this is beyond mueller. this is about the fbi. that s right. republicans don t feel the need to talk about a fundamental principle and the fourth amendment, and protecting the search and seizure tenets? i can t speak for them. when we have private conversations most of my colleagues recognize this is not healthy, not good. but they re so happy with what they re getting out of the trump administration in terms of deregulation, tax cuts, two new justices to the supreme court, that they re willing to let him, as they say, ramble on, on twitter. they pay attention to the policy accomplishments not twitter rants. having the president say and do things like this on twitter is fundamentally cor fundamentally corrosive. the criminal justice reform you believe he ll sign that today? we ll take up and i believe pass the first step act, which has important sentencing revisions in it as well. this is a bipartisan effort that i ve been part of for three
congre congresses now. president trump has said he will sign it. unfortunately we ve seen this movie before where the president commits to signing something important like immigration reform and then changes his mind. i think we should take this particular deal, get it through the senate, hope the president will sign it before christmas and this will be a heck of a holiday gift for thousands of families who will see family members who have served long, long sentences released early. a federal judge has ruled obamacare unconstitutional. all of our experts say that will be challenged on appeal and could work its way up to the supreme court. i know you don t want anybody to lose their coverage but do you take some slight perverse pleasure in watching this play out in that it means that republicans have broken their promises on the campaign trail to protect pre-existing
conditions and things in place now? this is the opportunity for republicans to show they mean what they say that, they want to protect pre-existing conditions and work to fix parts of the affordable care act. there hasn t been any move in that direction for this congress. it s going to be a tough issue for the republicans facing the electorate in 2020. affordable care act, its protections that allow young people under 26 to stay on their parents health care, the closing of the so-called donut hole and the pre-existing condition protection. those are very popular. so much so that governors and senators who ran against obamacare, who participated in this lawsuit ran in the last few weeks of the 2018 election claiming, without foundation that they, in fact, were trying to protect pre-existing conditions. is the government going to shut down partially, this friday? i have no idea. the only person who is saying
republican states attorneys general who are now saying the entire act has to go, despite the fact that congress did not do that. i think we are in totally unchartered territory that politically they would not have done. can i just amplify one thing that i think is very important. go ahead. we have had two polls, one in august and one recently in october suggesting that over half of republican voters are for medicare for all. we have gotten so polarized. republican voters want health insurance and we view health insurance as something everybody in the country ought to have. the threats to obamacare and to coverage and pre-existing conditions posed by the republicans are driving more than half of republican voters to now support medicare for all. that tells you the republican party has gotten the politics of this totally wrong. i think as was said, you know,
allows them to buy insurance. i would like to have a mandate with a real penalty, but it turns out the we sort of over blew how important it was getting people to purchase insurance, and i think the judge misconstrued the ideas we had in 2010 for the situation of 2018. the politics in this are fast kwraeuting a fascinating, and it changed so much since obamacare was crafted. republicans, so many of them ran on we are going to protect your pre-existing conditions, and now they are faced with the ruling throwing out obamacare and now they may have to step up to the plate and do it. this legal challenge has to be seen in the context of the long war with repeated losses by republica republicans seeking to do obamacare, whether to chip away