We begin today with Jake Traylor and Michael Schnell of MS Now reporting that Congressional Republicans are poo-poohing the Trump regime’s reported plan for a health care plan that includes the extension of Affordable Care Act subsidizes for two years.
Trump was expected to unveil a plan aimed at halting ACA premium spikes on Monday, as first reported by MS NOW. But the reveal has been postponed — though not canceled — said the White House officials, who were granted anonymity to discuss the internal strategy. [...]
While the White House sought to downplay the seriousness of the delay, Republicans indicated they were surprised and angered by a plan that would help preserve the Affordable Care Act.
“I wasn’t expecting the proposal to be Obamacare-lite,” a conservative House Republican, who requested anonymity to discuss the yet-to-be-released plan. “Absolutely not supportive of extending ACA subsidies.” [...]
The delay comes as the president — and Hill Republicans — are caught in a bind over health care. Covid-era subsidies for nearly 22 million Americans who get their health insurance through the ACA exchanges are set to lose those plans at the end of the year, a change that would cause massive price spikes in red and blue states alike.
Thune promised a vote on extending the subsidies to Democrats, who agreed to end the recent government shutdown as long as they secured a vote to extend them.
It’s been a long two weeks.
Arizona’s junior U.S. Senator, Ruben Gallego, gets right to the point is his statement denouncing plans by the Defense Department to bring charges of misconduct against Arizona’s senior U.S. Senator, Mark Kelly, as retribution for taking part in the video by six Democratic reminding the enlisted that they can and must refuse illegal orders.
I noted that Senator Gallego did not cross-post this message on Bluesky.
Nor did he cross-post his video message to Bluesky, though he did cross-post to Instagram.
David Kurtz of Talking Points Memo notes that in the instance of the dismissal of charges against James Comey and Letitia James, the guardrails were sturdy and the checks and balances checked and balanced...this time.
The dismissals of the politicized indictments of James Comey and Letitia James came down to a key provision in the law Congress passed to deal with U.S. attorney vacancies. The attorney general can appoint an interim U.S. attorney for 120 days, but after 120 days, the interim U.S. attorney must be selected by the judges in that district.
It’s a structural allocation of power between all three branches:
The executive branch gets to fill the slot, but only temporarily, so that it can’t do an end run around the legislative branch, where the Senate must confirm U.S. attorneys. If the executive could appoint interim U.S. attorneys indefinitely, the Senate’s role would be eviscerated. To square the circle, Congress gave the judicial branch the power to appoint interim U.S. attorneys after 120 days and thus assure some minimum degree of competence and professionalism in the district’s top federal prosecutor. The statutory arrangement also creates a “use it or lose it” incentive for the executive branch to work with the Senate to nominate confirmable candidates. Play too much hardball with senators, and you surrender your appointment power to district judges. [...]
The big threshold question was whether Halligan was properly appointed in the first place, but the politicized prosecutions of Comey and James were rife with other legal infirmities. Because the cases were dismissed without prejudice, James can be re-indicted. It’s not clear that Comey can be because of the statute of limitations in his case. But assuming Currie’s rulings hold up on appeal, it will be up to an interim prosecutor appointed by the judges in the district — not by Pam Bondi — to bring new indictments at Trump’s behest. To do so, they would have to once again overrule or disregard the deep reservations of career prosecutors in the office and be prepared to stake their careers on cases already tainted by the stench of corruption.
Will Sommer of The New York Times answers why many QAnoners seem to be silent in the case of the Congressional vote to release the “Epstein files” and the tantalizing e-mails from the Epstein estate mentioning the tacky shoe salesman’s government name...many times.
Mr. Epstein should matter to QAnon because he was a rare example of the supposed sex-trafficking cabal’s machinations coming out in the open. While Mr. Epstein was mentioned relatively rarely in QAnon before his 2019 indictment, his mysterious death propelled QAnon recruitment and provided endless alleys for its amateur internet sleuths to explore.
But Mr. Trump’s long friendship with Mr. Epstein has always been awkward for QAnon believers to explain. Why was Mr. Trump, supposedly the ultimate avenger of abused children, videotaped palling around with Mr. Epstein? Why was he calling a known sex trafficker who paid dozens of girls, some as young as 14, to have sex with him, a “terrific guy?” Why did he appoint Alex Acosta, the prosecutor in Florida who helped give Mr. Epstein a sweetheart plea deal in 2007, to his cabinet? [...]
QAnon’s retreat from the Epstein story is striking because there remain real questions about Mr. Epstein that could make for a rich vein of new theorizing. How exactly did Mr. Epstein get so rich? Why were so many wealthy, powerful men friends with him? Why did he move so easily through the global financial system?
But for most QAnon believers the priority is protecting Mr. Trump at all costs. Even if it means no longer asking questions. Even if it means letting the moment they finally got something right pass them by. Even if it means continuing to thirst for a storm that will never come.
Ashley Belanger of Ars Technica explains that the Department of Government Efficiency no longer exists...well, sort of...
Talking to Reuters, Office of Personnel Management (OPM) Director Scott Kupor confirmed that DOGE—a government agency notoriously created by Elon Musk to rapidly and dramatically slash government agencies—was terminated more than eight months early. This may have come as a surprise to whoever runs the DOGE account on X, which continued posting up until two days before the Reuters report was published.
As Kupor explained, a “centralized agency” was no longer necessary, since OPM had “taken over many of DOGE’s functions” after Musk left the agency last May. Around that time, DOGE staffers were embedded at various agencies, where they could ostensibly better coordinate with leadership on proposed cuts to staffing and funding. [...]
Because DOGE operated largely in secrecy, it may be months or even years before the public can assess the true cost of DOGE’s impact. However, in the absence of a government tracker, the director of the Center for Effective Public Management at the Brookings Institution, Elaine Kamarck, put together what might be the best status report showing how badly DOGE rocked government agencies.
In June, Kamarck joined other critics flagging DOGE’s reported savings as “bogus.” In the days before DOGE’s abrupt ending was announced, she published a report grappling with a critical question many have pondered since DOGE launched: “How many people can the federal government lose before it crashes?”
Finally today, Pjotr Sauer of The Guardian says that the chaos over the leaked Russian peace plan for Ukraine favors Vladimir Putin even as Putin is unlikely to support the plan as it stands.
While the exact inception of the plan – and Trump’s precise role in it – remains unclear, the US president is embracing it. On Sunday, he returned to portraying Ukraine as the obstacle to ending the war.
The US president wrote on his Truth Social platform complaining that Kyiv’s leadership had “EXPRESSED ZERO GRATITUDE FOR OUR EFFORTS”.
Moscow, meanwhile, has remained strikingly quiet. For days, the foreign ministry feigned ignorance, insisting it knew nothing of any peace initiative, before Putin himself said late on Friday that the proposals “could form the basis of a final peace settlement”. [...]
Even if Kyiv were to support the plan, Russian insiders and analysts expect Putin to demand further concessions.
“The plan may be 70% acceptable, but the rest is something Putin will not agree to,” said Anton Barbashin, a visiting researcher at the European Council on Foreign Relations. “He will certainly say: Yes, let’s work on this – here are my amendments.”
Everyone have the best possible day that you can!
