Tag Archives: Republicans

Some Republicans see attacking Obamacare through regulation

Obama signs Affordable Care Act AKA Obamacare

By Susan Cornwell

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Congressional Republicans are looking for the quickest ways to tear down Obamacare following Donald Trump’s election as U.S. president, including rapidly confirming a new health secretary who could recast regulations while waiting for lawmakers to pass sweeping repeal legislation.

Trump’s victory on Tuesday means Republicans will control the White House, Senate and House of Representatives. But congressional Democrats are expected to put up a huge fight against Republican efforts to repeal the 2010 law considered President Barack Obama’s signature domestic policy achievement.

The Affordable Care Act, dubbed Obamacare, has provided 25 million previously uninsured Americans with health coverage. Republicans have launched repeated legal and legislative efforts to dismantle the law, which they call a government overreach.

Wyoming Senator John Barrasso, a member of Senate Republican leadership, said one way for the incoming president and Congress to attack Obamacare immediately after Trump takes office on Jan. 20 would be to quickly confirm a new secretary of Health and Human Services, the official who writes the rules and regulations that enforce the law.

“We could confirm someone on Jan. 20 who could come in immediately and could be working right now on rewriting rules and regulations to give more freedom and choice to the states, to insurance companies and to businesses that are trying to provide affordable care to their workers,” Barrasso said in a telephone interview.

Barrasso noted that the Senate needs only a simple majority vote in the 100-seat chamber to confirm Cabinet members, as opposed to 60 votes to overcome procedural hurdles the Democrats could present to repeal legislation.

Passing repeal legislation “is not a ‘Day One’ activity. But a new secretary of HHS going after the regulations can be a ‘Day One’ activity,” Barrasso added.

Trump during the campaign called Obamacare “a disaster” and joined fellow Republicans in vowing to repeal and replace it with proposals like tax-free health savings accounts. His transition website says Trump wants a solution that “returns the historic role in regulating health insurance to the states.”

In repealing Obamacare, congressional Republican may have to resort to a special procedure known as reconciliation to get around Democrats in the Senate, where rules protect the rights of the minority party.

Republicans in Congress used reconciliation to try to undo large chunks of Obamacare in January, but Obama vetoed the legislation. The bill would have wiped out tax subsidies provided to help people afford insurance coverage, as well as tax penalties on people who do not obtain insurance as required by the law, and would have eliminated expansion of the Medicaid insurance health insurance program.

Republican Representative Chris Collins of New York, one of Trump’s earliest supporters on Capitol Hill, said he hopes Congress can pass a similar bill gutting Obamacare within Trump’s first 100 days in office, a promise Trump made during the presidential campaign. But some changes will doubtless be phased in over time, Collins said.

“There’s nothing that we will be able to do or would want to do that would impact anyone’s health insurance plan for 2017,” Collins said in an interview.

“From a replacement standpoint, our position has always been as Republicans to move forward in a step-by-step fashion,” Barrasso said.

In an interview with the Wall Street Journal published on Friday, Trump said he was considering retaining parts of Obamacare including provisions letting parents keep adult children up to age 26 on their insurance policies and barring insurers from denying coverage to people with pre-existing medical conditions.

MORE FLEXIBILITY

While waiting for Congress to act on legislation, the new HHS secretary could be reworking Obamacare regulations, Barrasso said. For example, regulations could give U.S. states more flexibility under a provision that lets states seek waivers from key provisions of the law, such as exemptions from the so-called individual mandate requiring Americans to obtain insurance and the employer mandate to provide it.

Kim Monk, an analyst at Capital Alpha Partners, which provides policy research to financial institutions, said Trump’s HHS might be able to tighten up the rules governing special enrollment periods for Obamacare. Insurers complain that these periods have allowed some people who initially skipped buying insurance to sign up after becoming ill.

HHS might also be able to alter the language on “essential benefits” that the law requires insurance plans to cover, which include trips to the emergency room, maternity and newborn care, and mental health services, Monk said.

“The law requires they have to cover 10 essential health benefit categories, but how that gets defined, a lot of that is interpretative,” Monk said. “And of course, everything the Obama administration interpreted was more, more, more, more expensive coverage, and all these things lead to premium increases.”

Collins, a member of the Trump transition team’s executive committee, said the job of HHS secretary or surgeon general “would be great for Ben Carson,” referring to the neurosurgeon who ran unsuccessfully for the Republican presidential nomination and later endorsed Trump.

(Reporting by Susan Cornwell; Editing by Will Dunham)

Battle over bathrooms looms large in North Carolina governors race

A sign protesting a recent North Carolina law restricting transgender bathroom access adorns the bathroom stalls at the 21C Museum Hotel in Durham, North Carolina

By Colleen Jenkins

WINSTON-SALEM, N.C., Nov 4 (Reuters) – In a year of police shooting protests, historic hurricane flooding and voting rights clashes in North Carolina, it is the battle over bathrooms that could prove pivotal in the Tar Heel state’s gubernatorial race.

The election will effectively serve as a referendum on a state law that bans transgender people from using government-run restrooms that match their gender identity and limits protections for gays and lesbians. Signed by Republican Governor Pat McCrory in March, the law has been blamed for hundreds of
millions of dollars in economic losses and the relocation of major sporting events from the ninth largest U.S. state.

Opponents of the law say the vote on Tuesday also could have national implications. If McCrory loses to Democratic challenger Roy Cooper, they said, elected officials backing such measures in other states will face greater political risk.

“I believe a strong message already has been sent to lawmakers across the country,” said Chad Griffin, president of the Human Rights Campaign, the nation’s largest lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer (LGBTQ) civil rights organization.

“I believe and hope on Election Day that an even stronger message will be sent.”

The advocacy group has joined with Equality North Carolina for a broad effort to boost voter turnout and unseat McCrory and other supporters of the law known as House Bill 2. The organizations are targeting about 400,000 pro-equality voters in the state, including an estimated 255,800 LGBT voters, Griffin said.

The Human Rights Campaign said that voting bloc could make a difference in a presidential swing state where Democrat Barack Obama won by about 14,000 votes in 2008 and Republican Mitt Romney led by about 92,000 votes in 2012.

“There’s no question this is going to be a very close race at the top of the ticket, and the LGBTQ voting bloc really has the ability to impact the outcome of this election,” said Chris Sgro, executive director of Equality North Carolina.

RACE A TOSS-UP

Elections experts consider the race between McCrory and Cooper, one of 12 U.S. gubernatorial seats being decided on Tuesday, to be among the country’s most competitive.

Public opinion polls have been tight most of the year, though the RealClearPolitics average of recent surveys shows
Cooper with a slight advantage.

A Reuters/Ipsos opinion poll found that, among residents who expect to vote, 38 percent were less likely to support McCrory’s re-election bid as a result of the law and its fallout, compared with 32 percent who were more likely to support him.

The poll was conducted online in English between Oct. 6 and Oct. 19. It included 1,233 likely voters and had a credibility interval, a measure of accuracy, of 3 percentage points.

Other polls have shown a majority of residents believe the law is hurting the state.

McCrory, who in 2012 became North Carolina’s first Republican governor in two decades, has blamed the backlash
against the law on national groups trying to redefine gender and “basic norms of privacy.”

Cooper says the law is discriminatory, and he has made McCrory’s support for it a central issue of his campaign.

An ad campaign launched last week by the conservative NC Values Coalition accuses Cooper, the state’s attorney general since 2001, of putting women and children at risk by refusing to defend H.B. 2.

“By not defending it, he’s allowing men into women’s bathrooms,” the group’s executive director, Tami Fitzgerald,
said in a phone interview. “We think that just goes too far.”

“Equality NC and HRC have made North Carolina ground zero for their radical LGBT agenda,” she added. “But I believe that their efforts will fail.”

At early voting sites in North Carolina this week, the issue appeared to be galvanizing people on both sides.

“I admire McCrory for standing behind H.B. 2,” said Republican Parker Umstead, 81, a certified public accountant who cast a ballot in Winston-Salem for the incumbent. “It takes
courage to stand up for your beliefs.”

But Holly Carpenter, a 41-year-old Republican from Cary who works in the medical field, cited the measure as the prime reason why she voted against McCrory, whom she supported in 2012.

“To lose so many economic opportunities over that was just a huge negative for me,” she said.

(Additional reporting by Marti Maguire in Cary, North Carolina,
and Chris Kahn in New York)

Party lines split U.S. on terror threat 15 years after 9/11: poll

An American flag flies near the base of the destroyed World Trade Center in New York on September 11 2001

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – With the 15th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks nearing, Americans are sharply divided on party lines over the threat of a major terrorist attack on the United States, according to a poll released on Wednesday.

Forty percent of Americans say the ability of terrorists to strike the United States is greater than it was at the time of the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, according to the Pew Research Center survey of 1,201 adults.

That share is up 6 percentage points since November 2013 and marks the highest percentage with that view over the past 14 years. Thirty-one percent of respondents say terrorists’ abilities to attack are the same, and a quarter say it is less.

“The growth in the belief that terrorists are now better able to launch a major strike on the U.S. has come almost entirely among Republicans,” the Pew Research Center said.

Fifty-eight percent of Republicans say terrorists’ ability to hit the United States in a major attack is greater than at the time of 9/11, up 18 points since 2013, it said.

The poll results marked the first time that a majority in either political party had expressed that opinion, the Pew center said.

About a third of independents, or 34 percent, and 31 percent of Democrats say terrorists are better able to strike the United States than they were then. Those views are up 2 percentage points each from three years ago, according to the survey.

The partisan divide is in line with other opinion sampling on the U.S. government’s ability to deal with terrorism, Pew said.

In an April Pew poll, three-quarters of Democrats said the government was doing very or fairly well in reducing the threat from terrorism, while 29 percent of Republicans said the same.

The Sept. 11, 2001, attacks are a powerful memory for many Americans. Almost 3,000 people died when hijackers slammed airliners into New York’s World Trade Center, the Pentagon and a Pennsylvania field

Ninety-one percent of the adults surveyed remember exactly where they were or what they were doing when they heard news about the attacks. Among those under 30, 83 percent said the same.

The Pew survey was conducted by telephone from Aug. 23 to Sept. 2. The margin of error is 3.2 percentage points, meaning results could vary that much either way.

(Reporting by Ian Simpson; Editing by Jonathan Oatis)

Republicans, Democrats sharply divided over Muslims in America

Muslim men attend Eid al-Fitr prayers to mark the end of the holy fasting month of Ramadan in the Queens borough of New York

By Emily Flitter and Chris Kahn

NEW YORK (Reuters) – Many Americans view Islam unfavorably, and supporters of Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump are more than twice as likely to view the religion negatively as those backing Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, according to a Reuters/Ipsos online poll of more than 7,000 Americans.

It shows that 37 percent of American adults have a “somewhat unfavorable” or “very unfavorable” view of Islam. This includes 58 percent of Trump supporters and 24 percent of Clinton supporters, a contrast largely mirrored by the breakdown between Republicans and Democrats.

By comparison, respondents overall had an equally unfavorable view of atheism at 38 percent, compared with 21 percent for Hinduism, 16 percent for Judaism and 8 percent for Christianity.

Spokespeople for Trump and Clinton declined to comment.

The poll took place before an attacker on Thursday drove his truck into a holiday crowd in Nice, France, killing more than 80 people in what President Francois Hollande called a terrorist act. Police sources said the driver, while linked to common crimes, was not on a watch list of intelligence services and no Islamist militant group immediately claimed responsibility for the attack.

The race for the Nov. 8 U.S. presidential election has put a spotlight on Americans’ views of Muslims with Trump proposing a temporary ban on Muslims entering the United States. He repeated the proposal after Omar Mateen, a New York-born Muslim armed with an assault rifle, killed 49 people in an attack on a Florida gay nightclub last month.

The ideological divide between Trump and Clinton supporters is set against a backdrop of increasing violence and discrimination against Muslims in the United States.

The poll shows 78 percent of Trump supporters and 36 percent of Clinton supporters said that when compared to other religions, Islam was more likely to encourage acts of terrorism. Trump supporters were also about twice as likely as Clinton supporters to say that Islam was more encouraging of violence toward Americans, women and gay people. Polling on none of the other belief systems and their perceived connection to terrorism or violence came close to matching those numbers.

Clinton has called for a more inclusive environment within American society and for a joint effort between the U.S. government and Muslim countries to battle the spread of Islamist militancy.

She has criticized Trump’s harsh statements about Muslims and Mexicans while Trump has bemoaned what he calls American society’s devotion to political correctness.

TRUMP, REPUBLICANS ALIGNED

Party affiliation accounted for the deepest division among Americans where their views on Muslims were concerned. Respondents’ status as rich or poor, young or old, or male or female did not offer as pronounced an overall view as did their identification as Democrats or Republicans.

“If it was true that Trump did not represent Republicans broadly defined, you would think Republicans would look different; they don’t,” said Douglas McAdam, a sociology professor at Stanford University who studies American politics.

“It goes against the claims of the (former presidential candidate) Mitt Romneys of the world, that Trump is not really a Republican, that he doesn’t represent the Republican party. He seems to be resonating with Republicans generally.”

According to the Council on American-Islamic Relations, a Muslim civil rights group, attacks on American Muslims and on mosques in the United States rose in 2015 to their highest level ever recorded.

The group said 31 incidents of damage or destruction of mosques were reported; there were 11 incidents in which a Muslim person was the target of a slur or another kind of harassment.

The Reuters/Ipsos poll ran in all 50 states from June 14 to July 6. It included 7,473 American adults and has a credibility interval, a measure of accuracy, of 1 percentage point.

(Reporting By Emily Flitter; Editing by Paul Thomasch and Howard Goller)

Many Senate Democrats frustrated with slow U.S. Syrian refugee admissions

Syrian refugee children play as they wait with their families to register their information at the U.S. processing centre for Syrian refugees, during a media tour held by the U.S. Embassy in Jordan,

By Patricia Zengerle

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – More than half the Democrats in the Senate, including many of President Barack Obama’s strongest supporters, signed a letter to him on Wednesday urging him to move more quickly to admit Syrian refugees into the United States.

Despite Obama’s pledge to admit 10,000 of the people fleeing Syria’s civil war in the year ending this September, only 1,736 have been allowed into the country so far. In contrast, more than 6,000 have been admitted from Myanmar and more than 5,000 have been admitted from Iraq.

“We urge your Administration to devote the necessary resources to expeditiously and safely resettle refugees from Syria,” the 27 senators wrote in the letter, which was seen by Reuters.

“We are deeply concerned about the slow pace of admissions for Syrian refugees in the first seven months of the fiscal year,” the letter said.

The lead signers on the letter included Senator Richard Durbin, the number two Democrat in the Senate, and Senator Amy Klobuchar. The letter was signed by 25 other members of the Democratic caucus, including presidential candidate Bernie Sanders

It requested an update on specific measures the administration plans to take to fulfill its commitment to resettle the remaining 8,264 Syrians within five months.

Obama said in late April that he expected the United States to meet his goal of admitting 10,000 Syrian refugees before Sept. 30, the end of the federal fiscal year.

But Obama’s promise sparked a firestorm of criticism in the United States, mostly from Republicans who say that violent militants could enter the country by posing as refugees. More than 30 governors, most of them Republicans, have tried to block refugees from coming to their states.

The United States has offered refuge to far fewer of the millions fleeing war in Syria and Iraq than many of its closest allies. Germany has taken in hundreds of thousands. Canada admitted 26,859 Syrian refugees between Nov. 4, 2015, and May 1, 2016.

“Other nations, including ours, can and should do much more,” the senators said in the letter.

(Reporting by Patricia Zengerle; Editing by Jonathan Oatis)

Republican Candidates Take Aim at Abortion; Planned Parenthood

Abortion and Planned Parenthood were two of the hot topics during the two Republican presidential primary debates held Thursday in Cleveland.

Former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee was asked about gaining support for President while supporting things like a Constitutional amendment banning abortion.

“I disagree with the idea that the real issue is a constitutional amendment. That’s a long and difficult process. I’ve actually taken the position that’s bolder than that,” Huckabee said. “A lot of people are talking about defunding Planned Parenthood, as if that’s a huge game changer. I think it’s time to do something even more bold. I think the next president ought to invoke the Fifth, and Fourteenth Amendments to the Constitution, now that we clearly know that that baby inside the mother’s womb is a person at the moment of conception.”

“The reason we know that it is because of the DNA schedule that we now have clear scientific evidence on,” Huckabee continued. “And, this notion that we just continue to ignore the personhood of the individual is a violation of that unborn child’s Fifth and Fourteenth Amendment rights for due process and equal protection under the law.”

Florida Senator Marco Rubio made comments very similar to those of Huckabee in saying that he is pro-life in all situations and that laws need to protect life at all stages.

“In fact, I think that law already exists. It is called the Constitution of the United States,” the 44-year-old Rubio said. “And let me go further. I believe that every single human being is entitled to the protection of our laws, whether they can vote or not. Whether they can speak or not. Whether they can hire a lawyer or not. Whether they have a birth certificate or not.”

Rubio also said that future generations will be appalled by abortion, adding they will “call us barbarians for murdering millions of babies who we never gave them a chance to live.”

When the topic of Planned Parenthood and the recent undercover videos by the Center for Medical Progress that show the selling of parts from aborted babies, both former Florida Governor Jeb Bush and current Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker talked about how they defunded the group in their states.

“I’m pro-life, I’ve always been pro-life, and I’ve got a position that I think is consistent with many Americans out there in that I believe that is an unborn child that’s in need of protection,” Walker said.

Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal was very blunt in his comments about Planned Parenthood.

“Planned Parenthood had better hope that Hillary Clinton wins this election because I guarantee that under President Jindal, January of 2017, the Department of Justice, and the IRS, and everybody else will be consenting, and the federal government will be going into Planned Parenthood,” Jindal asserted. “This is absolutely disgusting and revolts of conscience of the nation. Absolutely, we need to defund Planned Parenthood.”

State Republicans Push Forward Pain Capable Bills

Several states are seeing bills pushed forward to stop abortion after 20 weeks in the fallout of House Republicans pulling a vote on their federal level Pain Capable Abortion bills.

Ten states already have 20 week abortion bans while pro-abortionists have going to court to block laws in Arizona, Georgia and Idaho.

Ohio Right to Life announced Tuesday that legislators in their state house will introduce a 20 week abortion ban.

“Our Pain-Capable legislation will alter the abortion debate in Ohio,” Stephanie Ranade Krider, the group’s executive director, told the Washington Examiner. “An overwhelming majority of Americans, especially women, support protecting pre-born babies from scalpels and dismemberment. This is priority legislation for Ohio Right to Life and once again, the nation is watching.”

A poll by Quinnipiac University says that 60 percent of Americans oppose a ban on abortions after 20 weeks.  Only 33 percent of Americans were opposed to the ban.

The House Republican’s decision to pull the vote at the last minute has been causing problems with pro-life organizations across the country who feel national leadership abandoned them.