With friends like these… as the healthcare battle heats up, Republicans start turning on their own, with a GOP PAC pushing ads against holdout senators and major donors threatening to shut their purses until they start seeing some action.

After the PAC attack on Dean Heller, Josh Holmes, Mr. McConnell’s former chief of staff, said, “That the White House is asking people to take a tough vote and then running ads against members while we’re still in negotiations is so dumb it’s amazing we even have to have the conversation.”

Here’s what happened this week in Trump:

Russia:

1. Trump remains quiet about what he plans to do to prevent Russian interference in our elections in the future. He has never asked Comey how to stop a future cyber/disinformation attack, and Jeff Sessions has never received a classified briefing on the issue.
2. Paul Manafort reveals that his firm received over $17 million from the Ukraine’s Party of Regions, which is affiliated with the Kremlin. He didn’t reveal this at the time it happened, which is required by law.
3. Matt Tait, a security consultant, says that Peter Smith, a Republican opposition researcher, recruited him to authenticate the veracity of some hacked emails that were claimed to come from Clinton’s private server. He never completed the task and the emails seem to have been a hoax, but…
4. It turns out that Smith claimed to represent Michael Flynn in an effort to find emails that Clinton deleted hoping to use them against her in the election. Smith also supported Flynn in his effort to establish relations with Russian officials. Smith spoke to the Wall Street Journal about this story 10 days before he died on May 14 (at age 81, no foul play suspected). Interesting fact: Smith funded the troopergate investigation into Clinton, bankrolled David Bock to smear Clinton, and tried to find a woman who would initiate a paternity suit against Clinton.
5. Tait says he received a recruitment document from Smith listing these senior officials of the Trump campaign or staff: Steve Bannon, Kellyanne Conway, Sam Clovis, Lt. Gen. Flynn, and Lisa Nelson.
6. The document also lists a company Smith had set up, KLS Research, to avoid campaign reporting. It’s not clear who all was involved in that.
7. U.S. intelligence reports that Russian hackers were looking for an intermediary through which they could get emails to Flynn last year, which fits into the role Smith was playing.

Courts/Justice:

1. The Supreme Court rules that state grants that are available to nonprofits can’t be denied to a church-run school. This ruling applied specifically to playground safety, but it opens the door for taxpayers to provide funds to religious organizations.
2. The Supreme Court says they’ll hear the gay wedding cake case (the one where some business owners want it to be legal to discriminate against gay couples).
3. The compliance counsel at the DOJ, Hui Chen, resigns saying that the administration doesn’t live up to the standards she’s supposed to be enforcing in the business world.

Healthcare:

1. After a group aligned with Trump and Pence went after Nevada Senator Dean Heller last week for his refusal to support the healthcare bill, Mitch McConnell called the White House to complain, calling the attack “beyond stupid.” The group pulls the ad campaign.
2. The CBO scores the Senate’s healthcare plan. They estimate that 22 million Americans will lose healthcare coverage over the next decade, just slightly better then the 23 million that would lose it under the House plan. The CBO also estimates that premiums would rise before falling to less than under the ACA, out-of-pocket costs would increase, and there would be fewer covered benefits. But hey, we’ll save about $320 billion over 10 years.
3. Senate republicans add a provision to their bill that would prevent someone with a lapse in coverage from receiving coverage for 6 months.
4. Kellyanne Conway says people who lose Medicaid should look into getting jobs. Nearly 70% of able recipients already do work, but maybe we could find jobs for some of those folks in nursing homes?
5. Despite continual promises that, no matter what, a vote will be held on the healthcare bill, Mitch McConnell abruptly announces that he’s postponing the vote until after the July 4 recess. Earlier he had warned that if the repeal doesn’t get done this week, the GOP would lose all leverage and be forced to compromise with Democrats.
6. Trump invites all Republican senators to the White House for a meeting, during which he says “This will be great if we get it done. And if we don’t get it done, it’s just going to be something that we’re not going to like. And that’s OK, and I understand that very well.”
7. After the meeting, some senators express that they don’t think Trump understands the bill and that Trump seemed surprised that some are calling it a tax break for the rich.
8. A bipartisan group of governors who have been conspiring quietly on blocking the healthcare bill come out strongly against it this week. When Republican senators come home for July recess, these governors push back hard.
9. But never ones to give up hope, GOP senators are working behind the scenes to change the bill enough to bring on more votes. Expect this to continue throughout the recess.
10. While the hardliners want to cut more money from the healthcare bill, Trump says in a speech this week, “Add some money to it!”
11. Trump later says they should just repeal the ACA and replace it at a later date. This is concerning because they don’t have anything they can agree on after 6 years of wanting it, and not having a replacement will knock even more people off insurance.
12. The White House later denies that Trump has changed his mind on this.
13. Forty economists write a letter to McConnell saying that the healthcare bill is a giant step in the wrong direction.
14. Educators and school leaders come out against the healthcare bill, especially in depressed areas where the school nurse and therapists are reimbursed through Medicaid and tools are provided for students with special needs.

International:

1. French President Macron invites Trump to France for Bastille Day.
2. Trump looks at cracking down on Pakistani militants launching attacks on neighboring Afghanistan, including drone strikes and withholding aid from Pakistan.
3. Trump is behind on getting foreign ambassadors nominated and confirmed. His are taking an average of 77 days, Obama’s took 26 days, and Bush’s took 11 days. The holdup seems to be in his formal submissions for approval.
4. The CEO of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation expresses concerns over the massive foreign aid cuts in Trump’s budget (which is less than 1% of our budget). A large amount of global progress in health and development is because of us. Private philanthropy can’t make up for it. The cuts would:
   • Make it harder for NGOs to eradicate diseases (the ebola outbreak is an example of how this affects us at home).
   • Make it harder to help women with reproductive health and choice.
   • Make it harder for President Bush’s PEPFAR program to prevent AIDs. In countries where PEPFAR is established, political instability has dropped 40%.
5. The House Appropriations Committee approves an amendment that would revoke the president’s war authority, requiring congressional approval. It would repeal the Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF) bill passed in response to 9/11. Representative Barbara Lee (D-Calif.) has been trying to get this passed for years.
6. The U.S. plans a $1.42 billion arms deal with Taiwan, sure to invoke a reaction from China.
7. Tillerson and Mattis continue to work behind the scenes to find a solution to the stand-off in the Mideast between Qatar and four other nations. They are still at odds with Trump and Kushner on this because Qatar is actually a strategic ally for us.
8. The UN agrees to a $570 million budget cut for its peacekeeping missions. The administration had fought for even larger cuts.

Legislation:

1. The House passes two bills that target undocumented immigrants. Kate’s Law increases maximum penalties for deported immigrants who repeatedly try to enter the U.S. The No Sanctuary for Criminals Act eliminates federal grants for sanctuary cities and allows victims of crimes by undocumented immigrants sue those cities.
2. Kentucky Governor Matt Bevin signs HB 128 into law, letting schools teach bible classes. No word on whether the Quran and Bhagavad Gita are also allowed.

Travel Ban/Immigration/Discrimination:

1. The Supreme Court agrees to hear the travel ban in the next session, but reinstates parts of it with strict guidelines. The ban won’t affect anyone with a bona fide relationship with an entity in the U.S. People can come here for family, work, school, and so on. The court agrees to hear it in October, by which point it could be moot. That’s plenty of time for the administration to review it’s vetting policies. For an idea of how the justices feel about immigration and discrimination, Thomas, Alito, and Gorsuch all would have reinstated the ban in its entirety.
2. The administration issues guidelines for implementing the ban. People coming from the banned countries must have work, school, or close family ties—extended family (like grandparents, aunts and uncles, or nieces and nephews) does not count. Anyone with legal documents should be allowed in. Refugees are banned for 120 days. Somehow a step-sibling is defined as closer than a grandparent.
3. Khaled Almilaji is a renowned Syrian doctor who ran a campaign to vaccinate 1.4 million Syrian children. Because of the ban, he gives up on returning to the U.S., opting for Canada instead.
4. The Supreme Court overturns an Arkansas court and says that Arkansas discriminated against a lesbian couple by forcing them to go to court to get both women’s names on their child’s birth certificate. Under Arkansas law, a woman’s husband is listed as the father even if he’s not the biological father; gay couples want the same treatment.
5. About a thousand military recruits are waiting for basic training but had their visas expire during their wait, leaving them undocumented. They were recruited for a fast-track citizenship program for their medical and language skills.
6. The Texas Supreme Court rules against government-sponsored spousal benefit requirements for same-sex marriages. See you in the Supreme Court, I’m sure.
7. Trump appoints Bethany Kozma, an anti-transgender activist, to the office of Gender Equality and Women’s Empowerment.
8. The administration disbands the White House Council on Women and Girls.
9. Jim Mattis delays a plan to allow transgender recruits in the military.
10. June ends with no recognition of Pride Month from White House.
11. White House aide Stephen Miller pushes Rex Tillerson to get tougher on immigration, which just seems to piss Tillerson off.

Climate/EPA:

1. Emails show that the EPA’s chief of staff pressured one of the agency’s top scientists to change her testimony in a congressional hearing to downplay the firing of 57 scientific advisors. Scientists think the firings are evidence of the weakened role of science in the Trump administration. “The Board of Scientific Counselors had 68 members two months ago. It will have 11 come Sept. 1,” Dr. Swackhamer said. “They’ve essentially suspended scientific activities by ending these terms. We have no meetings scheduled, no bodies to do the work.”
2. The House Science Committee majority sends daily emails to members and staff. This isn’t new, but now the emails include links to conservative media that deny global warming, including Breitbart, the Daily Mail, and Koch media sources like the Washington Free Beacon and the Daily Caller.
3. Per Trump’s executive order, Scott Pruitt delivers a proposal to rescind Obama’s Waters of the United States (Wotus) protections. This will likely be a long legal battle. Wotus adds onto the Clean Water Act by protecting not only large bodies of water, but also smaller waterways that feed into them. The reversal removes protections from one-third of U.S. drinking water, and the administration openly admits it’s a business decision.
4. Less than a month after meeting with the CEO of Dow Chemical, Scott Pruitt announces that the EPA would no longer pursue a ban on a Dow pesticide known to impact the development of brains of fetuses and infants.
5. It looks like Rick Perry is going to get his wish for a red-team, blue-team climate study, which pits scientists with opposing views against each other basically trying to poke holes in the other’s research. Scott Pruitt plans to launch a critique of climate science with the goal of challenging mainstream climate science. Fingers crossed that they’ll do this right.
6. Florida Governor Rick Scott sign HB 989, which lets Floridians object to specific teaching tools. This bill is widely regarded to be aimed at global warming and evolution. Anybody can complain, even if they don’t have a child in school, and a hearing officer must review each complaint.
7. A coal power plant in central Mississippi gives up on it’s efforts to create clean coal power by capturing emissions. The technology isn’t working, so they plan to burn natural gas instead.

Budget/Economy:

1. Janet Yellen says she doesn’t expect another major financial crisis in her lifetime, thanks to the consumer protections written into the banking reforms under Obama. She adds that unwinding those reforms would be a bad thing. Also that same day I got an email from Paul Ryan touting the House bill that reverses some of those banking reforms…
2. The fight over tax reform is on in the House, upending a tentative agreement that would’ve initiated the process of tax reform and causing the budget committee to cancel their work this week.
3. The dollar falls to 12-month low against the euro.
4. Some Republican-dominated states are starting to approve significant tax increases after working for years under the theory that lower taxes lead to a stronger economy. Notably Kansas, South Carolina, and Tennessee are raising taxes to meet revenue requirements. This could pose a challenge to tax reform at the federal level.

Elections:

1. Trump’s voter fraud commission asks states to provide detailed information about every voter in their systems, including addresses, 10-year voting histories, party registrations, and the last four digits of SSNs. This commission is headed by Mike Pence and Kris Kobach, who has written some of the harshest and most litigated voter suppression laws.
2. While some states merely express concern about the request, at least 24 say they will not comply. Primary concerns are constitutionality, privacy, what the commission plans to do with the data, and how the data will be protected from Russian hackers.
3. Trump wonders what these states are trying to hide.
4. Kobach tried to implement a smaller version of this database in Kansas, and has been sued repeatedly for it and even fined in the process.
5. Kobach promises to make some of the collected information public, though not the most sensitive information.
6. The commission told states to send the information to an unsecured email address.
7. And finally, Mike Pence’s state of Indiana says they won’t comply, and Kobach announces that his own state, Kansas, won’t comply with the request. WTF??

Miscellaneous:

1. The AP releases an analysis showing how partisan gerrymandering has benefited the GOP, finding that Republicans widened or retained power because of the district lines they drew. The AP looked at all 435 House races and about 4,700 state seats. Four times as many states have Republican skewed districts than Democratic ones.
2. Sean Spicer continues to ban live broadcasts and video recordings of the daily briefings.
3. Europe gets hit with another ransomware attack called Petya.
4. Time magazine finds that fake covers featuring Trump are hanging in many of his country clubs. They ask the Trump Organization to remove them all.
5. Trump’s lawyer, Jay Sekalow, is accused of filtering millions from his charity to his family and himself.
6. Spokesperson Sarah Huckabee Sanders accuses the media of being fake news while telling them to watch a video that might be fake news. In a briefing, she denounced the media (to a room full of the media) for producing fake news, using CNN’s recent retraction as an example AND telling journalists to watch a video by the discredited James O’Keefe as proof, though with the caveat ″whether it’s accurate or not I don’t know…″ Playboy reporter Brian Karem unloaded on her for inflaming a room full of journalists who’re just trying to get the story right while the White House continues to lie to them (and can I say, that was a beautiful moment).
7. Tillerson blows up—I mean really blows up—at a high-level aide, apparently from building frustration about not being able to staff up his department because of White House oversight.
8. Trump holds a fundraiser for his re-election campaign in 3 years at his own hotel.
9. Trump continues to call Democrats on the Hill obstructionists, even though they tried working with him at first and they’ve offered to work together on healthcare. Everyone probably could’ve worked together on an infrastructure bill, but that good will is gone now.
10. Trump goes on a bizarre Twitter rant where he says Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski (of Morning Joe) tried to get into Mar-a-Lago last winter and that Mika was bleeding from a bad facelift.
11. This results in a unified, bipartisan chorus of protests that the tweets went too far…from pretty much everybody except Sarah Huckabee Sanders who defended the tweet.
12. Then Joe and Mika accuse White House staff members of trying to blackmail them by promising to stop a negative story about Mika in the Enquirer if they apologized to Trump for their coverage of him.
13. While the majority of Democrats are counseling against talk of impeachment, a group of House Democrats push a bill that would create a commission to investigate Trump and, if applicable, use the 25th amendment to remove Trump from office.
14. Ivanka Trump, senior advisor to the president, says she tries to stay out of politics.
15. The Inspector General clears the National Park Service of charges that they altered pictures of the sizes of crowds at Trump’s and Obama’s inaugurations. Whew. I was worried.
16. Trump reportedly watches five hours of TV per day.
17. The birth rate for teenage girls dropped 67% from 1991 to last year. It’s now at an all-time low and doctors point to knowledge of and access to contraceptives.
18. Trump sends federal agents to help Chicago deal with its crime problem.
19. Jason Chaffetz’ last day as a representative is this week. I don’t understand at all why he quit 6 months into his term.
20. Impeachment marches and counter protests are held across the country.
21. The last staffers of the science division at the White House leave this week. They were charged with policy issues like STEM education, biotechnology, and crisis response.
22. Public beaches in New Jersey are closed Sunday due to a budget impasse. Chris Christie takes his family to the beach while all other beach goers are turned away.

Polls:

1. The annual Pew Research Global Attitudes survey shows that 22% of people outside the U.S. have confidence that Trump will do the right thing, compared with 64% who had confidence in Obama at the same stage of his presidency. Trump rated higher than Obama in only 2 of the 37 countries polled: Russia and Israel.
2. 74% in the Pew survey don’t trust Trump to do the right thing versus 59% who think the same of Putin.
3. The survey also finds that U.S. favorability abroad has dropped from 64% to 49% under Trump.