Medicaid is proving to be one of the toughest sticking points for Republicans in their bumbling efforts to repeal Obamacare (forget about replace—they're still fighting repeal) as the hard-liners in the House continue to push for straight repeal and the end of Medicaid expansion. Thirty-one states accepted the Medicaid expansion, many with Republican governors. Those Republicans are panicking about the revenue they could lose, and the prospect of figuring out how to pay for taking care of the millions who'd be cut off. They've got Republican governors, including Wisconsin's Scott Walker and Ohio's John Kasich, trying to figure it out, getting something they can agree on and then have the White House and Congress follow them.

The discussions underscore another key point: While President Donald Trump promises to soon unveil his own health care plan, lawmakers on Capitol Hill are drafting the bill—while the Republican governors are likely to be the driving force behind the major entitlement reform over Medicaid coverage. […]

At the center of the talks are four governors who have taken different approaches to Medicaid: Walker and Gov. Bill Haslam of Tennessee, whose states did not expand Medicaid under the law; and two governors from states that did: Kasich and Nevada Gov. Brian Sandoval. The discussions are likely to continue at the National Governors Association meeting in Washington this week, and as Kasich privately meets later this week with Trump at the White House.

Walker is there to represent the maniacal interests of the Freedom Caucus types—if he can agree to something, they figure he can bring along the crazies. But they've got a bigger problem than getting the House on board. They've also got to get the Senate. Even if they manage to use the trick of budget reconciliation and need just 51 votes—a legislative challenge under the rules—they are going to have a hard time getting enough Republican support.

Donald Trump’s top appointees have brought with them some terrifying headlines about what they plan to do to the United States. But what’s equally terrifying is that below the people who make headlines are hundreds more Republicans doing Trump’s will in ways that you might not hear about—but that will do damage nonetheless. Take Victoria Lipnic, acting chair of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Because Lipnic has been on the EEOC, we can look at how she’s voted on actual cases, and the Center for Investigative Reporting’s Will Evans has done just that.

Lipnic also opposed bringing lawsuits against:

• Georgia Power Company for systematically discriminating against disabled job applicants and workers. The company was accused of rejecting workers even though they had doctors’ opinions that they could work. Last year, it agreed to pay nearly $1.6 million and change its policies.
• A financial services company for harassing a transgender employee with epithets and refusing to let her use the women’s restroom. Last year, Deluxe Financial Services Corp. settled for $115,000 and promised to send an apology letter to the employee.
• An Arizona trucking company, for failing to accommodate workers with disabilities, including firing a woman who needed more time to recover from eye surgeries. CTI Inc. paid $300,000 in 2015 and changed its policies.

That was under Barack Obama, when Lipnic was in the minority. Now she’ll be in the majority, and what’s more, she’s taking her cues on what matters from Trump:

“We enforce some of the most important civil rights laws in the country. Having said that, it is a new administration,” she said in a Feb. 9 speech to her former law firm, which represents employers in labor cases. “And President Trump has made it very clear that he is interested in jobs, jobs, jobs.”

When you’re like “yes, I’m supposed to enforce civil rights laws, but,” we have a problem.

When former national security adviser Michael Flynn needed someone to assure the American people that he hadn't had conversations with Russians that he did indeed have, Vice President Mike Pence showed up in spades on CBS's Face the Nation. Now, Pence has a new assignment: selling Trump's voter fraud delusions. Ben Kamisar writes:

Vice President Pence is in the process of selecting members for a White House task force investigating President Trump's unproven claims that millions of cases of voter fraud cost him the popular vote in last year's election.

White House press secretary Sean Spicer mentioned the development with little fanfare during Wednesday's press conference.

"He’s announcing that Vice President Mike Pence will lead a task force on this," Spicer said when asked about Trump's accusations that 3 million to 5 million people voted illegally in 2016. The White House so far has not offered evidence that so many people filed illegal ballots. "He named the task force, and the vice president is starting to gather names and individuals to be a part of it.”

Wow, nothing like being tapped to run down a rabbit hole as the pr*sident's errand boy on a mission that's going nowhere.

Pence is really going to have to dig deep to find something that satisfies the deluder-in-chief’s fantasies about “winning” the popular vote. And whatever Pence turns up, just remember that he also delivered a passionate defense of the now-resigned Michael Flynn.

Last week the State Department was feeling isolated, underutilized, and under threat.

Senior state department officials who would normally be called to the White House for their views on key policy issues, are not being asked their opinion. They have resorted to asking foreign diplomats, who now have better access to President Trump’s immediate circle of advisers, what new decisions are imminent.

And this week the State Department is feeling more of the same.

The Trump administration in its first month has largely benched the State Department from its long-standing role as the pre­eminent voice of U.S. foreign policy, curtailing public engagement and official travel and relegating Secretary of State Rex Tillerson to a mostly offstage role.

Why do you need a State Department anyway? Can those guys write a treaty in 140 characters or less? No? Then leave it to the real experts. The best brains.

The most visible change at the State Department is the month-long lack of daily press briefings, a fixture since John Foster Dulles was secretary of state in the 1950s. 

If the Hoover Administration could get by without daily briefings, then why would Trump need them?

Is the Trump White House now attempting to use the Federal Bureau of Investigations as their own political prop? Why yes. Yes they are.

The FBI rejected a recent White House request to publicly knock down media reports about communications between Donald Trump's associates and Russians known to US intelligence during the 2016 presidential campaign, multiple US officials briefed on the matter tell CNN. [...]

The direct communications between the White House and the FBI were unusual because of decade-old restrictions on such contacts. Such a request from the White House is a violation of procedures that limit communications with the FBI on pending investigations.

There seems to be some disagreement on who called who first (that is, somebody here is lying) but the contacts were between White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus and FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe. Priebus wanted the FBI to rebut press stories about constant contact between the Trump campaign team and Russian officials. That request made it to director James Comey.

Comey rejected the request for the FBI to comment on the stories, according to sources, because the alleged communications between Trump associates and Russians known to US intelligence are the subject of an ongoing investigation.

Reince Priebus has publicly claimed that he "talked to the top levels of the intelligence community", and those FBI officials told him that the reports of the campaign-Russia connections were "grossly overstated and inaccurate and totally wrong." He would appear to mean McCabe, then?

It's more than a little odd that the FBI would supposedly be giving so much information about the state of their investigation to the very target of that investigation—though when Trump's team is involved, we can hardly claim it would be surprising. It would be more surprising to hear that they weren't trying to use the agency as just another political tool.

The sun rises in the east and sets in the west and Maine Republican Sen. Susan Collins gets credit she doesn’t deserve for being a moderate who stands up to her party. The latest: would Collins, as a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, vote to subpoena Donald Trump’s tax returns as part of the investigation into his Russia ties?

"I don’t know whether we will need to do that. If it’s necessary to get to the answers, then I suspect that we would," Collins said on Maine Public Radio when asked if she would subpoena Trump's tax records for the investigation.

She added that such a decision would be up to the chairman and vice chairman of the Intelligence Committee.

Predictably, the headlines are all “Republican would subpoena Trump.” But come on. “I don’t know … if it’s necessary … I suspect.” That’s way past standard hedging—if she’d said “never say never, but ...” it would have communicated the same thing. She isn’t willing to say a flat no (because it would look bad and the headlines wouldn’t be half so flattering), but she doesn’t expect it to happen and she is definitely, definitely not standing up to her party to make it happen.

As we’ve been following the news over the last few weeks, we now know that the Trump administration has enacted a plan to widen the pool of immigrants who can be deported to anyone who is undocumented—regardless of criminal background. This means that in addition to Trump’s “bad hombres,” workers, students, parents, even toddlers are likely to be considered priorities for removal.

And while they cannot change what Trump’s deportation force plans to do, Chicago Public Schools (CPS) are doing what they can to make sure undocumented students and parents are safe and that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials follow the law. As such, they have instructed principals not to let ICE into its schools or facilities unless they have a criminal warrant. 

“To be very clear, CPS does not provide assistance to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in the enforcement of federal civil immigration law,” chief education officer Janice Jackson wrote. “Therefore, ICE should not be permitted access to CPS facilities or personnel except in the rare instance in which we are provided with a criminal warrant. If presented with any paperwork from ICE, please call the Law Department before taking any action.”

This is not necessarily new and it’s in full accordance with the law. But it does stand up to Trump’s mass deportation plans and reinforces that CPS is not going to make it easy for ICE to raid schools and make off with frightened students and parents without a fight. 

Matt O'Rouke witnessed something unusual Wednesday night while he was getting off his domestic flight from San Francisco to John F. Kennedy Airport: Customs and Border Protection agents checking the IDs of every single passenger who exited the plane.

"I don't think they had a clipboard or a list,” O'Rouke told The Gothamist. "I think they were just looking at everybody's ID. They did it really carefully. You could tell they weren't just looking for a name. They read my entire ID and looked at me the entire time."

A spokesman for CBP told Gothamist that such checks are "not a new policy" and that it is "not unusual for us to assist our fellow law-enforcement agencies."

CBP declined to comment on which agency it was working with on Wednesday, but said collaborative agencies might include Homeland Security, or any local or national law enforcement agency. The spokesman also said that CBP was seeking an individual, who, it turned out, was not on the flight.

Actually, it's entirely unusual for law enforcement officials to demand the IDs of every passenger exiting a domestic flight.

"This raises a lot of questions," says immigration attorney David Leopold. "What's the precise authority under which they were operating? That's what I want to know."

It takes a special kind of deplorable to be Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN), the odious leader of last year's House "investigation" into Planned Parenthood. You know, the one that endangered the lives of a Planned Parenthood staffer and medical researchers when she "accidentally" leaked their names and addresses? Yeah, her. Blackburn decided to hold town meetings this week, and they're contentious. She's apparently decided to deal with her constituents complaints by lying through her teeth.

Like when she's confronted with the truth about Planned Parenthood, the services it provides, and the number of people who have health care because of it, the vast majority of them not getting abortions. And none of the abortions it provides being paid for with federal tax dollars. Because the Hyde Amendment stops that. Blackburn blithely ignored all that.

"I stand firmly in my belief that taxpayer funds ought not to be used for abortion," Blackburn said. Her response was cut off by boos from the crowd, among which cries of "they are not," and "the Hyde Amendment" could be heard above the roar in the room.

That's bad. But it's nothing to compare with what she told the crowd opposing her long-standing efforts to repeal Obamacare.

Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.), a staunch Trump supporter from a deep red district, told constituents on Wednesday that "pre-existing conditions and 26-year olds were the two Republican provisions that made it into the bill," and would obviously be part of a replacement.

Oh no, they weren't, and oh no, it won't. Congressional Republicans did not add those popular provisions to the law. Republicans added nothing to the law. And what Republicans are talking about now on pre-existing conditions is "continuous coverage," only allowing people who never let their insurance coverage lapse to continue to have pre-existing condition coverage.

The last refuge of a typical Republican—when you're on the wrong side of history, lie.

Donald Trump declared during a White House meeting that there was a "military operation" underway to deport undocumented American immigrants. He said it quite plainly, though he appears from the actual arrests reported to be lying about just who was being targeted.

"All of a sudden for the first time we're getting gang members out, we're getting drug lords out, we're getting really bad dudes out of this country," Trump said during a listening session with manufacturing CEOs. "And it's a military operation because what has been allowed to come into our country."

They’re pulling people out of hospitals and waiting for them to pick their kids up from school. Doesn’t sound like they’re targeting “bad dudes” to me.

But declaring this to be a "military operation" on American soil would appear to be, say, unconstitutional, which explains why now his team has to walk yet another of his outrageous statements back lest anyone believe the so-called sitting president actually meant the words that rolled out of his empty head. Here's "Press Secretary" Sean Spicer.

President Trump wasn’t speaking literally when he described his deportation push as a “military operation,” according to his top spokesman.

“The president was using that as an adjective. It is happening with precision,” White House press secretary Sean Spicer told reporters Thursday.

Spicer added that “the president was clearly describing the manner in which this is being done.”

I wonder if there's ever been a public official—outside of Baghdad, anyway—whose tenure has been so dedicated to forever explaining why the thing Dear Leader said wasn't what Dear Leader meant and why you should all instead listen to the Dear Leader Whisperers to get your actual information on what the hell goes on in the man's brain.

Former Rep. Gabby Giffords is not going to put up with a cowardly Republican using her shooting to justify hiding from his constituents. The Republican in question is Rep. Louie Gohmert, of Texas, who tried to play tough by explaining that while he personally wasn’t afraid of his constituents, he worried about public safety should he appear in public and take questions.

“Threats are nothing new to me and I have gotten my share as a felony judge,” he wrote. “However, the House Sergeant at Arms advised us after former Congresswoman Gabby Giffords was shot at a public appearance, that civilian attendees at Congressional public events stand the most chance of being harmed or killed—just as happened there.” Giffords issued a response that shows just how dishonest an excuse this is from Gohmert:

I was shot on a Saturday morning. By Monday morning my offices were open to the public. Ron Barber—at my side that Saturday, who was shot multiple times, then elected to Congress in my stead—held town halls. It’s what the people deserve in a representative.

In the past year, campaigning for gun safety, I have held over 50 public events.

Many of the members of Congress who are refusing to hold town halls and listen to their constituents’ concerns are the very same politicians that have opposed commonsense gun violence prevention policies and have allowed the Washington gun lobby to threaten the safety of law enforcement and everyday citizens in our schools, businesses, places of worship, airports, and movie theaters. 

To the politicians who have abandoned their civic obligations, I say this: Have some courage. Face your constituents. Hold town halls.

There’s some courage for you. Meanwhile, Gohmert isn’t even really most afraid of being shot—he’s afraid of simply being asked some tough questions.