Tag: gop
Mike Lawler

New York GOP Lawmaker Lustily Booed By Handpicked Town Hall Audience

In what is now a familiar scene, yet another GOP lawmaker got mercilessly booed and jeered by their own constituents at a town hall, facing a barrage of questions that all boiled down to one central theme: Why won’t Republicans stand up to President Donald Trump?

The latest victim of town-hall rage was Republican Rep. Mike Lawler of New York, who held an event Sunday night in which he prescreened audience members to ensure they lived in his district, similar to what his Republican colleague Byron Donalds did in Florida last week.

Yet, despite Lawler’s efforts to keep out the supposed outside agitators whom Republicans have baselessly claimed are being paid by Democrats to incite scenes to embarrass GOP lawmakers, the prescreened attendees still took Lawler to task for not standing up to his party’s leader.

“What are you doing to stand in opposition to this administration, and what specifically are you doing that warrants the label ‘moderate’?” one constituent asked Lawler after laying out the ways Trump is hurting Americans, such as putting tariffs on all imports and deporting a two-year-old American citizen with cancer.

“My record speaks for itself,” Lawler replied, eliciting gasps and even laughter from the crowd. “I have been rated the fourth-most bipartisan for a reason, which is the very simple fact that, unlike many of my colleagues, I actually do work across the aisle.”

Lawler also got booed when he was defending Trump’s tariffs, with constituents chanting “blah, blah, blah” and drowning out his answer.

And in perhaps his most absurd answer, Lawler told voters not to believe that he’d vote to cut Medicaid, even though he voted earlier this month for the GOP budget blueprint that would require hundreds of billions in cuts to the lifesaving program that provides insurance to roughly 72 million Americans a year.

“When it comes to Medicaid, I have been very clear: I am not cutting benefits for any eligible recipient,” Lawler said, according to The New York Times, adding of the budget he voted for, “That is as good as the paper it’s written on.”

Lawler, for his part, is one of the most vulnerable Republicans in the House.

He's one of just three House Republicans who represent districts that Democrat Kamala Harris won at the presidential level. Harris received 49.9 percent of the vote in Lawler’s district, while Trump got 49.3 percent, according to data compiled by The Downballot.

Lawler is also mulling a bid for governor of New York, which may be an even tougher climb in a blue state where Trump is deeply unpopular. According to Civiqs’ tracking poll, just 34 percent of voters in New York approve of the job Trump is doing as president, as opposed to 62 percent who disapprove.

Because of his district’s partisanship, it’s not surprising that Lawler would face blowback.

However, GOP lawmakers are being met with enraged voters even in districts and states Trump won by large margins.

It’s a warning sign for Republicans, who will be facing strong headwinds in the 2026 midterm elections if Trump’s approval rating remains as abysmal as it is now. Even more concerning for Republicans is that Trump’s approval is this low before the impact of his tariffs have really hit voters, with experts warning that empty shelves and skyrocketing prices are expected to hit in May and June.

Early polling shows Democrats with an advantage on the generic congressional ballot, which asks voters which party they'd like to see control Congress.

A Fox News poll released Friday found that Democrats hold a lead on the generic congressional ballot by seven percentage points—a large margin that suggests a sizable Democratic victory in the midterms. The poll found that 49 percent of registered voters said they'd vote for a Democrat for Congress, while 42 percent said they'd vote for a Republican.

To put that in perspective, in 2018, when Democrats won control of the House, the final generic-ballot average had Democrats up by 7.3 points, according to RealClearPolitics.

"If the House GOP is under any illusions that Donald Trump's fall in the polls won't bring them down as well—well, they are living on fantasy island,” CNN polling analyst Harry Enten said, adding in a post on X, “Polls look like April ‘05 & '17, prior to big Dem midterm gains.”

Reprinted with permission from Daily Kos.

Andy Ogles

Congressional Republicans Unite In Blustering Defense Of Hegseth

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is digging in after the latest bombshell report that he shared classified war plans in yet another Signal group chat—this time including his wife, brother, and personal attorney.

But instead of condemning Hegseth’s clear mishandling of sensitive military information, GOP lawmakers are circling the wagons, making the insane claim that Hegseth is being taken down by some sort of nefarious deep state within the Pentagon rather than his own bad decisions.

"The D.C. foreign policy establishment is getting desperate. They've tried to take out [Hegseth] twice. Everyone knows exactly what they're doing. It won't work. As a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, I have full faith and confidence in his leadership," Sen. Eric Schmitt of Missouri wrote on X.

And Rep. Andy Ogles of Tennessee made a similarly absurd accusation.

“Deep State leakers inside the Pentagon are trying to sabotage [Hegseth]. They’re terrified of the bold, America-First reforms President Trump is delivering. The D.C. cartel is in full-blown panic mode. Their desperation says it all: we’re winning—and history will prove us right,” he wrote on X.

But those were far from the most ridiculous defenses of Hegseth.

Rep. Derrick Van Orden of Wisconsin, a noted douchebag who berated teenage Senate pages for taking photos in the Capitol rotunda, said that Hegseth was above reproach because he served in the military after 9/11—as if that absolves him of any wrongdoing.

"I don’t want to hear from any healthy American that was of fighting age on 9/11 who did not join the military and deploy to combat talking shit about [Hegseth]. You had your chance to serve our Nation when She needed you and you did not. Stand down, the Warriors will take,” he wrote on X.

And Sen. Markwayne Mullin of Oklahoma, a Republican who helped push to get Hegseth confirmed despite his numerous scandals, also said that he’s sticking by the former Fox News host.

“I will lead the breach. I will lay down cover fire. I will take the high ground. I’ll expose myself to enemy fire to communicate. We must bring back integrity, focus, and put the Warfighter first inside DOD. I stand with [Hegseth],” he wrote on X.

Even the entire Republican cohort on the House Foreign Affairs Committee defended Hegseth,

“Pete Hegseth is a warfighter and he’s helping President Trump make sure our country is worthy of the sacrifice of our men and women in uniform,” they wrote on X.

Meanwhile, Rep. Byron Donalds of Florida tried to use whataboutism to defend Hegseth during an appearance on CNN, which—unsurprisingly—did not go well.

"Nobody was saying a word when Lloyd Austin, the previous defense secretary, disappeared for a month. Nobody could find him," Donalds deflected.

So far, only one Republican has called for Hegseth to resign: Rep. Don Bacon of Nebraska, one of the most vulnerable GOP lawmakers in the House who represents a district that Vice President Kamala Harris carried in 2024.

“The military should always pride itself on operational security. If the reports are true, the Secretary of Defense has failed at operational security, and that is unacceptable. If a Democrat did this we'd be demanding a scalp. I don't like hypocrisy. We should be Americans first when it comes to security,” he told Axios.

But don’t expect other Republicans to join Bacon anytime soon.

According to Politico, Republicans are afraid that calling for Hegseth to resign will get them on President Donald Trump’s bad side.

“Everyone knows he’s a joke, but he’s the guy to do pushups with the troops,” a former congressional aide toldPolitico. “Plus, not many want to publicly say anything right now and get on Trump’s bad side.”

Now that is the definition of cowardice.

Reprinted with permission from Daily Kos.

Trump, CDC, public health threat

How Trump's Health Care Layoffs Will Hasten A National Recession

As the news about the Trump regime’s purge at every Health and Human Services agency poured in, it dawned on me that this could be the beginning of the next great recession.

Beyond the massive cuts already underway, there is more to come in Medicaid and possibly even Medicare as the GOP advances legislation to extend corporate tax breaks. This will lead to a sharp reduction in household spending, which drives the economy. Health care represents 18 percent of that economy.

I have consistently advocated for reducing the medical industrial complex’s draw on national income. But this isn’t the way to do it. Cutting Medicaid and premium support for individual insurance plans will undermine public health, make America sicker and increase demand for ameliorative care, which will increasingly be provided free of charge as the ranks of the uninsured swell. That will force those still insured to pay higher rates, which in turn will exacerbate the decline in consumer spending as households prioritize basics like food, housing, heat, and health care over discretionary spending.

This is in addition to the havoc raised by the president’s broad and irrational tariffs announced yesterday. Unless every economist except those working for Trump is wrong, this will drive prices for every imported good higher: from food and clothes to cars and computers.

The ostensible goal — bringing manufacturing jobs home — is a decades-long project. Those who honestly believe Hamiltonian-style protectionism can work in the 21st century understand that industrial policy must be 1) strategically targeted; and 2) accompanied by policies that promote the protected industries. That’s exactly what President Biden included in his Build Back Better program, partially enacted in the Inflation Reduction Act. The Trump regime is eliminating many of those provisions.

Is it safe? Will it be there?

The press did an admirable job over the past two days cataloging the effects of HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.’s purge of 10,000 HHS workers (on top of the 10,000 who jumped ship during the earlier buyouts). Here are some of the more pernicious cuts:

  • The Food and Drug Administration eliminated 170 staff from its inspections department. Most were support staff for the people who visit facilities in the U.S. and around the world to ensure there are no impurities in drugs and no bacteria in food. The backlog of uninspected facilities will grow as “front-line investigators will now be spending significant time processing their own travel and related administrative requirements,” rather than spending that time inspecting firms to ensure the American consumer is protected, one FDA official told CBS News.

The staff cuts at FDA included veterinarians monitoring the bird flu outbreak, which has led to egg shortages and emboldened producers to price gouge. The laid-off scientists included vets who designed studies showing pasteurization killed viruses found in milk, according to the Washington Post. Drinking raw milk is among the many quackeries embraced by Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.

  • The vaccine advisory panel at FDA lost the four staffers who run the meetings and monitor conflicts of interest, according to Bloomberg News. Meanwhile,Politico reports Sara Brenner, the FDA’s principal deputy commissioner, has asked for more data about the Novovax vaccine for Covid-19, the only non-mRNA vaccine on the market. Its approval was expected by April 1.
  • The HHS layoffs announced Tuesday included more than half of the 150 staff at the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation, which evaluates policy alternatives for the HHS secretary. More than third of the 300 staffers at the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality received pink slips this week, according to Stat. AHRQ conducts or supports most of the research aimed at improving patient safety at the nations hospitals, where drug-resistant infections remain a major threat.
  • About two-thirds of the 1,200 people working at the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health are being laid off, according to CBS News. They include the entire staff at the National Personal Protective Technology Laboratory, which is responsible for ensuring respirators and other personal protective equipment work properly.

This will effect not just hospital and medical personnel but mineworkers, construction workers and others routinely exposed to dangerous air, chemicals and other hazards at work. The layoffs will take effect on June 30, American Federation of Government Employees union representatives told Modern Healthcare. "Everybody in NPPTL is being RIF'ed," said Brendan Demich, chief steward of the AFGE Local 1916.

  • It is unlikely the public will get many details about the effects of the personnel cuts. Most staff in the offices that respond to Freedom of Information Act requests at HHS have been put on administrative leave. Those offices at the CDC, NIH and the FDA were entirely eliminated. Journalists, lawyers and patient advocacy groups depend on FOIA requests to gain insight into internal deliberations and lobbyist interactions behind government decions.

An HHS spokesman told NPR that “the FOIA offices throughout the Department were previously siloed, and did not communicate with one another. Under Secretary Kennedy's vision for a more efficient HHS, these offices will be streamlined, and the work will continue.” Only there will be fewer people, longer delays, and centralized control over what gets released.

A better way to cut spending

Here’s another news story that caught my eye this week. Employment at the nation’s largest health insurance companies dipped 4.6% in the fourth quarter of last year, according to a review of SEC filings by Modern Healthcare reporters. Even if one excludes UnitedHealth Group’s overseas divestitures, the seven largest insurers cut 1.4 percent of their workers at a time when total jobs in the economy grew by 1.2 percent.

Slower spending growth by both Medicare and Medicaid is shrinking insurer margins. Seniors opting for private Medicare Advantage plans, which now cover more than half of beneficiaries, is slowing dramatically, up just 3.1 percent to 34.4 million people this year, according to a STAT report in late February. Medicare pays MA plans about 22 percent more on average than those beneficiaries would cost if they had remained in the traditional program.

Why? Medicare pays insurers a risk-adjusted monthly premium to cover seniors who choose an MA plan. The “risk” is determined by how sick people are, which insurers can game by coding for illnesses they never treat. The Medicare Payment Advisory Commission estimates Medicare loses over $80 billion a year from insurer upcoding — and that’s after slapping an across-the-board 5.9 percent reduction in payments to insurers.

Increase that reduction to 20% — making MA reimbursement about equal to FFS Medicare — would save Medicare $1.0 trillion over the next decade. This could lead to higher cost sharing, higher premiums and fewer supplemental benefits for MA enrollees (so those plans looked more like traditional Medicare). Or MA insurers could take a profit haircut. But it would also eliminate any need to cut Medicaid to pay for tax breaks.

Here’s the popular slogan I offered last month: Don’t throw people off Medicaid to pay for your tax breaks for big corporations and the wealthy. Stop private insurers from ripping off Medicare.

Merrill Goozner, the former editor of Modern Healthcare, writes about health and politics at GoozNews.substack.com, where this column first appeared. Please consider subscribing to support his work.

Reprinted with permission from Gooz News.


The Cowardice Of Conservative And Business Elites Led Straight To This Disaster

The Cowardice Of Conservative And Business Elites Led Straight To This Disaster

A Wall Street Journal editorial described President Donald Trump's tariffs as the "dumbest trade war in history." It's important not to overrate intelligence, even in leaders. Judgment and maturity may be more crucial. But Trump is no ordinary dunce. He displays a stubborn stupidity that threatens to plunge the world into chaos and potentially into depression.

It should go without saying that our constitutional system was never meant to be so vulnerable to the whims and fantasies of one man. Nothing as critical as the entire world trading system or the maintenance of the NATO alliance should be decided by which side of the bed the emperor woke up on today, but due to the cowardice and cupidity of the GOP and others, we've gradually lost our antibodies to strongman rule and find ourselves bowing before a power-drunk man/child.

His peculiar blind spots and obsessions now threaten everyone. All of those supposedly worldly-wise Wall Street types who either supported or did not oppose Trump's return to power deserve some of the blame today. One thinks of Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorgan Chase, who has a long history opposing tariffs but was becalmed to the point where he told a Davos audience in January that tariffs are a good "economic weapon" and that critics should "get over it."

This kind of insouciance in the face of a severe economic threat is breathtaking. Even if Wall Street executives and others who chose to believe that Trump was preferable to Kamala Harris were indifferent to the civil liberties implications of a Trump second term and uninterested in public health and the administration of justice, you'd think they'd be interested in their own bottom lines. You would think they might have noticed that one of Trump's only long-term convictions was that America had been victimized by world trade and that tariffs would solve all of our problems.

Trump has an obsession with trade. He always has, and his views are wrong historically, economically and even morally. At his Rose Garden declaration of "Liberation Day" he repeated his oft-stated view that the U.S. has been "looted, pillaged, raped and plundered by nations near and far" for 50 years and more. Long-term trade deficits, he declared, are a "national emergency" that "threaten our way of life."

In vain did a procession of first-term advisers attempt to disabuse Trump of his absurd views about trade. They patiently explained that it is Americans, not foreigners, who pay tariffs. He was deaf to this. They noted that trade deficits are not a measure of wealth, far less who is "winning" or "losing." If we buy coffee from Costa Rica and they buy nothing from us (which isn't true, but just as an illustration), in no sense has Costa Rica taken advantage of, far less "raped," America. We gave them dollars and they gave us coffee in return.

That is called commerce, and nearly every exchange between a willing buyer and willing seller yields two winners, not one. Besides, as those first-term Trump advisers also tried to convey, those Costa Rican businessmen then take those dollars and buy American assets.

The global trading system the United States shepherded into existence in the post-World War II era has been a boon to people around the globe, and no one has benefitted more than the people of the United States. We've run trade deficits with many nations for many reasons. Sometimes that's a reflection of savings versus investment rates in other countries (think Germany). Sometimes it's a reflection of relative wealth (Vietnamese consumers can't afford to purchase as many American products as Americans can afford to purchase of Vietnamese products).

But in any case, it doesn't really matter because countries that run big trade deficits can be super wealthy. The United States has run trade deficits since the late 1970s and has also been the richest nation on the globe during those years. In fact, even during Trump's first term, which he has widely proclaimed to have been the greatest economy in the history of the universe, we ran consistent trade deficits. In fact, the trade deficit increased during the first Trump administration from $481 billion in 2016 to $679 billion in 2020.

In a saner world, Trump's delusions would not guide U.S. policy. They'd be checked by his own advisers, the Congress and the public. But here we are.

This is not the first time in history that a leader's misconceptions have been implemented on a broad scale, but you have to reach into the history of dictatorial regimes to find parallels. In the Soviet Union in the 1930s, the ideas of agronomist Trofim Lysenko gained acceptance not because they were true but because Stalin wanted them to be true. Lysenko promised a new golden age with dramatically improved crop yields that would transform even Siberia into a paradise of orchards and gardens. This was touted by Stalin as the "new biology" and ruthlessly enforced. Naysayers were arrested and executed. The result was repeated famines in the USSR and in China, where Mao also embraced the fallacy. Millions of men, women and children starved to death because a leader was able to impose his fantasies on a whole society.

Global trade is an engine of prosperity, and one man's stupidity now threatens billions.

Reprinted with permission from Creators.

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