Jul 27, 2017

GOP senators put the pressure on the House

Caitlin Owens, author of Vitals

Rob Groulx / Axios

Three Republican senators — John McCain, Lindsey Graham and Ron Johnson — put the Senate's "skinny repeal" of the Affordable Care Act in danger Thursday evening, saying they won't vote for it unless Speaker Paul Ryan and his team assure them the bill will go to conference with the House.

"The skinny bill as policy is a disaster," Graham told reporters at a press conference. "I need assurance from the Speaker of the House and his team that if I vote for the skinny bill, it will not become the final product…If I don't get those assurance, I am a no."

But so far, the House has said no such thing. Ryan spokeswoman AshLee Strong said only that a conference committee is "one option under consideration." House leadership aides are very concerned about whether there's anything that can come from a House-Senate conference committee that could pass through the Senate. Why put their members — which have already taken an extremely tough vote — through all of this again, just to get nothing done?

Bottom line: The skinny repeal is actually in mortal danger, and its fate seems to rest, yet again, with Ryan.

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Axios
52 mins ago - Politics & Policy

Louisville officer: "Breonna Taylor would be alive" if we had served no-knock warrant

Breonna Taylor memorial in Louisville. Photo: Brandon Bell/Getty Images

Sgt. Jonathan Mattingly, the Louisville officer who led the botched police raid that caused the death of Breonna Taylor, said the No. 1 thing he wishes he had done differently is either served a "no-knock" warrant or given five to 10 seconds before entering the apartment: "Breonna Taylor would be alive, 100 percent."

Driving the news: Mattingly, who spoke to ABC News and Louisville's Courier Journal for his public interview, was shot in the leg in the initial moments of the March 13 raid. Mattingly did not face any charges after Kentucky Attorney General Daniel Cameron said he and another officer were "justified" in returning fire to protect themselves against Taylor's boyfriend.

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Scott Rosenberg, Ashley Gold, Kyle Daly
1 hour ago - Technology

U.S. vs. Google — the siege begins

Illustration: Sarah Grillo/Axios

The Justice Department fired the starter pistol on what's likely to be a years-long legal siege of Big Tech by the U.S. government when it filed a major antitrust suit Tuesday against Google.

The big picture: Once a generation, it seems, federal regulators decide to take on a dominant tech company. Two decades ago, Microsoft was the target; two decades before that, IBM.

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Dion Rabouin, author of Markets
2 hours ago - Economy & Business

Why the stimulus delay isn't a crisis (yet)

Illustration: Aïda Amer/Axios

If the impasse between House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and the White House on a new stimulus deal is supposed to be a crisis, you wouldn't know it from the stock market, where prices continue to rise.

  • That's been in no small part because U.S. economic data has held up remarkably well in recent months thanks to the $2 trillion CARES Act and Americans' unusual ability to save during the crisis.
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