How the Impeachment Process Works →

FYI

The Constitution permits Congress to remove presidents before their term is up if enough lawmakers vote to say that they committed “treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors.”

Only three presidents have been subjected to impeachment proceedings. Two were impeached but acquitted and stayed in office: Andrew Johnson in 1868 and Bill Clinton in 1998 and 1999. A third, Richard M. Nixon in 1974, resigned to avoid being impeached...

First, the House of Representatives votes on one or more articles of impeachment. If at least one gets a majority vote, the president is impeached — which essentially means being indicted. (In both the Nixon and the Clinton cases, the House Judiciary Committee considered the matter first.)
Next, the proceedings move to the Senate, which holds a trial overseen by the chief justice of the Supreme Court.
A team of lawmakers from the House, known as managers, play the role of prosecutors. The president has defense lawyers, and the Senate serves as the jury.
If at least two-thirds of the senators find the president guilty, he is removed, and the vice president takes over as president.

Major Breakthrough On Capitol Hill: Government May Stop Making Drugs Expensive →

We will spend over $440 billion this year for drugs that would likely sell for less than $80 billion in a free market. The difference of $360 billion is almost 2.0 percent of GDP, coming to almost $2,800 a year per family.
Patent monopolies on drugs lead to the sort of waste and corruption that economists predict when the government artificially inflates the price of a product. In the case of prescription drugs these problems are especially serious since the gap between the protected price and free market price is so huge.
...
The list of offenses by the pharmaceutical industry is lengthy: payoffs to doctors to push their drugs in articles and lectures, payoffs to generic drug companies to keep competitors out of the market, payments to politicians to make patents stronger and longer both domestically and in international trade deals.
This is why the provision in the Senate bill to have the government start picking up the tab directly is so important. While the government already does spend more than $32 billion a year on basic research through the National Institutes of Health, the Senate bill would support payments to gain direct control over the end product either by buying out the patent or paying for the clinical testing and bringing the drug through the Food and Drug Administration’s approval process.
In both cases, new drugs could be sold as generics. No one would have to worry about mortgaging their house to pay for a loved one’s cancer treatment, drugs would be cheap.
In addition, by making drugs available at free market prices the bill would largely eliminate the incentive to lie. The test results would be fully public so doctors and researchers could determine which drugs were most effective in specific cases, without the corrupting influence of corporate money. And, research would likely proceed more quickly since findings would be quickly available to the community of researchers, rather than being closely guarded secrets from which drug companies hoped to profit.
Realistically, this bill has almost no chance of passing in a Republican-controlled Congress. Nonetheless, it is an enormous victory for clear-thinking over inertia. Democrats are embracing a way in which the market can be used to better people’s health and reduce inequality.
It is the Republicans who support big government in the form of patent monopolies. And their goal is to make the rich even richer.

Congress Removes FCC Privacy Protections on Your Internet Usage →

Think about all of the websites you visit every day. Now imagine if the likes of Time Warner, AT&T, and Verizon collected all of your browsing history and sold it on to the highest bidder. That's what will probably happen if Congress has its way.
This week, lawmakers voted to allow Internet service providers to violate your privacy for their own profit. Not only have they voted to repeal a rule that protects your privacy, they are also trying to make it illegal for the Federal Communications Commission to enact other rules to protect your privacy online.
That this is not provoking greater outcry illustrates how much we've ceded any willingness to shape our technological future to for-profit companies and are allowing them to do it for us.
There are a lot of reasons to be worried about this. Because your Internet service provider controls your connection to the Internet, it is in a position to see everything you do on the Internet. Unlike a search engine or social networking platform or news site, you can't easily switch to a competitor. And there's not a lot of competition in the market, either. If you have a choice between two high-speed providers in the US, consider yourself lucky.
What can telecom companies do with this newly granted power to spy on everything you're doing? Of course they can sell your data to marketers -- and the inevitable criminals and foreign governments who also line up to buy it. But they can do more creepy things as well.
They can snoop through your traffic and insert their own ads. They can deploy systems that remove encryption so they can better eavesdrop. They can redirect your searches to other sites. They can install surveillance software on your computers and phones. None of these are hypothetical.
They're all things Internet service providers have done before, and they are some of the reasons the FCC tried to protect your privacy in the first place. And now they'll be able to do all of these things in secret, without your knowledge or consent...
...

When markets work well, different companies compete on price and features, and society collectively rewards better products by purchasing them. This mechanism fails if there is no competition, or if rival companies choose not to compete on a particular feature. It fails when customers are unable to switch to competitors. And it fails when what companies do remains secret.

Unlike service providers like Google and Facebook, telecom companies are infrastructure that requires government involvement and regulation. The practical impossibility of consumers learning the extent of surveillance by their Internet service providers, combined with the difficulty of switching them, means that the decision about whether to be spied on should be with the consumer and not a telecom giant. That this new bill reverses that is both wrong and harmful.

Reactions to the Republicans' Proposed Tweaks to the ACA ("Obamacare")

I'm still looking for a comprehensive review, but with such an important piece of legislation, it feels necessary to give some kind of analysis, even if it's preliminary. Before that, though, one thing screams for attention: I don't think I've ever seen a bill that's as hated by everyone. I have yet to see a single mostly-positive review of the proposed bill, from anyone across the political spectrum. This bill's far from a "compromise", where people may be unhappy about a few particulars but willing to live with it overall.

As for its effects, some seem quite likely with even a quick analysis:

Millions Risk Losing Health Insurance in Republican Plan, Analysts Say, Abby Goodnough, Reed Abelson, NYT

Millions of people who get private health coverage through the Affordable Care Act would be at risk of losing it under the replacement legislation proposed by House Republicans, analysts said Tuesday, with Americans in their 50s and 60s especially likely to find coverage unaffordable.

Starting in 2020, the plan would do away with the current system of providing premium subsidies based on people’s income and the cost of insurance where they live. Instead, it would provide tax credits of $2,000 to $4,000 per year based on their age.

...

Other people likely to be hurt under the new plan are those in areas where the cost of coverage is high. Subsidies are now pegged to the cost of a plan within a specific market, but the tax credits in the Republican plan are the same whether you live in Alaska or Minnesota...

The GOP health bill doesn’t know what problem it’s trying to solve, Ezra Klein, Vox

4. Adverse selection seems like a huge problem in this plan. The individual mandate is gone, healthy people can buy coverage at any time with only a 30 percent penalty, and eliminating actuarial values makes it simpler for insurers to pull the young and healthy away from older and sick. Death spirals seem very likely in weak markets. Republicans will fully own those death spirals.
5. The plan is strikingly regressive compared to the Affordable Care Act. Cynthia Cox estimates that a 40-year-old making 160 percent of the poverty line would get $4,143 in subsidies under the ACA, but only $3,000 under the GOP plan. By contrast, a 40-year-old making $75,000 would get nothing under the ACA, but $3,000 under the GOP plan.

And a more in-depth analysis (details on the method for estimating cost in the article): Analysis: GOP plan to cost Obamacare enrollees $1,542 more a year, David Cutler, Vox

We’re presenting an analysis here of the net financial impact of the Republican bill on premiums, after tax credits, plus cost-sharing. We estimate that the bill would increase costs for the average enrollee by $1,542, for the year, if the bill were in effect today. In 2020, the bill would increase costs for the average enrollee by $2,409.
We provide the figure for 2020 because that’s when the Republican tax credits would go into effect; we provide a figure for this year so that readers can get a sense of how the plan might affect their situation were it implemented today. Importantly, the gap between costs under the ACA and under the Republican bill would grow over time.
In general, the impact of the Republican bill would be particularly severe for older individuals, ages 55 to 64. Their costs would increase by $5,269 if the bill went into effect today and by $6,971 in 2020. Individuals with income below 250 percent of the federal poverty line would see their costs increase by $2,945 today and by $4,061 in 2020.

The Purpose of the State of the Union Address, and Why President Trump's Was Not Just a Failure, But an Attack on Our Values

Furthermore, as Radley Balko notes in the Washington Post, President Trump's speech was filled with lies and half-truths, many of which are holdovers from his campaign, though he certainly has the information to know better now, as president. The worst of them divide the nation and tarnish whole groups of people. It's worth thinking about why he keeps lying on these points.

Shaky Dams Are Just The Start; 56,000 Bridges Are Also In Trouble →

“Structurally deficient” doesn’t necessarily mean the bridges are unsafe, but that they need attention. To earn the rating, one or more key bridge elements ― such as the deck, superstructure or substructure — must be in “poor” or worse condition, according to the report.
“Just because a bridge is classified as structurally deficient doesn’t mean that it’s unsafe to drive on,” Peter Jones with Caltrans in California told ABC-7 News. “Those roads are perfectly safe.”  
...
The study was conducted by the American Road and Transportation Builders Association, which has a vested interested in fixing up spans, but the findings are based on data from the Department of Transportation. 
Almost 174,000 bridges (more than 1 out of 4 of all the bridges in America) are at least 50 years old and have never had major reconstruction work. Some 1,900 of the structurally deficients bridge are on interstate highways, the study found.

The Politics Trump Makes: Is Trump, like Carter, a disjunctive President? →

Fascinating way of thinking about "kinds of presidencies". The whole article is worth reading, for more details of the theory and the history.

Journalists and pundits often fixate on a President’s personality and psychology, as if the office were born anew with each election. They ignore the structural factors that shape the Presidency...
...
Every President also inherits a political situation in which certain ideologies and interests dominate. That situation, or regime, shapes a President’s exercise of power, forcing some to do less, empowering others to do more. Richard Nixon was not a New Deal Democrat, but he was constrained by the political common sense of his time to govern like one, just as Bill Clinton had to bow to the hegemony of Reaganism...
...
In Skowronek’s account, FDR ran against the Republicans’ sclerotic Gilded Age regime. The combination of the President’s opposition and the regime’s weakness enabled FDR to launch a radical transformation of American politics. Presidents like FDR—Jefferson, Jackson, Lincoln, and Reagan—are “reconstructive” leaders. They are revolutionaries and founders, creating the terms and conditions of politics for decades to come.
Lyndon Johnson was elected to deepen and extend a still vital New Deal regime, making his role one of “articulation,” which is also a potent position. (George W. Bush was another articulation President.) Nixon, by contrast, was elected to oppose the New Deal regime, but the regime was not ready for overthrow. This put him in a position of weakness: unable to overthrow the regime, he pushed and prodded where he could (shoring up opposition to desegregation via the Southern Strategy) and placated and pandered when he had to (instituting wage and price controls, creating the EPA). Presidents like Nixon engage in a politics of “preemption.” Andrew Johnson was a preemptive President, as were Clinton and Obama. Preemptive Presidents tend to get impeached.
At the end of each regime—after it has completed its three-quarter orbit of reconstruction, articulation, and preemption—comes the politics of “disjunction.” Jimmy Carter is the most recent case; before him, there was Herbert Hoover and Franklin Pierce. Disjunctive Presidents are affiliated with a tottering regime. They sense its weaknesses, and in a desperate bid to save the regime try to transform its basic premises and commitments. Unlike reconstructive Presidents, these figures are too indebted to the regime to break with it. But the regime is too dissonant and fragmented to offer the resources these Presidents need to transform it. They find themselves in the most perilous position of all—hated by all, loved by none—and their administrations often occasion a new round of reconstruction. John Adams gives way to Thomas Jefferson, John Quincy Adams to Andrew Jackson, Carter to Reagan.
...
We remember Carter as an extraordinarily hapless President, but for a time he was remarkably effective at scrambling the political map. (Both Tip O’Neill and Robert Byrd marveled at his success.) Delivering on his promise to abandon old ways of doing things, Carter deregulated the banking and transportation industries. He distanced the Democratic Party from its Cold War liberalism by negotiating a nuclear arms treaty with the Soviet Union, recognizing China, and criticizing anticommunist dictatorships. But he also signaled his fidelity to traditional liberal ideals by creating a Department of Education and Department of Energy, pursuing aggressive conservation policies, and pressing for a consumer protection agency, a subtle but supple nod to the consumer republic of the late New Deal.
For all the innovations of his presidency and the considerable power he wielded, Carter found himself undone, not just by the crises with which his name is associated today—oil, inflation, and hostage-taking—but also by the very innovations he pursued and the power he exercised. Standing atop a party increasingly divided over the New Deal—one faction, based in organized labor, demanded the old regime’s extension; another, based in the professional classes and younger voters, thrilled to the new currents of the free market and deregulation—Carter made no one happy. In the fading shadow of the New Deal, his meager liberalism seemed both too much to the right and too little to the left. His reconstructive achievements—particularly toward the end of his Presidency, when he elevated Paul Volcker to the Fed, slashed social spending, and increased the military budget—became the signs of his disjunction. Like Herbert Hoover a half-century before him, he was the last man standing, the poor schmuck who came into office to nudge his party away from its commitment to a weak regime, only to be deserted by his party and tarred by his opponents as that regime’s most orthodox defender.

Presidential priorities

This is why Trump's trips (and the uncommon practices of sticking us taxpayers with the bill for his adult children's security details and his wife's staying in NY) are important: budgets require tradeoffs, and while he's spending way more money on himself and his family than any recent president, he's cutting all kinds of services for everyone else. Where are his priorities?