Former Sheriff Joe Arpaio was convicted on Monday of defying a court order to stop rounding up immigrants, and he may face jail time — another rebuke for a once-popular politician who was voted out of office last year.
In 24 years as sheriff of Maricopa County, Ariz., Mr. Arpaio built a national reputation for harsh conditions in his county jail, and for his campaign against undocumented immigrants; his deputies detained people solely based on a belief that they were in the country illegally, and then turn them over to immigration authorities for deportation.
In December 2011, a federal district judge hearing a racial profiling lawsuit ruled that the immigration detentions were illegal and ordered the sheriff to halt them — an order that was upheld by an appeals court and reinforced by another district court order in 2013. But Mr. Arpaio vowed, publicly and repeatedly, that the roundups would continue, and they did.
After federal prosecutors charged him with criminal contempt of court, he maintained that he had not willfully violated the court order, but that his underlings had done so. United States District Judge Susan R. Bolton dismissed that claim in a ruling on Monday in Phoenix..
“Not only did Defendant abdicate responsibility, he announced to the world and to his subordinates that he was going to continue business as usual no matter who said otherwise,” she wrote in delivering the guilty verdict.
Mr. Arpaio, 85, could be jailed for up to six months on the conviction. Judge Bolton scheduled sentencing for Oct. 5.
Mr. Arpaio, who once called himself “America’s toughest sheriff,” famously made jail inmates wear pink underwear, and served food that some prisoners called inedible. He regularly held undocumented immigrants past their court-ordered release dates to ensure that they would be picked up by immigration agents, and vowed to investigate President Barack Obama’s birth certificate.
He was also accused several times of abusing his authority to investigate political opponents, and his legal troubles caused mounting bills for the county, Arizona’s largest.
Last year, frustration with his headline-grabbing tactics turned into a defeat at the polls.
WASHINGTON — President Trump on Monday removed Anthony Scaramucci from his position as communications director, the White House announced, ousting him just days after Mr. Scaramucci unloaded a crude verbal tirade against other senior members of the president’s senior staff.
“Anthony Scaramucci will be leaving his role as White House Communications Director,” Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the White House press secretary, said in a statement. “Mr. Scaramucci felt it was best to give Chief of Staff John Kelly a clean slate and the ability to build his own team. We wish him all the best.”
Mr. Scaramucci’s abrupt removal came just 10 days after the wealthy New York financier was brought on to the West Wing staff, a move that convulsed an already chaotic White House and led to the departures of Sean Spicer, the former press secretary, and Reince Priebus, the president’s first chief of staff.
In a Twitter message just before 5:30 on Monday morning, just hours before the announcement about Mr. Scaramucci, Mr. Trump insisted that there has been “No WH chaos!”
The decision to remove Mr. Scaramucci became public as Mr. Kelly, who replaced Mr. Priebus as the top adviser in the White House, began his first day in charge of the White House staff. He told aides gathered in early-morning staff meetings that he intended to impose a new sense of order and operational discipline that had been absent under his predecessor.
Mr. Scaramucci had boasted about reporting directly to the president, not the chief of staff. But the decision to remove him came at Mr. Kelly’s request, the people said.
It was not clear whether Mr. Scaramucci, who is known informally as “The Mooch,” will remain at the White House in another position or will leave altogether. The White House had originally said that his official start date as a government employee was to be August 15, although he appeared to begin performing his duties immediately.
While Mr. Kelly’s objection was the decisive factor in Mr. Scaramucci’s departure, people close to the decision said that Mr. Trump had quickly soured on the wisecracking, Long Island-bred former hedge fund manager, and so had his family.
Ivanka Trump, the president’s daughter, and Jared Kushner, her husband, had pushed the president to hire Mr. Scaramucci, seeing him as a way to force out Mr. Priebus, the former national Republican committee chairman, and his allies in the West Wing.
In that, Mr. Scaramucci was successful. Mr. Spicer, a close ally of Mr. Priebus, resigned just hours after the news about Mr. Scaramucci’s hiring was made public. And shortly after Mr. Scaramucci called Mr. Priebus a “paranoid schizophrenic, a paranoiac,” — adding a more vulgar term to the beginning of the phrase — Mr. Priebus, too, offered his resignation.
Mr. Trump was initially pleased by Mr. Scaramucci’s harsh remarks, directed at Mr. Priebus and Steve Bannon, the chief White House strategist. But over the weekend, after speaking with his family and Mr. Kelly, the president began to see the brash actions of his subordinate as a political liability and potential embarrassment, according to two people familiar with his thinking.
Mr. Scaramucci’s swift departure is an early indication that Mr. Kelly intends to assert his authority over the operations of the White House, and that several of the big personalities there — including Mr. Kushner, Ms. Trump and Mr. Bannon — may be inclined to defer to him.
It also suggests that, at least for the moment, Mr. Kelly has the president’s support in that effort.
The president still values Mr. Scaramucci, according to people close Mr. Trump and his family, and is hoping to find another, less high profile, position for him in the White House — although it is uncertain if Mr. Scaramucci would be willing to accept a demotion.
In Donald Trump’s White House, Reince Priebus and Sean Spicer were more than chief of staff and press secretary. They were the president’s connection to the Washington establishment: the donors, flacks and apparatchiks of both parties whose influence over politics and the economy many Trump supporters wish to upend.
By firing Mr. Priebus and Mr. Spicer and hiring John Kelly and Anthony Scaramucci, President Trump has sent a message: After six months of trying to behave like a conventional Republican president, he’s done. His opponents now include not only the Democrats, but the elites of both political parties.
Since the start of his presidential campaign, Mr. Trump has made no secret of his dislike of the capital. But his contempt for the city and the officials, lobbyists, consultants, strategists, lawyers, journalists, wonks, soldiers, bureaucrats, educators and physicians who populate it becomes more acute with each passing day.
He ignores pleas to ratchet back his Twitter feed, rails against the inability of Congress to advance his agenda, bashes the press, accuses the so-called deep state of bureaucratic setbacks, and struggles to hire staff. In Robert Mueller, the special counsel, he faces a paragon of D.C. officialdom, investigating not only his campaign but also perhaps his finances. For Trump, the Senate’s failure to repeal Obamacare was more evidence of Washington dysfunction, and a reason to declare independence from Priebus, the Republicans and political norms. The call to “drain the swamp” is now a declaration of war against all that threatens his presidency.
What we have been witnessing is a culture clash: a collision of two vastly different ways of life, personal conduct and doing business. The principles by which Mr. Trump lives are anathema to Washington. He abhors schedules. He wants to be unpredictable. He doesn’t tune out critics, but responds ferociously to every one. He values loyalty to the executive above all, and therefore sees family, who are tied together by blood, as essential to a well-managed enterprise.
Mr. Trump has no patience for consultants and experts, especially the consultants and experts in the Republican Party who were proven wrong about his election. Insecurity is a management tool: keeping people guessing where they stand, wondering what might happen next, strengthens his position.
Mr. Trump’s bombast, outsize personality, lack of restraint, flippancy and vulgarity could not be more out of place in Washington. His love of confrontation, his need always to define himself in relation to an enemy, then to brand and mock and belittle and undermine his opponent until nothing but Trump catchphrases remain, is the inverse of how Washingtonians believe politics should operate. The text that guides him is not a work of political thought. It’s “The Art of the Deal.”
The difference in style between Mr. Trump and Washingtonians is obvious. D.C. is a conventional, boring place. Washingtonians follow procedure. Presidents, senators, congressmen and judges are all expected to play to type, to intone the obligatory phrases and clichés, to nod their heads at the appropriate occasions, and, above all, to not disrupt the established order. We watch “Morning Joe” during breakfast, attend a round table on the liberal international order at lunch, and grab dinner after our summer kickball game. No glitz, no glam, no excitement.
Washingtonians avoid conflict. When someone is disruptive on the Metro we shuffle our feet, look another way, turn in the opposite direction. Residents of the “most literate city” in America, we do not shout, we read silently. We lament partisanship, and we pine for a lost age when Democrats and Republicans went out for drinks after a long day on Capitol Hill. The extent of our unanimity is apparent in the Politico poll of bipartisan “insiders,” the vast majority of which, regardless of party or ideology, tend to agree on who is up, who is down, who will win, who will lose.
To say that Donald Trump challenges this consensus is an understatement. Not only is he politically incorrect, but his manner, habits and language run against everything Washington professionals — in particular, people like Reince Priebus — have been taught to believe is right and good.
This is what distinguishes him from recent outsider presidents such as Bill Clinton and Ronald Reagan: Both had a long history of involvement in politics, and thought the Washington political class might play some role in reform. Mr. Trump does not.
In this respect, Mr. Trump has more in common with Jimmy Carter. Neither president had much governing experience before assuming office (Mr. Trump, of course, had none). Like Mr. Carter, Mr. Trump was carried to the White House on winds of change he did not fully understand. Members of their own parties viewed both men suspiciously, and both relied on their families. Neither president, nor their inner circles, meshed with the tastemakers of Washington. And each was reactive, hampered by events he did not control.
If President Trump wants to avoid Mr. Carter’s fate, he might start by recognizing that a war on every front is a war he is likely to lose, and that victory in war requires allies. Some even live in the swamp.
Every once in a while people make the point that much of what eventually became Obamacare came from, of all places, the Heritage Foundation – that is, the ACA is basically what conservatives used to advocate on health care. So I recently reread Stuart Butler’s 1989 Heritage Foundation lecture, “Assuring Affordable Health Care For All Americans” – hmm, where have I seen similar language? — to see how true that is; and the answer is, it really is pretty much true.
First of all, this wasn’t just one guy at Heritage writing: Butler referred to his proposal as “the Heritage plan”, referring to a monograph that lays it out and does indeed present it as the institution’s policy, not just his opinion.
Second, while the Heritage plan wasn’t exactly the same as ObamaRomneycare, it was pretty close. Like the ACA, it imposed a mandate requiring that everyone buy an acceptable level of coverage. Also like the ACA, it proposed subsidies to make sure that everyone could in fact afford that coverage. That’s two legs of the three-legged stool.
Where the plan differed was in the handling of pre-existing conditions. Butler opposed community rating, viewing it as an indirect tax on the healthy – but called instead for big subsidized high-risk pools to cover those private insurers would otherwise shun.
I have real doubts about whether this would have been workable. But two things about it are notable. (1) The Heritage plan would have required bigger, not smaller, government spending; that is, on-budget outlays would have been larger. (2) The piece of the ACA Heritage didn’t want was the part that’s actually most popular with the public.
Overall, what’s striking about the Heritage plan is that it’s not notably more conservative than what Obama actually implemented: a bit less regulation, a substantial amount of additional spending. If Obamacare is an extreme leftist measure, as so many Republicans claim, the Heritage Foundation in the 1980s was a leftist institution.
MOSCOW — President Vladimir V. Putin announced on Sunday that the number of workers at American diplomatic posts in Russia would be cut by 755 by Sept. 1, escalating the tensions between Washington and Moscow.
Speaking in a television interview on the Rossiya 1 network, Mr. Putin said that Russia’s patience in waiting for improved relations with the United States had worn out.
“We waited for quite some time that maybe something will change for the better, had such hope that the situation will somehow change, but, judging by everything, if it changes, it will not be soon,” Mr. Putin said in the interview, according to Interfax news agency.
Russians are fond of a proverb, “besplatniy sir biyvaet tol’ko v mishelovke”: “Free cheese can be found only in a mousetrap.”
Having long considered the United States its main enemy, the Kremlin deploys a full quiver of intelligence weapons against America and its national security agencies, political parties and defense contractors. Its intelligence services, though best known for clandestine operations to recruit spies, also run covert “influence operations” that often use disinformation to try to affect decisions or events in rival countries. A central tool of those operations is “kompromat,” “compromising material”: things of seemingly great value that are dangled, at what appears to be no cost, before unwitting targets. This is the “free cheese” that ensnares victims in a trap.
I know all this from having spent much of my 30-year government career, including with the C.I.A., observing Soviet, and then Russian, intelligence operations. I came to realize that President Vladimir Putin, who spent his formative years in the K.G.B., the Soviet Union’s main intelligence agency, and served as director of its successor agency, the F.S.B., wants, as much as anything, to destabilize the American political process. For all his talk of desiring friendly relations, Mr. Putin favors a state of animosity between our two nations. By characterizing the United States and NATO as Russia’s enemies, he can attack within his own borders what threatens him the most — the ideals of liberty, freedom and democracy, of which the United States has been a defender.
This background is necessary for understanding the real meaning of the June 2016 meeting in Trump Tower between Kremlin-connected Russians and three representatives of Donald Trump’s campaign: his son, Donald Trump Jr., his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, and Paul Manafort, then the campaign manager. The evidence that has emerged from this meeting strongly suggests that this was not an effort to establish a secure back channel for collusion between Moscow and the Trump campaign but an influence operation with one simple objective: to undermine the presidential election.
No conclusive proof has yet emerged that the Kremlin arranged this meeting, and the Russians involved have asserted they were not working for the Putin government. Mr. Kushner himself told Senate investigators that there was no collusion between the Trump campaign and Moscow. But to me, the clearest evidence that this was a Russian influence operation is the trail of bread crumbs the Kremlin seemed to have deliberately left leading from Trump Tower to the Kremlin. This operation was meant to be discovered.
The meeting was arranged by a British publicist named Rob Goldstone, who told Donald Trump Jr. via email that his client, the Russian pop star Emin Agaralov, wanted to share incriminating evidence on the Clinton campaign that had been obtained from the Russian government. Sophisticated Russian intelligence tradecraft that was meant to be kept secret would not have permitted such an insecure opening gambit for establishing continuing communication with the Trump campaign. They would not have used something as insecure as email, or relied on liaison cutouts who could so easily be traced to the Kremlin. Instead, the Russians who attended the meeting had obvious Kremlin ties, including Natalia Veselnitskaya, a Moscow lawyer who has done work on behalf of the F.S.B.; Rinat Akhmetshin, a Russian-American lobbyist who served in the Soviet military; and Mr. Agaralov, whose father is a real estate titan close to Mr. Putin.
I can’t say how news of the meeting broke, but once it did, Mr. Putin achieved one of his goals: throwing the American government into greater turmoil amid the frenzied media coverage, escalating F.B.I. and congressional investigations and intensified political conflict. And with the revelation that Russia was behind the meddling, Mr. Putin achieved another objective: to allow Russia, despite its economic and military inferiority, to claim that it could rival the United States on the global playing field. He could do all this while denying, with a wink and a nod, any involvement.
If this all sounds far-fetched, consider that the Russians have a long history of these kinds of operations, including in the United States. In the 1968 presidential campaign, Soviet Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin unsuccessfully offered financial assistance to the Democratic candidate, Hubert Humphrey, according to a K.G.B. archivist, Vasili Mitrokhin. Mr. Mitrokhin also uncovered a Soviet intelligence campaign to spread vicious attacks in 1976 against Senator Henry Jackson, a Democratic presidential candidate known for his anti-Soviet views. Russia’s active-measures operations slowed during the 1990s under President Boris Yeltsin, but Mr. Putin has resurrected the art of covert influence often in conjunction with cyberwarfare, particularly against Georgia, Ukraine and the United States.
The most effective method to combat Russia’s intrusions into our political process is to be clear, transparent and honest with ourselves about how the Kremlin operates and what it hopes to achieve. The Trump campaign did not need to collude with the Kremlin for Russia’s cyber and covert influence campaign to be considered a serious breach of our electoral process, and hence our national security. The Trump administration and both parties in Congress need to speak with one voice against Russia’s attack on our democratic institutions. If they do not, Mr. Putin will have won.
Remnants from an ancient Canaanite found in the Sidon excavation site. A genetic analysis found that the Canaanites survived a divine call for their extinction and that their descendants live in Lebanon.Credit
Claude Doumet-Serhal/Sidon Excavation
There is a story in the Hebrew Bible that tells of God’s call for the annihilation of the Canaanites, a people who lived in what are now Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, Israel and the Palestinian territories thousands of years ago.
“You shall not leave alive anything that breathes,” God said in the passage. “But you shall utterly destroy them.”
But a genetic analysis published on Thursday has found that the ancient population survived that divine call for their extinction, and their descendants live in modern Lebanon.
“We can see the present-day Lebanese can trace most of their ancestry to the Canaanites or a genetically equivalent population,” said Chris Tyler-Smith, a geneticist with the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute who is an author of the paper. “They derive just over 90 percent of their ancestry from the Canaanites.”
Dr. Tyler-Smith and an international team of geneticists and archaeologists recovered ancient DNA from bones belonging to five Canaanites retrieved from an excavation site in Sidon, Lebanon, that were 3,650 to 3,750 years old. The team then compared the ancient DNA with the genomes of 99 living people from Lebanon that the group had sequenced. It found that the modern Lebanese people shared about 93 percent of their ancestry with the Bronze Age Sidon samples.
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The Sidon excavation site in Lebanon. Archaeologists retrieved bones from five Canaanites that were 3,650 to 3,750 years old.Credit
Claude Doumet-Serhal/Sidon Excavation
“The conclusion is clear,” said Iosif Lazaridis, a geneticist at Harvard who was not involved in the study. “Based on this study it turns out that people who lived in Lebanon almost 4,000 years ago were quite similar to people who lived there today, to the modern Lebanese.”
Marc Haber, a postdoctoral fellow at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute in England and lead author on the study, said that compared with other Bronze Age civilizations, not much is known about the Canaanites.
“We know about ancient Egyptians and ancient Greeks, but we know very little about the ancient Canaanites because their records didn’t survive,” he said. Their writings may have been kept on papyrus, which did not stand the test of time as clay did. What is known about the Canaanites is that they lived and traded along the eastern coast of the present-day Mediterranean, a region that was known as the Levant.
“What we see is that since the Bronze Age, this ancestry, or the genetics of the people there, didn’t change much,” Dr. Haber said. “It changed a little, but it didn’t change much and that is what surprised me.”
At first the team was not sure if it would be able to retrieve DNA from the ancient skeletons, which were recovered from the hot and humid excavation site within the last 19 years. Dr. Haber had chosen more than two dozen bones from the site that looked promising and had them investigated for genetic material. It turned out that only five contained ancient DNA. All of those came from the petrous part of the temporal bone, which is the tough part of the skull behind the ear, from five different individuals.
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Ancient DNA recovered from bones in the excavation site was sequenced for a new study.Credit
Claude Doumet-Serhal/Sidon Excavation
After extracting that DNA, the team members compared it with a database that contained genetic information from hundreds of human populations. They then further compared their results with the genomes of the modern-day Lebanese population sample, which revealed what happened to the ancient Canaanite population.
“Genetics has the power to answer questions that historical records or archaeology are not able to answer,” Dr. Haber said.
He said researchers thought that migrations, conquests and the intermixing of Eurasian people — like the Assyrians, Persians or Macedonians — with the Canaanites 3,800 to 2,200 years ago might have contributed to the slight genetic changes seen in modern Lebanese populations. Still, the Lebanese retain most of their ancestral DNA from the Canaanites.
“It confirms the continuity of occupation and rooted tradition we have seen on-site, which was occupied from the 4th millennium B.C. right to the Crusader period,” Claude Doumet-Serhal, an archaeologist and director of the Sidon Excavation who is a co-author on the paper, said in an email.
She said that the archaeologists had found about 160 burials to date at their excavation site, which is in the heart of modern Sidon. They include graves and burials where a person was placed in a large jar, and they date to between 1900 and 1550 B.C. The genetic results further support the archaeological findings.
“We were delighted by the findings,” Dr. Doumet-Serhal said. “We are looking at the Canaanite society through 160 burials and at the same time uncovering a common past for all the people of Lebanon, whatever religion they belong to.”
WASHINGTON — The Senate in the early hours of Friday morning rejected a new, scaled-down Republican plan to repeal parts of the Affordable Care Act, derailing the Republicans’ seven-year campaign to dismantle President Barack Obama’s signature health care law and dealing a huge political setback to President Trump.
Senator John McCain of Arizona, who just this week returned to the Senate after receiving a diagnosis of brain cancer, cast the decisive vote to defeat the proposal, joining two other Republicans, Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, in opposing it.
The 49-to-51 vote was also a humiliating setback for the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, who has nurtured his reputation as a master tactician and spent the last three months trying to devise a repeal bill that could win support from members of his caucus.
As the clock ticked toward the final vote, which took place around 1:30 a.m., suspense built on the Senate floor. Mr. McCain was engaged in a lengthy, animated conversation with Vice President Mike Pence, who had come to the Capitol expecting to cast the tiebreaking vote for the bill. A few minutes later, when Mr. McCain ambled over to the Democratic side of the chamber, he was embraced by Senator Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of California. A little later Senator Amy Klobuchar, Democrat of Minnesota, put her arm around Mr. McCain.
The roll had yet to be called, but the body language suggested that the Trump administration had failed in its effort to flip the Arizona senator whom President Trump hailed on Tuesday as an “American hero.’’
Many senators announced their votes in booming voices. Mr. McCain quietly signaled his vote with a thumbs-down gesture. He later offered an explanation on Twitter:
Skinny repeal fell short because it fell short of our promise to repeal & replace Obamacare w/ meaningful reform https://t.co/tZISIvccOO
The truncated Republican plan that ultimately fell was far less than what Republicans once envisioned. Republican leaders, unable to overcome complaints from both moderate and conservative members of their caucus, said the skeletal plan was just a vehicle to permit negotiations with the House, which passed a much more ambitious repeal bill in early May.
The “skinny repeal” bill, as it became known at the Capitol this week, would still have had broad effects on health care. The bill would have increased the number of people who are uninsured by 15 million next year compared with current law, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office. Premiums for people buying insurance on their own would have increased roughly 20 percent, the budget office said.
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Senator John McCain of Arizona leaving the Senate chamber early Friday after casting the vote that ensured the measure’s defeat.Credit
Gabriella Demczuk for The New York Times
Unlike previous setbacks, Friday morning’s health care defeat had the ring of finality. After the result was announced, the Senate quickly moved on to routine business. Mr. McConnell canceled a session scheduled for Friday and announced that the Senate would take up the nomination of a federal circuit judge on Monday afternoon.
With so many senators in both parties railing against the fast-track procedures that Republican leaders used, a return to health care seemed certain to go through the committees, where bipartisanship and deliberation are more likely.
“We are not celebrating,” said the Senate Democratic leader, Chuck Schumer of New York. “We are relieved that millions and millions of people who would have been so drastically hurt by the three proposals put forward will at least retain their health care, be able to deal with pre-existing conditions.”
Mr. McConnell said he was proud of his vote to start unwinding the Affordable Care Act. “What we tried to accomplish for the American people was the right thing for the country,” Mr. McConnell said. “And our only regret tonight, our only regret, is that we didn’t achieve what we had hoped to accomplish.”
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Vice President Mike Pence arriving at the Capitol late Thursday. He was not able to save the measure with a tiebreaking vote.Credit
Zach Gibson/Getty Images
The new, eight-page Senate bill, called the Health Care Freedom Act, was unveiled just hours before the vote. It would have ended the requirement that most people have health coverage, known as the individual mandate. But it would not have put in place other incentives for people to obtain coverage — a situation that insurers say would leave them with a pool of sicker, costlier customers. It would also have ended the requirement that large employers offer coverage to their workers.
The “skinny repeal” would have delayed a tax on medical devices. It would also have cut off federal funds for Planned Parenthood for one year and increased federal grants to community health centers. And it would have increased the limit on contributions to tax-favored health savings accounts.
In addition, the bill would have made it much easier for states to waive federal requirements that health insurance plans provide consumers with a minimum set of benefits like maternity care and prescription drugs. It would have eliminated funds provided by the Affordable Care Act for a wide range of prevention and public health programs.
Before rolling out the new legislation, Senate leaders had to deal with a rebellion from Republican senators who demanded ironclad assurances that the legislation would never become law.
Mr. McCain and Senators Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and Ron Johnson of Wisconsin insisted that House leaders promise that the bill would not be enacted.
“I’m not going to vote for a bill that is terrible policy and horrible politics just because we have to get something done,” Mr. Graham said at a news conference, calling the stripped-down bill a “disaster” and a “fraud” as a replacement for the health law.
Mr. Graham eventually voted for the bill after receiving an assurance from the House speaker, Paul D. Ryan, that the two chambers would negotiate their differences if the Senate passed the legislation.
“If moving forward requires a conference committee, that is something the House is willing to do,” Mr. Ryan said in a statement. “The reality, however, is that repealing and replacing Obamacare still ultimately requires the Senate to produce 51 votes for an actual plan.”
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From left, Senators Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, Ron Johnson of Wisconsin and John McCain of Arizona, all Republicans, spoke about the “skinny repeal” bill on Thursday.Credit
Gabriella Demczuk for The New York Times
But Mr. Ryan left open the possibility that if a compromise measure had failed in the Senate, the House could still pass the stripped-down Senate health bill. That helped push Mr. McCain to “no.”
Republican senators found themselves in the strange position of hoping their bill would never be approved by the House.
“It may very well be a good vehicle to get us into conference, but you got to make sure that it’s not so good that the House simply passes it rather than going to conference,” said Senator Michael Rounds, Republican of South Dakota. Mr. Rounds, who built a successful insurance business in his home state, said he was concerned that “the markets may collapse” if the Senate bill ever took effect.
Two influential House conservatives made clear that they did not want to simply pass the Senate bill. Representative Mark Walker, Republican of North Carolina and the chairman of the conservative Republican Study Committee, said he favored a conference, calling the bill “ugly to the bone.”
And Representative Mark Meadows, Republican of North Carolina and the chairman of the hard-line Freedom Caucus, said that for many conservatives, it would be a “nonstarter” to send President Trump a bill that has “gotten so skinny that it doesn’t resemble a repeal.”
But senators had at least some reason to be nervous. The House majority leader, Kevin McCarthy of California, notified House members that “pending Senate action on health care,” the House schedule could change, and that “all members should remain flexible in their travel plans over the next few days.” That did not sound like a man preparing for protracted House-Senate negotiations.
Representative Chris Collins, Republican of New York and a key ally of Mr. Trump, said the stripped-down bill would be “better than nothing” if it became apparent that the Senate did not have the votes for a more ambitious bill.
“It becomes a binary choice,” he said. “If it’s this or nothing, who wants to go home and say I did nothing?”
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Mr. Graham, right, called the Senate bill a “disaster,” and Mr. Johnson, left, said it “doesn’t even come close to honoring our promise of repealing Obamacare.”Credit
Gabriella Demczuk for The New York Times
“No one can guarantee anything,” he added, sending a message to senators wanting assurances.
Even some senators who voted for the bill Friday conceded that its enactment could have been disastrous. It would have repealed the mandate that most Americans have insurance, without another mechanism to push Americans to maintain insurance coverage. Under those circumstances, healthy people could wait to buy insurance until they are sick. The insurance markets would become dominated by the chronically ill, and premiums would soar, insurers warned.
America’s Health Insurance Plans, the Blue Cross Blue Shield Association and the American Medical Association all expressed similar concerns.
“We would oppose an approach that eliminates the individual coverage requirement, does not offer alternative continuous coverage solutions, and does not include measures to immediately stabilize the individual market,” said America’s Health Insurance Plans, a trade group for the industry.
On the other side, the Trump administration twisted arms. Mr. Trump directed Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke to call Ms. Murkowski, the Alaska senator, to remind her of issues affecting her state that are controlled by the Interior Department, according to people familiar with the call, who requested anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to the press.
Ms. Murkowski confirmed to reporters that she had received a call from Mr. Zinke, but she declined to describe the details. However, people familiar with the call described her reaction to it as “furious.”
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