Republicans might have control of the House, the Senate and the White House, but control of all three branches of government hardly guarantees the next two years are going to harmonious for a party that has years of differences to litigate.

The Congressional Budget Office laid out some important ground rules in a blog post Tuesday for how it will judge whatever Obamacare replacement plans lawmakers eventually offer if they repeal the Affordable Care Act next year. The CBO said it would not be giving any proposals credit for covering consumers unless the plans that consumers would be receiving met certain broad standards for coverage.

The post comes as GOP lawmakers are readying their push to repeal Obamacare early next year, but with a two- to four-year delay that they say would give them enough time to settle on a replacement. Over the six-plus years since the ACA was passed, Republicans have struggled to develop consensus around an alternative, in part because of deep disagreements within the party over the government's role in the health care industry and whether universal coverage should be a goal.

The CBO blog post adds a new wrinkle to the debate, by making clear that lawmakers won't be able to claim that they will protect the millions of people that stand to lose insurance with an Obamacare repeal if the coverage that comes with their ACA replacement is significantly less generous or wide-ranging.

Rep. Mick Mulvaney (R-SC), President-elect Donald Trump’s pick to direct the Office of Management and Budget, has been an ardent supporter of budget proposals that would privatize Medicare and has made overhauling the program a key issue in his approach to governance.

“We have to end Medicare as we know it,” Mulvaney said in 2011.

What a difference eight years will make.

The frontline of Democrats defending Obamacare from a GOP repeal in the new year looks a whole lot different than the lineup of lawmakers who fought for its passage in 2009-10.

Gone are the likes of Ted Kennedy, Tom Harkin, Harry Reid, and Henry Waxman.

With those stalwarts either deceased or retired, a new lineup has emerged that will be tasked with defending the law that their predecessors spent nearly their entire careers waiting to see enacted. But unlike their counterparts eight years ago, these Democrats will be playing defense and in the minority, with fewer legislative and political tools at their disposal.

“It’s mostly the bench who are now out front,” said John McDonough, a Harvard public health professor who wrote the 2011 book "Inside National Health Reform."

“It’s a very experienced and well-rounded bench in terms of understanding and familiarity with these issues in a very, very deep way, but it is a whole new generation that will be rising up and taking leadership roles in this,” he said.

President Barack Obama called upon President-elect Donald Trump to support a bipartisan, independent investigation in foreign influence in the U.S. election.

"One way I do believe that the President-elect can approach this that would be unifying is to say that, we welcome a bipartisan, independent, process that gives the American people an assurance not only that votes are counted properly, that the elections are fair and free, but that we have learned lessons about how internet propaganda from foreign countries can be released into the political bloodstream and that we got strategies to deal with it for the future," President Obama said at his end-of-the-year press conference Friday. "The more this can be non-partisan, the better served the American people are going to be."

Most members of Congress might be home for the holidays, but the difficult GOP staff work of hammering out how to repeal Obamacare is underway on Capitol Hill.

Senate Democrats are dubbing President-elect Donald Trump's pick for Secretary of Treasury Steven Mnuchin the "Foreclosure King" on a new website they've set up to solicit public complaints from people allegedly hurt by Mnuchin's past work in financial services.

Mnuchin– the former chief executive officer and chairman of OneWest Bank– was accused of aggressively foreclosing on homes during the financial crisis.

Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and Jeff Merkely (D-OR) are leading the charge.

“After years peddling the kind of dangerous‎ mortgage-backed securities that eventually blew up the economy, Mnuchin swooped in after the crash to take a second bite out of families by aggressively--and sometimes illegally--foreclosing on their homes,” Warren said in a statement about the website. “This man has engaged in the worst kinds of practices on Wall Street and directly hurt thousands of working families – and now, Donald Trump wants to literally hand him the keys to the Treasury where he can make big banks even richer at the expense of America's families.”

The GOP's most likely path for repealing Obamacare immediately eliminates hundreds of billions of dollars in tax revenue that would otherwise be available to fund their replacement plan.

The large tax cut, which would go disproportionately to high earners, will seriously handcuff lawmakers as they try to cobble together a replacement plan to cover the millions of Americans dependent on Obamacare for health insurance, health care policy experts say.

With Republican Party's strict anti-tax orthodoxy, it is difficult to envision the new GOP-controlled Congress raising taxes down the road to fund their Obamacare replacement. So while the current plan of repeal and delay contemplates a future replacement plan, the lost tax revenues is perhaps the most telling sign that a viable replacement may be either impossible to achieve or a meager substitute.

One name was notably absent from the President-elect’s Monday night tweet announcing that he would turn the Trump Organization’s management over to his adult children: Ivanka Trump.

The omission of his eldest daughter, compounded with reports that she and her husband Jared Kushner are house hunting in Washington, D.C. and Donald Trump’s recent remark that he would “love” to have both in his administration, fueled speculation that he intends to give her an official White House role.

CNN added another dash of gasoline in a Wednesday tweet citing a transition source who claimed that Ivanka Trump would receive an office in the space traditionally reserved for the first lady, although Trump spokeswoman Hope Hicks told Business Insider that "no decisions regarding Ivanka's involvement have been made."