March 22 – 28, 2017 Up Front News Opinion Cover Story Culture Sportsball Crossword Shot in the Triad Triaditude Adjustment
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OPINION
EDITORIAL
The Affordable Care Act, by any other name Torn between a piece of legislation they pledged to destroy and the hard truth that said legislation actually helps millions of their constituents, the plan for Republicans in Washington this week seems to be a simple rebranding. We’ve already seen a cognitive disconnect in voters who consider themselves sworn enemies of “Obamacare” but like the Affordable Care Act just fine. It wouldn’t take much to convince them that Trump came up with the whole thing himself one night while watching old episodes of “Scrubs” in his bathrobe, in the lonely chambers of the East Wing. The current Republican healthcare plan is untenable, hurting people in the very states that gave Trump the White House — not that this bothers anyone in the GOP, but there is an election coming up in 2018, and people have long memories when it comes to missed chemotherapy and insulin treatments, or unaffordable prescriptions. So it seems they might let this new legislation die, allow the ACA to do its work and then take the credit for it when things tick upwards. It wouldn’t take much to make the Affordable Care Act work better in North Carolina. Accepting the federal Medicaid expansion would be a good start. And that’s got nothing to do with Trump. This Medicaid expansion allows states to ease restrictions on those eligible for Medicaid, and the federal government would have paid for most of it. It’s a key provision of the Affordable Care Act. Without it… well, here in North Carolina, we know how it plays out. Back in 2011, when the NC General Assembly blocked Medicaid expansion, it was part of a strategy to minimize the success of the ACA. The plan faltered when so many North Carolinians who were formerly unable to obtain insurance found affordable plans on the exchange — more than 533,000 of them obtained plans on the NC exchange for 2017, according to a December 2016 report from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services. Only the state General Assembly can greenlight Medicaid expansion. Gov. Roy Cooper tested that law back in January, but a federal judge blocked his action with a restraining order. Yep: a restraining order, preventing a governor to expand medical coverage to the people of his state. As a statement on the separation of governmental power, it makes legal sense, but try telling that to the thousands of North Carolinians who are paying the price. That’s why this stance by Republicans in Raleigh may soften as the conundrum of affordable healthcare slowly dawns on these gatekeepers, who, after all, have elections of their own to win.
CITIZEN GREEN
Trump’s lies are beginning to catch up with him He couldn’t have been more clear. “I have been authorized by the Department of Justice to confirm that the FBI, as part of our counter-intelligence mission, is investigating the Russian govby Jordan Green ernment’s efforts to interfere in the 2016 presidential election,” FBI Director James Comey told the House Intelligence Committee on Monday. “And that includes investigating the nature of any links between individuals associated with the Trump campaign and the Russian government, and whether there was any coordination between the campaign and Russia’s efforts.” We simply don’t know whether the Trump campaign actively coordinated with the Russian government to gain an advantage in the election, if the campaign was unwittingly manipulated by the Russians, or whether the two parties only crossed paths. The investigation began in July, around the time of the Republican National Convention — notably when the GOP softened its support for Ukraine against Russian aggression. It’s unclear how long the investigation will continue, but it’s likely to leave a cloud hanging over the president for some time. “Because it is an open, ongoing investigation, and is classified, I cannot say more about what we are doing and whose conduct we are examining,” Comey told the committee. Meanwhile, one senses that the mesmerizing chimera of lies the president has constructed as a false reality around him is beginning to crumble, even to his GOP enablers in Congress that are desperately clinging to the illusion of stability. The president has stubbornly stuck to his claim, made during an impulsive early-morning tweetstorm at Mara-Lago on March 4, that President Obama ordered a wiretap of Trump Tower during the campaign — in the face of wide-ranging refutations and without offering a scintilla of evidence. As a sample: “How low has President Obama gone to tapp [sic] my phones during the very sacred election process. This is Nixon/Watergate. Bad (or sick) guy!” Compounding the damage from the lie right up to the eve of the House Intelligence Committee hearings, White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer made the outlandish suggestion, based on a commentary by Andrew Napolitano on Fox News, that Obama outsourced spying on then-candidate Trump to the British intelligence service GCHQ. The next day, March 17, a spokesperson for British Prime Minister Theresa May reportedly said British officials received assurances from National Security Advisor HR McMaster that the ridiculous claims wouldn’t
be repeated. Even as McMaster was performing damage control with his British counterparts, Trump stuck to his original whopper in a statement that seemed to make German Chancellor Angela Merkel recoil in distaste. “As far as wiretapping, I guess, by this past administration, at least we have something in common, perhaps,” Trump said, alluding to 2013 revelations about surveillance on Merkel by the NSA. If statements from the ranking Republican and Democratic lawmakers on the Senate and House intelligence committees were not sufficient, Comey put the final nail in Trump’s credibility on Monday. “With respect to the president’s tweets about alleged wiretapping directed at him by the prior administration, I have no information that supports those tweets,” the FBI director testified. “And we have looked carefully inside the FBI. And the Department of Justice has asked me to share with you that the answer is the same for the Department of Justice and all its components. The Department of Justice has no information that supports those tweets.” Hyperbole and trash-talking on the campaign trail is one thing, but when a commander in chief reflexively lies in the presence of visiting head of state and his press secretary besmirches the reputation of our closest ally, it’s hard to imagine anyone taking him seriously in the midst of a foreign crisis. It would be naïve to imagine Trump being chastened under any circumstances, but in the middle of a congressional hearing in which the nation’s top law enforcement confirms that your closest aides are under investigation and practically calls you a liar, you would expect the president to maybe lay low for a couple hours. Instead, he preposterously tweeted: “The Democrats made up and pushed the Russian story as an excuse for running a terrible campaign. Big advantage in Electoral College & lost!” In the evening, like the magnate that buckles under pressure and impulsively flies to Vegas for an escape, Trump slipped out of the White House to relive his glory days on the campaign trail with an appearance at Freedom Hall in Louisville, Ky. “This place is packed,” the president exulted, according to a report in the New York Times. “We’re in the heartland of America, and there is no place I would rather be.” For a moment, he could avoid the pointed questions that are becoming harder and harder to answer. “We sacrificed our own middle class to finance the growth of foreign countries,” Trump said. “Ladies and gentlemen, those days are over. “We won’t be played for fools, and we won’t be played for suckers anymore,” he added, without a hint of irony.