing everything in the Executive Branch. The complaints should be directed at Congress.

"With these actions... we are moving toward lower costs and more options in the health care market..."

"... and taking crucial steps toward saving the American people from the nightmare of Obamacare... This is going to be something that millions and millions of people will be signing up for... and they’re going to be very happy. This will be great health care."

Said President Trump, quoted in "Foiled in Congress, Trump Signs Order to Undermine Obamacare" (NYT).

Mr. Trump directed three cabinet agencies to develop rules that would expand access to less expensive, less comprehensive insurance, including policies that could be sold by trade associations to their members and short-term medical coverage that could be offered by commercial insurers to individuals and families....

Mr. Trump’s order could eventually make it easier for small businesses to band together and buy insurance through new entities known as association health plans, which could be created by business and professional groups. A White House official said these health plans “could potentially allow American employers to form groups across state lines” — a goal championed by Mr. Trump and many other Republicans.

"Senator John McCain of Arizona announced on Friday that he would oppose the latest proposal to repeal the Affordable Care Act..."

"... leaving Republican leaders with little hope of succeeding in their last-ditch attempt to dismantle the health law" (NYT).

So Lindsey Graham’s being his best friend was not enough.