Amid all the flip-flopping, backstabbing, and scheming going on at the White House, a new strategy to kill the Affordable Care Act has emerged, one that’s cruel and unusual enough to delight even the most hard-core Ayn Rand fan.

The idea is simple: leave insurance companies holding the bag for cost-sharing subsidies, which help insurers pay medical bills for low-income customers. This can be done by ending federal opposition to a suit brought by GOP lawmakers in 2014: essentially by Trump doing nothing.

The Obama administration appealed an initial decision against the subsidies, allowing the payments to continue to flow. The Trump administration faces a deadline next month on whether it will continue to fight the lawsuit.   [Read more…]

Attorney General Jeff Sessions tour of the U.S.-Mexico border this week included a tough guy speech before border patrol agents in Nogales, Arizona.

“This is a new era. This is the Trump era.” he said. “It is here, on this sliver of land, where we first … we first take our stand.” Aware of the media in the room, Sessions stopped short of delivering the prepared remarks as written. He left out “It is here, on this sliver of land, where we first take our stand against this filth.”

Sessions intent, however, was made clear by policies announced during the speech.   [Read more…]

You wouldn’t know from reading San Diego Mayor Kevin Faulconer’s monthly press releases touting his commitment to the environment that he’s opted to remain silent on President Trump’s executive order demolishing his predecessor’s attempts to slow the pace of climate change.

Seventy-five other big city mayors (including Chula Vista), representing 42 million Americans have taken a stand, saying they want no part of what Andrew Steer, the president and CEO of the World Resources Institute, is calling “taking a sledgehammer to U.S. climate action.”

Moreover, unlike the hyperbola about sanctuary cities coming from some quarters, these Mayors are taking action to back up their rhetoric. A group of these mayors have already announced plans for $10 billion worth of electric vehicles in response to Trump’s announcement he was changing vehicle fuel-efficiency standards,   [Read more…]

It turns out that Making America Great Again involves rolling back drug policy and enforcement to the 1960s.

The first step in such a reversal involves denying science. The second step involves ginning up the racism. The final step involves reviving mass incarceration.

Attorney General Jeff Sessions made it clear in a speech in Richmond, Va on March 15, that enforcement is now the primary tool in responding to drug abuse, and, apparently, casual use.   [Read more…]