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This exemption could have the effect of ensuring that members of Congress have coverage for a wider array of benefits than other Americans who purchase their own coverage.

A Senate Republican aide confirmed that the exemption existed but was unable to comment as to the specific effect it would have. The aide said it was included to ensure that the bill hewed to the chamber’s strict reconciliation rules that limit the policies this health bill can include.

The exemption is similar to the one that existed in the House health bill. After Vox reported on its existence, the House voted to close the loophole — and the Senate aide expected their chamber to follow the same path.

Donald Trump Jr.’s Russia meeting may have been legal.

The revelation that Donald Trump Jr. met with a Russian lawyer to try to obtain incriminating information about Hillary Clinton has sparked another round of analysis on the technicalities of criminal law. On this front, the criminal code shouldn’t be the only yardstick.

Lawyers for Trump administration officials insist that their clients didn’t break any laws at the meeting with Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya in June 2016. But merely following the law is the least we expect of anyone in our society. The question isn’t whether Kushner or others broke the law in meeting with Veselnitskaya.

On this point, we can’t count on the results of the special counsel to provide the answer. Mueller’s inquiry will be limited to actions that crossed the threshold of criminality, which is a very narrow question.

A former Soviet counter-intelligence official attended a meeting last year with senior aides to President Donald Trump and his son, it has emerged.
Rinat Akhmetshin, now a lobbyist, confirmed to US media he was present at the Trump Tower encounter.
Donald Trump Jr was promised damaging material on Hillary Clinton at the meeting, his emails show.
Mr Trump Jr has only previously acknowledged that a Russian lawyer, Natalia Veselnitskaya, was present.

Who is Rinat Akhmetshin?
Mr Akhmetshin told the AP news agency he served in a Soviet military unit that was part of counterintelligence, but that he was never formally trained as a spy.
In court papers filed in 2015 with the US District Court in Washington DC, where he lives, a mining company accused him of organising a hack on its private records as part of an alleged smear campaign.
International Mineral Resources hired a private investigator to follow Mr Akhmetshin to London.
The Russian-American was overheard in a coffee shop bragging about arranging the cyber-attack on the firm's computer system, according to court documents.
Mr Akhmetshin denied the allegations, and the case was later dropped.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov says the Russian government knows nothing about Mr Akhmetshin, the AP reported.
Mr Akhmetshin told the Washington Post he became a US citizen in 2009 but retains his Russian nationality.
He is a registered lobbyist who has focused in recent years on overturning the 2012 US Magnitsky Act.
The law, which froze the assets of senior Russian officials, angered President Vladimir Putin.

You guys are desperate...

An administration without a conscience
...The ultimate explanation for this toxic moral atmosphere is President Trump himself. He did not attend the meeting, but he is fully responsible for creating and marketing an ethos in which victory matters more than character and real men write their own rules. Trumpism is an easygoing belief system that indulges and excuses the stiffing of contractors, the conning of students, the bilking of investors, the exploitation of women and the practices of nepotism and self-dealing. A faith that makes losing a sin will make cheating a sacrament.

...Let me suggest the real problem is not the Trump family, but the GOP.

...It’s a party as unfit to govern as Trump is unfit to occupy the White House. It’s not by accident that Trump chose to inhabit the party that has defined itself in opposition to reality and to any “external moral truth or ethical code.”

Dennis Prager‏Verified account
@DennisPrager
The news media in the West pose a far greater danger to Western civilization than Russia does.
10:55 AM - 14 Jul 2017

After Donald Trump Jr.’s constantly shifting explanations for his meeting with a Kremlin-connected Russian lawyer, we now know that he, Jared Kushner, and Paul Manafort were eager to receive incriminating information about Hillary Clinton that was offered as “part of Russia and its government’s support for Mr. Trump.” Is this the smoking gun investigators have been waiting for?
There will be no single smoking gun that will bring down this White House. It will be death by firing squad — or perhaps a sequence of firing squads — as the whole story inexorably pours out of the administration’s smoldering ruins. This week’s bombshell has the feel of gallows humor. Trump Jr.’s panicked release of the self-incriminating emails is tantamount to picking up a loaded gun and shooting himself in the head. Why did Little Donald not do what the Trumps always do in these situations — let the press (in this case the Times) go ahead and report its incriminating findings, rail against leakers, and then dismiss the latest incontrovertible evidence of wrongdoing as “fake news”? Was Little Donald trying to protect his father from even worse revelations? To take down his brother-in-law even as his brother-in-law (a possible source of the emails) tried to take down him? To deliver a message from or to the Kremlin?