The fight to repeal Obamacare is ramping up as Congress prepares to return from its recess. Senators and representatives will hear from President Trump on Tuesday during his address to a joint session, and repeal and replace is expected to be among the most important talking points in the speech.
Perhaps the most important policy question of the young Trump administration is: What will the new health-care regime look like? If you believe the Washington Post‘s reporting, the president himself hasn’t nailed down some of the principles. During his meeting last week with Trump, Ohio governor John Kasich delivered a pitch for a health-care reform proposal—one that differs from what the Trump administration and House Republicans have been drafting.
Here’s more from the Post: “At one point, senior adviser Jared Kushner reminded his father-in-law that House Republicans are sketching out a different approach to providing access to coverage. ‘Well, I like this better,’ Trump replied, according to a Kasich adviser.”
Another Middle-Class Entitlement?
Conservative health-care wonks may be shuddering at the idea that John Kasich is apparently having so much influence with Trump on access to coverage. After all, Kasich expanded Medicaid in Ohio under Obamacare, then attacked opponents of the expansion for being “hard-hearted” and un-Christian. During his presidential campaign, Kasich touted his “Ohio model” as a way to improve access to health care.
There’s reason to think the White House is closer to the Kasich view of health-care reform than with opponents to the expansion of Medicaid as laid out in Obamacare. As one White House aide puts it, much of the haul for Republicans on Obamacare is to figure out how to repeal a major entitlement and replace it with…another entitlement.
That would likely be more popular politically in the short term—Republicans are paying attention to all these raucous town halls, even if many publicly dismiss them—but it’s not exactly what Paul Ryan and conservatives on Capitol Hill had in mind. Nor did Ryan likely think that with united Republican Congress, he’d have a Republican White House send him a budget with no reforms to Medicare or Social Security. But that’s almost surely what’s bound to happen.
On McMaster’s ‘Walk-in Privileges’
The new national security advisor, H.R. McMaster, has been on the job for less than a week. Described by staff as gregarious and upbeat, McMaster is settling into his role as head of the National Security Council—while seemingly bringing a different tone than Trump to one of the major national-security challenges of our time. At an all-hands NSC staff meeting Thursday, the New York Times reported Friday evening, McMaster told the staff he did not view using the term “radical Islamic terrorism” as helpful in the fight against terror and that groups like al Qaeda and others were perverting the Muslim faith. That, the Times wrote, was a “rejection” of the worldview espoused by Trump.
Furthermore, the Times reported, McMaster is not among the president’s most senior aides who have “walk-in privileges”—that is, the informal status of being able to meet with the president without permission or an appointment. The paper’s insinuation is that more senior aides with views closer to Trump on Islam, like senior counselor Stephen Bannon, could have more influence over the president. Bannon has the walk-in privileges that McMaster does not. But when I asked White House press secretary Sean Spicer if this was true, Spicer bluntly replied, “No.” And as another senior White House official said of McMaster’s privileges, “He has total access whenever he needs it.”
And White House sources say, in fact, McMaster popped over from the West Wing to the White House residence Friday evening to speak directly with the president about some national security matters. If those aren’t “walk-in privileges”, I don’t know what are.
Deconstructing Bannon
Over the weekend, the New York Times published an essay by my WEEKLY STANDARD colleague Christopher Caldwell on Stephen Bannon, the chief source of ideological energy in the White House. Here’s an excerpt:
Read Caldwell’s whole essay here.
Song of the Day
“The Waiting,” Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers
