President Trump, Day One: A Schedule of Events, Price’s Obamacare Conundrum, and Alone Time With Stuart Smalley

Here’s a brief look at Trump’s schedule Friday morning:

8:30 – The president-elect will attend a service with Vice President-elect Mike Pence and the Trump and Pence families at St. John’s Episcopal Church on Lafayette Square, just a stone’s throw from the White House.

9:30 – Trump and his wife Melania will have tea with President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama at the White House.

10:30 – The Trumps and the Obamas will leave via motorcade for Capitol Hill.

11:00 – Trump, Pence, and their wives will arrive at the U.S. Capitol.

11:30 – The Inauguration Ceremony will begin with Missouri senator Roy Blunt calling to order and invocations and readings by Timothy Cardinal Dolan, Samuel Rodriguez, and pastor Paula White-Cain. Music will be provided by the United States Marine Band, the Missouri State University chorale, the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, and Jackie Evancho (who will sing the National Anthem). Mike Pence will be sworn in by Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas, using the family Bible of Ronald Reagan.

12:00 – Donald Trump will be administered the presidential oath of office by Chief Justice John Roberts and then deliver his inaugural address. Benedictions and readings will be delivered by Rabbi Marvin Hier, Rev. Franklin Graham, and Bishop Wayne T. Jackson.

You can watch a live stream the inauguration here. If you’d rather listen to something else (and something way off-topic) check out this week’s episode of the Weekly Substandard podcast for a little pop and nerd culture.

Will the Price Be Right for Replacing Obamacare?

At the top of the new administration’s to-do list is passing a repeal of Obamacare and replacing it with some other federal health-care regime. Just how much of a role will Tom Price, Donald Trump’s nominee for secretary of Health and Human Services, play in crafting the Obamacare replacement? So far, it’s unclear, and it will likely be up to Andrew Bremberg, the incoming director of the White House Domestic Policy council and the Trump transition’s health-care policy team. The transition itself is cagey about whether Price will have a seat at the table.

“There’s a reason that he selected Dr. Price to be his HHS secretary,” said transition spokesman and incoming press secretary Sean Spicer. He cited the Georgia congressman’s status as an orthopedic surgeon and work in the House of Representatives on health-care policy.

Specifically, Price is the author of an Obamacare replacement proposal that’s a sort of synthesis of where the House Republican conference is on health-care policy. The bill establishes grants to the states to run high-risk insurance pools, allows Medicare and Medicaid patients to opt out for a tax credit instead, and otherwise expands tax credits for purchasing health insurance. Price’s bill influenced House speaker Paul Ryan’s “Better Way” Obamacare replacement proposal. If there’s anyone who could be described as the “conscience” of the House Republicans on health care, it’s Tom Price. It would make sense that whatever the GOP passes and President Trump signs into law would look a lot like Price’s proposal—right?

Not so fast. Trump, Spicer said, “was impressed with the work and plans that Dr. Price put out early on, and I think, I don’t know if you’d call this a starting point, but, it’s definitely got a lot of ideas we found helpful.” That’s not exactly a ringing endorsement of the Price plan. And the fact is that Trump’s own rhetoric on health care diverges from where Republicans like Price have been.

During the campaign Trump was consistently opposed to making any significant cuts to Medicare, for instance. And while GOPers have always spoken about universal access to health insurance, Trump’s vague comments to the Washington Post last weekend that his proposal will provide “insurance for everybody” are nonetheless a contradiction—and one that threw both congressional Republicans and health-care policy folks on the transition team for a loop. There’s a tension here, and since Trump has no concrete proposal, it’s unresolved as the Trump administration begins which side will give in.

Earlier this week, during Price’s first of two confirmation hearings, this tension was on display in front of the Senate and the TV cameras. Price assured the HELP committee senators that he shared Trump’s goal of insurance for everybody—after making sure he kept the promise about “access” and not coverage. And in a round of tough questioning from Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren, who pressed him about Trump’s promise to keep his hands off Medicare, Price skated around the issue, insisting that his “metric” for success for health-care entitlements wasn’t dependent on the amount of money spent.

Here’s how one aide close to Price put it after the hearing: “Dr. Price’s work on health care policy and the specific positions he’s taken on issues like Medicare reform and broader patient-centered solutions to the health care system are well-known, known by the president-elect, and show that depth of understanding about these issues that the president-elect wants in his cabinet.” And if confirmed, the aide underscored, Price’s role will be to implement whatever reforms President Trump signs into law.

Song of the Day, Inauguration Edition

“Golden,” by My Morning Jacket.

Yeah, Science!

Conservatives in Washington are understandably outraged at a recent Washington Post article—and in particular, the Post‘s headline—about possible White House science advisor David Gelernter. According to the Post, Gelernter is a “fiercely anti-intellectual computer scientist” and a “vehement critic of modern academia.” The newspaper even quotes the director of the Center for Science and Democracy at the Union of Concerned Scientists, Andrew Rosenberg, who says he’s never heard of Gelernter and claims the Yale computer scientist is “not mainstream in the science community or particularly well known.”

The crux of Rosenberg’s (and the Post‘s) problem is that Gelernter is a climate change skeptic, a predictable complaint. But it’s not simply incorrect to describe Gelernter as “anti-intellectual”—it’s childish, insulting, and ignorant of the man’s work and career. Gelernter might be considered the very definition of an intellectual, and it would be more precise to call him an opponent of the dominant intellectual culture. In addition to his notable contributions to his own field of computer science, he has written on art, biology, history, culture, religion, the academy, and politics—including for THE WEEKLY STANDARD, where he is a contributing editor. His interests and views are unconventional and off-beat, which makes his writing and commentary much more lively than might be expected from an Ivy League academic. It’s worth watching his conversation with Bill Kristol from 2015 to get a taste of Gelernter’s intellect.

A 1992 New York Times profile of Gelernter reveals a bit about his contrarian nature. While in graduate school, he helped create a new programming language for parallel computing (whatever that is) to replace an existing language called Ada:

Phrasing!

The Trump transition team sent out a list of the “top moments” from Rick Perry’s Thursday confirmation hearing for Energy Secretary, which didn’t include the most obvious choice. This exchange between the former Texas governor and Minnesota senator Al Franken is hilarious and, for anyone who’s spent time around him, classic Rick Perry.

Remember, you can send tips (but no complaints) to [email protected].