With only days to go before the end-of-month deadline to obtain health insurance or face a fine, a new poll from the Kaiser Family Foundation finds that Republican calls to overturn the law may be wearing thin. In the survey, only 18 percent of respondents favored repealing the law wholesale, while 11 percent supported repealing it and replacing it with a Republican alternative. Combined, that's a paltry 29 percent who wanted to repeal the law in some form. Meanwhile, 49 percent wanted to keep and improve the law, while another 10 percent said it was good as is — good for a total of 59 percent.
Moreover, the repeal/don't repeal split has grown even more in favor of Democrats since last year. Back in October, 37 percent supported repeal, while 47 percent did not. And importantly for Democrats as they stare down a potentially disastrous election year, the survey found that Americans are warming up to the health-care law now that it has taken hold.
All of which is to say: Republicans might need to find a new issue to flog if they want to maintain their election edge all the way to November. Jon Terbush
Fox News' Chris Wallace is putting President Trump on blast for his "sustained assault" on freedom of the press.
Wallace spoke Wednesday night at the Newseum in Washington, D.C., saying Trump "is engaged in the most direct, sustained assault on freedom of the press in our history," Mediaite reports. He went on to say these attacks by Trump on press freedom have actually "done some damage," citing a poll in which nearly a third of Americans said the First Amendment goes "too far."
The Fox News anchor would certainly know all about Trump's attacks on the press, seeing as he has frequently been a specific target of the president's. Just last month, Trump labeled Wallace "nasty" and "obnoxious" after he challenged House Minority Whip Steve Scalise (R-La.) in an interview. On Fox News, Wallace has also broken from his colleagues in his analysis of the Ukraine scandal, in September calling the whistleblower complaint against Trump "damaging" and slamming the "astonishing" and "deeply misleading" spin from pro-Trump circles.
Wallace did conclude his speech Wednesday on a positive note, though, saying that as "we've seen presidents come and go," "we will endure" and "so will freedom of the press." Brendan Morrow
We've heard this one before.
On Thursday, in one of his 80-plus tweets before 10 a.m., President Trump shared an all-too-familiar refrain: "Getting VERY close to a BIG DEAL with China." It's a deal Trump has been talking about for more than a year, and has been promising is just around the corner for just as long.
A dive back into Trump's tweets since the summer of 2018 and even before show dozens of mentions of a trade deal with China. By his account, in September 2018, China was "under pressure to make a deal with us." As of December 14, 2018, tariffs against China were working so well that a deal "could happen, and rather soon," Trump tweeted. And on February 26 of this year, Trump said the two countries were "getting very, very close" to signing a deal — yes, that's an extra "very" from Trump's more recent announcement.
Trump's "very close" mantra came up again in April, with Trump suggesting there could be an agreement made in the following four weeks. Then came some apparent fallout, where China "attempted renegotiation of the trade deal," Trump tweeted in May. It took until Nov. 20 for Trump to say the U.S. and China were back at their "very close" stage, which, considering the first times those words came up, could mean everything or nothing at all. Kathryn Krawczyk
Michael Bloomberg's top adviser has his life — and death — planned to a T.
Patti Harris was the deputy to Bloomberg when he was mayor of New York City. She's now chairing his Democratic run for the presidency. And she's the only person who knows where he'll be buried, because "she made all the arrangements," Politico reports.
Bloomberg's burial plot and even make of his coffin were all decided by Harris, and it's the most telling example of how Harris has every aspect of Bloomberg's life under her purview, Politico describes in a profile of their relationship published Thursday. Harris started working for Bloomberg's news business in 1994, and since then, Bloomberg campaign manager Kevin Sheekey says she's been "the quiet force in everything that Mike has done."
A few years after Harris started working for Bloomberg's business, she shifted to his first mayoral campaign, eventually becoming his deputy mayor when he won the election in 2001. She was known as Bloomberg's cultural foil who "polished him off," one former staffer told Politico, introducing him to the artistic elite of the city and bringing in public art installations. Bloomberg biographer Eleanor Randolph also wrote that "when [Harris] was not around, the mischievous old Mike could slip back into his old ways," telling "dirty jokes" and making sexual suggestions toward women. Harris would immediately curb that just by showing up, Randolph wrote in her new book, The Many Lives of Michael Bloomberg, and Harris ended up being his top defender when women accused him of inappropriate behavior ahead of his 2020 run.
Harris declined an interview with Politico, like she does with most media requests. Read more at Politico. Kathryn Krawczyk
Former Attorney General Eric Holder is "reluctant to publicly criticize my successors," he wrote in a Washington Post op-ed Wednesday night, but the current attorney general, William Barr, "has made a series of public statements and taken actions that are so plainly ideological, so nakedly partisan, and so deeply inappropriate for America’s chief law enforcement official that they demand a response from someone who held the same office."
Among Barr's troubling statement, Holder writes, were his "ode to essentially unbridled executive power" in a Federalist Society speech, his evidence-free attacks on the FBI and Justice Department inspector general, and his "stunning declaration not merely of ideology but of loyalty: to the president and his interests." In fact, Holder said, "to me, his attempts to vilify the president's critics sounded more like the tactics of an unscrupulous criminal defense lawyer than a U.S. attorney general."
"Virtually since the moment he took office," Holder writes, "Barr’s words and actions have been fundamentally inconsistent with his duty to the Constitution. Which is why I now fear that his conduct — running political interference for an increasingly lawless president — will wreak lasting damage." He concluded:
The American people deserve an attorney general who serves their interests, leads the Justice Department with integrity, and can be entrusted to pursue the facts and the law, even — and especially — when they are politically inconvenient and inconsistent with the personal interests of the president who appointed him. William Barr has proved he is incapable of serving as such an attorney general. He is unfit to lead the Justice Department. [Eric Holder, The Washington Post]
Holder wasn't the only former official giving successors advice in the Post on Wednesday — 17 former Watergate special prosecutors also advised their latter-day congressional counterparts that Trump has committed impeachable high crimes and misdemeanors and counseled putting country over party. Read Holder's entire op-ed in The Washington Post. Peter Weber