It's the Midday News Wrap, with guest host Nathan Sterner sitting in for Tom Hall. Among the stories Nathan spotlights in this week's review: the drama of competing healthcare bills, the wrangling and chaos within the Republican Party, and the still-unfolding puzzle of possible Russian ties to President Trump's inner circle.
Early in the week, Senate Republicans lacked the votes for their latest proposal to replace the Affordable Care Act. By Tuesday, President Trump announced, “We’ll let Obamacare fail.” The confusion deepened later in the week with proposals to Repeal without Replace and Repeal with Delayed Replace.
Also this week, there was the drip, drip of revelations about exactly who else was in the room in June of 2016 when Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner and Paul Manafort, the Trump campaign chief at the time, attended a meeting where they were promised Russian government help for their campaign and some dirt about Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton. Then on Thursday came the announcement that Trump Jr., Kushner and Manafort have all agreed to appear before Senate committees next week to discuss Russia and the 2016 election.
Andy Green, Editorial Page editor of the Baltimore Sun, and Richard Cross, a longtime Republican communications staffer in both Annapolis and Capitol Hill, are here with background and analysis on the week's developments.
But first, Julie Rovner is on the line from DC to help us make sense of the week’s healthcare news. Rovner is chief Washington correspondent for Kaiser Health News, where she is the Robin Toner Distinguished Fellow. If her voice is familiar to you, that’s because Rovner was a health policy reporter for NPR for 16 years before joining KHN. She is the author of the book “Health Care Politics and Policy A-Z,” now in its third edition.
