3 Stories You Should Read 12/26/2019: Obamacare, Lisa Murkowski, Andrew Johnson
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In the category of: Take the wins where you can
Democrats seize on anti-Obamacare ruling to steamroll GOP in 2020
The party looks to regain the offensive on an issue critical to its success in the 2018 midterms.
The landscape in 2020 may be more challenging for Democrats than it was in 2018, when Republicans had more recently voted to repeal the Affordable Care Act. Republicans also say they now have more ammunition to push back on Democrats’ arguments with the party’s divisions over single-payer health care, which would replace Obamacare, shaping the presidential race.
Moreover, the appeals court’s ruling — which in all likelihood punted any final disposition on the case until after the 2020 elections — eliminates what some Republicans saw as a nightmare scenario: If the court had embraced a lower court ruling striking down the law in its entirety, it would have put the issue before the Supreme Court during the heat of the election, putting tens of millions of Americans’ health insurance at risk.
In the category of: Outliers
Republican Gets Spine for Christmas, Finds That Mitch McConnell Is Shady AF
In news that can only be described as shocking, Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski told an Anchorage TV station that she’s “disturbed” by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s (R-Ky.) admission that he’s already decided his position on Trump’s impeachment.
McConnell, the result of a turtle falling in love with a boat shoe and having unprotected sex, has openly admitted that he’s rooting for the White House and has called the entire case for Trump’s impeachment “so darn weak” there is “zero chance” Trump would be removed from office, the Washington Post reports.
Trump’s Not Richard Nixon. He’s Andrew Johnson.
Betrayal. Paranoia. Cowardice. We’ve been here before.
It’s not hard to think of a historical precedent for President Donald Trump’s attempts to trade military assistance to the Ukrainian government for actionable dirt on his chief political rival. The pathetic desperation of the crime itself, the bungling attempt at a cover-up, the incriminating transcript—“it really is stupid Watergate,” one Democrat told the Washington Post in September. The similarities to the scandal that forced Richard Nixon from office in 1974 extend to the people talking about it. An attorney on Nixon’s House impeachment committee, Bill Weld, is running for president. John Dean, Nixon’s White House counsel, and Carl Bernstein, who helped break the scandal, are CNN contributors. A Nixon dirty trickster, Roger Stone, recently went on trial for doing more of the same for Trump. And of course there’s Trump himself, channeling Nixon’s appeals to the “silent majority” and “law and order,” and pillorying the “enemy” press. There’s even an attempt to cover up a break-in at the Democratic National Committee—read the partial transcript of Trump’s call with the Ukrainians and you’ll find the president floating a cheese-brained conspiracy theory absolving Russia of its 2016 hacking of the DNC.
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