It’s amazing how much can happen in a week under the Trump administration.
The “new and improved” version of Trumpcare couldn’t muster enough approval to get to a vote. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell then tried for a pure repeal of Obamacare (with no replacement) but that died as well.
Yet, the zombie trundles on. McConnell has now said there will be a vote on some version of Trumpcare this week – although no one knows what it will look like. Mitch has promised that everyone (well, all Republicans) will be able to introduce whatever amendments they want, although Mitch could renege on that promise or change the entire bill at the last moment before a vote.
It is incredibly unlikely that anything will emerge that will satisfy both the Republican moderates and the Republican hardliners. McConnell cannot lose more than two votes from Republicans to pass whatever bill this will be. Still, as Yogi Berra famously said, “It ain’t over ‘til it’s over.”
McConnell’s job has become one vote harder, as John McCain is unable to appear in the Senate due to being diagnosed with brain cancer. I’ve disagreed many times with Senator McCain and his pick of Sarah Palin as his Vice Presidential running mate was appalling. Still the man is a Vietnam War hero; his plane was shot down over North Vietnam and he spent many years in a prison camp there under brutal conditions. He has also been a Senator for many years. In short, he has devoted many years of his life to his country and I wish him all the best.
Trump threatened to sabotage Obamacare (aka the Affordable Care Act) if Trumpcare did not pass. Unfortunately, there are several ways he could do that.
And, of course, there is Russia. Amazingly, Trump publicly criticized his own Attorney General, Jeff Sessions. Trump said that if he’d know Sessions would recuse himself from any dealings with the Russia investigation, he would not have put Sessions in that position. Many Attorneys General would have immediately resigned after that, but Sessions said he would stay on.
The question is whether Trump wanted Sessions to resign so that Trump could appoint a new Attorney General as part of a process to fire special counsel Robert Mueller, stopping the latter’s Russia investigation.
Trump also is investigating Robert Mueller and stated that if Mueller’s investigation examined time periods prior to Russian interference with the election, there would be a problem. Of course, there has been much speculation about Trump performing money-laundering for Russia oligarchs over perhaps a 20-year period. As the oligarchs are tightly connected with the Russian government, those connections could feed directly into collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia. At about the same time press reports stated that Mueller was reviewing exactly these types of connections.
Then news broke that Trump asked his attorneys to research whether Trump can pardon his own family members – and even whether he can pardon himself. That certainly indicates that Trump believes pardons may be needed.
There’s not a lot of law in this area. An 1866 U.S. Supreme Court case said that pardons can be granted even if there’s no conviction and even if no charges have been brought. President Clinton pardoned his half-brother. The one thing that seems to be prohibited is a President pardoning himself. Richard Nixon had his legal team looked into this and they concluded it could not be done. That was why it was Nixon’s successor, President Ford, who pardoned Nixon.
