House Voted Today to Begin the Process

Republicans moved one step closer to repealing Obamacare when the House passed a measure this afternoon directing committees to begin working on legislation to repeal major pieces of the law.

The resolution cleared the House 227-198. Ten members didn't vote. Similar legislation passed in the Senate Thursday morning largely along party lines.

Republican leaders expect to enact a repeal as early as next month; House Speaker Paul Ryan said it would "definitely" come in the first 100 days.

They also say they will advance a replacement at a similar pace, though it could take years to go into effect.

The passage of the budget measure allows Republicans to dismantle large pieces of the Affordable Care Act quickly and efficiently.

A group of nine moderate and conservative House Republicans voted against the bill with concerns that Republicans would end up repealing the law without clearly laying out and presenting their replacement.

"The only thing I've ever asked for is that the replacement plan be fully developed before we take on the repeal issue," Rep. Charlie Dent, R-PA, a leading moderate who voted against the measure, said in an interview.

Hardliners want more details and are concerned about adding to the deficit.

Democrats criticized the vote and accused the GOP of playing politics.

"It's being done for political reasons," said Rep. John Delaney, D-Maryland, on the House floor.

Essentially means that the ACA is done for - however the GOP leadership in Congress continues to insist that popular measures (Protection of those with preexisting conditions, people under 26 can stay with parents) would remain in their future plan.

That remains to be seen, because we've yet to get a replacement plan after six years.

For a man about to end ~50 of government service, I can only say congrats

Quote from: Icy on January 10, 2017, 10:32:15 PM

Quote from: DAS B00T x2 on January 10, 2017, 09:02:00 PM

Guys it was all just pol playing 4d chess again.

Color me skeptical.

It makes too much sense.
I want off this multidimensional ride.

It literally makes no sense, especially with the collage you posted.

Michael Cohen tweeted a picture of his passport and the statement "I have never been to Prague in my life."

Quote from: Icy on January 10, 2017, 06:30:03 PM

The initial story that Meta linked has now been picked up by various media outlets.

The Trump team has remained stone silent so far.

Do you think this will absolutely destroy Trump's cred/political capital in DC?

I'd say it definitely threatens his credibility and capital. He's already a man coming into office with approval ratings 10+ points lower than his predecessor, and Republicans need Democrats to pass much of his agenda in the Senate.

I would be shocked if there aren't bipartisan investigations into this

Mother Jones in October:

Quote

Mother Jones has reviewed that report and other memos this former spy wrote. The first memo, based on the former intelligence officer's conversations with Russian sources, noted, "Russian regime has been cultivating, supporting and assisting TRUMP for at least 5 years. Aim, endorsed by PUTIN, has been to encourage splits and divisions in western alliance." It maintained that Trump "and his inner circle have accepted a regular flow of intelligence from the Kremlin, including on his Democratic and other political rivals." It claimed that Russian intelligence had "compromised" Trump during his visits to Moscow and could "blackmail him." It also reported that Russian intelligence had compiled a dossier on Hillary Clinton based on "bugged conversations she had on various visits to Russia and intercepted phone calls."

The former intelligence officer says the response from the FBI was "shock and horror." The FBI, after receiving the first memo, did not immediately request additional material, according to the former intelligence officer and his American associates. Yet in August, they say, the FBI asked him for all information in his possession and for him to explain how the material had been gathered and to identify his sources. The former spy forwarded to the bureau several memos—some of which referred to members of Trump's inner circle.

Comey is on suicide watch tonight.

Quote from: Icy on January 10, 2017, 05:52:12 PM

Quote from: i cum in peace on January 10, 2017, 05:51:02 PM

Something to note: Carl Bernstein was a party to the CNN article in the OP. He was who broke Watergate, and who the FBI leaks to.

I wouldn't say that means much, but fair.

Have you read the document of allegations?

Can you offer us the cliffs?

I've read a bit of it, can offer some highlights.

- Russians have been "cultivating, supporting and assisting Trump for at least five years....Aim has been to encourage splits and divisions in western alliances" (Page 1)

- Trump and inner circle have accepted intelligence from Kremlin, including on Democratic and political rivals (Page 1)

- Claims FSB has comprised Trump from his time in Moscow to blackmail him, which includes "perverted acts" (Page 1)

- Claims that Trump team had moles in the DNC, Putin "hated and feared" Clinton, Russia behind DNC leaks (Page 7)

- Transmission of intelligence through "pension" disbursements to Russian emigrates as cover, using consular officials in Miami, NYC and DC (Page 7)

- Trump agrees to sideline Russia intervention in Ukraine as a campaign issue, raise US/NATO defense commitments in Baltics/East Europe to distract from Ukraine (Page 8 )

- Claims of bribes and kickbacks with business deals in China/other emerging markets (Page 8 )

- Various reports of secret meetings between Trump allies (Carter/Manafort) and Russian officials

- Russia targeted "educated youth" to deter them from voting for Clinton (Page 15)

- Trump Lawyer, Michael Cohen, met with Russian officials in Prague in August (Page 16)

- Confirmation of ties between Manafort and Ukraine/Russia (Page 20)

- Kremlin officials credit Cohen for his role in Russia-Trump connections (Page 32)

Also, claims that Trump hired prostitutes to perform golden showers in the Presidential Suite of a Moscow hotel, where the Obamas had stayed. - Page 1

I don't normally use Buzzfeed as a credible source, nor do I advocate it to be used as such...

But Buzzfeed's News Team (lol) released a dossier that has been making it's way through journalism outlets, intelligence agencies, and even Harry Reid's office that has unverified claims of Russian ties to Trump. Figure some of you may want to read it in light of this story.

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A dossier making explosive — but unverified — allegations that the Russian government has been “cultivating, supporting and assisting” President-elect Donald Trump for years and gained compromising information about him has been circulating among elected officials, intelligence agents, and journalists for weeks.

The dossier, which is a collection of memos written over a period of months, includes specific, unverified and potentially unverifiable allegations of contact between Trump aides and Russian operatives, and graphic claims of sexual acts documented by the Russians. CNN reported Tuesday that a two-page synopsis of the report was given to President Barack Obama and Trump.

Now BuzzFeed News is publishing the full document so that Americans can make up their own minds about allegations about the president-elect that have circulated at the highest levels of the US government.

The document was prepared for political opponents of Trump by a person who is understood to be a former British intelligence agent. It is not just unconfirmed: It includes some clear errors. The report misspells the name of one company, “Alpha Group,” throughout. It is Alfa Group. The report says the settlement of Barvikha, outside Moscow, is “reserved for the residences of the top leadership and their close associates.” It is not reserved for anyone, and is also populated by the very wealthy.

The documents have circulated for months, and acquired a kind of legendary status among journalists, lawmakers, and intelligence officials who have seen them. Mother Jones writer David Corn referred to the documents in a late October column. Harry Reid spokesman Adam Jentleson tweeted Tuesday that the outgoing Senate Democratic leader had seen the documents before writing a public letter to FBI director James Comey about Trump’s ties to Russia. And CNN reported Tuesday that Arizona Republican John McCain a gave “full copy” of the memos to FBI Director James Comey on December 9, but that the FBI already had copies of many of the memos.

Click Here

I'm worried that this story is going to fly under the radar for a lot of Americans, because they simply tune out whenever they hear or see the media discussing Trump.

That being said, does this surprise anyone?

And?

Quote from: Azumarill on January 09, 2017, 02:46:54 PM

63 million votes for this guy, and i guarantee some of them came from sep7 members

Do you find nothing wrong with this?

Quote from: Flee on January 06, 2017, 04:46:33 AM

Is this surprising? I honestly wasn't expecting much different.

Maybe it's because I mostly hang out on econ-based subreddits; standard assumption was that economic insecurity was behind Brexit/Trump.

I'd say economic issues certainly played a role in the rise of populism in rural America. But cultural issues were also key to Trump's victory.

The NYT actually had a pretty interesting opinion piece today that focused on this - Why Rural America Voted for Trump

Political analysts have talked about how ignorance, racism, sexism, nationalism, Islamophobia, economic disenfranchisement and the decline of the middle class contributed to the popularity of Mr. Trump in rural America. But this misses the deeper cultural factors that shape the thinking of the conservatives who live here.

For me, it took a 2015 pre-caucus stop in Pella by J. C. Watts, a Baptist minister raised in the small town of Eufaula, Okla., who was a Republican congressman from 1995 to 2003, to begin to understand my neighbors — and most likely other rural Americans as well.

“The difference between Republicans and Democrats is that Republicans believe people are fundamentally bad, while Democrats see people as fundamentally good,” said Mr. Watts, who was in the area to campaign for Senator Rand Paul. “We are born bad,” he said and added that children did not need to be taught to behave badly — they are born knowing how to do that.

“We teach them how to be good,” he said. “We become good by being reborn — born again.”

He continued: “Democrats believe that we are born good, that we create God, not that he created us. If we are our own God, as the Democrats say, then we need to look at something else to blame when things go wrong — not us.”

Mr. Watts talked about the 2015 movie theater shooting in Lafayette, La., in which two people were killed. Mr. Watts said that Republicans knew that the gunman was a bad man, doing a bad thing. Democrats, he added, “would look for other causes — that the man was basically good, but that it was the guns, society or some other place where the blame lies and then they will want to control the guns, or something else — not the man.” Republicans, he said, don’t need to look anywhere else for the blame.

Hearing Mr. Watts was an epiphany for me. For the first time I had a glimpse of where many of my conservative friends and neighbors were coming from. I thought, no wonder Republicans and Democrats can’t agree on things like gun control, regulations or the value of social programs. We live in different philosophical worlds, with different foundational principles.

Quote from: Icy on January 03, 2017, 01:18:40 PM

They just did jack shit to try and change it.

Shows a lack of leadership. I think Trump coming in and saying this spoke how he might lead. I do have to give him credit.

Oh I'm not dismissing Trump's statement and leadership.

Moreso saying that to blame Ryan for this, when by all accounts he was unaware, is poor choice.

Alright, going to give Trump credit here for that.  That was a completely stupid move on the Repub's part.

To be fair, even the GOP leadership in the House were somewhat blindsided by the move to kill the Ethics Committee.

They just did jack shit to try and change it.

I'd like more details on the plan, but I see no reason why people should be unhappy about this.

Here

WASHINGTON — House Republicans, overriding their top leaders, voted on Monday to significantly curtail the power of an independent ethics office set up in 2008 in the aftermath of corruption scandals that sent three members of Congress to jail.

The move to effectively kill the Office of Congressional Ethics was not made public until late Monday, when Representative Robert W. Goodlatte, Republican of Virginia and chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, announced that the House Republican Conference had approved the change. There was no advance notice or debate on the measure.

The surprising vote came on the eve of the start of a new session of Congress, where emboldened Republicans are ready to push an ambitious agenda on everything from health care to infrastructure, issues that will be the subject of intense lobbying from corporate interests. The House Republicans’ move would take away both power and independence from an investigative body, and give lawmakers more control over internal inquiries.

It also came on the eve of a historic shift in power in Washington, where Republicans control both houses of Congress and where a wealthy businessman with myriad potential conflicts of interest is preparing to move into the White House.

Speaker Paul D. Ryan and Representative Kevin McCarthy of California, the majority leader, spoke out during the meeting to oppose the measure, aides said on Monday night. The full House is scheduled to vote on Tuesday on the rules, which would last for two years, until the next congressional elections.

In place of the office, Republicans would create a new Office of Congressional Complaint Review that would report to the House Ethics Committee, which has been accused of ignoring credible allegations of wrongdoing by lawmakers.

“Poor way to begin draining the swamp,” Tom Fitton, president of the conservative group Judicial Watch, said on Twitter. He added, “Swamp wins with help of @SpeakerRyan, @RepGoodlatte.”

Mr. Goodlatte defended the action in a statement on Monday evening, saying it would strengthen ethics oversight in the House while also giving lawmakers better protections against what some of them have called overzealous efforts by the Office of Congressional Ethics.

“The O.C.E. has a serious and important role in the House, and this amendment does nothing to impede their work,” the statement said in part.

But Representative Nancy Pelosi of California, the House minority leader, joined others who had worked to create the office in expressing outrage at the move and the secretive way it was orchestrated.

“Republicans claim they want to ‘drain the swamp,’ but the night before the new Congress gets sworn in, the House G.O.P. has eliminated the only independent ethics oversight of their actions,” Ms. Pelosi said in a statement on Monday night. “Evidently, ethics are the first casualty of the new Republican Congress.”

The Office of Congressional Ethics has been controversial since its creation and has faced intense criticism from many of its lawmaker targets — both Democrats and Republicans — as its investigations have consistently been more aggressive than those conducted by the House Ethics Committee.

The body was created after a string of serious ethical issues starting a decade ago, including bribery allegations against Representatives Duke Cunningham, Republican of California; William J. Jefferson, Democrat of Louisiana; and Bob Ney, Republican of Ohio. All three were ultimately convicted and served time in jail.

The Office of Congressional Ethics, which is overseen by a six-member outside board, does not have subpoena power. But it has its own staff of investigators who spend weeks conducting confidential interviews and collecting documents based on complaints they receive from the public, or news media reports, before issuing findings that detail any possible violation of federal rules or laws. The board then votes on whether to refer the matter to the full House Ethics Committee, which conducts its own review.

But the House Ethics Committee, even if it dismisses the potential ethics violation as unfounded, is required to release the Office of Congressional Ethics report detailing the alleged wrongdoing, creating a deterrent to such questionable behavior by lawmakers.

Under the new arrangement, the Office of Congressional Complaint Review could not take anonymous complaints, and all of its investigations would be overseen by the House Ethics Committee itself, which is made up of lawmakers who answer to their own party.

The Office of Congressional Complaint Review would also have special rules to “better safeguard the exercise of due process rights of both subject and witness,” Mr. Goodlatte said. The provision most likely reflects complaints by certain lawmakers that the ethics office’s staff investigations were at times too aggressive, an allegation that watchdog groups dismissed as evidence that lawmakers were just trying to protect themselves.

“O.C.E. is one of the outstanding ethics accomplishments of the House of Representatives, and it has played a critical role in seeing that the congressional ethics process is no longer viewed as merely a means to sweep problems under the rug,” said a statement from Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, an ethics watchdog group that has filed many complaints with the Office of Congressional Ethics.

“If the 115th Congress begins with rules amendments undermining O.C.E., it is setting itself up to be dogged by scandals and ethics issues for years and is returning the House to dark days when ethics violations were rampant and far too often tolerated,” the statement continued.

One Republican House aide on Monday disputed the suggestion that the Office of Congressional Complaint Review was a new entity, arguing that the current staff would largely remain and that the outside board overseeing it would also continue to exist.

“It’s the same office, same people, most of the same rules,” said the House aide, who was not authorized to speak on the record.

Among the most prominent cases brought by the Office of Congressional Ethics since it was created was an investigation into Representative Maxine Waters, Democrat of California, who was accused of intervening with the Treasury Department to try to assist a struggling bank in which her husband owned stock.

Ms. Waters was ultimately cleared by the House Ethics Committee, but the committee criticized the actions of her grandson, who was then her chief of staff, and urged the House to consider broadening a ban on lawmakers’ hiring their relatives to include grandchildren.

By moving all of the authority to the House Ethics Committee, several ethics lawyers said, the House risks becoming far too protective of members accused of wrongdoing.

Bryson Morgan, who worked as an investigative lawyer at the Office of Congressional Ethics from 2013 until 2015, said that under his interpretation of the new rules, members of the House committee could move to stop an inquiry even before it was completed.

“This is huge,” said Mr. Morgan, who now defends lawmakers targeted in ethics investigations. “It effectively allows the committee to shut down any independent investigation into member misconduct. Historically, the ethics committee has failed to investigate member misconduct.”