RUTHFULLY YOURS

With the Senate health-care bill delayed for now, the conservative and more centrist GOP wings need to bridge a philosophical gap to succeed. The outcome of this debate will define what the Republican Party stands for—and whether the problems of America’s entitlement state can ever be solved.

The biggest policy divide concerns the future of Medicaid, and here the problem is the moderates who are acting like liberals. Despite their campaign rhetoric, some Senators now want to ratify ObamaCare’s Medicaid expansion as an unrepealable and unreformable welfare program.
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Most of the Affordable Care Act’s insurance coverage gains have come from opening Medicaid eligibility beyond its original goal of helping the poor and disabled to include prime-age, able-bodied adults. The federal-state program has become the world’s single largest insurer by enrollment, covering more people than Medicare or the British National Health Service. Total spending grew 18% in 2015 and 17% in 2016 in the 29 states that expanded, and the nearby chart shows the growth of overall federal Medicaid spending under current law and without reform.

The Senate bill attempts to arrest this unsustainable surge by moving to per capita spending caps from an open-ended entitlement. When states spend more now, they generate an automatic payment from the feds. The goal is to contain costs and give Governors the incentive and flexibility to manage their programs.

Meanwhile, four long years from now, the bill would start to phase-down the state payment formula for old and new Medicaid beneficiaries to equal rates. Governors ought to prioritize the most urgent needs.

This would be the largest entitlement reform ever while still protecting the most vulnerable. The bill is carefully designed to avoid overreach and would save taxpayers $772 billion compared with what Medicaid would otherwise spend under current law, according to the Congressional Budget Office. This does not “cut” spending; it merely slows the rate of increase.

This has nonetheless made some Senators nervous, like West Virginia’s Shelley Moore Capito and Ohio’s Rob Portman. The growth rate for the block grants would be set at the rate of medical inflation for most beneficiaries at the start and then fall to the consumer price index in 2026, which is more ambitious than the House bill. Some Senators would like to see more generous growth rates, while others favor waiting six or seven years, rather than four, to start the phase-down of the expansion.

President Obama has been busy since leaving office. In February he was photographed kite surfing with billionaire Richard Branson in the British Virgin Islands. March brought a visit to Hawaii, followed by four weeks in French Polynesia and yachting with David Geffen, Oprah, Tom Hanks and Bruce Springsteen.

May included biking and golfing at a pal’s luxury hotel in Tuscany, before speeches in Berlin and Scotland, the latter providing the chance to play 12 holes at St. Andrews. Now the Obamas are in Indonesia for a nostalgic return to what was briefly his childhood home. But before jetting off on Friday, the former president, that champion of the poor and dispossessed, waded into the health-care debate with a lengthy Facebook post.

It was a trite, tone-deaf, partisan and condescending attack on the Senate Republicans’ health-care proposal. The comments show that the former president, still prickly and defensive, doesn’t understand how flawed ObamaCare really is.

Mr. Obama sold the Affordable Care Act with well-formulated falsehoods. “If you like your plan, you can keep your plan,” he said repeatedly, and “if you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor.” The law would “cover every American and cut the cost of a typical family’s premium by up to $2,500 a year.” It would “bend the cost curve” for health care, he said, without adding “one dime to the deficit.” None of this was true, and Mr. Obama must have known that.

So did he address these failings in his Facebook post? Of course not. The former president changed his talking points for ObamaCare. “Women can’t be charged more for their insurance,” he bragged—but the GOP proposal doesn’t alter that policy. “Young people can stay on their parents’ plan until they turn 26,” he said—but Republicans would leave that in place, too. “Contraceptive care and preventive care are now free,” Mr. Obama added—except taxpayers actually pay for them with levies on, among other things, hospital stays, medical devices and insurance policies. Meanwhile, Mr. Obama shoved his broken promises down the memory hole.

Mr. Obama did repeat the left’s canards that the GOP proposal “would raise costs, reduce coverage, roll back protections, and ruin Medicaid.” He piously added: “That’s not my opinion, but rather the conclusion of all objective analysis,” starting with “the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office.”

The CBO, however, did not issue its report on the Senate legislation until four days after Mr. Obama posted on Facebook. And when the CBO report did come out, it didn’t back up his indictment. For example, the CBO concluded: “By 2026, average premiums for benchmark plans for single individuals in most of the country under this legislation would be about 20 percent lower than under current law.”

One could scour the CBO’s report in vain for anything to justify saying the bill would “roll back protections” or “ruin Medicaid.” Under the Senate plan, Medicaid outlays would continue to rise, albeit at a slower rate.

Wielding the left’s favorite new club, Mr. Obama also claimed that “23 million Americans would lose insurance” if the GOP bill passes. But how can that be, since only 10 million people get coverage through the ObamaCare exchanges? Further, how many of those people want insurance in the first place? The CBO says that “in 2018, 15 million more people would be uninsured under this legislation than under current law—primarily because the penalty for not having insurance would be eliminated.” CONTINUE AT SITE

Neil Gorsuch has spent only a fraction of a term as a Supreme Court justice, but few justices have had a more promising start. He has shown himself a careful textualist in reading statutes, a serious originalist in interpreting the Constitution, and an adherent of judicial restraint—and he has done all this with an engaging style that will allow him to reach over the heads of Court watchers and critics to the people. He seems an ideal schoolmaster for the American republic—a jurist whose every opinion is a lucid primer on the civics of our governance.

His first majority opinion in Henson v. Santander Consumer USA was a superb exercise in meticulous analysis of statutory text. The question at hand was whether a law designed to regulate debt collectors applied to a bank that had a bought a debt and tried to collect on it. By its terms, the statute covers those “who regularly collect debts . . . owed or due . . . another.” The bank argued that it was collecting the debt of its own, not of another, since it had purchased the debt. The debtor seized on the past tense of the term “owed” and contended that the debt was another’s because it had been previously “owed” to the party from which the bank bought it. Gorsuch showed the debtor’s argument did not follow from ordinary language because the past tense is often used to describe the present state of a thing, as when one refers to “burnt toast or a fallen branch.” Moreover, he observed that the word “due” was obviously meant only to cover debt that was currently due. Thus, Gorsuch held that to rule for the debtor “we would have to suppose Congress set two words cheek by jowl in the same phrase but meant them to speak to entirely different periods of time. All without leaving any clue.”

His first concurrence, written in Maslenjak v. United States, objected to the majority opinion in the case because it went further than necessary. Here, the issue was whether a statute that made it a crime to lie during a naturalization proceeding covered only lies that caused the government to grant citizenship. Gorsuch agreed with the majority that causation was required, and thus that the lower court must be reversed because of a jury instruction that did not require such proof. But he complained that the Court’s majority then proceeded to craft instructions on the contours of the jury instruction on causation. Gorsuch correctly argued that the better course was to permit lower courts to decide on these details after briefing on the precise questions. The essence of judicial restraint is judicial modesty: the Supreme Court should decide no more than is strictly necessary because it is likely to make mistakes on matters that are not directly before it.

Gorsuch also signaled that he will be an originalist and a strong ally of Justice Clarence Thomas. In Weaver v. Massachusetts, in which a majority of the Court assumed that the right to a public trial extends to jury selection, Gorsuch joined Thomas in demanding that that assumption be tested against the original understanding in a future case. In dissent from the Court’s refusal in Peruta v. California to take a case on the Second Amendment, Gorsuch again joined Thomas in arguing that the lower court had ignored the history surrounding the amendment, which shows that the right to bear arms includes the right to carry them publicly.

If we are to believe the latest news reports, congressional Republicans are out to murder Americans, ripping life-saving medication from their hands and forcibly dragging them from health-care clinics by the thousand. Setting aside the fairly obvious fact that the GOP reform bill will not, in fact, kill millions, one wonders why the Left’s semblance of measured rhetoric on health care has vanished so quickly.

The recent histrionics from Democratic politicians, pundits, and even many journalists stand in stark contrast to the tone of public conversation about health-care reform before Donald Trump’s election. As recently as last fall, commentators on both the left and the right seemed to agree that the Affordable Care Act needed further work.

To be sure, Democrats at every level of government remained adamant that the few shortcomings of Obamacare were a necessary part of the equalizing process to provide health insurance for low-income Americans and minorities. But at the same time, most on the left named those shortcomings (however reluctantly) and acknowledged the need for improvement.

Even the Democrats’ own presidential nominee said as much. During the 2016 campaign, Hillary Clinton admitted that “premiums have gotten too high” and vowed to “fix” Obamacare. And while Clinton’s idea of “fixing” Obamacare would have looked much different from, say, Ted Cruz’s, she didn’t embrace the far-left-wing solution of single-payer health care, either.

A Huffington Post article from early 2016 divulged some of President Obama’s own proposed health-care reforms, noting, “Even the guy who signed it knows the Affordable Care Act has problems.” And last fall, several Democratic senators stretched magnanimous hands across the aisle, urging their Republican colleagues to work with them for the sake of improving the Obamacare markets.

“There are things we can do and need to do to address restoring competition in these exchanges, and my hope is when we’re through the elections and past the elections, we’ll do those,” said senator Tom Carper (D., Del.) last September.

“You know, I think the Affordable Care Act from the very beginning has been a roller coaster,” Democratic senator Chris Murphy (Conn.) said around the same time. Senator Bob Casey Jr. (D., Pa.) agreed: “I think it’s important to be vigilant, because like any complex area of policy, it’s going to require some changes.”

But after Trump’s surprise victory in November, the tenor of health-care-reform dialogue underwent a rapid transformation. Today’s Left — including these previously fair-minded Democratic senators — seems to have completely forgotten their earlier admissions that Obamacare needs some work.

Instead, pundits and politicians alike have settled on a tone akin to total panic. The American Health Care Act that passed the House this spring, and the recently proposed draft bill written by GOP leadership in the Senate, are surely not the type of reforms that Democrats had in mind. But neither of those bills by any means represents a full repeal-and-replace effort, and both at least attempt to address the skyrocketing costs and plummeting options that have plagued the Obamacare exchanges.

In the months since Donald Trump became America’s 45th president, the unemployment rate among black people has hit the lowest number since 2000.

In February, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) reported the black unemployment rate at 8.1, but the number dropped to 8.0 in March, 7.9 in April, and 7.5 in May.

During most of Barack Obama’s presidency, black unemployment was in double digits, hitting a high mark of 16.8 in March 2010. Between July 2008 (during the financial crisis) and February 2015, the rate remained above 10 percent.

Black unemployment has not been this low since December 2000, when 7.4 percent of African-Americans looking for work were unable to find it.

This good news should be taken with a grain of salt, however, because the workforce participation rate remained low in May, at 62.7 percent. It is possible that many people stopped looking for work, just as others found good jobs.

Some might argue that Obama could be credited for this drop in unemployment. But under that logic, Bill Clinton is responsible for the increase in black unemployment in the first year of George W. Bush’s presidency.

Even so, this decline in the black unemployment rate is good news for the new president during his first year in office.

This comes on the heels of a Los Angeles Times report that President Trump has been a unique champion of historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs).

“For [President] Obama, people expected him to come in and fix everything — especially for black people,” Walter Kimbrough, president of Dillard University in New Orleans, told the L.A. Times. “But he never campaigned strongly for HBCUs.”

But Trump came into office with no expectations, and has pleasantly surprised black leaders like Kimbrough. “He’s coming in saying he’s going to be the president for HBCUs,” the university president noted.

As former FBI Director James Comey’s best friend, Robert Mueller, stocks his Seinfeld investigation-about-nothing with every Democratic lawyer and Hillary and/or Obama donor he can find, we are treated to the delicious irony of collusion with Russia being confirmed — and the colluder-in-chief being Ex-president Barack Hussein Obama.

Even Obama’s Democrat supporters are now acknowledging he knew about Russia’s hacking of the DNC and Podesta emails. They are acknowledging that he did nothing but are not acknowledging the reason why – that he thought Hillary Clinton was going to succeed him and he wanted to do nothing to offend the Russians to whom he had once famously promised more “flexibility.”As Fox News Politics reported:

President Trump criticized his predecessor for allegedly doing “nothing” about reports that Russia interfered in last year’s presidential campaign, in a recent interview.“I just heard today for the first time that (former President) Obama knew about Russia a long time before the election, and he did nothing about it,” Trump said in the interview set to air Sunday on “Fox & Friends Weekend.” “The CIA gave him information on Russia a long time before the election. … If he had the information, why didn’t he do something about it?”

Even Rep. Adam Schiff, ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee, acknowledged that President Obama’s refusal to embarrass his Russian friends by doing nothing was a mistake:

President Obama’s decision to not act sooner on Russian election interference last year was “a very serious mistake,” says California Rep. Adam Schiff.

“I think the administration needed to call out Russia earlier, and needed to act to deter and punish Russia earlier and I think that was a very serious mistake,” Schiff said in an interview on CNN’s “State of the Union” on Sunday.

Schiff, the top ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, said that Obama was hesitant to confront Russia over its active measures campaign for fear of being seen as helping Hillary Clinton and of fueling Donald Trump’s allegations that the election was being “rigged” against him.

That is the excuse made by those caught with their hands in the cookie jar. What happened to our democracy being at stake, the sanctity of our electoral process being violated? It was okay to jeopardize our national security through inaction as long as it was thought it might embarrass Hillary? But when Trump won, suddenly it became an issue for which he was responsible?

As noted, Obama’s collusion with the Russians began years earlier when he conspired to gut U.S. missile defense efforts in Europe. As Investor’s Business Daily noted over a year ago, President Obama had other plans and his betrayal of our allies was exquisitely ironic:

Yet within hours of Medvedev’s election as president in 2008, the Russian announced that Moscow would deploy SS-26 missiles in his country’s enclave of Kaliningrad situated between our NATO allies Poland and Lithuania.

He wanted the U.S. to abandon plans to deploy missile interceptors in Poland and warning radars in the Czech Republic designed to counter a future threat from Iran.

It was a Chicago weekend filled with gay pride events, with friends and families cheering on the marchers. But a dark cloud loomed over one event. When some lesbians showed up at the “Dyke March” with banners that included a Star of David, they were booted out.

The Jewish symbol “made us feel unsafe,” the organizers said.

As the blues-rock singer Delbert McClinton once wrote, “If you can’t lie no better than that, you might as well tell the truth.”

Noxious in its own right, this incident highlights several problems that are now pervasive on the left and increasingly pollute the public sphere. They deserve exposure and censure.

There’s no mistaking the Star of David’s meaning. It’s the universal symbol for Judaism, one seen at every synagogue—and on every “Coexist” bumper sticker. It is the centerpiece of Israel’s flag, marking it as the Jewish state. It was pinned as the mark of Cain on Jews in ghettos and concentration camps.

When the organizers of Chicago’s “Dyke March” prohibited its display, they were saying, “Jews are not welcome here if they display any symbol of their faith or cultural history.”

The irony, of course, is that gays themselves were treated this way for years. They were told to keep their heads down and never say who they really are, much less display their orientation openly, proudly. They are still treated this way in many countries, the very ones embraced by the Dyke March organizers. It’s a bizarre contortion of “progressive ideology,” one they could test by marching through Ramallah or Gaza City.

The organizers were open about why they prohibited the Jewish symbol. They loathe Israel and love Palestinian opposition to it. Of course, you could hold those views and still let others march. But that wasn’t “progressive” enough for them.

Incidents like this are not confined to a few wackos. They occur regularly at leftist protests and on college campuses. For the first time since the 1950s, anti-Semitism is voiced openly, well beyond fringe groups and “restricted” country clubs.

This resurgence of anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism has been growing in Europe for more than a decade. On the right, it’s a return to age-old hatreds in an age of globalization and dislocation. On the left, it’s a fashionable way to show solidarity with Muslim immigrants—without actually dealing with the serious (and increasingly lethal) problems of integrating them into modern European life.

Like so many bad ideas, this New Anti-Semitism jumped the pond, landing first in universities and spreading from there. On campus, the vanguard has been Muslim activists from the Middle East and North Africa, especially Palestinians, with little regard for free speech if it conflicts with their political aims. They show up to protest at virtually all pro-Israel events (okay), and routinely disrupt them (not okay).

They have many fellow travelers, as the Dyke March shows. What they share is contempt for the First Amendment. They think views that diverge from theirs should be suppressed. Of course, they alone are allowed to make those decisions.

The Dyke March incident reveals several other disturbing trends, as well. It shows how easily the disparagement of Israel, which is nearly universal on the left, spills over into denigration of all Jews.

Ah, you say, but aren’t many Jews active on the left? Yes, but too few have fought back against their comrades’ scorn of their religion or the Jewish state. Some don’t care because they are thoroughly secular. Judaism may have been their parents’ or grandparents’ religion, but it is not theirs. Others are aggressively anti-Israel. Their presence as Jews (which they highlight) gives political cover to others’ hatred. How could we be anti-Semitic if we welcome these Jews?

Dr. Price, an orthopedic surgeon and former Republican Rep. from Georgia District 6 is secretary of health and human services.

America faces an urgent crisis in its health-care system. Costs are skyrocketing and choices are disappearing on the individual and small-group markets. Many people now confront the real challenge of having no choice in their health coverage.

One of them is Doug Lake, an Iowa radiologist who came to the White House last week to share his story. His daughter, who suffers from a rare cardiac condition, is covered by an insurer that plans to pull out of ObamaCare’s exchange in their state next year. Only one insurer remains in their county, and that company has requested a 43% increase in premiums.

The situation is even worse elsewhere. As of this week, 49 counties across the country do not have a single insurer offering plans on the exchanges next year.

This year more than 1,000 counties had only one insurer in the ObamaCare market, meaning millions of Americans had no meaningful choice. Meanwhile, the insurers that did stay in the market increased premiums for their midlevel plans by an average of 25%. Premiums on the individual market are up about $3,000 since ObamaCare was implemented. Think about what else that money could buy!

It is too early to know how much premiums will rise next year, but reports so far indicate that double-digit increases again will be the norm.

These are not simply numbers on a page: They represent real people with real stories, facing real health-care and financial crises.

Dudley Bostic, a pharmacy owner in Tennessee, can no longer afford to provide health insurance for her employees because of ObamaCare’s mandates. Candace Fowler, a Missouri homemaker who was recently diagnosed with a serious neurological condition, lives in a county where there are slated to be no insurers selling ObamaCare plans next year. Tommie McClain, a student in Clinton, Mo., who suffers from chronic migraines, faces the possibility of zero choices in his county, too.

The good news is that Congress has the chance to help Doug, Dudley, Candace, Tommie and the millions of other Americans suffering under this law by undoing the damage done by ObamaCare and fulfilling the promises President Trump has made.

The bill recently introduced in the Senate would get rid of the individual mandate, which in 2015 alone caused 6.5 million Americans to pay $3 billion in penalties to the IRS because they did not want or could not afford a government-dictated health plan. It would directly repeal some of ObamaCare’s most costly regulations while giving states flexibility to waive others if they develop innovative ways to provide coverage and bring down costs.

The Senate’s plan also would repeal hundreds of billions of dollars in onerous taxes. It would put Medicaid on a sustainable spending path and give states a real chance to reform the program to make it work for the people who rely on it.

In the Sunday Washington Post’s 7,000-word account of what President Obama knew about Russian election meddling and what he did about it, one absence is notable. Nowhere in the Post’s lengthy tick-tock is Mr. Obama presented with evidence of, or described as worried about, Trump collusion with Russia.

Moscow intervened in the election eight ways from Sunday, but it’s clearer than ever that what’s occupied Americans for the past six months are baseless accusations about the Trump campaign.

Among the evidence on Mr. Obama’s desk was proof that Vladimir Putin was personally directing the Russian espionage effort. For a variety of sensible reasons, though, the White House and U.S. intelligence also concluded that Russia’s meddling was “unlikely to materially affect the outcome of the election.”

President Obama made at least one inevitably political calculation: Hillary Clinton was going to win, so he would keep relatively mum on Russian interference to avoid provoking “escalation from Putin” or “potentially contaminating the expected Clinton triumph,” in the Post’s words.

Strangely missing from the Post account, however, is one Russian intervention, revealed by the paper’s own earlier reporting, that may really have, in farcical fashion, elected Donald Trump.

This was FBI Director James Comey’s ill-fated decision to clear Hillary Clinton publicly on intelligence-mishandling charges. His choice, it now appears, was partly shaped by a false intelligence document referring to a nonexistent Democratic email purporting to confirm that then-Attorney General Loretta Lynch had vowed to quash any Hillary charges.

On April 23, the New York Times first alluded to the document’s existence in an 8,000-word story about Mr. Comey’s intervention.

On May 24, the Post provided a detailed description of the document and revealed that many in the FBI considered it “bad intelligence,” possibly a Russian plant.

On May 26, CNN adumbrated that Mr. Comey “knew that a critical piece of information relating to the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s email was fake—created by Russian intelligence—but he feared that if it became public it would undermine the probe and the Justice Department itself.”

“In at least one classified session [before Congress],” CNN added, “Comey cited that intelligence as the primary reason he took the unusual step of publicly announcing the end of the Clinton email probe. . . . Comey did not even mention the other reason he gave in public testimony for acting independently of the Justice Department—that Lynch was compromised because Bill Clinton boarded her plane and spoke to her during the investigation.”

Why has this apparently well-documented, and eminently documentable, episode fallen down the memory hole, in favor of a theory for which there is no evidence, of collusion by the outsider Mr. Trump?

The alternative history is incalculable, but consider: If Mr. Comey had followed established practice, the Hillary investigation would have been closed without an announcement, or the conflicted Ms. Lynch or an underling would have cleared Mrs. Clinton. How would this have played with voters and the media? Would the investigation’s reopening in the race’s final days, with discovery of the Weiner laptop, have taken place? Would the reopening have become public knowledge? CONTINUE AT SITE