Respond to prefers-color-scheme dark in app web views

Follow section front redirects in Spectrum

Enable NLP source in PCS for load testing

Switch off the News Alerts Survey Widget when we have enough responses

Poll to determine if new LUF updates are available

Allows the winning A/B test variant to be turned on without Spectrum deployment

Show infinite scrolling sections in Assembler MultiView

Show option for NLP article summaries in Action Bar

A general feature flag for Recipe Features that aren't yet released

Feature flag for media team features that aren't yet released

Use new Orca video player for preroll plugin in Spectrum

Show the snow tracker (instead of the heat tracker) on Spectrum

Hope Hicks witnessed nearly every Trump scandal. Now she must testify.

Elections 2024 latest news: Biden to honor distinguished Americans; Trump back in N.Y. court

To the Gaza protesters helping to elect Trump: Give it a rest

Miss Manners: Host eats luxurious breakfast, leaves cereal for guest

Ask Amy: Should I be the best man if I think the bride is abusive?

Carolyn Hax: Husband keeps pushing modest spouse to wear sexier clothes

The dangerous new call for regime change in Beijing

Ukrainian men abroad voice anger over pressure to return home to fight 

U.K. local election results could spell doom for Conservative Party

Riot police and over 2,000 arrests: A look at 2 weeks of campus protests

Hope on the horizon | The Trump Trials: Sidebar

Police break into UCLA encampment

Is Pastis as good as our food critic thought? He sent spies to find out.

Trevor Williams’s escape act helps Nationals blank Rangers 

Nationals can’t solve Nate Eovaldi, drop series finale to Rangers

Teen grabs wheel when driver passes out and school bus veers into traffic

Cat climbed into Amazon return box, found alive 630 miles away

I learned to heal my sadness by cradling dying chickens 

The New York Times, alone in its outrage over access to Biden

Wait, what is Stephen A. Smith talking about? Find out with our quiz.

Stephen A. Smith would like even more of your attention

This is the technology we’re loving right now

NASA moon capsule suffered extensive damage during 2022 test flight

Microsoft is changing how you log in to your accounts

On Press Freedom Day, little to celebrate for Hong Kong’s journalists

Young Georgians want to be part of Europe. Their government is in the way.

Taxes are inevitable. Paying to prepare them doesn’t have to be.

You asked: Do I need a passport for my cruise?

What’s the best bus to New York? We tested 5 for comfort and value.

Adaptive equipment is making national parks more inclusive

An I bond is now at 4.28 percent. Are they still a good deal?

Use these 6 points to say no to a college you and your kid can’t afford

How this new rule protects retirement savers from costly advice

Trump

See more coverage in your recommendations

Get the weekly Campaign Moment newsletter

Set alerts for major election developments

Election 2024

The Campaign Moment newsletter

Politics alerts

Leaders of conservative groups that oppose the House Republicans’ health-care bill met with President Trump at the White House on Wednesday night, part of a high-profile effort to quiet anger from the right. In the process, the conservatives heard the president and his team express some openness to tweaks to the bill that go further than House or Senate leaders might accept.

Trump and his team did not outright reject changes on at least three components of the GOP’s American Health Care Act, said some of the meeting’s attendees, speaking on the condition of anonymity. One idea was accelerating the timetable for key changes to Medicaid under the House GOP plan from 2020 to 2018.

Thirty-one states plus the District of Columbia accepted Medicaid expansion under the Obama administration’s Affordable Care Act. The House GOP plan would restrict Medicaid payments starting in 2020.

Another change that some of the conservative leaders want to see take effect more swiftly — in 2018 instead of 2020 — is a proposal in the House GOP plan to allow insurance companies more freedom in the types of coverage they can offer Americans. One of the meeting’s attendees said Trump and his team seemed open to this idea.

Leaders of the Club for Growth, the Heritage Foundation, Heritage Action for America, Americans for Prosperity, Tea Party Patriots, and FreedomWorks all participated in the meeting, joined by White House staff including Chief of Staff Reince Priebus, White House Budget Director Mick Mulvaney, chief strategist Steve Bannon, senior adviser Kellyanne Conway and legislative affairs director Marc Short.

The White House did not comment directly the content of the meeting, but noted generally that it is reaching out to various coalitions as it works with Congress to repeal and replace the ACA. Shortly after the meeting ended, Trump’s social media manager tweeted out a black-and-white photo.

A third tweak Trump and his team seemed at least open to, attendees said, was raising the cap on how much money people can put into tax-exempt savings accounts for health-care costs, going further than the House GOP proposal. And as he’s done in public, Trump stressed that the bill represented the first in three phases to “repeal and replace,” followed by regulatory changes from the Department of Health and Human Services and legislation passed through the Senate’s normal legislative process.

One element of the House bill that Trump and his team appeared unwilling to overhaul are the age and income-based tax credits in the House proposal designed to replace federal insurance subsidies in the Affordable Care Act. Some conservatives have said they amount to a new and unnecessary entitlement program.

Mulvaney gave an “impassioned” explanation in the meeting for why the credits are necessary in the context of the repeal-and-replace strategy Republicans have adopted, one attendee said.

David McIntosh, president of the Club for Growth, said Trump used the 45-minute meeting to convince conservatives that a real strategy for repealing the ACA was in place. The Club had denounced the AHCA, saying it did nothing to legalize the purchase of insurance plans across state lines; Trump emphasized that such deregulation could only be done in a stand-alone bill.

“The president asked us: ‘Don’t be doom and gloom, and against getting this done,'” said McIntosh. “He emphasized that there will be three phases to this, and he said ‘I wish they’d done a better job; then maybe you’d have realized some of your issues are being taken care of.'”

The “they,” in that case, were House Republicans who had rolled out a bill that alienated not just the conservative groups but the AARP, the AMA and a small constellation of retirement and insurance coalitions.

“I‘m most optimistic that they’re actually pushing back in the House and ultimately in the Senate to improve the bill,” said McIntosh. “They’re not saying that in public, but they’re negotiating.”

But the meeting, said attendees, did not end with any of the critics dropping their previous worries about the bill. “It was cordial,” said TPP’s Jenny Beth Martin. “I left encouraged because the president is listening to us, [but] I don’t believe we left that room with any order from him to do anything.”

Trump also mentioned centrist Democratic senators from red states up for reelection in 2018. Their support might be key in future changes to the law — the “third phase” — though none are inclined to support the AHCA. Trump noted that he performed well in the Democrats’ states and was up to the task of swaying them to come around on health-care reform, the attendees said. And Trump returned to an argument he made at the Conservative Political Action Conference, that the failure of a Republican bill could and would allow the ACA’s problems to be blamed on Democrats.

So far this week, conservative groups have not embraced that argument — or let Republicans off the hook. By Tuesday, FreedomWorks was already running social media ads attacking the bill as “RyanCare,” illustrated with a doctored photo of the speaker of the House getting cozy with former president Barack Obama.

Freedomworks.org

But as of Wednesday afternoon, Republican vote-counters were confident that there was not enough genuine conservative opposition to the bill to grind it down. One staffer suggested that FreedomWorks et al needed to remain in opposition mode, or they’d lose their argument to activists and donors — a common Republican gripe about the outside groups.

Also among the critics: Breitbart News. The site, run by White House political strategist Steve Bannon until 2016, has gone all-in against the AHCA, describing it as “Ryancare” and leading for much of Wednesday with an interview with AHCA critic Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.).

“Many Republican offices outside the House Freedom Caucus privately tell Breitbart News that as many as 70 or more House Republicans are opposed to Ryan’s plan,” <a href="http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2017/03/08/exclusive-sen-rand-paul-paul-ryans-obamacare-lite-speaker-trying-pull-wool-eyes-president/">wrote reporter </a>Matt Boyle, who reportedly was on the receiving end of a rant from Bannon last month. “Leadership knows this too, they say, as all the “hard no” votes have told the Speaker’s office or the whip teams they cannot vote for this bill.”

The Show That Never Ends: The Rise and Fall of Prog Rock

Northwestern University, B.S. in Journalism, 2004

David Weigel is a national political correspondent covering Congress and grass-roots political movements. He is the author of "The Show That Never Ends," a history of progressive rock music.

David Weigel

Hamilton College

Sean Sullivan covers the White House for The Washington Post.  

Sean Sullivan

The Washington Post

The Early

The Technology

The Health

The 202s

prism://prism.query/site,/politics/powerpost&limit=20

The 202s - The Washington Post

PowerPost, by The Washington Post, delivers essential intelligence for D.C. decision-makers.

THE 202s

prism://prism.query/site-articles-only,/politics&limit=20

2021 Election: Complete coverage and analysis

Politics

Post Politics from The Washington Post is the source for political news headlines, in-depth politics coverage and political opinion, plus breaking news on the biden administration and White House, Congress, the Supreme Court, elections and more.

prism://prism.query/site,/politics/the-fix&limit=6