WE ALL KNEW WHERE THIS WAS HEADED:

Republicans could have spent their time in the Obama era wilderness doing the hard work of building consensus around an alternative vision for healthcare when the stakes were low. Instead, they squandered this opportunity by focusing their efforts on scoring daily messaging victories. In the short-term, the strategy seemed to pay off politically, as Republicans regained unified control of government. But when it comes to achieving longer-term policy victories, the strategy has proven a dismal failure.

When Republicans took over in 2017, they had to start largely from scratch to gain support for plans to repeal and replace Obamacare. Though healthcare is among the most complicated domestic issues, Republicans wanted to race through the issue as quickly as possible so they could get on with tax cuts. Despite seven years of promises to repeal Obamacare, they came up largely empty handed. (Repealing the individual mandate penalties is not the same as advancing a broad free market healthcare vision.)

Republicans seem to have resigned themselves to moving on. From a purely technical standpoint, it remains highly unlikely that Republicans will even pass a budget this year, let alone one that would include the reconciliation instructions that would be necessary to pass any sort of healthcare bill with a simple majority in the Senate. Of course, even if they had the procedural tool to pass a bill with a simple majority, they are no closer to getting 50 Republicans to agree on a plan than they were last fall. And if they don't address the issue this year, they aren't going to be able to in 2019, when even under the best case scenario they'd have a much narrower majority in the House.

It would be bad enough if Republican stumbles merely preserved an Obamacare status quo with rising premiums and dwindling choices. But by failing to deliver on an alternative, Republicans are providing the space that Democrats need to plot their next big expansion. And liberals have been using that space to develop competing plans all with the goal of completing the job that Obamacare started.

HOW WOULD LAW ENFORCEMENT NOT BE AGAINST HIM?:

NIKKI 2018!:

Nikki Haley's surprising remonstrance, issued this week from under the bus, earned huzzahs from both parties and showed the world what successfully surviving service in the administration of President Trump looks like. It also showed the lady can throw some damn good shade.

After she appeared last Sunday on CBS' "Face the Nation" and announced there would be new sanctions on Russia to follow recent airstrikes in Syria, the White House said the ambassador was mistaken. Larry Kudlow blamed it on "momentary confusion," to which Haley responded: "With all due respect, I don't get confused." Kudlow folded immediately and apologized. And the man of too many words used none -- a rare occasion when Trump himself held back.

Haley is an unlikely heroine in the ever unfolding drama that is the presidency of Donald Trump. She was an outspoken opponent of Trump during the 2016 campaign, and is the daughter of Sikh immigrants who smashed glass ceilings to become South Carolina's first female governor, the nation's first ever Sikh governor and the second ever Indian-descent governor. She has not stooped to the sycophancy most of her colleagues have, and without foreign policy chops has studied and worked her way to success in one of the highest-profile positions in U.S. government.

EVEN GUNGA DIN COULDN'T CARRY THIS MUCH WATER:

Hemingway's theory is that CNN had the Steele dossier, and could not cover it unless it had a news hook to do so. Comey's meeting was designed to be the hook. He would tell Trump about the dossier, and then leak the fact that he told Trump to the news media, which "provided them the very news hook they sought and needed" to report on the dossier.

If you read the CNN report on the dossier that Hemingway describes, though, literally the first sentence describes the fact that President Obama was briefed on the dossier before Trump was told about it: "Classified documents presented last week to President Obama and President-elect Trump included allegations that Russian operatives claim to have compromising personal and financial information about Mr. Trump, multiple US officials with direct knowledge of the briefings tell CNN." And then, if you go a few paragraphs down in the CNN story, you learn that the dossier's allegations were also "mentioned in classified briefings for congressional leaders last year."

So CNN knew Congress had been briefed on the dossier in 2017. And it also knew Obama had been briefed on the dossier. Hemingway's theory is that CNN would not have reported either of these facts without the additional revelation that Trump had also been briefed on the dossier. [...]

York's analysis is different than Hemmingway's, but possibly even less plausible. York argues that Trump's request for loyalty was not an attempt to suborn the FBI into an instrument of his personal control, but instead a defensive and completely reasonable response to what looked like Comey blackmailing him.

SPARE SOME PITY FOR THE TRUMPBOTS...:

EVERYTHING IN THE DOSSIER HAS BEEN CONFIRMED SO FAR:

"The president brought up the 'Golden Showers thing' and said it really bothered him if wife had any doubt about it," Comey recalled. "He then explained, as he did at our dinner, that he hadn't stayed overnight in Russia during the Miss Universe trip. ... The president said 'the hookers thing' is nonsense but that Putin had told him 'we have some of the most beautiful hookers in the world.' He did not say when Putin had told him this."

That is a strange thing to say to an FBI director on your third-ever meeting -- in their first, Comey had briefed Trump on the Russia dossier compiled by British ex-spy Christopher Steele, which included the unsubstantiated "golden showers thing" -- but it is also odd because officially, Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin had spoken only once, on a Jan. 28 phone call. Trump claimed to have met Putin several times between 2013 and 2016 -- as CNN meticulously documents -- including during a 2015 debate, though his story changed in 2016.

On Jan. 17, 2017, however, Putin said on TV: "I don't know Mr. Trump. ... I have never met him and I don't know what he will do on the international arena." And in that same speech, he made light of the Trump-prostitute allegation, saying Trump had met the most beautiful women in the world and so had no need for Moscow prostitutes, adding that "they are also the best in the world."

TIGHTENING THE NOOSE THEMSELVES:

Among other highlights, the documents showed:

• Comey's Senate testimony, the story in his book, and the interviews he's given during his publicity tour describing the details of conversations he had with Trump hew incredibly closely to what he wrote at the time of the conversations themselves.

• During a previously unreported Feb. 8 conversation with Trump--which had been recorded in a classified memo--the president allegedly said to him that Vladimir Putin had personally told Trump "we have some of the most beautiful hookers in the world." This statement was allegedly made in front of former Chief of Staff Reince Priebus.

• According to that classified memo: Prior to that conversation, Priebus met Comey in his office and allegedly asked him if they were having a "private conversation." He then asked him: "Do you have a FISA order on Mike Flynn?" Priebus, it should be noted, was seeking information about a criminal probe that would be useful to any of Flynn's potential confederates.