Who Is Kathie Allen And How Does A Progressive Run For Congress In Beet-Red Utah?

Dr. Kathie Allen is a family physician who has practiced medicine in Utah for 30 years. As you probably know, she decided to challenge Jason Chaffetz this past February in the 2018 mid-term elections after, she told sum she "realized he had no intention of challenging the Trump administration or fulfilling his role as Chair of the Government Oversight Committee." But when Chaffetz stepped down from Congress, it set off a quandary in Utah because the state has no specific law for how to implement a Special Election. Both the Federal and state statutes give authority to the governor to call a Special Election, but there is no specified methodology on how to do this. We asked Kathie to introduce herself to DWT readers by bringing us up to date on the state of her race in Utah.

UT-03 stretches from the suburbs east on Salt Lake City, like Holladay and Cottonwood Heights, almost to Park City and then down through Heber City, Provo, Spanish Fork and way down through Moab and Blanding to the 4 corners where Utah, Arizona, New Mexico and Colorado all meet. Although there are 7 counties in the district, most of the votes-- by far-- are in Utah County and Salt Lake County. Bernie beat Hillary in every county and took more voters overall that Trump did in the caucuses. In Utah County Bernie beat Hillary 85.3% to 14.2%. He got 6,071 votes to Trump's 3,713 votes. In Salt Lake County, Bernie beat Hillary 78.8% to 20.9% and his 35,610 votes far outstripped Trump's 6,542 on the same day. (Cruz won the county in the GOP caucus-- with 31,164 votes-- and Bernie beat him too. And it wasn't that different in the sparsely populated rural counties. Take Grand-- Bernie beat Hillary 79.6% to 20.2% but he beat Trump 636 votes to 127 votes. Now, keep in mind, Utah's third district has a PVI of R+28. McCain beat Obama 67-29% and 4 years later Romney eviscerated the president 79-20%, one of Obama's weakest performances anywhere. But Trump isn't well-regarded in Utah and UT-03 only gave him 47.2% of the vote (to Hillary's 23.3%). Still, every one of Chaffetz's reelection bids has been won with over 70%. This is going to be a tough race.

Kathie has an extensive issues page on her official website and if you like what she stands for and what she has to say below, you can contribute to her campaign here.




On The Idiosyncrasies Of Utah Politics In The Special Election To Replace Jason Chaffetz
-by Dr. Kathie Allen

Governor Herbert took the quandary about a special election to mean that the authority was completely in his hands. He chose not to call a special session of our state Legislature. His rationale was that several State Legislators had their hats in the ring, and he felt that giving the Legislature a voice in the process would open the possibility that they would manipulate it to their own ends, enhancing the possibility that a Republican State Legislator would be named the Republican nominee. This set off a backlash and a meeting of both Democratic and Republican caucuses of the Legislature who considered suing the Governor for having bypassed their authority. They will no doubt address this fuzziness in the election law when they convene in 2018.

However, Governor Herbert prevailed, and he determined that the Democratic nominee could be chosen at the Democratic State Convention by the 3rd Congressional District delegates. Since we had not yet had our Convention, this was easy to implement and we had enough advance warning to make the caucus of the 3rd District an integral part of the State Convention.

The Republican party, however had already had its State Convention. They had to call a separate caucus session of their 3rd CD delegates, and they had no money to do so. Their mini-convention was financed by donations from delegates and Jason Chaffetz donating his left-over campaign funds to them.

The Republican Party in Utah is broke. They are over $300,000 in debt. This is largely because they chose to fight a Ballot Initiative called “Count My Vote” that the citizens of Utah were able to pass and enact into law. The Republican party wanted to preserve the caucus system intact, in which neighborhood meetings are the means of electing party delegates. These party delegates are then empowered with choosing the party’s official nominees for the local and national election slate. The problem with this approach is that it draws zealots to the small neighborhood meetings. Everyone else would rather stay inside with family, watch a sports game on TV, or pursue another activity. As the years have gone by since the emergence of the Tea Party, more and more of the Republican delegates have become Tea Party adherents or have embraced other extreme positions of the Right. More moderate Republicans and others wanted to challenge this caucus system by providing a second means of putting names on the ballot. The successful enactment of “Count My Vote” allows a signature-gathering process where signatures representing approximately 1% of the population of a district provide a pathway for a candidate to go directly on the ballot, bypassing the caucus system.

There are 3 contenders for the Republican nomination to replace Jason Chaffetz. The official designee to come out of the traditional caucus system is, as expected, a right-wing candidate by the name of Chris Herrod. He is a former State legislator with views bordering on racist. He is anti-immigration for certain, a view that does not sit well even with many of the otherwise conservative Mormons in the district who have been actively helping refugees. The two other candidates went the signature gathering route. One is the more moderate mayor of Provo, Utah, John Curtis. He actually was once a Democrat, but has been a Republican for many years now. The third candidate is Tanner Ainge, who would not have been able to collect the required signatures without the backing of his famous father, Danny Ainge, former NBA basketball star and currently top management in the Boston Celtics organization. His chances of being elected possibly dipped a little when the Boston Celtics wooed away one of Utah’s best players, Gordon Hayward, in free agency this summer.

As for me, my two opponents tried and failed to gather the necessary signatures to primary me. I was able to secure the Democratic nomination with 77% of the caucus vote. I am a progressive candidate running in a very conservative district. Some variables that will help me are if Curtis fails to advance and I face the extremist Herrod; if Donald Trump continues to undermine our democracy with no response from our all-GOP Congressional delegation (as has so far been the case), and if my message of “health care for all” resonates. My district has had one of the highest enrollments in the ACA, and many are threatened with loss of coverage. Our internal polling indicated that healthcare is the #1 issue on the minds of our constituents. The poll showed us a route to victory in identifying who our likely supporters are and what the best messaging might be. For instance, people responded to “Dr. Allen is a family doctor who will tell you the truth, even if it is hard to hear.”

This Special Election is the final chance to send a Democrat to Congress in 2017. While admittedly an uphill climb, it is a winnable race. A victory for our side would send shock waves to the White House and to Trump supporters. Symbolically, replacing Jason Chaffetz with a progressive female family doc would be a coup. I hope that you will support my race!

Will Putin-Gate Lead To Impeachment?

Looks like his decision to not seek reelection has set Jason Chaffetz free from at least some partisan obligations to the Trumpist Regime. Watch that video above. Responding to a question about Trump/Putin crony Michael Flynn, Chaffetz said "As a former military officer, you simply cannot take money from Russia, Turkey or anybody else. And it appears as if he did take that money. It was inappropriate. And there are repercussions for the violation of law." CNN reported that "The announcement about Flynn comes a week after CNN reported that Jared Kushner, Trump's son-in-law and a senior adviser to the President, has yet to detail to the federal government all of his foreign contacts, a condition of receiving his top secret security clearance, CNN has learned. When Kushner first submitted his forms to the FBI, he left the section about foreign contacts blank-- despite the fact that he had met with a large number of foreign emissaries and leaders once Donald Trump became the president-elect and he became the point man for international contacts for the incoming Trump administration."

Trumpist flack Spicy Spice then went on the air to say that Chaffetz's and the House Oversight Committee’s request for documents on Flynn is "pretty outlandish," defending the Regime's shocking denial of the request. The number of Americans who want an independent, non-partisan professional investigation into Putin-Gate has been growing by leaps and bounds, According to the new Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll the number of Americans who want an independent probe is now 73%. And 61% of respondents say they have little to no confidence in Congress conducting a fair and impartial investigation into Russia's involvement in the 2016 election.

Putin-Gate is now a giant octopus of interconnected scandals that is quickly swallowing the entire Trump Regime. It's no longer just about Michael Flynn, Paul Manafort, Roger Stone and Carter Page-- all of whom are likely to see prison terms-- but has spread right to the top, including Kushner-in-law. Devin Nunes, head of the Intelligence Committee was forced to recuse himself from the investigation (as was Attorney General Jeff Sessions) and Nunes is now under investigation himself for having participated in a coverup.

Yesterday Politico reported that Flynn's stint as a secret lobbyist for Turkey was tied to-- wait for it-- Putin!

The Turkish man who gave Mike Flynn a $600,000 lobbying deal just before President Donald Trump picked him to be national security adviser has business ties to Russia, including a 2009 aviation financing deal negotiated with Vladimir Putin, according to court records.

The man, Ekim Alptekin, has in recent years helped to coordinate Turkish lobbying in Washington with Dmitri “David” Zaikin, a Soviet-born former executive in Russian energy and mining companies who also has had dealings with Putin’s government, according to three people with direct knowledge of the activities.

This unusual arrangement, in which Alptekin and Zaikin have helped steer Turkish lobbying through various groups since at least 2015, raises questions about both the agenda of the two men and the source of the funds used to pay the lobbyists.

Although Turkey is a NATO ally, its president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, has grown increasingly authoritarian and friendly with Putin. And the hiring of Flynn by Alptekin came at a time when Flynn was working for Trump’s campaign and Putin’s government was under investigation for interfering with the U.S. election.

Flynn’s lawyer, Robert Kelner, declined to comment. In a filing with the Justice Department, Flynn said he relied on assurances from Alptekin that he was not directly or indirectly funded by a foreign government. But shifting explanations and a web of business ties raise questions about the arrangement.

Flynn has offered evolving accounts of his lobbying work for Alptekin. In September, Flynn reported his client as a Dutch shell company owned by Alptekin. After being forced to leave the White House-- reportedly because he lied to Vice President Mike Pence about his conversations during the transition with the Russian ambassador-- Flynn filed new paperwork in March acknowledging that his lobbying work “principally benefitted” the Turkish government.

The revelation of Russian business ties to the man who hired Flynn-- which has not been previously reported-- threatens to complicate the White House’s struggle to escape the shadow of the FBI investigation into whether members of the Trump campaign coordinated with Russian agents.

Flynn has been a focus for concerns about Russian ties to both the Trump campaign, for which he was a key adviser and surrogate, and the Trump administration, in which, as national security adviser, he had access to the most sensitive state secrets.

Yesterday's NY Times reported that the same Kremlin hackers who put Trump into the White House have begun working on winning the French election for neo-Nazi Marine Le Pen. Nicole Perlroth wrote that "The campaign of the French presidential candidate Emmanuel Macron has been targeted by what appear to be the same Russian operatives responsible for hacks of Democratic campaign officials before last year’s American presidential election, a cybersecurity firm warns in a new report. The report has heightened concerns that Russia may turn its playbook on France in an effort to harm Mr. Macron’s candidacy and bolster that of Mr. Macron’s rival, the National Front leader Marine Le Pen, in the final weeks of the French presidential campaign. Security researchers at the cybersecurity firm, Trend Micro, said that on March 15 they spotted a hacking group they believe to be a Russian intelligence unit turn its weapons on Mr. Macron’s campaign-- sending emails to campaign officials and others with links to fake websites designed to bait them into turning over passwords. The group began registering several decoy internet addresses last month and as recently as April 15, naming one onedrive-en-marche.fr and another mail-en-marche.fr to mimic the name of Mr. Macron’s political party, En Marche. Those websites were registered to a block of web addresses that Trend Micro’s researchers say belong to the Russian intelligence unit they refer to as Pawn Storm, but is alternatively known as Fancy Bear, APT 28 or the Sofacy Group. American and European intelligence agencies and American private security researchers determined that the group was responsible for hacking the Democratic National Committee last year."

Putin has his intelligence forces going all in to do in France and Germany exactly what he was able to a chief in the U.S.-- undermine democracy and placing political leadership into the hands of a divisive, incompetent and friendly politician. It's worth mentioning that the Republican passage of Jeff Flake's bill to allow internet service providers to sell everyone's personal information-- which was swiftly and secretly signed by Trump-- will make these kinds of operations-- allowing the Russians to gain access to the campaigns' email accounts-- all the easier.

“The phishing pages we are talking about are very personalized web pages to look like the real address,” Mr. Mahjoubi added. Anyone could easily think he was logging into his own email. “They were pixel perfect,” he said Monday night. “It’s exactly the same page. That means there was talent behind it and time went into it: talent, money, experience, time and will.”

The goal was to obtain the email passwords of campaign staff members so a cyberattacker could lurk unseen inside an email account reading confidential correspondence. “If you are speed reading as you sign on, and everybody speed reads online, it’s something you might not notice,” Mr. Mahjoubi said. “For instance, it uses a hyphen instead of a dot, and if you are speed reading you don’t look at the URL.”

Unlike the attacks aimed at Mrs. Clinton’s staff, those directed at the Macron camp, Mr. Mahjoubi said, failed to gain access to any email accounts used by the candidate or his lieutenants.

This winter, the campaign’s website also came under attack. The attacks coincided with highly slanted articles about Mr. Macron on the French language services of Sputnik and RT, formerly Russia Today. Both are state-funded Russian news media outlets.

Chaffetz and Nunes-- Which One Is Heading For Disgrace And Which For A Job At Fox?

I couldn't make it to Visalia for the anti-devon Nunes town hall at the College of the Sequoias on Wednesday. (Good excuse-- I had to spend the day at City of Hope working with my doctor on a marijuana protocol for the chronic cough that got left behind after a post-stem cell replacement operation bout of pneumonia. All these medicines aren't working; marijuana oil is.) Anyway... good people don't use marijuana but I missed the Nunes-without-Nunes shindig. About 150 people did show up, constituents according to them but "a bunch of left-wing activists" according to Nunes. They invited him to the event and he replied by insulting them. He claimed the event was designed to make him look bad, but could anyone have made him look as bad as Trump already has?

“We aren’t here to scream at him,” said Natasha Moiseyev of Central Valley Indivisible, one of the organizers. “It’s not a fringe left gathering of crazies. We want to get the facts out and speak respectfully. We are dying for a conversation. We have questions and we would like answers.”


...The event was hosted by Together We Will-- Fresno/Central Valley and Central Valley Indivisible, and the costs were covered by Health Access California, according to organizers.

Organizers asked speakers to announce their ZIP codes to show that they lived in Nunes’ 22nd Congressional District.

The format Wednesday consisted of presentations-- including mention of Nunes’ voting record and public statements-- about health care, immigration and government transparency and accountability, followed by questions and statements from people in the audience.

Marsha Comant of Fresno, a delegate to the 2016 Democratic National Convention, said if Nunes were there she’d tell him “people in the district without health care will die. This is my question: Do you not care?”

Celeste Cook, 63, a retired teacher from Visalia, led a brief chant of “Not Nunes” as the elected representative in Congress.

Some of the most emotional moments came from advocates of immigration law reform for so-called Dreamers-- young adults brought to the United States as children-- to get legalized.

“These are some the hardest working, most bright people I’ve ever met,” said Alexander Flores, a University of California, Berkeley, graduate in English literature. “They’re scared ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) will arrest them.” He said he’d say to Nunes, “Will you protect my friends? Will you protect my community from being torn apart?”

Jose Sigala, a Tulare City Council member elected in November, said the event demonstrates that town hall meetings are needed in a democracy.

“I am excited about the momentum that has developed to hold our elected officials accountable,” he said.

But getting support for them from fellow elected officials can be hard, he said. Sigala said he asked the Tulare council to put on its agenda an item about sending a letter asking Nunes to hold a town hall in his hometown. The council split 2-2, with one absent, so the topic won’t be on the agenda.

Republicans have largely avoided town hall meetings on recent visits home. Rep. David Valadao, R-Hanford, for instance, held one-on-one meetings in Hanford with constituents.

The 22nd Congressional district that Nunes represents includes Tulare, Visalia, Reedley, Clovis and part of Fresno. It’s considered a safe Republican district with 43-33 percent Republican to Democratic registration.

Last year, Nunes won re-election last year with 68 percent of the vote. He was first elected to Congress in 2002.

He’s been in the national news lately as chairman of the House Intelligence Committee and a strong supporter of President Donald Trump. But he stepped aside from a probe of alleged Russian interference in the presidential election amid intense criticism over his late-night visit to the White House to review purported intelligence documents with the assistance of White House staff.

Retired music teacher Carole Greening of Visalia said she attended the town hall event to send him a message.

“I want him representing the ordinary people,” she said. “He’s in Washington representing the richest people in our area. He goes where the money is. We’re the people in his district. He needs to pay attention to us.”

It's Pelosi's dogged policy to not allow the DCCC to challenge Republican House leaders or committee chairs and Nunes has never had a serious challenge for reelection. Younger fed up Democrats in Congress are working to make sure than regardless of Pelosi's bullshit, Nunes will have a challenge in 2018. Another top candidate for Democratic ire was Jason Chaffetz (R-UT), but as you know, he announced this week that he won't be seeking reelection and then said he's thinking of resigning altogether. Wants to spend more time with the family! That usually needs something's up. Yesterday, the Deseret News set tongues in Salt Lake City and DC wagging... if you could get beyond the GOP propaganda in the first couple of paragraphs. The infamous Chaffetz town-hall in Cottonwood Heights, engineered by Chaffetz to be as far from the heart of his district and as close to leftists as he could get, included protesters "masked and dressed in black. They worried Chaffetz most. They carried guns and, he would later learn, were prowling the parking lot trying to find his car." This is the substitute most Americans get instead of actual journalism.

[H]e parlayed his rising visibility into a chairmanship of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, which he used to go after Planned Parenthood, Hillary Clinton and other favorite punching bags of the right. He became the most high-profile antagonist of the Obama administration, the tormentor-in-chief, and in the final weeks of the campaign he vowed that he would continue to investigate Clinton for using an unclassified email server, improperly staffing the embassy in Benghazi, and any other possible crimes, whether she won re-election or not.

Then Donald Trump got elected and everything changed.

“Trump getting elected was the worst possible thing for him,” says one Utah political insider. “Under a Hillary Clinton presidency, he would have had a nightly gig on Fox News. It would have been Crooked Hillary every night. Instead he got Trump.”

Had Clinton won, Chaffetz would have used the platform to attack the administration at every turn, the subpoena power literally resting in the pen in his pocket. But now, he was suddenly limited by demands to play team ball for a team that was already struggling, fumbling health care right out of the gate. And whatever Trump and the fractious House Republicans did, he would be held accountable, even though he would have little control.

And if the town hall was any indication, he was already being held accountable for his team’s performance. His approval rating in the 3rd District had dropped by 14 points since the election, according to an April Dan Jones and Associates poll.

Money, mostly from out-of-state, had started to pour in for a Democratic challenger with no political experience named Kathryn Allen. Allen had only raised $20,000 in an exploratory account and then her campaign went viral when Chaffetz went on CNN in early March and made one of his most embarrassing gaffes trying to sell the Republican overhaul of Obamacare.

"Americans have choices, and they've got to make a choice," he said. "So rather than getting that new iPhone that they just love and want to go spend hundreds of dollars on that, maybe they should invest in their own health care.” In less than a week, Allen’s campaign war chest had skyrocketed to $410,000.

It’s unlikely Allen or any Democrat would have beaten Chaffetz, who still had a 72 percent approval rating in his district, but the amount of money Allen had raised suggested that for the first time since his election, Chaffetz would actually have to campaign and spend a good chunk of the next year aggressively fundraising, a chore he’s never enjoyed. The campaign could get costly, loud and bruising. And for someone who had much greater ambitions than the House, it could do lasting damage to his brand.

Chaffetz says the decision not to run came down to family, and there’s no doubt that was a factor. His wife, Julie, always made a point of never complaining, never being an obstacle to his aspirations, insiders say, but the strain and isolation were wearing on her, and Chaffetz said it was time for him to spend more time with family now that he and Julie were nearly empty nesters.

Among political insiders in Utah and Washington, there was widespread speculation Thursday that Chaffetz was stepping down because of a scandal, and that word of his resignation was imminent. Chaffetz told Politico news of a scandal was “absolutely, positively not” true.

“Not in any way, shape or form,” he told Politico. “I’ve been given more enemas by more people over the last eight years than you can possibly imagine. From the Secret Service to the Democratic Party. I am who I am. If they had something really scandalous, it would’ve come out a long, long time ago.”

And yet, it’s hard to imagine Chaffetz truly stepping away from the spotlight. This is a man who appears on TV so willingly and so often he carries two earpieces with him for live interviews and has the names of Fox News hosts programmed into his phone. As the New York Times recently put it, he practically rushes “toward television cameras with an eager smile.”

Chaffetz’s announcement came the same day Fox News announced it was severing ties with Bill O’Reilly, its most popular host. When asked Wednesday about rumors Fox has offered Chaffetz a hosting gig, he demurred. “None of that can come to fruition until you actually go forward and make this announcement,” Chaffetz said. “Then you can pursue what these opportunities might be.”

Chaffetz hasn’t revealed how long he's going to stay in office, but he probably won’t remain chairman of his committee. A Fox hosting gig would be lucrative-- Sean Hannity makes many millions each year-- and it would provide Chaffetz the sort of platform he had on the committee during the Obama years but with an even wider audience. By 2020 he’d be perfectly poised to run for office again. Already the page for jasoninthehouse.com redirects to jasonforgovernor.com. And that might not be the full extent of Chaffetz’s ambitions. Two weeks ago, Chaffetz’s campaign committee registered domains for a possible presidential run: jason2028.com and jasonchaffetz2028.com.

It’s unlikely this is the end of Jason Chaffetz’s political career, but if his abrupt announcement is a pivot to something bigger and better, what is it? More importantly, how and why did someone so ambitious walk away from one of the most high-profile positions in American politics?

A month or so before Chaffetz announced he wouldn’t seek re-election, he was in Washington on his way to dinner with two reporters. He checked his phone, where he keeps apps for his favorite restaurants: McDonald’s, Dominos and Five Guys. Tonight, he wanted Five Guys. The apps sped things up, he explained, at least in theory. He could order his favorite burger while his press secretary, MJ Henshaw, drove. The apps also saved money. He was always finding deals on the McDonald’s app.

Except tonight the apps weren’t working, and Chaffetz was getting mildly annoyed. As Henshaw slowed for a motorcade of blacked out SUVs, Chaffetz looked up.

“Looks like Mike Pence,” he said. “We love Mike Pence.”

“Would you rather Pence were president?” a reporter in the back seat asked.

Chaffetz nervously chuckled and changed the subject.

At Five Guys, Chaffetz ordered a burger and a jumbo-sized carton of fries and tucked his large frame into a small corner table. He talked with great enthusiasm about how much he loved fast food and how often he ate out of vending machines. He ate out of the one in the basement of his office in the Rayburn Building so often he had the number memorized for his favorite Hostess cupcakes.

Chaffetz seems determined to push the image of the everyman, the guy who eats out of vending machines and drives a truck, even though he lives in one of the most expensive zip codes in Utah and wears camo not to hunt, but to take pictures of wildlife. Every politician has an image, a brand they’d like to push, and this is Chaffetz’s: the tightwad congressman who sleeps on a cot to save his constituents money (even though it actually saves him money). The cot has become his most reliable prop in self-branding, and it still comes up in pretty much every profile written about him, but the thing is, it’s actually uncomfortable, and he said he’s getting a little tired of sleeping on it.

“I’m turning 50 and I’m sleeping on a cot,” he said. “Maybe it’s time to re-evaluate my life.”

Chaffetz seemed constrained by the image he’d created for himself. If he was governor, he could sleep in his own bed.

“I say I’m a definite maybe,” Chaffetz said of running for governor. “You also think about when you hang up the cleats, too. I’m not a lifer. I’m just not.”

It had become clear to him he would have a hard time rising any higher in the House. Two years before, he’d thrown his hat in the ring for speaker, testing the water and he got crickets.

He seemed wistful when asked if another run for speaker was in the cards, as if he wanted it, but couldn’t imagine it happening.

“I don’t know how I would get from here to there,” he said. “I would have to do some things that are very hard. And I’m up for hard and difficult, but I would have to be a prolific fundraiser. That’s part of it. Never say never, but only a handful of people in the nation have ever been able to pull that off. It’s harder than anybody thinks.”

Chaffetz was also struggling to find his footing as oversight chairman in a Republican administration. “I think most people, including myself, expect me to hold the Trump administration to the same high standard, of course they do.”

He pointed out that he had, in fact, opened a number of inquiries into the Trump administration, including Trump’s lease of the Old Post Office building (which Trump turned in to a Trump hotel), and Michael Flynn’s ties to Russia, but he’d left most of the heavy lifting on possible collusion with the Russians to the House Intelligence Committee, which had frustrated the Democrat Elijah Cummings, the ranking member on the oversight committee.

“When it comes to Russian interference issues, it’s hard for me to tell whether it's his own beliefs that he should not look into that too deeply, or whether that is also coming from higher-ups. I don’t know. I can’t tell,” Cummings said. “… We’ve sent all types of letters to Chaffetz trying to get him to join in on the various things. And he says he wants to wait to see if something is going to go wrong. I keep telling them, I say, ‘Chaffetz, you keep saying we will cross that bridge when we get to it, and as each little thing happens, I keep telling them, we’re on the bridge.’”

Tom Davis, who chaired the oversight committee during the George W. Bush administration, said the very nature of the chairmanship was political, and there was no way Chaffetz could avoid it. “Your job is to over-investigate when the other party is in power and under-investigate when your party is in power,” Davis says. “Part of his job is to protect the quarterback.”

Gowdy, a fellow member of oversight committee, agreed with Davis. If Chaffetz got too aggressive to appease the Do Your Job! crowd back home, his party could turn on him, Davis said.

Chaffetz shook his head when he heard this.

“No, heaven’s no,” he says. “The quickest way to lose all the credibility I’ve built over eight years is to give Donald Trump a pass. That’s not my job... We need to call balls and strikes as we see them.”

...The last three times one party held the Senate, House and presidency, they lost in the midterms, and if history holds, that may happen again.

If Democrats were to take the House, Chaffetz would have been reduced to ranking member on the oversight committee, playing the role of foil and defender for Trump, but mostly having to go along with a committee now doing to the bidding of Democrats who would like nothing more than to see Trump lose re-election, or face impeachment.

By getting out now, Chaffetz clears the path for other Republicans to run in the 3rd District, and by making it clear he won’t run for Senate either, donors can decide if they want to bet on Hatch for one more term, or back Mitt Romney, who is being pushed to enter the race.

Politically, at least, Chaffetz’s most likely path seems the governorship. “My guess is he wants to start rebuilding a base for (governor) in 2020,” a Utah political heavyweight says. “No member of Congress has been elected Utah governor in recent years-- maybe ever-- though many have tried. His PR instincts probably tell him that he can't be seen as coming straight from Congress, therefore some distancing before things get serious.”

Despite the public hectoring Chaffetz got at the town hall, the death threats, the zingers from late night talk show hosts and Saturday Night Live writers, conventional wisdom is that he’d have a good shot of winning in a race for Utah governor, even against Josh Romney, who some see as inexperienced and unqualified. While Chaffetz was initially seen as a policy lightweight, more interested in attention than actually getting anything done, that perception has changed, and he’s now seen as a serious politician with a strong grasp of policy.

“I had initially been pretty skeptical of him,” said someone in the governor’s office who requested anonymity. “But I’ve become very impressed. He’s very intelligent and articulate.”

Then again, maybe Chaffetz is serious about a return to the private sector. On Thursday afternoon, rumors circulated he planned to announce his retirement, and he told Politico he’d already started looking for a job, hoping to “link up with a television network.”

“I started poking around to see what I might be worth and what sort of possibilities are there,” Chaffetz said. “And I got a series of ‘Let us know when you’re serious.’ Well now I can say, ‘Can you tell I am serious?’”

Perhaps a Fox deal is already in hand. Joe Scarborough left Congress to become a TV host at MSNBC, and it didn’t kill his political career. As recently as the last election, his name was floated as a potential vice presidential candidate for the Trump ticket.

As for when Chaffetz might leave Congress, only he knows.

“I might depart early. It’s not tomorrow, it’s not next week," he told Politico. "If it is, it’s going to be in the months to come.”

Tulsi Gabbard's Republican Friends Aren't Doing Well

Tulsi with Miriam Adelson and Rabbi Shmuley

Tulsi Gabbard was born into a staunchly Republican family. Her father, Mike Gabbard, a religious-right whackadoodle obsessed with homosexuality ran as a Republican, for the congressional seat Tulsi now represents. He lost. Two years later (2006) he was elected to an open state Senate seat as a Republican. He was basically a one issue asshole: it was all about his crackpot homophobia. Seeing there wasn't much he could accomplish as a Republican, he switched parties-- keep all his right-wing baggage and bullshit but ran with a "D" next to his name, while rejecting much of the party agenda. It saw how well being a conservaDem was working for his daughter who was in the state legislature leading the anti-LGBT jihad there. What a truly disgusting pair they were! In 2012 EMILY's List helped get her into Congress.

Tulsa's always known how to get along with Republicans. It's in her DNA. Once she got to Congress she started dating Republican Mafia thug Michael "Mikey Suits" Grimm and palling around with another GOP criminal Aaron Schock (R-IL) who was hoping to use her to get into Grimm's pants. Both Grimm and Schock were forced to resign in disgrace. Grimm went to prison. Schock is still trying to avoid prison. Meanwhile, ProgressivePunch rates her lifetime crucial vote score an "F." So far this session she has a score of 50, voting for and against progressive initiatives an equal amount of times. With the exception of a few issues, she's right down in the trash pile with the Blue Dogs and New Dems.

And she's developed a strong relationship with the Adelsons. In fact 2 years after first being elected, she teamed up with Jason Chaffetz and a gaggle of other Republicans eager to kiss Adelson's fat ass by introducing a bill to ban internet gambling, one of his obsessions.

She and Chaffetz-- now one of the most prominent and hated faces of Republican fecklessness-- became friends and now it looks like he's resigning as well-- although the reasons haven't become clear yet. What is clear though is that whichever Republican malefactor she teams up with soon winds up destroying his own career. And you know who else she's close with? Steve Bannon. He tried persuading Trump to appoint her to a big State Department job. Trump met with her at Trump Tower and... didn't appoint her to anything. And Bannon, as you know, still hasn't resigned... at least not yet. At a townhall in Hilo on Wednesday, Gabbard says she's looking into what impeaching Trump would mean. She told her constituents that she understands "the calls for impeachment, but what I am being cautious about and what I give you food for thought about is that if President Trump is impeached, the problems don't go away, because then you have a Vice President Pence who becomes President Pence. If you do your research on his positions on many of the issues we've talked, many of the issues that I get phone calls about from people all across the state, the issue of war and peace, he's about as hawkish as they come. Issues relating to the environment, education, healthcare-- I disagree with so many of the positions that he has. In some ways given the fact that he's a former member of Congress and very well connected within the Republican establishment in Washington, he'd be able to, I believe, be far more effective in furthering his agenda than we have seen so far in President Trump's first 100 days."

Did The Far Right Render Ryan's Health Care Repeal Dead On Arrival?

A brand new Monmouth poll, found that 51% of Americans said they would prefer to keep the Affordable Care Act and work to improve it, with another 7% saying they want to keep the ACA entirely intact. That's 58%, while only 39% want to see the ACA repealed, either with a replacement (31%) or repealed entirely without a replacement, the Freedom Caucus' preferred outcome (8%). Just as that poll was being released yesterday, Mike Lee (R-UT) was at odds with the House Republican leadership's talking points, pointing out that Ryan's bill "is exactly the type of backroom dealing and rushed process that we criticized Democrats for." And House Freedom Caucus crackpot Mo Brooks (AL), for example, said that Ryan's Obamacare replacement "is a huge step in favor of socialized medicine" and that he'll vote against it and will only back total repeal. But not every member of Congress hates the Ryan ACA repeal plan. Utah's most odious and pathetic Establishment lapdog, Jason Chaffetz, was out regurgitating the GOP leadership's mostly deceitful, focus-group-tested talking points on early morning TV Tuesday:

• we campaigned on this
• death spiral
• premiums are going up, I think 25%
• Arizona, 100%
• deductibles up/choice down
• almost one third of the counties in this country have only one choice
• access, access, access...
• we've got to save health care for the American people

As you can see on the soon-to-be-classic segment above, when confronted with the facts from the Kaiser Foundation-- "with Medicaid reductions and smaller tax credits, this bill would clearly result in fewer people insured than under the ACA. The House GOP proposal seeks to reduce what the federal govern,went spends on health"-- Chaffetz extolled choices like this: "rather than getting that new iPhone that they just love, that they want to go spend hundreds of dollars on, maybe they should invest it in their own healthcare. They've got to make those decisions themselves." No, really; he said that. I swear. Watch for yourself; it's a short video.

Cadavers don’t need health insurance

Vulnerable Chicagoland GOP Rep. Peter Roskam was laying low-- and continuing to avoid his constituents, while Democratic opponent and health care advocate Geoff Petzel was talking with voters about health care-- while the Chicago Tribune thundered that the Ryan repeal plan is even worse than anyone expected, not exactly what Roskam wanted to hear yesterday. Michael Hiltzik's verdict: "it’s a nastier, more consumer-unfriendly proposal than even close followers could have expected." He summed up exactly what Chaffetz and others like him have been out on the stump doing:

The House GOP, in a written statement, cloaked this plan with a bodyguard of outright deceit. “What we’re proposing will deliver the control and choice individuals and families need to access healthcare that’s right for them,” the statement said. House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-WI) said the measure would “drive down costs, encourage competition and give every American access to quality, affordable health insurance.” Curiously, the GOP statement says the plan embodies “President Trump's proposed healthcare reforms,” although the president has never advanced a coherent set of proposals.

The truth is that the GOP measure would destroy the ability of millions of Americans to access any healthcare worth the name. The Congressional Budget Office reportedly warned the Republicans that their proposals would lead to lost coverage for millions and higher costs for millions more, but the GOP is pushing ahead anyway.

...The proposal defunds Planned Parenthood. No federal funding can be made, either directly or indirectly, by Medicaid to a healthcare organization that “provides for abortions,” other than those done in cases of rape or incest or to save the life of the mother. That’s Planned Parenthood. It’s proper to note that Planned Parenthood doesn’t use federal funds to pay for abortions, as that’s already against the law. This measure shuts down funding for the organization just because it uses other funds to cover those procedures.

The bill effectively shuts down private health insurance coverage for abortion. According to a House Ways and Means Committee digest, the measure forbids spending federal tax subsidies on health plans that include coverage of abortion, even if the customer doesn’t get an abortion. This would dramatically shrink working Americans’ access to insurance-covered abortions, or would lead to insurers dropping abortion coverage from their plans, or both. Customers could buy separate policies to cover abortions, but couldn’t use the federal subsidy to help pay for them. Insurers likely would charge hugely discouraging premiums for such policies, as the market for them would be tiny.

The individual and employer mandates are eliminated. They’re not repealed exactly, but the penalties are repealed, which amounts to the same thing. Without a requirement that individuals carry health insurance, the insurance markets are almost certain to collapse. The repeal is retroactive back to the beginning of 2016, but the real problem is in the market starting this year. Individuals would be able to drop their coverage immediately, which will wreak havoc with the market starting right now. Aetna’s chairman and chief executive, Mark Bertolini, said recently that the individual market was entering a “death spiral” in which healthier customers dropped coverage, leaving sicker customers who know they need insurance facing an ever-increasing rates. This provision will do much to guarantee that will happen.

Essential health benefit rules are repealed. As of Dec. 31, 2019, ACA rules that required qualified health plans to provide hospitalization, maternity care, mental health services and other benefits would be sunsetted at the federal level. States would have the authority to set them instead. The impact on private, non-Medicaid plans would therefore vary by state. If a state removes maternity benefits, for example, that’s likely to make maternity coverage, among other services, immensely expensive, if available at all.

Income-based premium subsidies would be replaced by age-based subsidies, which will hurt working-class families in many states. Under the ACA, subsidies to help individual buyers afford premiums and (for poorer households) deductibles and co-pays were based on household income. The GOP measure will base them on the buyer’s age, instead, with older buyers receiving more help than younger. The GOP plan limits subsidies to $4,000 per individual; under the ACA, which also keys subsidies to the cost of benchmark insurance plans in the buyer’s home market, the subsidies theoretically could be several times higher. No family could receive more than $14,000 in subsidies, and no more than five family members could be eligible for subsidies.

As we reported last week, this scheme would reduce subsidies to many of the people who need them the most, while awarding them to recipients who don’t need them. “People who are lower income, older or live in high-premium areas would be particularly disadvantaged,” the Kaiser Family Foundation observed after examining an earlier draft. The new draft retains those features. Some modest means-testing of the subsidies-- an idea tossed around within the GOP caucus last week to quell complaints that the change would make the rich richer-- appears to be incorporated into the fiscal provisions of the proposal.

The Medicaid expansion is killed. As of Dec. 31, 2019, the Medicaid expansion is repealed. Traditional Medicaid will be block-granted, a system almost certain to result in less federal funding for the joint state-federal program than it would have received, over time. The neediest and sickest Americans will increasingly be on their own, as states get less federal help to provide them with medical services.

All of Obamacare’s taxes are repealed, another boon for the rich. Everything from the tax on tanning salons and medical devices to the surcharge on high-income taxpayers will be gone. As we explained earlier, this amounts to an enormous tax cut for the wealthy-- at least $346 billion over 10 years, every cent going to taxpayers earning more than $200,000 ($250,000 for couples). The proposal would sharply raise the limits on contributions to tax-advantaged Health Savings Accounts-- another gimme for the rich.

The tax repeal, the Brookings Institution has reported, will make it impossible to pay for any Obamacare “replacement”-- which still isn’t on the horizon. It also will exacerbate the fiscal problems of Medicare, by hastening the exhaustion of the program’s trust fund by four years, to 2025.

Not only would the Ryan plan give huge tax cuts to the wealthiest Americans and to drug, insurance and medical-device companies-- and even give a special tax break for health insurance CEOs-- it hikes premiums by 30% for people with pre-existing conditions if for any reason-- such as losing a job-- they don’t have coverage for 63 days. That's what Hiltzik must have had in mind when he wrote it's "a nastier [and] consumer-unfriendly." So... no, Democrats are not getting behind this monstrous and destructive mishmash. But neither are many Republicans. The Democrats only need 3 Senate Republicans to kill it and there are already 6 who have said they don't like it-- for various reasons-- enough to vote for it. On top of that, House anti-healthcare extremists on the far right fringe, are going crazy and denouncing it like mad. The week, the Conservative Review was fuming that the Ryan plan was based on an "entire premise of GOP lobbyist-driven negotiations over Obamacare are about as divorced from the reality of free markets as our thoughts are from the thoughts of God," concluding that House Republicans "continue to accept the entire premise of the RINO-care framework, and are merely negotiating the fine print. They are insufferable." 

Their analysis may be all wrong from top to bottom, but for right-wingers who buy into it, there's no way to back Ryan's bill. They've deluded themselves into thinking Señor Trumpanzee will ride to the rescue. "Trump needs to give a landmark speech laying out a vision of free market health care. As a populist with the persona of 'America’s entrepreneur,' he is the perfect messenger to rail against the Big Government/Big Pharma cartel working to stifle innovation and competition in the hopes of preserving the troughs for more subsidies. Trump needs to ask the American people and Congress if they want a health care system that looks more like Walmart and Uber or one that looks like the Post Office, the DMV, and a mini bar in your hotel room. Trump must call all the CEOs of health insurance companies into his office and tell them loudly and clearly: “we will not regulate you, but we will not subsidize you either. The era of government-run health care is over. Go out and compete for business.” He should also promise them that once full repeal is signed, he will promote cross-state line insurance, equal taxation for the individual market, and repeal of even pre-Obamacare interventions and regulations. This will ensure a healthy and robust individual market that is worth competing in." WOW! Talk about delusional The completely out-of-his-depth Trumpanzee-in-chief already tweeted that he loves the bill.

Heritage Action, which is never reluctant to crack a whip over the heads of Republicans headed in even a slightly a mainstreamish direction, was fuming by Tuesday morning. Their perspective is that the bill "not only accepts the flawed progressive premises of Obamacare but expands upon them... bad politics and, more importantly, bad policy... [Republicans] should fully repeal the failed law and deliver on promises that create a free market health care system."

By late Tuesday, even the Trumpanzee Daily News Breitbart website was denouncing Ryan's replacement proposal in no uncertain terms. "The Obamacare 2.0 bill," wrote one of the staff neo-Nazis, "pushed by some Republicans strips out even Obamacare’s weak protections preventing illegal aliens from signing up for health care meant for citizens." She then made a paranoid wing-nut case about how Ryan has put together a bill that will flood America with Hispanics obtaining counterfeit drivers licenses or something like that.

Justin Amash (R-MI), on the other hand tweeted within minutes of Ryan declassifying the plan that it's "Obamacare 2.0." Tuesday morning Rachael Bade laid out congressional wing-nut opposition for Politico readers, starting with extremist kook and Freedom Caucus chairman Jim Jordan (R-OH) saying that the Ryan plan is "Obamacare by a different form." His members "dismissed the bill as creating a new 'entitlement program' by offering health care tax credits to low-income Americans." The all-powerful House Republican Study Committee memo sent to chiefs of staff echoed those comments and blasted the bill’s continuation of the Medicaid expansion for three years.

Freedom Caucus member Dave Brat (R-Va.) piled on, telling Politico he’d vote against it in its current form because “the bill maintains many of the federal features including a new entitlement program as well as most of the insurance regulations.”

"Now [they] are saying we're going to do repeal and replace but the bill does nothing of the sort,” he said. “[Speaker] Paul Ryan has always said the entire rationale for this bill is to bend the cost curve down, and so far I have seen no evidence that this bill will bring the cost curve down.”

...“This is a Republican welfare entitlement,” the RSC memo reads. “Writing checks to individuals to purchase insurance is, in principle, Obamacare. It does allow more choices for individuals, and is more patient-centered, but is fundamentally grounded on the idea that the federal government should fund insurance purchases.”

It is unclear if conservatives who still don’t like the bill would be willing to vote against it, potentially blocking the repeal effort from passage. While Brat said he’d vote against it, few others have taken a position yet. House Republican leaders expect some conservatives and moderates to oppose the measure on the floor. But they can only afford to lose 21 votes.

RSC chairman Mark Walker in a statement thanked leadership for their work on it and said “I applaud the movement and believe it is the right direction.”

“We are carefully reviewing this legislation looking in three main areas of shared conservative concern: protection of the unborn, elimination of Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion and ensuring the tax credits are fiscally responsible,” the North Carolina Republican said.

The RSC's steering committee will meet Tuesday to discuss next steps forward.

Freedom Caucus members, meanwhile, talked amongst themselves about the bill. While many believed the final version was more to their liking than older drafts, one source wasn’t sure if conservatives could get on board with GOP’s plan to offer advanceable, refundable tax credits. Such credits are a key pillar of the Ryan plan and one of the most controversial issues for conservatives. They worry the plan will create an entitlement and have been pushing for a tax deduction instead.

The attraction-- and temptation-- for many nervous Republicans, of course, is that it reduces taxes on the very rich, the people who have financed their careers. As Richard Rubin explained for Wall Street Journal readers Tuesday, "Households at the top of the U.S. income ladder would see taxes on their wages and investments drop under the House Republicans’ new health-care proposal, a repeal of a 3.8% tax on investment income and a 0.9% tax of wages for only the highest earning Americans.

The other day the American Hospital Association rejected Ryan's replacement bill (TrumpCare) and this morning the much more politically powerful American Medical Association did the same. From the AMA:

The American Health Care Act (AHCA), released by Congress this week, is intended to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act (ACA). But as introduced, it does not align with the health reform objectives that the AMA set forth in January to protect patients. While the ACA is imperfect, the current version of the AHCA is not legislation we can support.

The replacement bill, as written, would reverse the coverage gains achieved under the ACA, causing many Americans to lose the health care coverage they have come to depend upon.

...It is unclear the exact impact this bill will have on the number of insured Americans, and review by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office is still pending. The ratings and analytics firm S&P Global Ratings has already estimated that as many as 10 million Americans could lose coverage if this bill becomes law, saying that between 2 million and 4 million people could lose the insurance they purchased in the individual health exchanges under the ACA, and between 4 million and 6 million could lose their coverage under Medicaid.

That just won’t do.

We all know that our health system is highly complex, but our core commitment to the patients most in need should be straightforward. As the AMA has previously stated, members of Congress must to keep top of mind the potentially life-altering impact their policy decisions will have.

We physicians often see patients at their most vulnerable, from the first time they set eyes on a newborn child to the last time they squeeze a dying loved one’s hand. We don’t want to see any of our patients, now insured, exposed to the financial and medical uncertainties that would come with losing that coverage.

We're going to continue this discussion in the next post, when you'll meet a Democratic candidate running for Congress from Houston, a doctor-- cancer specialist Jason Westin-- who is challenging entrenched, but now vulnerable, Republican troglodyte John Culberson.

Why Diane Black Has Far More To Fear From Her Constituents In Tennessee Than Justin Amash Does From Michigan Voters

Justin Amash isn't hiding from his constituents and he's not hiding the media coverage of his raucous downhill meetings. He welcomes them and wants Michiganders to know about them. Amash's Grand Rapids-based seat is in a swing district (PVI is R+4); most of the voters coming from Kent (Grand Rapids) and Calhoun (Battle Creek) counties. Obama won it 50-49% in 2008, lost it 53-46% in 2012 and Hillary lost to Trump 51.6% to 42.2%. 3 months ago, Amash did considerably better than Trump-- winning reelection with 203,069 votes (59.6%) to 128,159 (37.5%). He won all 5 counties in the district.

According to the ProgressivePunch crucial votes scores, he's the most likely Republican in the House to support progressive legislation and, in fact, his score so far this year is 40.0, more progressive than would-be Democratic Leader Tim Ryan (D-OH), New Dem leader Jim Himes (CT), Blue Dog leader Kurt Schrader (OR) and over two dozen other Democrats from the Republican wing of the Democratic Party, who apparently see the Trump-Ryan agenda as more attractive and supportable than Amash does. Amash's 2017 score is 40.0 while reactionary Blue Dogs like Kyrsten Sinema (AZ), Collin Peterson (MN), Henry Cuellar (TX), Jim Costa (CA), Dan Lipinski (IL), Jim Cooper (TN), and Tom O'Halleran (AZ) all have scores of... ZERO. You can see why Ryan and McCarthy prefer Democrats like Sinema and Cuellar way more than independent-minded Republicans like Amash and Walter Jones (NC).

This week, while Ryan's lockstep Republicans were being torn apart by their own constituents in town halls, even in deeply red districts and in every part of the country, Amash was packing in the crowds-- and with a different result than, for example, Tom McClintock found waiting for him in Roseville, in the suburbs north of Sacramento.

More than 600 people showed up to a town hall meeting hosted by Congressman Justin Amash Thursday night. It was his second Grand Rapids town hall in less than a month and it was the second time so many people showed up they had to close the doors and turn people away.

Some Michigan members of Congress have been criticized lately for avoiding constituents.

But town halls are not new for Amash. The Republican says he’s always felt taking unscripted questions from his constituents, in person, is part of the job. But under the new administration, the crowds have been major.

“I like to be here hearing the different perspectives. I’m not afraid of my positions. They’re positions I believe in and positions I ran on,” Amash said... The generally left-leaning crowd gave Amash heat for supporting the repeal of the Affordable Care Act and a bill dismantling the U.S. Education Department. Amash got cheers for his support of immigrant families and civil rights. He told the crowd President Donald Trump needs to release more personal information, up to and including his tax returns if necessary, in order to ease ethical concerns.

But, more than anything, they thanked him for showing up and listening.

16-year old Holly Heathfield came with a group of classmates from Coopersville seeking extra credit in her government class. She asked Amash whether he supported expanded charter schools; she doesn’t, he does.

“Even though I don’t agree with all his views I do respect him for holding these meeting and hearing other people’s opinions. I think that’s really important for the community as a whole,” Heathfield said.

“You can see how hard it is to get people to accept the idea of non-partisan discourse,” Amash said after the event, “Of listening and working together and learning from each other, but I believe that a majority of Americans want something like that.”

The Republican town hall that got all the attention Thursday night was Jason Chaffetz's in the Salt Lake City suburb of Cottonwood Heights, one of the more moderate parts of his district. He was roundly booed by a thousand of his constituents, who are sick of him on a whole array of issues.

The din of the hostile and harassing audience that filled the 1,000 seats of a high school auditorium Thursday night drowned him out.

"Explain yourself," they roared over him.

When the congressman did get a chance to speak, the crowd often didn't like what he had to say. And he knew it.

The town-hall meeting was 75 minutes of tense exchanges between Chaffetz and residents from across the state. They were frustrated by the Utah Republican's refusal to investigate President Donald Trump's potential conflicts of interest. They doggedly pursued him for his initiatives to transfer or sell public lands. They questioned his position on immigration and refugees.

And that was only half of the largely liberal crowd.

About 1,500 people stood outside Brighton High School, too far back to make the cut, their signs reading, "Do your job" and "America is better than this."

...The congressman addressed 13 questions, three focused on public lands and four on investigating Trump. The other subjects jumped from Planned Parenthood to air quality to Education Secretary Betsy DeVos.

Noor Ul-Hasan, a Democratic activist, said, "If you want to continue to look into Hillary Clinton, I don't care. But why aren't you checking out your own president?"

Chaffetz, chairman of the House Oversight Committee, said he's looking into comments made by Kellyanne Conway, a counselor to Trump, who plugged Ivanka Trump's fashion line in a national television interview.

"There's no case to be made that we went soft on the White House," Chaffetz said as police nervously patrolled the perimeter of the room. "In terms of doing my job, that's what I'm supposed to be doing."

Melissa Batka Thomas, from Salt Lake City, steadied her shaking hands as she read a quote from Chaffetz in which he called on presidential candidates to release their tax returns and "show everything."

"I'm asking you to explain what your timeline is to uphold your word or why there is a reluctance to do so," she said.

The congressman said, as he has before, that the president is "exempt" from conflict of interest laws. "Until there is evidence that [Trump] has somehow overused that to ingratiate his family …" Chaffetz said before boos cut him off.

...While discussing public-land use and his opposition to Bears Ears National Monument, Chaffetz was greeted by the strongest pushback of the night.

"I hope you do appreciate that not every person has the same viewpoint on the use of public lands," he said. "What we're trying to do is find a balanced approach."

The topic came up again, giving him a chance to speak about his bill to strip Bureau of Land Management and Forest Service employees of their law enforcement powers, an idea that elicited protest from the audience.

"I'm trying to be as representative as I can," he said.

Charlie Luke, a Democratic member of the Salt Lake City Council, wrote on Facebook that the harassment Chaffetz faced "ensured his reelection for as long as he chooses to run."

"It will embolden his majority Republican district," he wrote. "We need to resist, but let's be smart in the way we do it."

This drooling imbecile represents TN-06 in Congress

In November Trump only got 47.2% of the votes in Chaffetz's district, dramatically down from the 78.3% Romney got 4 years earlier. Clinton actually beat Trump in Salt Lake County 175,863 to 138,043. Chaffetz was reelected 186,743 (73.3%) to 68,104 (26.7%), a feat he's unlikely to duplicate in 2018. Halfway across the country in Tennessee, Diane Black, her state's most reactionary member of Congress, represents one of the state's two most backward fascist-oriented districts, TN-06, the north-central Tennessee district composed mostly of the suburbs and exurbs east of Nashville. She won every county in the district-- by a lot-- as did Trump. Trump beat Hillary there 72.6% to 23.7%. Black did nearly as well-- 71.1% to 21.8%. Her Murfreesboro town hall wasn't as raucous as Chaffetz's or McClintock's, but it was no love-fest either. One hundred of her constituents confronted her at an "Ask Your Reps" event hosted by the Middle Tennessee State University's College Republicans.

Mike Carlson, a 32-year-old student from Antioch, Tennessee, said that as an overweight man, he depended on Obamacare to stay alive.

"I have to have coverage to make sure I don't die. There are people now who have cancer that have that coverage, that have to have that coverage to make sure they don't die," Carlson said. "And you want to take away this coverage-- and have nothing to replace it with! How can I trust you to do anything that's in our interest at all?"

Black responded that Obamacare's individual mandate-- which requires everyone to have health insurance or pay a penalty-- still allowed millions, including many young and healthy people, to be without coverage.

"About 20 million people did actually come into the program who were uninsured," Black said. "You don't want to hurt one group of people to help the another. We can help both groups at the same time."

Bohon shot back: "How many of those people were in states where they played a political game with people's lives?"

Black appeared flustered, and declined to continue. "I'm going to pass this one," she said.

Bohon told CNN afterward that as a state employee, she receives health insurance through the state. Her question to Black, she said, was motivated in part by her Christian beliefs, as well as her upbringing in the coal-mining town of Grundy, Virginia.

"Growing up in the community that I grew up, in Appalachia, because we were so poor there that we had to take care of each other," Bohon said.

Both Carlson and Bohon told CNN that they voted for Hillary Clinton in the general election.

The same event hosted by MTSU's College Republican last year was attended by around 30 to 40 people, according to organizers. On Thursday night, the room was quickly filled to capacity while dozens outside chanted: "Let us in! Let us in!"

Black, along with two other GOP local officials, were at first asked questions that had been pre-submitted on the topics of healthcare and tax reform-- a format that clearly frustrated audience members and prompted some to interrupt.

At one point in the discussion, GOP State Rep. Mike Sparks told the room: "I'll be honest with you. As a state representative, I got health insurance. I feel a little guilty."

Multiple audience members could be heard responding: "You should."

While Republicans were suffering through accountabilty sessions with their constituents, House Democrats were at a retreat in Baltimore where they tried to figure out what went wrong in November and how to move forward. As has become too commonplace among House Democrats-- so utterly dominated by timid corporatists-- everyone was all smiles and upbeat, while "progressives privately vented about being lectured to by a speaker from a moderate [note: when Politico writers use the word "moderate," they are invariably referring to corrupt right-wingers, in this case the putrid whores from Third Way] think tank. And several lawmakers worried that the Democratic leadership would be too dependent on consultants and data to chart a course forward, rather than focusing on a clearer vision for the party... [I]t’s obvious from private and public conversations with members and Democratic aides that the caucus is still struggling, trying to unite on a path forward while still fighting about how they got here in the first place."

Silicon Valley freshman Ro Khanna (D-CA) had far more to offer than Pelosi and her sad-sack eggshell-walking lieutenants. "We need to stop doing the autopsies, stop doing all this metric data stuff and listen to the visionary voices. [Trump] didn’t have deep-dive data. He bragged about not polling. He offered a vision based on what he thought was his vision." Khanna proposed including liberal economic thinkers like Robert Reich and Paul Krugman in Democratic Party discussions like the one they were having.

ABC News' John Parkinson and Mary Alice Parks reported more fully on what Khanna had to say.

Rep. Ro Khanna, D-California, echoed, "I don’t think that running on Donald Trump’s missteps is going to win. That didn’t work for Hillary."

As she has often repeated since the election, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi said again this week that the problem for Democrats during the election was messaging around their own ideas.

"There wasn't that clarity of the message coming through so we could represent we were the party of the working people," she said.

But Khanna and other progressive members in the party argue it isn’t that simple. They contend Democrats need to spend time crafting a clearer, populist economic agenda, in line with the ideas offered by Sen. Bernie Sanders during his presidential campaign, in order to present a concrete alternative to voters.

“What is the Democrats’ bold economic vision?” Khanna wondered rhetorically, during an interview with ABC News. “People get that the Democratic Party is for the little guy, but that is not a bold economic vision where it is clearly rejecting corporatists past, being populist and future looking and aspirational.”

He argued the passion and energy in the party right now was with the left and that he worries the party was looking for an all-inclusive “lowest common denominator” message to present that all members in the party, including more moderates, could get behind.

“I think the way to win is to be clear, to be bold, to be progressive, to look at where [Sen. Elizabeth] Warren and Sanders are taking the party and if there are 20 or 30 folks who are not onboard with it fine. But it is better to run with a bold, clear, contrasted vision of the future,” he said.

Jim Himes (New Dem-Wall St)

"The energy of this party is with a message of economic populism, of... questioning the rules of capitalism and saying that these rules have been rigged and written in a way that favors concentrated economic interests and need to be changed" was the message Khanna wanted House Democrats to focus on, something that frightens and infuriates the Members from the Republican wing of the Democratic Party, like Jim Himes (ex-bankster and head New Dem-CT). Times was obviously discomforted by Khanna's perspective. "We need to be really careful about convincing ourselves that the right answer is to have 'the perfect message,'" said the congressman who has taken $5,547,712 in legalistic bribes from the Finance Sector since first being elected in 2008. "We bristle a little bit at the idea that 'my gosh, this person shouldn’t even be allowed in the room.'"

After the conference Progressive Caucus officers Raúl Grijalva (D-AZ), Keith Ellison (D-MN) and Mark Pocan (D-WI) issued this statement on the confirmation of Tom Price as Secretary of Health and Human Services. It's probably no more what Himes or his Third Way buddies would have like to have seen than it is what Chaffetz, Black and McClintock would embrace:

Rep. Tom Price has led the Republican crusade to dismantle Medicare and Medicaid as we know it. As the Chairman of the Budget Committee, Price has advocated for privatizing Medicare, and turning it into a voucher program, which would increase costs and harm our seniors and most vulnerable Americans.

He has worked to defund Planned Parenthood in order to restrict women’s access to comprehensive reproductive health services. And he has introduced legislation to repeal the Affordable Care Act (ACA), which would threaten health care coverage for more than 20 million newly insured Americans.

With Price’s confirmation today, it is clear that Republicans are doubling down on their efforts to destroy these fundamental programs and turn health care over to the hands of insurance companies.

Health care is a right, not a privilege. The CPC will oppose any attempts to repeal the Affordable Care Act, privatize Medicare, or destroy Medicaid. We will fight to guarantee high-quality health care for all regardless of gender, age, or income.