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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: JohnM who wrote (332892)	3/30/2017 11:22:43 PM
From: Sam	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 541674

Excerpt from a Reuters article on the Trump admin and the Republican Party split. \| Thu Mar 30, 2017 \| 8:07pm EDT Republican disarray deepens as Trump attacks rebel conservatives By Susan Cornwell and Amanda Becker \| WASHINGTON reuters.com excerpt: U.S. President Donald Trump lashed out on Thursday at Republican conservatives who helped torpedo healthcare legislation he backed, escalating a feud within his party that jeopardizes the new administration's legislative agenda. Trump threatened to try to defeat members of the Freedom Caucus - a bloc of conservative Republicans in the House of Representatives - in next year's congressional elections if they continued to defy him. "The Freedom Caucus will hurt the entire Republican agenda if they don't get on the team, & fast. We must fight them, & Dems, in 2018!" Trump wrote on Twitter on Thursday morning. [....] The discord following the healthcare debacle was not limited to tensions between Trump and the Freedom Caucus. In recent days, the president has been out of sync with the two highest ranking Republicans in Congress, House Speaker Paul Ryan and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. Trump and his aides have suggested reviving the push for a healthcare bill. While Ryan expressed openness to the idea, McConnell said he thought doing so would be futile. But Ryan publicly disagreed with Trump when the president offered to work with Democrats on new healthcare legislation. "I don't want that to happen," the speaker told CBS in an interview aired on Thursday. 'NOT AN IDEAL POSITION' More than healthcare legislation was at stake. Republican lawmakers still await key details on what Trump's priorities are in the monumental tax reform effort they want to launch. Passing a budget for next year could also prove challenging. Trump and the Freedom Caucus want to dramatically shrink domestic programs. Moderate Republicans are aghast at proposals to cut popular programs that fund environmental cleanup and meals for senior citizens. Most pressing is an April 28 deadline for approving new funding to keep the government running. "The GOP (Republican) House is riven by factions that are quite ideological. Trump is not," said University of Virginia political science professor Larry Sabato. "And let's throw in the fact that Trump is unpopular and weak and has no Democratic support in Congress. "Add all this up. Neither Trump nor congressional Republicans are in an ideal position to govern, and that's an understatement," Sabato said. There are about three dozen members of the House Freedom Caucus, comprising about 15 percent of the 237 House Republicans. But their clout is larger, as Trump and Ryan cannot afford to lose too many House Republicans if they want to try to pass bills, like the Obamacare repeal, that attract zero Democratic support. Dan Meyer, a legislative affairs chief to former Republican President George W. Bush, said that with the Freedom Caucus threatening Trump's agenda, the White House either had to find a way to work with the conservatives, or tack to the left. Some Republicans were so furious they were publicly saying things usually reserved for closed-door meetings. Representative Chris Collins, a Trump ally and part of the "Tuesday Group" of moderate Republicans, told reporters his group was so angry with the Freedom Caucus that it would "never" meet with it. He accused its members of trying to shift blame for the healthcare failure to moderates. more at the link