Washington may have (mostly) stopped talking about the Affordable Care Act, but debates over the law are still raging in some states. Take Idaho. Just as the state was seeking to allow the sale of health insurance plans that don’t comply with the law, a group of activists was pushing to put Medicaid expansion on […]
Welcome to FiveThirtyEight’s weekly politics chat. The transcript below has been lightly edited. micah (Micah Cohen, politics editor): Today’s debate will center around this tweet from a political analyst: Everybody always writes columns about why Democrats or Republicans should pay more attention to issue X. It would be actually way more useful if people wrote […]
Energized by the successful passage of tax cuts, some Republicans are eying a new target: entitlement programs like Social Security and Medicare. House Speaker Paul Ryan is leading the charge, arguing that the only way to break the cycle of rising deficits and surging debt is to reduce entitlement spending. Political resistance is likely to […]
It’s almost 2018. For some, that means looking forward to the new year — what are the big political storylines to watch in the coming year? But I can’t do that until we finish one last end-of-year tradition: remembering all the times I screwed up! That’s right: It’s time for my annual mea culpa column. […]
The near collapse of the GOP’s tax reform bill in the Senate on Thursday night was the latest debacle for a party that has struggled to govern this year. It suggests that the Republican Party may fail to enact a tax overhaul — or any other major legislation. Republicans might still approve the bill on […]