Congress is moving to avoid another lapse in funding, but a freeze in welfare support to blue states shows what’s missing in the debate.
Budget
Posted inTAP
Constitutional Softball: Congress Gives Up Its Power of the Purse
After the shutdown deal, Trump has gone right back to withholding funds and dismantling appropriated entities.
Posted inHealth and Social Policy
Panic Tears Through U.S. as Health Insurance Costs Spike
The end of expanded subsidies for the Affordable Care Act exchanges means more people will go without health insurance, workers, doctors, and researchers said.
Posted inHealth and Social Policy
Republicans Will Never Find a Health Care Replacement
The GOP is too wedded to free markets and scornful of the welfare state to ever make anything in health care work.
Posted inVideos
The Prospect Weekly Roundup: The Shutdown Cave and the Next Health Care Fight
David Dayen and Prospect co-founder Bob Kuttner look at the politics and policy of the end of the government shutdown.
Posted inTAP
The Shutdown’s End as a Republican Victory? No Way.
The shutdown enabled the Democrats to highlight the Republicans’ withdrawal of health coverage from millions of Americans, and Trump’s withholding food stamps—while he was praising himself for building a ballroom and rebuilding the Lincoln bathroom—only accelerated his descent in the polls.
Posted inPolitics
The Most Frustrating Thing About the Shutdown Cave
Senate Democrats actually know how to use their power to counter Donald Trump and ensure that legislative funding gets spent—but this continuing resolution makes it clear they chose not to.
Posted inPolitics
Democrats Get Rolled by Their Own
Coming out of last Tuesday’s election blowout, the Democrats were riding high and unified. But on Sunday night, centrist Senate Democrats, with Chuck Schumer’s tacit encouragement, voted to reopen the government on Republican terms.
Posted inPolitics
Poll: Trump Is Not Delivering on Foreign Policy
Overall, Americans are not pleased with President Trump’s performance on foreign policy: 50 percent grade him as “poor” against 37 percent as “good,” and on a range of foreign-policy topics, he is only above water on stopping “international drug trafficking.”
Posted inPolitics
The Republican Plot to Turn Pennsylvania Into Hungary
Judicial retention elections are normally pretty sleepy, but the Pennsylvania Republican Party, led by right-wing megadonor Jeff Yass, who is also the richest person in the state, is conducting an all-out effort to get rid of three Democrats on the state Supreme Court.