A handful of Senate Republicans are openly questioning the repeal-and-delay tactic on Obamacare. The question is whether there are enough of them who will demand a replacement first to scuttle the whole thing. It may depend on, gulp, President-elect Trump. Via New York magazine.
When lobbyists go quiet
What are the healthcare-industry lobbyists doing as Republicans begin to dismantle Obamacare? They’re being very, very quiet. Via The New York Times.
Vetted 5, unvetted 4
The Office of Government Ethics still hasn’t finished vetting four of the nine Trump nominees facing Senate hearings this week. Is that a problem — ethical or otherwise? Via The Washington Post.
More ethics. Or maybe less.
Trump is ready to appoint his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, as a top White House adviser. Kushner has promised to divest himself of any troubling assets — selling many to his brother and leaving some in a trust controlled by his mother. Ethics lawyers have expressed, uh, concern. Sound familiar? Via The New York Times.
An A-minus or a C-plus?
How do you grade out Obama’s economic record? He helped rescue the economy from a Great Recession-sized disaster. And then he led it to steady, but clearly unspectacular, growth. So, it depends. Via The New Yorker.
Mitch on Mitch
Dana Milbank: It’s McConnell vs. McConnell for all the marbles. Which version of the Senate majority leader will pull out the win? Via The Washington Post.
Extremist then, extremist now
Sen. Patrick Leahy: Jeff Sessions was an extremist in 1986 when the Senate rejected him for a federal judgeship and he’s an extremist still. Via The Boston Globe.
Why liberals win
David French: One conservative thinks that Meryl Streep’s victory shows why liberals win. Not necessarily in politics, he writes, but in the culture wars, where it really counts. Via The National Review.
Copy cat politics
CNN showed that Monica Crowley, Trump’s pick for a top National Security Administration job, plagiarized a book she wrote. Now Politico shows that she plagiarized her Ph.D. dissertation.
Photo credit by DonkeyHotey for Creative Commons on Flickr.
