Atlantic Monthly Contributors's Blog, page 186

UnitedHealth's Obamacare Retreat

UnitedHealth Group, the largest health-care provider in the U.S., said that next year it will pull out of Affordable Care Act marketplaces in most of the 34 states where it now operates.  

“The smaller overall market size and shorter term, higher risk profile within this market segment continue to suggest we cannot broadly serve it on an effective and sustainable basis,” Unitedhealth’s CEO, Stephen J. Hemsley said.

The announcement came Tuesday, in a call with investors. But UnitedHealth had warned of such a move last November. At the time, it said it planned to re-evaluate involvement in the exchanges because participation had “tempered industrywide, co-operatives have failed,” and because analysts had projected an even harder time making money in the markets because of what UnitedHealth called “higher risks and more difficulties.”

UnitedHealth said it expects to lose $650 million in the exchanges this year. In the past week, it said it’d leave marketplaces in Arkansa, Michigan, and much of Georgia. The impact will be hardest felt in the South and the Midwest, where there are already few options in the exchanges for consumers to choose from, and it could leave as many as 1.1 million people with just one health plan option, according to a report by the Kaiser Family Foundation.

The Kaiser report said that if UnitedHealth were to withdraw from all state marketplaces, the effect would vary in each state, and even by county. It would mean that 532 counties would drop from three insurers, down to two. And 536 counties would have one insurer. Most of these counties are rural, and cover a much smaller share of the total who are insured under the ACA. The Kaiser report also said that if UnitedHealth dropped out, customers in these counties probably wouldn’t see cost increases in the most popular plans.

The ACA brought the country’s uninsured down to 11 percent, a record low. President Obama said more than 20 million previously uninsured people had signed up for his signature legislative achievement. At the close of 2016 enrollment in February, around 13 million people purchased their insurance through the exchanges. But insurers have complained that they can’t make money in the marketplace programs. A Blue Cross Blue Shield report released in March found that average monthly medical spending for someone insured in the marketplace was higher than someone insured through their employer––about $560 each month compared with $460.

UnitedHealth was a latecomer to the marketplace, and in 2014 started selling in four states. It now insures 795,000 people through the exchange, which it expects to drop 650,000 by the end of the year.

The Search for Survivors in Ecuador’s Earthquake

The death toll in the powerful earthquake that struck Ecuador has risen to at least 480 people, according to the country’s government.

The 7.8-magnitude quake struck off Ecuador’s Pacific coast Saturday night and was felt as far inland as Quito, the capital, about 100 miles away. As many as 2,500 people were injured and an unknown number became trapped under the rubble of collapsed buildings and homes. Emergency rescuers were finding survivors in the ruins as late as Monday night.

Rafael Correa, Ecuador’s president, said Tuesday he believes the number of dead will rise, according to the BBC. “There are signs of life in the rubble, and that is being prioritized,” he said.

Deaths have been reported in the cities of Manta, Portoviejo, and Guayaquil, Ecuador’s most populous city. One of the worst-affected coastal towns was Pedernales, which officials described as “destroyed”; there, rescuers and guide dogs continue to search for survivors:

Un equipo de guías y canes #FFAA realizan búsqueda y rescate de personas bajo escombros #Pedernales #FFAAContigo pic.twitter.com/bnyekfezJt

— FFAA ECUADOR (@FFAAECUADOR) April 19, 2016

Correa said Tuesday it may cost billions of dollars to rebuild. Ecuador is located along the “Ring of Fire,” the name given to a winding chain of volcanoes and trenches in the Pacific Ocean where seismic activity is common.

Russia and Ukraine’s Battle Over Nadiya Savchenko

Ukraine and Russia have neared a deal to free a Ukrainian air-force pilot was captured by Russian-backed rebels in eastern Ukraine in 2014 and sentenced last month to prison in Russia.

Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko said Tuesday the two nations had “agreed on a certain algorithm” for the release of Nadiya Savchenko, the AP reported. Her release could come as part of a swap, Poroshenko said, for two Russian officers who were sentenced Monday in Kiev to 14 years in prison on charges of terrorism in eastern Ukraine. Poroshenko said in a tweet Tuesday he had spoken with Savchenko by phone, and urged her to end the hunger strike she began in early March. Her lawyer told the AP the pilot has agreed to start accepting food.

Savchenko was captured during a clash between Ukrainian government forces and separatists in Luhansk in June 2014. She was found found guilty last month in the deaths of two Russian journalists, who were killed by artillery fire, and sentenced to 22 years in prison. Ukraine and Western governments said the Russian charges against her were fabricated, and her defense said cellphone data from that day indicated Savchenko was detained at least an hour before the journalists were killed. Russia says Savchenko escaped from pro-Moscow Ukrainian separatists and was caught inside Russia’s borders.

Savchenko, the first woman to graduate from the Ukraine’s Air Force University in 2009,  has become a Ukrainian national hero following her capture and conviction.

Better Call Saul and the Edge of Boredom

“We want to make a show that stands on its own,” Better Call Saul’s co-creator Peter Gould has said about his and Vince Gilligan’s Breaking Bad spinoff. Two seasons in, Saul has achieved many things, but this particular goal isn’t one of them. In fact, the longer the show’s been on, the more it’s felt powered by the lingering energy of the supernova that was Breaking Bad.

Cameos are a small part of why that might be; arguably the biggest source of suspense from last night’s finale was the fan realization that the first letters of the season’s episode titles make an anagram for “FRINGS BACK.” More important, though, is the fact that Saul’s creators clearly feel the luxury of built-in viewer interest. Its affiliation with one of the best shows of all time allows it to work at a pace that would doom an original series to quick cancellation.

You might call that pace brilliantly deliberate, or you might call it merely boring. Saul, of course, never promised to be as gripping as Breaking Bad: The journey from somewhat morally compromised lawyer to more morally compromised lawyer is a less obviously dramatic trip than one from high-school teacher to murderous drug lord. Making it pop on screen would seem to require an imaginative, colorful plot. The cast’s strong acting and Vince Gilligan and Peter Gould’s beautiful cinematography counts for a lot, but serial TV dramas cannot run on formal virtuosity alone.

The first season demonstrated that a compelling story can be told even when the stakes are low. The nail-salon denizen Jimmy McGill, the headtrip that is Chuck, the steely law associate Kim, and the tragically human version of Mike were introduced. Amusing capers—involving a family of scammers, the consequences of insulting a drug dealer’s abuelita, and the scutwork required to uncover an extortion scheme at a retirement facility—were staged. The moral arc was clear and relatable, invoking true suspense with the question of whether the system would allow Jimmy to succeed above board. And the big twist, which revealed that Chuck had been working against his brother, was constructed for maximum devastation and seemed like the perfect inciting incident for Jimmy to become Saul. In the finale, he declined a legitimate lawyer job and drove off humming his dead conman friend’s favorite song, “Smoke on the Water.”

Season two, though, started out by having Jimmy turn around and accept that same job. This was a surprising choice, one that would seem to hint that Gilligan and Gould decided to revise whatever master plan they had for the series. There’s no sin in course correcting, but this was more like hitting the brakes and taking a U-turn—only to then drive a slightly different route to the same spot. Season one depicted Jimmy trying to move away from his old Slippin’ persona to earn Chuck’s respect before realizing Chuck was worse than unreachable. Season two had Jimmy again try to walk the path of respectability in hopes of pleasing a different loved one, Kim. This time, instead of being actively undermined by someone else, he faced an authentic clash between his own criminal leanings and the strictures of legal ethics. Jimmy’s problem is Jimmy.

But, still, it’s really also Chuck. He’s the one man Jimmy can’t fully con because the normal calculations about a mark’s humanity, compassion, and mercy don’t apply when that mark loathes you. Much of this season has been spent with flashbacks showing how firmly rooted Chuck’s resentment toward Jimmy is, and with present-day deceptions from Jimmy that show why some amount of that resentment is warranted. When the last scene of the finale revealed Chuck had been taping Jimmy’s confession of fraud, I’m not sure it represented all that different a betrayal from Chuck’s big betrayal in season one. But it was meant to feel deeper and more tragic given how much more we’d learned about their relationship.

It would be churlish to ding a show for deciding to shade more nuance in its characters. Better Call Saul’s recursive second season did, happily, have time to round out Kim by giving her goals, struggles, a code, and a personality—but ideally it would have done that in any case. It gave Mike a full arc of trying and failing to resist the pull of underworld violence—but many viewers sort of assumed that arc had already happened after seeing the first-season flashback to his time as a cop. Mike’s storyline was nevertheless the most exciting thing here, a reminder of the fact that though Vince Gilligan has a charming obsession with the peeling-paint banality of administrative offices and parking lots, his real talent is as a crime writer. Those talents went underused this season because all the work Better Call Saul did to deepen its world came at the expense of expanding it, or even playing around very much. One-off cases were not taken. New characters obviously worth seeing more than once were not introduced. The same battles that defined the first season were mostly just waged again and again. The best scene was a montage with an inflatable air dancer.

All of the work that Better Call Saul did to deepen its world came at the expense of expanding it.

Again, whether this makes for brilliant or boring TV is on some level a matter of preference. This week’s, Slate editor, Julia Turner, argued that Better Call Saul is superior to Breaking Bad, and her enthusiasm is shared by many viewers. But it’s probably worth noting that she used the word “subtle” four times in 1,200 words. Her same publication recently ran an essay called “Against Subtlety,” which for all its seeming provocation was centered on an idea that should be uncontroversial: Subtlety is not a virtue in itself, and many of the greatest works of art make their points bluntly. Saul, I’d argue, has made so many fine needlepoint stitches around the same delicate patterns for the past two seasons to approach its own kind of tackiness. We’re meant to admire the work, but at a certain point you start to wonder if there are better ways for all involved to be spending their time.

Breaking Bad’s second season ended with a midair plane collision that rained debris over the house of the man whose callous actions had set off the chain of events that caused the collision. It was a gloriously preposterous climax signaling that the world the show inhabited was one where fate has a strong hand and morality is a force as real as gravity. When Saul Goodman eventually showed up, he seemed like a manifestation of that magical-realist universe, a creature of supernatural sleaze. Better Call Saul supposedly exists in that same modern mythos, and perhaps by taking things so slow, Gould and Gilligan are setting up an even greater transformation routine than Breaking Bad achieved. For now, though, many viewers might feel as though they’ve been left stranded in a Cinnabon, law-firm basement, or some other place that people both in the show and watching it might be trying to escape from.

You're Fired: The Donald Trump Campaign Shakeup

Leo Tolstoy famously declared all happy families alike, and every unhappy family unhappy in its own way. With political campaigns, it’s just the reverse: Every winning campaign gets there its own way, but every struggling campaign tends toward the same frantic gestures: leaks, acrimony, and staff shakeups.

So it is with the Donald Trump campaign, which has been on a losing streak—both in the most recent nominating contests in Wisconsin, Colorado, and Utah, and in a series of delegate-selection conventions at the state level, where Trump has failed to send loyalists on the slate to go to Cleveland. Over the weekend, the big staff shakeup finally arrived, in a move first reported by Politico.

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On the staffing side, Trump has promoted Paul Manafort and Rick Wiley to take charge of the campaign’s operations going forward. Both of them are relatively recent additions: Trump first hired the veteran operative Manafort in late March, when it became apparent that Trump might not win the nomination outright, that delegate-wrangling would therefore be essential, and that Trump was badly behind on that count. But Manafort quickly extended his reach beyond simply nose-counting. Wiley, former presidential-campaign manager for Scott Walker, is a still more recent addition, having just come aboard last week.

The big loser in all of that is Corey Lewandowski, the controversial erstwhile campaign manager, who according to CBS has been demoted “to a role that amounts to body man and scheduler.” That’s not quite the final indignity for Lewandowski, but it’s close. He’s been on a roller coaster over the last year: When he was selected to run Trump’s campaign, Lewandowski was little known and had never run anything of the magnitude of a presidential team. But as Trump surged to the fore of the Republican field, Lewandowski's profile rose.

In early March, however, he grabbed and yanked a reporter away from Trump, precipitating weeks of scrutiny and recriminations, and ultimately resulting in Lewandowski’s arrest for battery. As Lewandowski sat in legal limbo, Trump’s campaign started slipping. He lost a couple of contests, and the state-delegate process began to elude him. Last week, a prosecutor in Palm Beach County announced he wouldn’t charge Lewandowski, but by then the damage was done. He had already been de facto demoted, as Manafort and others grabbed more power. Reports of his reduced role emerged as early as April 2.

Manafort, meanwhile, was touting his new role, telling CNN he had a direct line to Trump and didn’t have to go through the campaign manager. “I work directly for the boss,” he said. (As BuzzFeed’s McKay Coppins and Christopher Massie put it Monday, Trump is an extremely loyal boss right up until he sacks you.)

If the case for demoting Lewandowski was clear—he is a personal political liability, and he didn't seem to have the answer for Trump’s troubles—the case against is equally clear. Lewandowski has been responsible for hiring many of the people on Trump’s team, who are now upset and owe little loyalty to Manafort, Wiley, or anyone else. On Monday, national field director Stuart Jolly, a Lewandowski loyalist, submitted his resignation rather than begin reporting to Wiley, Politico reported. Jolly, in turn, had hired many lower-level staffers. The Trump campaign has been remarkably leak-proof, likely a result of a small staff with intense loyalty to the boss. But as the team expands, there’s greater acrimony, looser affiliation, and more chances for leaks.

The thing about promoting Manafort is that it’s not yet clear that he’s got better answers than Lewandowski. Since his addition, Trump has been shellacked at state conventions. It’s essential for candidates to get loyal delegates sent to the Republican National Convention, because if—as expected—no candidate wins an outright majority before Cleveland, delegates are freed up to support the candidate of their choice on the second, third, or subsequent ballots, depending on state rules. So far, however, Senator Ted Cruz is cleaning Trump’s clock at state conventions even where Trump easily defeated him, giving Cruz an organizing edge in a floor fight.

Protestations that the game is rigged and the rules unfair from Manafort, Trump, and others have riled some Trump voters, but for the most part they’ve been met with derision and ridicule from Republican officials and journalists. (Republican officials seem more optimistic than they have in months, as they start to think that a contested convention is the most likely outcome—though the fact that a contested convention is their better option is cold comfort.) Manafort himself has also become something of a personal liability, thanks to past lobbying work for controversial clients including Saudi Arabia.

The other big news from the shakeup is that Trump has decided to start throwing money at his campaign. After insisting on running the campaign on the cheap—a tactic that largely worked, as Trump hoovered up valuable media attention—he has finally decided to spend a reported $20 million in May and June. That’s a substantial chunk of money. The question is whether it’s too late. Trump will need to win a huge portion of the remaining delegates in order to clinch the nomination outright in the races that remain, although the map ahead is thought to generally favor him. The counterfactuals are tempting: What if Trump had spent some of his ample fortune on organizing ahead of the Iowa caucus, which he narrowly lost to Cruz? What if he had spent that money in the last month, cutting into Cruz’s delegate maneuvering? If Trump loses the nomination, despite having defied the oddsmakers and pundits on so many counts, the paradox will be impressive: the first billionaire candidate, felled by his own unwillingness to spend money.

All of this chaos is one reason not to read too much into Tuesday night’s New York primary results. Even if Trump triumphs across the board in his home state, winning in every congressional district, it’s too soon to say that his campaign will have stabilized after a rough stretch. On Wednesday morning, he’ll still be faced with an uphill battle to reach 1,237 delegates, a bleak slate of delegates in Cleveland, and a campaign staff in disarray.

An Israeli Convicted

The ringleader in the killing of a Palestinian teenager in Jerusalem in 2014 was convicted Monday after a Jerusalem district court rejected his insanity plea.

Haaretz reports:

Yosef [Haim] Ben David properly understood what he was doing and was in full control of his actions, the court ruled, adding that it was well within his ability to prevent the crimes from being committed.

The district court convicted Ben David for charges of murder, kidnapping for the purpose of murder, and battery causing bodily harm.

Ben David will be sentenced in early May.

As we reported last November, the court convicted two Israeli minors—whose names were withheld because of their age—in the killing of Mohammed Abu Khdeir, 16. Ben David was said to be the ringleader of the plot to abduct the Palestinian teenager outside a mosque near his home in East Jerusalem in July 2014. Khdeir was driven to a forest and burned alive. His killing was suspected to be a revenge attack for the slaying of three Israeli teenagers by Hamas, the Palestinian militant group, a month earlier in the West Bank.

Deadly Houston Flooding

Updated on April 19 at 12:15 p.m. ET

As much as a foot and a half of rain has fallen in parts of southeast Texas from storms that started Sunday.

Authorities conducted more than 1,200 water rescues, including one that saved 70 trapped horses. In parts of Houston, water levels reached 20 inches. As of Tuesday morning, there is a flash-flood watch for city, the fourth-largest in the U.S., situated close to the Gulf of Mexico. More rain is expected Tuesday, with chances of it continuing for the next few days. A flood watch is in effect until Wednesday morning.

Texas Governor Greg Abbott on Monday signed a disaster declaration for nine counties in the area.

At least three of the six deaths occurred in a highway underpass. Indeed, “most people who die in flash flooding will die in their vehicles,” the National Weather Service warned, urging Houston residents to stay off flooded roads Tuesday.

While Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner said authorities were actively rescuing people stranded in water, he implored residents to stay at home and wait the storm out. “A lot of rain coming in a very short period of time, there’s nothing you can do,” he said, according to the Associated Press.

Authorities were unable to respond to 180 emergency calls because of high water, the mayor said. More than 1,000 buildings and homes were flooded, the Houston Chronicle reports.

The region has experienced devastating flooding before: Tropical Storm Allison, which struck Houston in 2011, caused $5 billion in damages.

The Search for the Missing Malaysia Airlines Plane

The two pieces of debris were recovered independently—last December and in February—about 130 miles apart off the coast of Mozambique.

The Australian Transport Safety Bureau, which is investigating the disappearance of flight MH370, concluded in its report Tuesday:  

At the time of writing, ongoing work was being conducted with respect to the marine ecology identification as well as testing of material samples. The results from these tests will be provided to the Malaysian investigation team once complete. Nevertheless, from the initial examination it was concluded that:

Part No. 1 was a flap track fairing segment, almost certainly from the Malaysian Airlines Boeing 777 aircraft, registered 9M-MRO.

Part No. 2 was a horizontal stabiliser panel segment, almost certainly from the Malaysian Airlines Boeing 777 aircraft, registered 9M-MRO.

Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 was traveling from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing with 227 passengers and 12 crew members on board when it disappeared from radar shortly after takeoff on March 8, 2014. An international search effort to find the aircraft turned up nothing. Even if Australian investigators are correct, and the parts do indeed belong to the missing plane, it’s unclear why the aircraft was near the coast of southeastern Africa, in a direction nearly opposite to where it was headed.

The Jungle Book Points Toward a CGI Future

One of Disney’s newest cash cows is the “live-action remake”—a lavish, big-budget revival of an animated classic (Alice in Wonderland, Cinderella) that appeals to both young viewers and their nostalgic parents. The latest is The Jungle Book, which got strong reviews (including one from my colleague Christopher Orr) and collected a healthy $103 million at the box office in its opening weekend. But even though The Jungle Book is an unqualified hit, it isn’t quite “live action” in the traditional sense.

In an era when many big blockbusters like Star Wars: The Force Awakens, Interstellar and Mad Max: Fury Road are drifting back toward “practical” filmmaking (big sets, with visual effects done mostly in-camera), The Jungle Book took the opposite approach. Though the story is set in the jungles of India, the cast and crew never filmed anywhere but a Los Angeles warehouse. Meanwhile, its young star Neel Sethi worked alongside a cast of characters who were created entirely in CGI, and voiced by famous actors like Bill Murray and Lupita Nyong’o, who recorded their parts months later. That it works is a testament to the ongoing evolution of computer-assisted filmmaking, which is getting ever closer to replicating reality.

One reason for The Jungle Book’s triumph is that it avoids rendering people as CGI creatures, which has historically put off audiences thanks to a phenomenon known as the “uncanny valley.” As the “man-cub” Mowgli, Sethi is a recognizable human amid the film’s soup of visual effects. When the director Robert Zemeckis experimented with motion-capture filmmaking in the 2000s, he made three films that attempted to render real people in 3D-animated form: The Polar Express (2004), Beowulf (2007), and A Christmas Carol (2009). They all came under fire for the waxy, glass-eyed look of their computerized stars, even while they took huge steps in the realm of performance-capture technology.

The Jungle Book director Jon Favreau didn’t have to worry about that, but his biggest challenge was almost equally tough—getting a convincing performance out of a star who was acting in a vacuum. As detailed in Wired, The Jungle Book used“pre-visualization” techniques pioneered by movies like Avatar and Gravity, in which the film’s look—including camera moves, motion-captured performances, and set design—were sketched out before beforehand and created before filming even began. “Everything was mapped against the virtual sets. We designed the sets like you would for a video game,” Favreau said.

Sethi filmed all his scenes against green screens; small pieces of the set would be created if he had to interact with something (like a log, a rocky outcropping, or a slick, muddy field). This approach was pioneered by filmmakers like George Lucas, but to mostly deleterious effect. His Star Wars prequels, which featured real actors interacting with virtual sets and CGI creatures, had a clunky, airless feel to them. The challenges of conjuring realistic performances in such an artificial environment aren’t small, especially when coupled with numerous technical demands. Details audiences wouldn’t think to look for—like realistic lighting and having CGI characters cast accurate shadows—are hugely important for making a primarily virtual movie work.

James Cameron’s Avatar, set on the invented world of Pandora and mainly starring 10-foot-tall blue aliens, marked a huge step forward in this regard. Still, its plot for the most part kept its real-life actors from interacting with the CGI Na’vi until the final action sequences. The Jungle Book is basically a computer-animated film with a real actor at its center, but against all odds, it never feels “fake.” In it, Mowgli successfully manages to sustain heartfelt conversations with realistic-looking wolves, bears, panthers, orangutans, and tigers. Unlike so many previous attempts, it feels seamless.

The next step, making good CGI humans and truly conquering the uncanny valley, may still be a while off. Major efforts, like the creation of a young Jeff Bridges in the 2010 Disney film Tron: Legacy, were perceived as flops; for all The Jungle Book’s success, it wouldn’t work without Sethi to ground it. But progress can be shockingly swift. The Jungle Book would have been a failure if it had been created with the technology from a decade ago; now, it’s a pioneering example for future blockbusters.

It’s still cheaper to hire the real George Clooney than to make a fake one, but visual-effects firms are hard at work to create convincing digital doubles to stand in, or even replace, the real ones. In 2014, digital researchers at USC created a demo for a character called “Digital Ira,” a realistic-looking CGI human that showed off the progress made in recent years. It’s still a fact that replacing a recognizable face (like, say, Jeff Bridges’) doesn’t go over well with viewers, but The Jungle Book is the latest and most promising sign that Hollywood is on the brink of still more technological revolution.

The Ever More 'Complicated' U.S. Relationship With Saudi Arabia

Almost exactly 11 years ago, in April 2005, Crown Prince Abdullah of Saudi Arabia visited President George W. Bush at his ranch in Crawford, Texas. It was a friendly occasion. The Bush family had long had good relations with the Saudi royal family. Though the war in Iraq was not going especially well, and the fallout concerned Riyadh, the Saudis were glad to see Saddam Hussein gone. The two men issued a statement hailing “our personal friendship and that between our nations.” They spoke about the need to “forge a new relationship between our two countries—a strengthened partnership that builds on our past partnership, meets today’s challenges, and embraces the opportunities our nations will face in the next sixty years.”

As President Obama heads to Saudi Arabia this week, that hope is unfulfilled, and relations between the two long-time allies are extremely strained. Bush is long out of office and mostly out of the political scene. Abdullah is dead, replaced by his half-brother Salman. The Saudi and American governments are at odds over a host of issues. The U.S. disapproves of the ongoing Saudi intervention in Yemen and was angry at Saudi Arabia’s execution of Shiite cleric Nimr al-Nimr early this year. The Saudis want the U.S. to do more in Syria, and, in particular, remain upset about the U.S. nuclear deal with Iran.

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But the most pressing issue at hand is much older: It’s the September 11 attacks. As Obama prepares to travel, Congress is considering a bill that would open the door for Saudi interests to be held liable in court for the attacks. And as The New York Times reported over the weekend, the Saudi government is threatening to sell off nearly a trillion dollars in assets held in the U.S. if the bill passes.

The families of 9/11 victims have attempted to sue Saudi Arabia for playing a role in those attacks, but under a 1976 law, foreign governments are immune from many types of lawsuits in American courts. The bill under consideration now would tweak current law, so that foreign governments could be held liable if they are found culpable for attacks on U.S. soil that kill Americans. That very narrow scope—carefully calibrated to apply to few situations—could allow lawsuits to move forward.

The bill is unusually bipartisan, co-sponsored by members of both parties’ leadership teams: Democrat Chuck Schumer of New York, the presumptive leader when Senator Harry Reid retires, and Republican John Cornyn of Texas, the majority whip. It has the support of members from Ted Cruz to Chris Coons and Chuck Grassley to Kirsten Gillibrand. In the last couple of days, both Hillary Clinton and Senator Bernie Sanders, the Democratic presidential candidates, have said they support it. It passed through the Senate Judiciary Committee unanimously in February.

Notably, however, the Obama administration has opposed the bill. The White House has lobbied Congress not to pass the bill, and Press Secretary Josh Earnest threatened a presidential veto on Monday, saying, “It's difficult to imagine a scenario in which the president would sign the bill as currently drafted.” In February, Secretary of State John Kerry told senators that the bill would “create a terrible precedent” that could lead to other countries opening up the U.S. government to lawsuits, despite the carefully tailored language. The Times reports that top State and Defense Department officials warned lawmakers in a closed-door briefing that the law could expose American soldiers and diplomats abroad.

The Saudi threat to withdraw investments has gotten more attention than those cautions, though. The assets in question include $750 billion in Treasury notes, plus some other investments, which the government fears could be frozen by U.S. courts in a lawsuit. Saudi Foreign Minister Adel al-Jubeir reportedly delivered the threat in Washington in person. There’s a great deal of skepticism from economists and lawmakers about the threat, which could be damaging to the U.S. economy, but even worse for the Saudi economy, which has already been battered by the declining price of oil.

But wait, what role did Saudi Arabia play in the attacks? The 9/11 Commission report said this: “We have found no evidence that the Saudi government as an institution or senior Saudi officials individually funded the organization.” Just like the proposed change to sovereign foreign immunity, it’s a narrowly tailored sentence.

“You can’t provide the money for terrorists and then say, “I don’t have anything to do with what they're doing,’” Bob Kerrey, the former senator and a member of the 9/11 Commission, told 60 Minutes recently. “In general, the 9/11 Commission did not get every single detail of the conspiracy. We didn’t. We didn’t have the time, we didn’t have the resources. We certainly didn’t pursue the entire line of inquiry in regard to Saudi Arabia.”

Even then, there’s some information about Saudi involvement that has been gathered but is not yet public. A 2002 joint congressional investigation into intelligence failures ahead of 9/11 produced 28 pages that remain classified, and which are said to shed light on potential Saudi involvement in the attacks—perhaps by lower-level Saudi officials, or by elements of the government but not the government “as an institution.” Former Senator Bob Graham, a Florida Democrat who chaired the Senate side of the committee, has been pushing for years for the 28 pages to be released. Graham (no relation to this reporter) has fought a long and somewhat lonely battle, in part because he believes it could affect the victims’ families’ quest for restitution.

“No. 1, I think the American people deserve to know the truth of what has happened in their name,” he said last year. “No. 2 is justice for these family members who have suffered such loss and thus far have been frustrated largely by the U.S. government in their efforts to get some compensation.”

The pages were classified at the request of the FBI when produced. Graham and then-Representative Porter Goss, who was the House chair of the committee (and later directed the CIA) suggest there’s been no good reason given for keeping the document secret. Since the documents are classified, Graham won’t say what’s in them, but he has promised “a real smoking gun.”

Obama adviser Ben Rhodes, who worked on the 9/11 Commission, described how Saudis were involved to David Axelrod recently:

Without getting into that specifically because that's still classified, I think that it's complicated in the sense that, it's not that it was Saudi government policy to support Al Qaeda, but there were a number of very wealthy individuals in Saudi Arabia who would contribute, sometimes directly, to extremist groups, sometimes to charities that were kind of, ended up being ways to launder money to these groups. So, a lot of the funding—and you know Bin Laden himself was a wealthy Saudi—so a lot of the money, the seed money if you will, for what became Al Qaeda, came out of Saudi Arabia.

Between the increased tension with the Saudis, Obama’s upcoming trip, and immunity bill, there seems to be greater pressure and awareness to release the 28 pages now than ever before. Interestingly, the Saudis themselves have in the past backed those efforts. In 2003, then-Foreign Minister Saud al-Faisal called for release so that Saudi Arabia could defend itself.

“We want to see them for two reasons,” he told CNN. “If there are accusations against Saudi Arabia, we want to respond to it, because we know we are clear of any accusations. But if there are any also information about possible supporters of terrorists, we want to know about them to take care of the situation.” (Saud al-Faisal died last summer, but his position is one the Saudis appeared to maintain as recently as 2014, though their current position on declassification is unclear.)

Now there’s some indication that the U.S. government might actually do it. Graham told the Tampa Bay Times last week that the White House told him a decision on whether to declassify was coming within the next one to two months. That means not before Obama’s trip to Riyadh—assuming the decision is to declassify at all.

While American officials have expressed ambivalence about the Saudi government before, noting the kingdom’s dismal record on human rights and involvement in exporting radical Islamism, there’s a new drumbeat of questions about the value of the relationship. The new mood suits both liberals who have always disliked Saudi Arabia and seen America’s ties to it as cynical, and conservatives who think the kingdom is doing too little to stop terrorism, and may in fact be fomenting it. But the U.S. still relies on the Saudi government for plenty of things, notably funneling support to Syrian rebels who oppose the Assad regime.

Despite the movement on the 28 pages and the immunity bill, it isn’t clear whether Obama will discuss them with the king this week, according to Earnest, the White House spokesman. Despite his lobbying against the current bill, and refusal thus far to declassify the congressional investigation, Obama has shown himself to be no fan of the Saudi government, and far more skeptical of the royal family than his predecessor. As Jeffrey Goldberg reported in his recent Atlantic cover story, the president complained to Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull about Saudi and Gulf influence producing stricter forms in Islam in places like Indonesia, where practice had been more liberal.

“Aren’t the Saudis your friends?,” Turnbull wondered, to which Obama replied: “It’s complicated.” Nor does it seem likely to get any simpler at the moment.