Laurel Raymond Archive

House lawmakers are back in their home districts this week for a short recess — which, for some Republicans, means walking straight into a storm of constituent anger over their vote to pass the Affordable Health Care Act (AHCA), also known as Trumpcare.

While most House Republicans were willing to be vocal about their support for the bill from the safety of the Rose Garden — where they celebrated AHCA’s passage through the House with speeches and selfies — many lawmakers this recess are avoiding defending their vote to their own constituents.

According to a list compiled by TownHallProject.com, a crowd-sourced list of congressional district events, only 14 of the 217 lawmakers who voted for the bill are holding in-person town hall events this recess. But even with their members absent, a lot of people are finding creative ways to express their outrage with the vote.

Dozens of protests are planned across the country — many of them timed to coincide with lawmaker visits and staged on capitol grounds. In Madison, Wisconsin, activists staged a die-in at the capitol.

President Donald Trump is continuing to profit from campaigning, new Federal Election Commission disclosures filed on Friday show. In the first quarter of 2017, Trump’s 2020 campaign and party committees spent close to $500,000 at Trump brand properties, according to a tabulation by the Wall Street Journal.

According to the filings, the campaign spent more than $6.3 million in the first quarter of 2017. Six percent of that was spent at Trump properties, including nearly $300,000 in rent to Trump Tower, where the campaign is headquartered, nearly $60,000 for lodging at Trump’s West Palm Beach golf course, and almost $14,000 in rental and catering fees at his Las Vegas hotel.

The campaign also spent heavily in businesses owned by other top Trump-connected figures. $1.5 million went to a web-marketing firm owned by campaign digital director Brad Parscale. Parscale now works for a nonprofit aimed at promoting the administration’s agenda. Some money also went to a company owned by White House Senior Advisor Steve Bannon — nearly $30,000 for administrative and secretarial services.

The Trump campaign is legally required to pay market price for services, even at Trump-owned properties. It’s incredibly unusual, however, for a president to also own and profit from the businesses their campaign is patronizing. Despite the advice of the government’s independent ethics office and ethics experts, Trump has refused to divest from ownership of his businesses.

President Donald Trump has ignored the advice of the independent Office of Government Ethics and other ethics experts to fully divest from his businesses. Instead, he insists that, because he has resigned from management positions and handed control over to his adult sons Eric and Donald Jr., he has no conflicts.

Trump and his lawyers say that by putting his sons in charge, Trump has set up a firewall between his administration and his businesses, though he still owns them. But his sons’ own public statements show there’s no firewall at all.

Donald Trump Jr. told the Associate Press on Tuesday that he “has spoken to his father more frequently in recent weeks,” though he said he didn’t discuss the details of either business or the government with his father.

Yet a few weeks ago, defending his father’s business arrangements, Trump Jr. said he had almost no contact with his father.

“I basically have zero contact with him at this point,” he said in a speech at a GOP fundraiser in Dallas, according to NBC news.

The majority of Americans hold fairly progressive views on reproductive rights, according a new poll, but their views are at odds with many of the policies Republican leadership promotes. And those views are markedly more progressive than the policies promoted in the health care bill the House will vote on on Thursday.

Right now, Trumpcare’s fate is uncertain and its future looks bleak — Republicans need almost every caucus vote they have to pass it, and the right-wing Freedom Caucus has been whipping votes against it because they argue it isn’t conservative enough.

The bill would roll back Medicaid (disproportionately affecting women and children), defund Planned Parenthood, and make abortion coverage more difficult and expensive to obtain.

Researchers at the nonpartisan polling firm PerryUndem surveyed a representative sample of registered voters in early March, and the poll found found that all of these measures run contrary to the beliefs of a majority of voters.

Senator Al Franken (D-MN), as he said himself during Neil Gorsuch’s confirmation hearing on Tuesday, used to have “a career in identifying absurdity” as a humorist and one of SNL’s original writers.

Ironically, his early career has carried over rather too well to policy making, as he demonstrated while grilling Gorsuch about his ruling in the so-called “Frozen Trucker case.”

The case at hand is that of Alphonse Maddin, a truck driver for TransAm. The brakes on Maddin’s trailer locked up on a subzero January night, and he called for help from TransAm’s road service. They told him to wait, and he did — for two hours, despite discovering that the heat in his truck cab was broken. When he was woken by a phone call, he had a numb torso and couldn’t feel his feet.

“If you fall asleep waiting in 14 below zero weather, you can freeze to death. You can die,” Franken explained in his retelling of the case.

Republicans in Congress spent seven years attacking Obamacare as a failed health care law, but now that they have the opportunity to advance their own bill, things aren’t going as smoothly as they hoped. The GOP’s Obamacare replacement bill is already wildly unpopular, and party leadership is passing the blame like a hot potato.

According to a poll from Public Policy Polling, only 24 percent of voters support the plan, and the GOP caucus itself is split: while the right flank attacks the bill as “Obamacare lite,” moderate Republicans are concerned over the cuts to Medicaid, the projected drop in the overall insured rate, and the proposal to defund Planned Parenthood.

Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) has long been lauded as the GOP’s signature policy wonk (a reputation he’s failed to live up to), and, as Speaker of the House, he has had a leading role in crafting the bill. So far, an outsized share of the responsibility for the slow-rolling legislative disaster is landing with Ryan.

On Wednesday, he fought back.