The Trump administration has been making it progressively harder for the press to ask questions. Daily televised press briefings are gone, replaced by ad hoc off-camera gaggles. The Atlantic’s Rosie Gray encapsulated the problem in a telling anecdote: “Asked why the briefings are now routinely held off-camera, White House chief strategist Steve Bannon said in a text message ‘Sean got fatter,’ and did not respond to a follow-up.”

Bannon’s gibe distills in three words why this is such a toxic administration. In its glibness it shows contempt for Gray as a journalist. It is also dismissive of the press and the genuine problem of not holding televised briefings. But the comment also verifies press reports that this White House is a nest of vipers.

Bannon’s remarks were not just immature and unprofessional but also evidence of a White House where leading members cannot treat each other, let alone the larger public, with a modicum of decency.

The special election for Tom Price’s vacated seat in Congress between Jon Ossoff and Karen Handel will finally end on Tuesday, a day after becoming the most expensive race in the history of the House of Representatives. That level of engagement isn’t surprising, though, given the stakes. The race for GA-6 has been widely seen as a divining rod for how much of the country, but particularly for how suburban voters, will vote in 2018—and for just how many Republicans will be vulnerable in the next round of congressional elections. After all, Tom Price won re-election in 2016 by more than 20 points, and the Handel-Ossoff race is shaping up to be a squeaker.

The race is also being presented as a referendum on Trumpcare. If Handel loses, the thinking goes, it could spook Republicans. “It could at least give them pause that there will be a bigger backlash than they even thought and that they should rethink this huge bill,” one health care expert told HuffPost. Given how tight the House vote was and the fact that Mitch McConnell currently doesn’t have the votes to pass the bill in the Senate, a result that jars even a few congressional Republicans could have a profound effect.

There are reasons to be suspicious of both of these narratives. The race between Ossoff and Handel is likely to be very close, and even a narrow Handel victory would affirm what we already know: that the electoral momenum is on the side of the Democrats, that many longtime Republican voters are disgusted with their own party, and that the health care bill being pushed through Congress is historically unpopular. Unless there’s an unexpected blowout, the result of this race probably isn’t going to tell us anything we don’t already know about 2018 or the ultimate fate of the health care bill. Still, Democrats and Republicans both need a win to strengthen their respective messages on health care and other issues.

Last night the office of Ossoff, who is in a tight, closely watched race for a congressional seat in Georgia, barred Free Beacon writer Brent Scher from attending a campaign event. The campaign was apparently upset by Scher’s report about Ossoff living in an adjacent district to the one he’s seeking to represent. Supporting the ban of the Free Beacon, former Vermont Governor Howard Dean tweeted:

Dean is wrong. Much of the conservative press is terrible but the Free Beacon is far superior to propagandist fare like The Daily Caller. Unlike other comparable conservative websites, the Free Beacon makes an effort to do original reporting. Its commitment to journalism should be welcomed by liberals.

As Mother Jones noted in 2015, “In its short history, the Free Beacon’s tiny staff of fewer than two dozen journalists has pulled off an almost unprecedented feat: Amid a conservative movement that has often evinced something between disinterest and disdain for the work of investigative reporters, it has built genuine muckraking success.”

This judgement still stands. And given the problems of disinformation and propaganda in the Trump era, liberals would do well to encourage any effort to improve conservative journalism.

The emerging Senate version of the American Health Care Act makes it starkly and inescapably evident that Republicans are going to gouge poor people. The Hill reported this morning that the Senate’s version of the AHCA would cut Medicaid even more drastically than the version passed by the House:

The proposal would start out the growth rate for a new cap on Medicaid spending at the same levels as the House bill, but then drop to a lower growth rate that would cut spending more, known as CPI-U, starting in 2025, the sources said.

It’s a near-apocalyptic scenario for the poor, people with disabilities, and many middle-class families as well. Republicans know this. It’s why they’re writing the bill in secret. It’s why they’re avoiding townhalls. But opacity will not protect them forever. If they pass this bill, they’ll create their own Grenfell Tower moment: People will die, and their loved ones will know who is responsible.

They’ll also set up an easy move for Democrats. Politico reports that only 42 percent of Trump voters strongly approve of the president they supported. Regarding the AHCA specifically, only 39 percent of voters overall support the bill. Nobody likes to lose an entitlement. Democrats find themselves in an almost enviable position: If they run on a full-throated defense of health care access as a precious right, their message will resonate.

Democrats must stop pretending that the old rules still apply, while the GOP goes about destroying every governing norm in sight. There are no “good” Republican officials right now, at least not any who are willing to take a genuine stand against this health care bill and the secretive way it is being crafted. Democrats may not be able to prevent Republicans from passing the AHCA now. But they should raise hell anyway. It’s their best path to reclaiming government—and to rectifying this impending tragedy.

So much for Trump’s so-called “lobbying ban.” Axios is reporting that Jeff Holmstead, a former Bush administration official and revolving-door lobbyist, is expected to be nominated for the Environmental Protection Agency’s number-two position. The move wouldn’t be unusual for Holmstead, who for nearly two decades has moved seamlessly between lobbying for the fossil fuel industry during Democratic administrations and working in the public sector during Republican one. As PolluterWatch reports:

Jeff Holmstead began his political career as the Associate Counsel to former President George H.W. Bush, moving from his government office to a lobbying firm to the Environmental Protection Agency to his current lobbying firm. During the Clinton years, Holmstead spent his time as a lobbyist for Latham & Watkins. In 2001, Holmstead was appointed to Assistant Administrator of the United States Environmental Protection Agency Office of Air and Radiation, where he played a key role in the George W. Bush administration’s efforts to roll back clean air and climate change protections.

Holmstead left the George W. Bush EPA in 2005, later joining the litigation firm Bracewell LLP as head of the firm’s Environmental Strategies Group (ESG), which Bracewell describes as “a multi-disciplinary group that includes environmental and energy attorneys, public policy advocates, and strategic communications experts – most of whom have had high-level government experience.”

Axios says Holmstead, whose appointment would require Senate confirmation, “would represent a moderating tilt inside the agency’s leadership” because he “is a veteran Washington insider,” but environmentalists likely won’t see it that way. Holmstead has spent parts of his career working to weaken air pollution standards, has said mercury pollution from coal is not “a significant public health issue,” and has spoken against regulating carbon dioxide emissions that cause climate change.

Some conservatives aren’t happy, either. One “movement source” reportedly told the Daily Caller that groups are “trying to work behind the scenes to block him.” That’s partially because Holmstead doesn’t share all of their policy priorities—for example, he doesn’t want the EPA to undo its scientific finding that carbon dioxide is a harmful pollutant. But it’s also because they see Holmstead as part of the so-called “swamp.” In that sense, they’re not wrong.

On Monday, the Court announced that it would hear Gill vs. Whitford, a partisan gerrymandering case from Wisconsin, raising the possibility that it could rule on the constitutionality of political parties drawing state districts to their overwhelming advantage. While the Supreme Court has overturned race-based gerrymandering before, to date it has not struck down a plan because of its partisanship.

In Wisconsin’s case, challengers argued that Republicans had drawn districts in 2010 so that the party could retain control of the state’s legislature for the following decade. A divided panel of three federal judges ruled that the plan was unconstitutional.

The Wisconsin challengers have developed a way to calculate exactly how partisan a plan is through what they call an “efficiency gap.” Developed by two political scientists, the method, according to the Washington Post, “measures the difference between the wasted votes of the two parties in an election divided by the total number of votes cast. In an ideal scenario, where individual votes have as much impact as possible, the efficiency gap would be zero. The gap in Wisconsin was 13.3 percent in 2012.” In other words, votes for Democrats in Wisconsin were worth less than votes for Republicans.

If the Supreme Court came out against partisan gerrymandering, it would be a decisive blow to the political power of Republicans, who have utilized partisan tactics to dominate state legislatures and House races. In 2010, the GOP poured money into key state races—$30 million, more than three times what Democrats spent—to control the congressional redistricting process, which only occurs every ten years.

Republicans now control the districting process in a majority of the states. Ed Gillespie, the conservative political strategist who engineered the takeover, called the plan REDMAP, and purple-ish Wisconsin was among the targeted states. According to HuffPost, in Wisconsin’s 2012 elections, “Republicans got just 48.6 percent of the vote statewide, but won 60 of the state’s 99 Assembly districts.”

Democratic activists and organizers have been eyeing 2020 as a landmark year to push back against Republican control. But the Supreme Court could dramatically affect how those new district lines are drawn regardless.

A week ago, Wisconsin Republican Ron Johnson expressed displeasure at the secrecy that is shrouding the Senate’s health care bill. “I want to know exactly what’s in the Senate bill,” he told Bloomberg’s Sahil Kapur. “I don’t know yet. It’s not a good process.” Asked about Johnson’s quote on Face the Nation on Sunday, Marco Rubio concurred, although he argued that secrecy isn’t so bad—as long as there’s time to debate the bill: “The Senate is not a place where you can just cook up something behind closed doors and rush it for a vote on the floor—especially on an issue like this. The first step in this may be crafted among a small group of people, but then everyone’s going to get to weigh in. And it’s going to take—you know it’s going to take days and weeks to work through that in the Senate.”

These quotes broadly reflect the two ways Republican senators have responded to Mitch McConnell’s secret health care bill. The first is to throw up their hands and say, “Well, I don’t like the way this is being done either!” And the second is to suggest that, even though Republicans are secretly crafting a bill that will have dire consequences for millions of Americans, it’s not actually that bad.

The problem with both of these arguments, however, is that they’re bullshit. If senators really were concerned about the process, they have ways to push for something more open. “If these senators told McConnell that they genuinely want or need an improved process, that would put him in a meaningful bind,” The Washington Post’s Greg Sargent wrote last week. “He’d have to prioritize the need to get the bill through over his members’ genuine needs or demands, precisely because the bill can’t survive too much public scrutiny, as it’s so toxic.”

Rubio’s claim that a real debate will happen down the road also rings hollow. On Sunday, Jonathan Swan reported that McConnell “is dead serious about forcing a Senate vote on the Obamacare repeal-and-replace bill before the July 4 holiday.” That timeline would not create the conditions for the kind of open debate Rubio is citing.

The whole point of an open process is that members of the public can respond to legislation that will have a profound impact on their lives. The process that McConnell and Republicans are using to write this bill is designed to prevent the public from having any impact on this legislation. If Republicans truly wanted an open process or meaningful debate, or merely cared about paying lip service to these concepts, we’d have both.

The British prime minister, already reeling from a humiliating election that cost her Conservative Party the majority in Parliament, has been shockingly inept in responding to the high-rise fire in London that has left at least 30 people dead.

She reportedly met with emergency crews during a Thursday visit to Grenfell Tower, but not survivors. She also blocked media access during the visit—for “security reasons,” according to her defense minister. On Friday morning, May was holed up in St. Clement’s Church as a crowd gathered outside demanding that she answer questions about the fire. Under tight police escort, May managed to leave the church. The BBC is now reporting that she will meet with survivors tomorrow.

May’s mishandling of this matter has political roots: She is probably (and rightly) concerned that an enraged public will blame her government for poor safety at the high rise. As Heather Brooke wrote in The New York Times earlier this week, “These are turbulent times in Britain, and the fire at Grenfell Tower touches on many of the issues that are riling people. Over the past decade, a series of events have demolished the trust citizens once had in officialdom: the financial crash of 2008, the scandal of parliamentary expenses and the chaos in government following the Brexit referendum.”

May, having lost her majority in Parliament, is already in a precarious position. By responding to this crisis so tactlessly, she could very well lose her job.