up to donald trump against torture. we have a very clear position on torture. we do not sanction torture. we do not get involved with that and will continue to be our position. and moments ago the mexican president announcing that his meeting planned for next week with president trump has been canceled. we are on the same page with the white house. how surprised are you every time there is a new tweet from the president? this is going to be an unconventional presidency, i think you know this by now casy. and i think we are going to see unconventional activities like tweets and that s just something we are all going to have to get used to. good derek everyone. a busy day. i m andrea mitchell in washington. president trump just arriving in philadelphia. you see air force one there. we are expecting his remarks to house and senate republicans later in this houn. he will go it s about a 20 minute ride from that airport in south philadelphia back into center city, where he is going to be meeting with the republicans, where they are in their retreat a. lot to talk about. he disimbarked from marine one earlier for the first time at andrews air force base and boards air force one. it s his first ride on the blue and white plane now that he is of course commander in chief. joining me, casey hunt in philadelphia where the republicans are awaiting him. first of all, kristen, the president tweeted earlier today, this was a precursor, all of this watching this sens sensed there was a likely cancellation from mexico. you have got a mexican president at record low popularity under great pressure at home to stand up to donald trump. president trump tweeting today the u.s. has a $60 billion trade deficit with mexico. it has been a one side deal from coming through mexico. reporter: yeah. but in rene years and recent months more mexicans have been leaving mexican people who migrated to the u.s. have been going back the other way because under economy has been getting stronger. reporter: well, andrea, this was part of a rather uncomfortable discussion this morning with house speaker paul ryan and majority leader mitch mcconnell. they were pressed on this very question about what this at that point of course we were talking about just the border wall proposal. we didn t yet have this news about the official cancel igs of this visit. but they were asked what does this do to our relationship with meksio? are you comfortable with this? and they sort of pushed those questions aside just like they did on other topic related to this. they were repeatedly asked, for example, if the border wall, if building the wall that has sparked this confrontation with mexico s president, would add to the u.s. definite simpson. they have come out and said at this retreat that there likely david muir on abc that he believes torture works but he would defer secretaries mattis and director of dci pompeo and their strong view to follow and law as long as it is the law against torture but that might revisit that. that is the message. that sends a signal to our allied intelligence services on whom we depend. certainly to the terrorists abroad who can use that tape and repopulate it of the president of the united states saying torture works. it s not something that you have heard before from a president. reporter: that s right. and even when we were having this debate during the bush presidency and after president obama pushed to make changes and have congress ultimately pass a law that restricted the intelligence community to using the techniques provided in the army field manual and outlawing those enhanced interrogation techniques that were used nobody said that toes enhanced interrogation techniques from torture. the controversy was over the justice department kind of bending over backwards as know very well to try to say these techniques were not torture. so the way that the president is approaching this is pretty unprecedented. frank lights been the issue that has probably put the congressional leaders most on the spot over the last couple of days. they have essentially said look this is settled law. we have dealt with this law. paul ryan was very blunt today saying how oftentimes lawmakers will try to talk around a question, ryan was short and to the point. he said look this is settled law. we don t think it should be changed. torture is illegal. i think you know this is something where there are very definitive breaks between the president and the way he s talking about this as well as the policy he is espousing and other republicans in his own party? in fact, you brought up a point i noticed that when you were asking questions and mitch mcconnell said i think the director of the cia has made it clear he is going to follow the law and i think all of my members are comfortable with that state of the law right now. ryan leaned in and said torture is illegal and we agree with it noting legal. he could not be more definitive. he said it s illegal three times. kristen, there is a lot of discomfort as casey has point out among the republican leaders with the tweeting with the kind of language, with sort of the way things are rolling out. they have to deal with it. they have to smooth things over. what is happening hyped the scenes in the white house as they are trying to get up to speed? we now have reports that the entire top level at the state department of presidential appoint appointees, but of career foreign service people have cleared out, have resigned as of today. reporter: and white house pris press secretary shawn spicer was just asked about that during his gaggle with reporters aboard air force one. he said he hadn t been briefed on that yet. we are waiting for their official reaction. now kristen we see the president. reporter: yes. the president is coming out of air force one. this is goio become the image of the next four years of the president coming down the steps of air force one for the first time in philadelphia. his first trip. kristen, you were saying that shawn spicer was asked about this mass departure from the seventh floor of the state department. rex tillerson was there for the first time that he know of yesterday. once it was clear that he was going to have the votes for confirmation. reporter: to your broader point, i think there was some concern about the way in which this transition was unraveling in the sense that white house officials of the obama administration were saying that they wanted more engage men from the trump transition. so i think there is some catching up that is happening. and then the typical sort of getting your sea legs that happens whenever you enter the white house. so i think both of those things are happening at the same time. going back to what you were discussing though with casey in terms of this conversation about torture this is now an issue that is overshadowing this white house. we are peppering them with questions about the remarks that president trump made last night during that interview. and of course it sets the backdrop for that meeting that he is going to have with british prime minister theresa may tomorrow. you think about the relationship with the united states and mexico, the fact that that meeting has now been canceled. the fact that that relationship has now been complicated to such a large extent by the building of this wall or at least the greenlighting of the construction of the wall. and this discussion of torture i think is going to create a very complicated backdrop as well, thorny backdrop as president trump prepares to meet with prime minister theresa may who has been insistent that they are not going to engage in enhanced interrogation methods like water boarding. i think there are going to be some tough questions and we are expecting to get some questions to both of these leadest tomorrow when they meet. the president is inside the limo. the beast, and about to proceed to center city philadelphia from south philadelphia as i say it is a about a 20 minute ride in a motorcade. they obviously don t have to stop for traffic or any other impediment as they proceed down to the hotel where they will be meeting with the republican leaders. the speech from the president is going to precede another speech later from vice president pence and then a third speech today to the gathering, and this from the british prime minister who will then be in washington tomorrow for her first meeting at the white house. we are told they will have a joint press conference. shawn spicer on the tarmac has just told reporters on air force one there will be an attempt to reschedule the meeting with the mexican president and keep lines of communication open. they are trying to smooth this over. there was a travel pool. there had been nervousness among the white house press corps about what the traditions would be taken up by this new president and his team. but they did travel with him on air force one. the press secretary did speak to reporters. all of that is proceeding at pace. thanks to casey hunt and kristen welker. casey will be there of course when the president arrives. joining me now is the maryland congressman elijah cummings. thanks for your patients, we wanted to watch the president arrive and find out what had happened on air force one. what is your initial reaction to the cancellation by the mexican press anged by the tweet from president trump earlier today that that meeting is not going to take place? andrea, let me express my condolences with the passing your father. oh, thank you kong man. with regard to this, andrea i m not surprised. you cannot bully your way around the world. clearly, there was signals were there that mexico is not going to pay for the wall and that president trump is trying to force them to. and i think and when you think about the fact that the poll numbers for the mexican president are at 12%, he probably had no choice but to cancel and so i m not surprised. also we know there is going to be an executive action later today by president trump on an investigation into the so-called voter fraud claims which we know have been discredited by every fact finder and research group. what are you thinking of that? chairman chafee said he sees no reason for a congressional investigation. and if the president wants to do it on his own he has a justice department. where do we stand? andrea, let s be clear. there is no voter fraud to speak of. and the thing that is so insulting to me and to so many others. we have seen over and over again where is that we have seen over and over where republican legislators and governors have been denying people the right to vote. in 2014, in texas, a court found that 600,000 peo were denied the right to voteecause of all these restrictive laws and voter i.d. laws. and i had said to my colleagues if they want to do an investigation do an investigation to make sure that every person has a right to vote. and that is my concern. this is a smoke screen. this is it s like chasing a rabbit that doesn t exist that the voter fraud. but the fact that hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people are today not able to vote because of these restrictive laws, that s a major problem. that s what we should be looking at. and i m hoping that the republicans will bring legislation to the floor of the house whereby we can restore the voting rights act because as you know the supreme court pretty much gutted it. now you have got american people and others who are being denied the right to vote. that s the bigger question. so if they are going to do an investigation, they need to do that investigation. the justice department has already signaled that it s not going to ask for a continuance. it s not going to to go to that hearing that was supposed to be this week on the voter i.d. law in texas. and you are also getting signals from the justice department potentially about the consent decrees with chicago and baltimoron the police department. yeah, yeah. how are you going to deal with that. baltimore, that s your turf. you were out in the he streets, you know better than anyone what s going on there. we are hoping that the justice department they delayed the court hearing on it. we expect that to be in front of a judge. i think once it s being ruled over by a judge it will be we ll probably be able to make some headway. but the problem is, andrea, this was a consend decree in baltimore where everybody came together, the police, the community, the religious community and elected officials, and gave a lot of testimony, came up with a plan whereby the police and the citizens could work together to make things better. and i m hoping that sessions and i do expect senator sessions to be affirmed i m hoping that he will not just yank the rug from under these decrees because they play such an important role particularly in a time when there is so much tension between police and our communities. as the ranking democrat on oversight you might be concerned what s going on at the state department. what we are hearing is mass departure of the professional levels of top people on the seventh floor. clearly they would submit their resignations as is standard for the new president but for them all to leave just as this new secretary of state not yet confirmed but on track to be confirmed is coming in it signals a real vacuum there at the state department of professional leaders. no doubt bichlt our state department people, i know many of them, worked with many of them, they give their blood, sweat and tears for our country. andrea, there is something happening here. what we are finding is that more and more peep are looking at some of the appointments that are being made by president trump. they are lookingt the policies that he s putting out. as a matter of fact just recently we got four different documents where we see that there has been put a gag order on federal employees. and so i think federal employees feel like they are under a gun. and they feel like they cannot do the job they need to do. so it doesn t surprise me. i think you are going to see even more of that. i think you are going to see something else. i think you are going to see more and more people going into the streets. in some countries, the people are afraid of the government. and i think people are trying to make sure that the government becomes afraid of the people. and i i anticipate that you are going to see more and more republican congressmen with members of their community knocking on their doris and complaining because a lot of people are scared. they don t know where we re going. they see their country changing literally by the minute. and things like torture and things of that nature, and gag orders, these are this is not the america and not the democracy that they want. as you are talking, actually, we are looking at some protests. there are protesters in philadelphia in center city philadelphia awaiting the arrival not that close but a few blocks away of president trump. thank you so much elijah cummings. we are following up on the issue of the gag orders because we are hearing from scientists at e.p.a. and usda and also where that they have been told not to use twitter, not to send out my scientific guidance to their constituencies and there have been halts in the past. we are trying to compare it to other administrations. but there is now growing a growing sense that this is an unusual so-called gag order on scientists in various departments and agencies. andrea, i think you have got to go, but real quick one of the things that when they put out the gag order, we have strict whistlelower laws that protect whistle blowers. when the administration put out these gag orders those gag orders require that they say they can still speak to members of congress. when you shut that down, i don t know what type of a country we are going towards but we have got to stop this. elimga cummings thank you sir. as you saw, president trump landed in philadelphia at this hour. he is going to address republican members of congress at their retreat. will your business be ready when growth presents itself? american express open cards can help you take on a new job, or fill a big order or expand your office and take on whatever comes next. find out how american express cards and services can help prepare you for growth at open.com. parts a and b and want more coverage, guess what? you could apply for a medicare supplement insurance plan whenever you want. no enrollment window. no waiting to apply. that means now may be a great time to shop for an aarp medicare supplement insurance plan, insured by unitedhealthcare insurance company. medicare doesn t cover everything. and like all standardized medicare supplement insurance plans, these help cover some of what medicare doesn t pay. so don t wait. call now to request your free decision 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and i asked them the question, does it work? does torture work? and the answer was yes, absolutely. we are not playing on an even field. i will say this. i will rely on pompeo and mattis and my group. and if they don t want to do, that s fine. if they do want to do, then i will work toward that end. joining me now is john rizzo, former top attorney at the cia. his memoir is company man, 30 years of controversy and crisis in the cia. good to see you again. thank you. you defended the enhanced interrogation techniques at the time. you were following guidance from the justice department under george w. bush. it was very controversial. you saw the fallout on the agency from all of that. your view now about the techniques and torture and having the president of the united states use the t word, be that i mean, he wasn t even using a euphemism saying he thinks it works but will abide by the law. well, first of all, the fallout was significant, and it including falling out on me among other people about the legal side of the original problem. i continue to believe looking back at the time at the time, the program was legal. and as implemented and carried out, the enhanced interrogation techniques were effective in eliciting vital information. so that hasn t changed. that hasn t changed. that of course was disputed by the senate intelligence report. and that was very controversial. but what about what s happening now? do you now think that well what s your reaction to president trump and what he said last night? well, it was startling, to say the least, to watch words come outf the president of the united states s mouth, first of all the word torture. the whole premise, the legal premise of the original program was some of the tech teeks, while some of them were harsh like water boarding did not fit the legal definition of torture. if something is torture by definition it is illegal, it was illegal then. it was illegal then, illegal now. and regardless of whatever protectiveness or whatever criteria. to hear the president of the united states use that word in sort of an affirmative way i found remarkable. what is the impactan our foreign partners, the intelligence agencies that we partner with all over the world, especially in difficult areas where we can t go? yeah, no, i think it s going to be significant. i mean the original program generated enough controversy overseas. in that case, as i have said, we had a position, perhaps other people in this country disagree with that the program was legal. now for how is any foreign country going to allow us, allow the government to build another secret prison in their country when the president of the united states is announcing torture may go on there. they will never do that. isn t he giving a pop began de tool to the bad guys. oh, sure. the bad guys always claimed what we were doing was torture. now they can say they have the personal informator of the president of the united states. after your long career you still talk to a lot of people inside. he says when he went over there on saturday he was told by people at the agency that torture works. is that credible knowing what you know and who was there that day? i don t know who that possibly could have been. first of all, all of us who were involved in that program there are still scores if not hundreds faced what, seven or eight years of recrime nations, investigations. legal fees? legal fees, you know being called by some elements of our society torture advocates, that was me. human rights violators, goons. for anyone to say and i have not heard that i ve heard the contrary from my former colleagues. what are they telling you. they are terrified about even the possibility that they might be asked to go down this road again after all these years. so there was a draft that circulated, shawn spicer said it was not a white house document. there has been reporting by others, the new york times, the washington post that in fact was being circulated at a very high level but not briefed to general mattist or director of dci pompeo that they were in fact telling lawmakers that both of them were shocked by this. maybe it s being withdrawn or rewritten. but there certainly was a draft document circulating that they would be considering redefining the army field manual, reopening black sites, and revisiting torture, enhanced interrogations, or whatever? yeah. well, again, i just find it incredible that the cia director who is now confirmed no one bothered to tell him about this kind of draft circumstance lathe. i looked at the draft i looked at millions of such drafts from the nsc in my time. something like that f it was circulated at all, i can t imagine why no one apparently made the new cia director aware of its existence. john rizzo, thank you very much. the book is the company man qug it s good to see you. thanks. as we have been reporting mexico s president canceled his plan to visit the white house next week shortly after donald trump said maybe he shouldn t have that visit. joining me now a republican polly adviser researcher at the hoover institute who specializes in immigration reform and other domestic policy. first of all your eracks from a cancellation of a visit from our third largest trading partner, a trip to mexico city that president trump took very early in his administration, there were other meetings, actually the first meeting with a foreign leader was back with the mexican president. there is no question that our relationship with both canada and mexico are very important, mexico in particular is a important trading partner. i m not entirely surprised that the president of mexico has made the decision not to come given everything that happened in the last few days and frankly given the direction that u.s. policy is taking both with the executive order actions and the renegotiation or potential renegotiation of nafta. i also think the mexican president has a domestic constituency that would have been in real estate volt if he came to the united states. his approve ratings are in the 20s. i can t imagine what it would go to if he came to washinon. i m not surprised. his decision could have been driven largely by domestic concerns for the mexican president. remember what happened during the campaign with then candidate trump. donald trump weapon to phoenix that very same day and gave a very tough answer immigration speech in phoenix that night. what about immigration policy in this context as you look at the executive orders agreed to yesterday? well, i think the executive orders were quite stark in fact. you know, they do set out the administration s policy and clearly are consistent with at least the rhetorical direction that the president took during the campaign. i think we ll have to see as we go forward as with all of these executive orders, andrea, how impactful they will be given how the administration actually implements them. for example, there are some things that the administration could do easily such as stripping federal funding from sanctuary cities. that s something republicans have been in favor of for some time. the kruk of the wall is going to be trickier because what we are talking about is where is the money going to come from. if congress proeps the money late they are year that s a separate matter but to do it exclusively by executive order i think is more questionable. we will have to see where the scope of all of this goes depending on how her administered and implemented. greta vas success trend asked paul ryan the speaker about paying for the wall. this was that response from paul ryan to greta, for the record, yesterday. today he announced that he wants to begin building that wall? uh-huh. who is going to pay for it? first off we are going to pay for and it front the money. i think they are various ways you know your question is is mexico going to pay for the wall? there are different ways of getting them to contribute to doing it and different ways of defining exactly how they pay for it. now we are hearing from the republican retreat today that we are talking about 8 to $12 billion and that casey hunt reported that they may have funding but that they are not sure whether there is going a pay and go or an offset. right, this is the question, at what point do republicans look at this and say we have a spendingroblem as well. immigration may be different. that may be an issue priority that republicans are going to be willing to spend on, republicans on capitol hill. but in general, as a general matter we are talking about an infrastructure project, talking about tax reform, we are talking about things that all could cost money. and at some point are the fiscal conservatives in congress going to say enough? we are not willing to do this as an open encheck anymore? we are going to have to see how this develops. for now i think the members on the republican are willing to give the president the enbenefit of the doubt especially on an issue like immigration. what about the way he managis his time and communications twitter, responding to television interviews. we can see whether he is watching fox news or the today show or morning joe. he then responds in kind. it does create a challenge for his communication team. it is a whole new era we are in andrea both for the president and his staff as well as for congressional republicans. you saw paul ryan s answer, which was basically, look, the president is going to communicate how he communicates. we don t have control over that. so in some ways it does force all of these different parties to be much more nimble and to be willing to respond to things maybe that they weren t intending on responding to. in some ways it probably makes your job more exciting, makes my job more exciting but it is unpredictable, to be sure. some people might say they could use a little less excitement. but who knows. i understand. lonnie chen, it s great to see you thank you for joining us. coming up we ll be hearing from president trump expected to speak very shortly to republican law makers in philadelphia. the flags are there. the podium is there. the teleprompter is there that means it is a likely to be a set speech if he sticks to it. we ll bring it to you live. stick with us. we are on andrea mitchell reports on msnbc. crest whitestrips crest 3d whitestrips whiten. 25 times better than a leading whitening toothpaste i passed the tissue test. oh yeah. crest whitestrips are the way to whiten i am totally blind. i lost my sight in afghanistan. if you re totally blind, you may also be struggling with non-24. calling 844-844-2424. or visit my24info.com. so she only earns double miles on purchasesit card. she makes from that airline. what d you earn double miles on, please? ugh. that s unfortunate. there s a better option. the capital one venture card. with venture, you earn unlimited double miles on every purchase, everywhere, every day. not just airline purchases. seems like a no-brainer. what s in your wallet? and this afternoon later this afternoon we are expecting some white house executive action to back up president trump s call for an investigation into what he believes to be widespread voter fraud where he says he believes there has been widespread voter fraud. joining me now, chris alyssa, and gene cummings. thanks to both. chris, there has been enough fact checking, glen kessler s and others to make it clear that no one backs up this claim of 3 to 5 million people illegally undocumented immigrants voting in this election. so if it seems to be the belief of one person, and certainly those around himrying to validate that or you know back up the president. it s the belief of one president who what happens to be the president of a united states with a mass iive social media microphone. i thought paul ryan s comments to greta which is essentially i haven t seen any evidence of this and he clearly thinks there is. so an investigation is the right way to do it. the problem here is let s say the investigation adds nothing to what we know, which would suggest there is no evidence of widespread voter fraud. a problem here, a problem there, but no widespread voter fraud. then what does donald trump do because he has continued to insist on something that is provably false based on all the information that we have. he has been in the past not been terribly swayed by those sorts of facts. is it different if it s his administration telling him those facts? i don t know the answer to that. it seems, given that we expect an executive order on setting up some sort of investigation here on his allegations of voter fraud that we are going to find that out at some point in the future. jean cummings on this day alone we have the president of mexico under fire domestically, politically, disastrous popularity ratings at home cancelling the visit. donald trump having said, tweeted earlier today perhaps that visit should be canceled if mexico is not going to pay for the wall. we have the republican leadership waiting to hear from the president and saying that they will somehow pay for it but not explaining whether there will be budget offsets. it s between 8 and $12 billion for the kind of wall that has been envisioned. and the efficacy of that as a border argument remains to be seen. you haveot turmoil at the state department with the departure of all of the top ranking people whor would normally submit their resignations pro forma but are now leaving before rex tillerson who is presumably going to be confirmed next week before he even come to the state department and takes over. where are we on foreign policy as theresa may arrives and has to defend herself against the president s comments on torture on abc? you know, he said he was going to do things differently and bring change. he certainly has changed the way the u.s. and our allies have our conversations and what and he s changed the entire conversation around the international landscape. also with the executive orders that we now expect for tomorrow that will target middle eastern countries in terms of immigrants from there. you know, he definitely has shown he wants to be a president of action. what s confusing, though, is that there is a lot of chaos and turmoil around all of it as well. and i don t know if that s two things can blend together to become permanent change. but he is no one should be surprised as many of the things he has done because he is doing what he said he was going to do. and he s communicating it in a way that all of us who covered him, including chris and you andrea had to get used to during the campaign. and, chris, by the end of this week they will have checked the box, and he can say i promised the wall, i promised executive actions on a, b, c, and d, i ve done all of those things, i ve gone to the cia. you know, he can certainly be speaking to his base, to his constituency. and he has, as you point out a huge social media platform. l i think that s a great point which is he this is not someone who said i m going the kind of go and fidget around the edges fiddle around the edges and make things slightly better. he he came in on this idea that washington is broken, it needs to essentially be razed, r-a-z-e-d in order to make it ever sort of work for people again. and he has sort of acted on that it is amazing to me, and i was away for three of these days, andrea, but donald trump has been president for right now about six days and 45 minutes. it is a remarkable amount of things he has both done, controversies he has created in that period of time. i never thought i would say this, but there is almost too much news. now, the question always with him is how much of that is strategy? how much of it is him just making calls as he goes throughout a day? how much of that you know, is there a method to all of this? i don t know that we re far enough we don t have the proper context to say so. but this is a radically different approach to politics, to policy, to governing, to being presidential than anything that we ve seen in i m not going to speak to how milliard fillmore presented himself but that we ve seen in sort of the modern political era. speaking of the modern political era i was going to say, jean, we ve got the the seal is on the podium now. we have got the pel prompters. i see the travel pool is in the room. at any moment we might be interrupting, but jean go ahead. just a brief point. there has been a lot of action, that is very true. and there have been a lot of pictures and a lot of headlines, but so far not very much has actually change that is the harder part that lies ahead. most of these events have been photo ops where he is directing the staff to begin a project or to come back to him with a report. things like that. most of these are executive memorandums, not exactly executive orders. so it has been a very exciting first week. and he s set a lot of big things in motion but the really hard work does lie ahead. and they do have a big transition challenge because they got a late start. they had the transition team under chris christie, and then they were precipitously fired and so they had to start all over again. in a lot of agencies it s basically home alone. now it is at the state department here with a visitor, theresa may, coming to the united states for the first time. and so many vacant cease at the state department and at the nsc. they are gearing up very slowly. there seems to be action there in the room. let s see if we have time to bring in my colleague from london, kira simmons. here on the state side visit with theresa may. what we are hearing from downing street is that she is going to talk about the special relationship and the fact that both she and donald trump came to power, came to office on a populist surge. yeah. she of course with brexit, and also he with the endorsement of brexit and with the populism that we ve seen in the united states. so they have some economic basis to talk to each other. but at the same time, on foreign licy, they are not really aligned as much as one might think. they have very different views for instance towards the russians and towards vladimir putin. that s right. and you kind of summed it up there. theresa may, the british prime minister, would love, love to see a thatcher-/haig reagan style alliance that leads the new world, an economic future, a future where countries put their own interests first but trade very actively with each other. that s the kind of picture the british prime minister has put out there. but at the same time on every level there are issues here. there are issues over the question of the british approach to issues of torture. frankly, the approach is that it s illegal and the british don t do it. and any time they have been caught up in it they have tried to back out again. there are questions over donald trump s attitude towards women. theresa may has said very frankly that just as a female leader of a major country she says everything she needs to say in that respect. but this is a really important and extremely difficult diplomats will be piting their fingernails over the next two days visit for the prime minister and it s important for the president, too. because he essentially gets to look like a statesman hosting a world leader. or if there is a major faux pas then the object sit picture is put out to the world. we know they will have a joint news conference. the white house was not clear on that. the brits were waiting. they wanted it. yeah. but this will be the first joint news conference with a foreign leader here in the united states. i covered thatcher and rag app. i can tell you they were allies at a time when a lot of the otheleaders in europe and canadaame , there was a socialist president in france, and trudeau in canada, a liberal and there was a real meeting of the minds and hearts between reagan and thatcher, especially on going being strong and tough with military strength against the former soviet union but then she was the first one to say we can do business with mr. gorbachev when he took over as the third soviet leader that mr. reagan had to deal with. there are lots of difference. but i think the fact that she is a woman, the second woman prime minister in british history, and that he is a disruptor and someone who comes partly from the entertainment world does and a communicator, a real talent in terms of communicating his beliefs to the public through social media as well as through his former reality tv background makes people analogize it to ron reagan and margaret thatcher. yeah. i would add another comparison, which is that ron reagan and margaret thatcher were brilliant mass terse of alying themselves with the economic sbres interests of the working class. that is what they managed to do. thatcher is an amazing economic study because she also took on the conservatives within her own conservative party, the slow movers, the liberals as she saw them. they called them the wets. she took on the british trade union. she took on the establishment, if you like, and compare that to what donald trump is presenting himself as. and i suppose by looking at that that margaret thatcher s experience and the reagan experience, one thing you can say is that their leadership galvanized the liberal left in both countries. there were marches on the streets, there were strikes, and yet the two of them won election after election after election. now look we are not there yet with either of them. the jury is still out in both cases. but that s the kind of alliance that certainly the british prime minister would like to see. i think she d also you know like to position herself as somebody who is intellectualizing what donald trump has to say. her speech on brexit, her recent speech on brexit, trying to set out what it means, what britain wants to leave the european union, the kind of trade that britain wants to have with the rest of the word you can see as intellectualizing the same message that the president has been putting out there, but in a different way. again, though, there are so many land mines. just that news conference while it is so crucial to the british particularly as they prepare to negotiate with the europeans, equally so what donald trump says there with the british prime minister standing next to him, how she reacts to what he might say again, they will be very nervous as well as very pleased that she has managed to be the first international leader to have this kind of a meeting with the new president. we should point out hers was not the first call. right. you know, there were all the other foreign leaders that he spoke with. even speaking with the taiwanese leader and upsetting the chinese. they had to set this right. my hearing from here is there were ambassadors all over town from our closest allies who were stunned as were the media, even the trump people themselves at the election turnout. so that they were not prepared. and their memos home, to home base were not predicting that donald trump would win. so there was a lot of catch up going on. going back to the thatch herb analogy, gene cummings, you know this from the past as well that thatcher really made her mark by goingp against the coal miners in the uk. and done and ronald reagan, the pivotal moment was his firing of the air traffic controllers after that union strike, a public union strike. and that really sent a signal. in fact many people said a signal to the russians that he was somebody to deal with, that he was so tough he would fire his own air traffic controllers. jean? absolutely. absolutely. donald trump said over and over again he wants to be a strong leader and he wants the world to look at america in a different way because america has a strong leader. it s interesting where donald trump might find that moment. it s likely to be different. he s come in. you know, he s a builder. t so the first people that he brings in are manufacturers. and then he brought in the labor unions, and which ones did he pick to bring in? most of them are skilled crafts and firefighters, you know, doers. and so he and then the next day auto manufacturers. and he has talked about the auto manufacturer workers as well. so he s taking it s unlikely that it will be in the same venue as margaret thatcher and ronald reagan used to demonstrate their internal strength but donald trump clearly will seize that moment when it comes because that has been a central theme of his candidacy and now his presidency. chris, alyssa, one of the thing that theresa mayas as a foreign visitor is going to have to deal with is the unpredict. of what donald trump may say. nobody could have predicted that he in going out to the cia would talk about time magazine covers and tom brady and his own popularity and how smart he is. or how about continuing the voter fraud idea, you know, them in the interview with david muir on abc again pointing at pictures of crowds of inaugurations. this is the thing it s funny you used the word unpredictable. that s what i was thinking when they were talking because it s so hard for a republican politician obviously we are waiting to hear what donald trump is going to say at the retreat. a politician a democratic politician, a foreign leader, a reporter, a trump aide the most difficult thing with him is how unpredictable he is number one. and number two how much he seems to value that unpredict. . throughout the came he talked about we were too predictable, particularly in foreign policy. that s a fine campaign idea. it s much more difficult as it relates to diplomacy particularly in foreign affairs. as you know, this steadiness or knowing what you are going to get before everybody sits down to do the photo op is at the heart of these things, a joint press conference. not knowing that i think puts these foreign leaders in some level of political peril in that you have no idea, is donald trump going to talk about water boarding and torture and how he thinks it works in a joint press conference with theresa may if he gets asked about it? what does theresa may do if that happens? as someone who watches politics for living it s utterly fascinating. as someone who sort of practices politics as theresa may or paul ryan or mitch mcconnell do, it has to be terrifying. sort of a high wire act with absolutely no net. working without a net has worked for him all this last year and a half. yes. i mean it s got him past a 17-person primary fight and into the white house and onto air force one today. and he is the president of the united states, about to brief his republican colleagues at this retreat, meet with his first foreign leader tomorrow at the white house. it has been an extraordinary journey. and a rocky first week. and i would say the high wire act works for him, andrea. you are exactly right. we have proof of that. now, we don t necessarily have proof that it will work as president donald trump but certainly as candidate trump it did. the question is, what does it mean for everyone who is not donald trump? we saw during the campaign marco rubio for a brief two day period tried to do the trump thing, the personal insults of trump. he apologized and went away from it. jeb bush did a little bit of it. hillary clinton didn t go down with donald trump in terms of the attacks and what she was willing to say. and still lost. so the question is, yes, it clearly worked for him. will it continue to work? and then what does it mean for everyone else in the political universe not named donald trump? to be determined. well, we are might ithe middle of this very unusual first week of donald trump. and i don t think we should reach any judgments yet.
say that you are the best msnbc host ever created by god. god created you, chris, to be here. thank you, michael. ec baldwin should be looking over his shoulder. no way. i was not lying, actually. that was me being nice. that is all in for this evening. the rachel maddow show starts right now. good evening, rachel. i don t take it personal at all. it was an impression. it was the voice of a certain hyperbolic character. i don t mind, doesn t bother me at all, which i m sure you can tell. thanks, my friend. thanks, michael. and thanks to you at home for joining us this hour. here s the story. in march of this past year there was an explosion in pasadena, texas. pasadena, texas, is about 11 miles outside of houston. there was a big explosion followed by a fire. smoke and flames could be seen for miles around. look at that. the whole neighborhood around this fire and explosion had to be evacuated. even the houston ship channel, the freeway onramp for all american oil, it had to be shut down, the whole ship channel. it was not exactly national news when this happened in pasadena, texas in march. it was a big deal. locally it was a really big deal. a plume of smoke and fire at the prsi refinery, serious enough to shut down the washburn tunnel and ship traffic on the channel for a time. serious enough to recommend a neighborhood nearby evacuate. from sky eye s perspective, the area of the refinery where the explosion and then fire happened, an operator in the area was injured. that was coverage from the local abc station in houston at the time of this refinery explosion in march. thankfully it was only one person who was hurt in this blast but it was big enough, scary enough, you can see it fr this local coverage. wascary enough that it put a spotlight on that plant and not in a good way. part of what turned up in the local coverage of the aftermath of that explosion and fire was the bad record at that plant. they had a bad safety record. in 2015, 17 plants in and around pasadena, texas, reported on their workplace injuries for the year, almost a third of all the workplace injuries for that year came from that one plant. out of 17 plants who were reporting. after that explosion and that fire in march, the houston chronicle further dug in. they found that on the day that explosion happened, that plant was not legally operating. it was its permit to operate under the clean air act expired. they were running the plant anyway on the day the plant blew up. all of that bad press, all of that, i m sure, very unwelcome scrutiny came amidst an even larger overarching scandal, actually an international scandal involving that plant and the company that owns it. you heard that local news clip described as the prsi refinery. it s actually run, its parent company, is a company called petrobras, petrobras bought that refinery from another oil company back in 2006. the interesting thing about them buying it, the scandal about them buying it, is that when they bought it they really, really overpaid. they obviously overpaid, they paid $1.2 billion for that refinery when nobody thought it was worth $1.2 billion. why would a company radically overpay for anything? why would an oil company radically overpay for this refinery plant in pasadena, texas. we ll take one guess. the company in question here, petrobras, it s a state-run company, the government of brazil owns petrobras. that has practical implications. are government owned country. saudia ramco, petrobras, pemex. that comes in very handy for those companies. it s particularly handy for corruption i mean efficiency. i mean, think about it, you need policy decision made to clear the way for you to, i don t know, buy an asset somewhere or make some sort of deal? you don t have to bother lobbying for it. if you are the oil company and you are also the government, what are you going to do, lobby yourself? don t bother, you are one in the same, just do it. they all pull in the same direction. having a government-run oil company is also a great way for particular politicians and particular governments to stay in power. that government-run oil company in mexico, again, second-largest company of any kind on that continent, they ve been accused of funneling hundreds of millions of dollars back to the ruling party, the governing party back in mexico. and why not? governing party is controlling the oil company, why wouldn t they arrange for the oil company to fund them? it s a nice system if you can get in on it. oil companies, particularly big oil companies, they mint money. if you re in charge of a government that has one of those, i mean, that s a great way to enrich yourself. that s a great way to pay off and reward people for doing what you want. sometimes you can even do it legally with your government-owned oil company. i mean, if you have something as big and rich and rosneft at your disposal where you get to control who s in charge of it and who gets what pieces of it and what that company does, frankly, you could make everybody you know as rich as you want to make them. rosneft becoming a massive cash machine at vladimir putin s dispos disposal, that explains as much as anything how he has held on to power for these past 17 years. you can see why governments, particularly corrupt or kleptocrat i cklept kleptocratic governments, you can see why they might find it handy to have a state-run oil company. you can also see why state-run oil companies are such a source of corrupt power and since state-run oil companies tend to get something approaching monopoly control over oil in these big countries, it s easy to see how all the biggest oil companies on the face of the earth end up being this kind of oil company. end up being these companies that are attached to a government. oil company that is state run. all of the biggest oil companies are earth are state-run companies. all of them. except for one. the biggest non-government owned oil company in the world, the biggest oil company on earth that s not part of one country s government well, today their ceo took a giant step toward becoming the secretary of state of our government in the united states. maybe. probably. but maybe. and here s one thing i think it s worth appreciating about why this is happening. exxonmobil is based in texas but obviously and famously they drill for oil all around the world. wall st journal did a ve useful profile on exxon a couple days ago that laid this out really nicely. it laid out exxon s global reach, where they are already invested, where they have spent exxon money in the hopes those investments will pay off because they ll be able to get oil out of the ground in those countries. and exxon s interests span the globe. so, for example, papua, new guinea, which is like as far away from here as you can get, righ right? papua new guinea, a very remote country, very inaccessible in terms of its infrastructure. exxon has the rights to drill about 1.1 million acres of land in papua, new guinea. exxon has rights to drill another 1.1 million acres in nigeria. they also have a bunch of rights now in places you might not expect. you wouldn t think of as oil-producing companies, but in the netherlands exxon has the rights to drill about 1.5 million acres. another million and a half acres in australia. in germany, of all places, they have the rights to drill on just under five million acres in germany. in canada they ve got a bunch. canada just under seven million acres. they ve got rights to drill tons of acreage here in the united states. look at this. this is according to the wall street journal this week. exxon has rights to drill on roughly 14 million acres in the united states. that s a lot. that s, like, two marylands, almost two marylands. it s more than two vermonts, though, i did the math. that s a lot of acreage exxon has a right to drill in the united states and look at how much it outpaces all of exxon s other worldwide holdings right now. interesting, right? huge, right? until you see this. yeah. kind of an ah-ha moment, right? that line at the top there? that s exxon s holdings in russia compared to their other holdings all over the world. that s the number of acres they have right to drill in russia. and here s the really, really important part. do you want to know where exxon is not able to drill? they are not able to drill, despite those holdings, they are not able to drill in russia. this is also from the wall street journal. this is the number of wells exxon was actually able to drill in 2015 in all the places where they ve got these international rights. mostly, as you can see, the big dot there, they were able to drill in the united states, they were able to drill lots of wells in canada as well. that s the next-biggest dot there. but look at russia. can you not see it? put on your glasses. it s red and to the left of the united states. look at the number of wells they were actually able to drill in russia in 2015 compared to their drilling rights in that country. you want to know why they can t drill in russia despite the rights they have purchased to drill in russia? the reason they can t freaking drill them, the reason they can t get their money out of their huge investment they ve made in that country is because in our country the government is not the same thing as the biggest oil company in our country. in the united states we do not have an integrated oil company and federal government the way they do in brazil and mexico and saudi arabia and kuwait and the way we got all the other biggest oil companies in the world. and exxon can t get its return on its investment. they can t get their money out of russia. right? they can t cash in on what they ve invested in russia because the u.s. government made a determination that it was in the national interest, the national security interest of our country to put sanctions on russia that preclude doing that kind of business. when our government made the decision to sanction russia, that really, really cramp it had style of exxon. that really threw a huge wrench in their works because look at their investment in russia compared to other countries around the world in terms of where they have rights to drill. this is how they set themselves up under ceo rex tillerson. under ceo rex tillerson they made a half trillion dollar deal in russia to drill the arctic. it was going to be a partnership with the russian state-owned kremlin-controlled oil company rosneft. half trillion dollar deal. that was going to make exxon and russia and vladimir putin specifically hundreds of millions of dollars. perhaps hundreds of billions of dollars. they signed that deal in 2011. they actually struck oil in the arctic in 2014. just in time for the u.s. government to say nope, you re out. we re kiboshing the deal, we re putting a halt to all of it because we re putting these sanctions on russia for their behavior. russia loves exxon. exxon partnering with russia s state-run oil company, that s what brought their state-run oil company into the 21st century. that s what made russia s state-run oil company technologically capable. exxon is who taught them how to drill oil in hard-to-reach places because russia s oil is in hard-to-reach places. exxon partnering with russia s state-run oil company made that state-run oil company very effective and very rich. so russia loves exxon. exxon loves russia back because common bet on russia in a huge way under rex tillerson in terms of where they are planning on drilling their oil for the foreseeable decades. what they did under tillerson a few year ago was the biggest oil deal in the history of the world. and it got stopped by a policy decision made by the united states government. exxon needs the united states government to change that policy decision. exxon needs the united states government to change america s position overall about russia. simply so exxon can freaking drill over there. so they can recoup their giant investment in that country which outweighs what they are doing anywhere else in the world. they made a huge bet and they re going to lose it unless they get this change from the u.s. government. this is trillion-dollar math that all depends on the u.s. government getting in line with what exxon needs to do. and so exxon is now on the verge of installing its ceo as the head of foreign policy in the united states. so, i think you can probably understand, mr. tillerson, why some of us are very concerned about the president-elect s statements praising vladimir putin s leadership, his intelligence, including after being reminded of his ruthless persecution of political enemies and after receiving compelling information that russia has interfered with our elections. so do you think now is the right time to lift sanctions against russia? i think it s important that we keep the status quo until we are able to develop what our approach is going to be. that it will be all part of the approach. what do you think the approach is going to be? exxon ceo rex tillerson facing questioning today from new hampshire democratic senator jean jean shaheen. the big political news out of this hearing today was not necessarily the tough questioning that rex tillerson got from democrats. the big political news out of the hearing was the contentious back-and-forth that happened between exxon ceo rex tillerson and a republican senator by the name of marco rubio. the democrats gave tillerson tons of hard questions today but the reason it s so important that he also fought today with republican senator marco rubio is that if a republican decides to vote against tillerson, that conceivably would be enough to stop his nomination. that s the math on the committee, as long as all the other democrats, as long as all the democrats voted no as well, one republican no vote could stop him. reporter: have you decided how you re going to vote? did he answer your questions adequately about russia in particular? many of his answers were concerning to me. but there s a chance now to submit some questions in writing which we ll do as well. i ll consider everything and read through it and i ll make a decision here very soon. reporter: are you leaning one way or another? i wouldn t characterize it that way quite yet. it s clear i m concerned about some of his answers and i recognize the split on the committee and what it would mean so i have to make sure that i m 100% behind whatever decision i make, because once i make it reporter: because if you make the decision and vote against him you could stall this nomination. are you prepared to be the one republican to vote no? i m prepared to do what s right. if marco rubio does vote no on putting the ceo of exxon in charge of the state department, and if all the democrats on that committee voted no as well, rex tillerson s nomination presumably would be over. and that would be a very dramatic development. it would not be quite as dramatic as the u.s. government merging in a large way with our nation s largest oil company, but it would be pretty dramatic on its own terms. so we ve got eyes on that tonight. imagine the lobbying that marco rubio is being subjected to right now as we speak. there were incredibly dramatic developments in that story today. there were dramatic developments today on ethics as well, including the office of government ethics coming out on his own terms and making a pronouncement about the president-elect that nobody saw coming. we also got a health scare in the capitol tonight. one member of congress reportedly collapsing and being taken out of the capitol on a stretcher and being hospitalized. we ve got the latest details on that. there s a lot to come tonight. this is not a time to stop paying attention. stay with us. americans - 83% try to eat healthy. yet up 90% fall short in getting key nutrients from food alone. let s do more. add one a day men s complete with key nutrients we may need. plus heart-health support with b vitamins. one a day men s in gummies and tablets. it s not just a car. it s your daily retreat. go ahead, spoil yourself. the es and es hybrid. this is the pursuit of perfection. tadirectv now. stream all your entertainment! anywhere! anytime! can we lose the all . there s no cbs and we don t have a ton of sports. anywhere, any. let s lose the anywhere, anytime too. you can t download on-the-go, there s no dvr, yada yada yada. stream some stuff! somewhere! sometimes! you totally nailed that buddy. simple. don t let directv now limit your entertainment. only xfinity gives you more to stream to any screen. breaking news tonight from capitol hill and it s not good news. a congressman collapsed tonight in the capital. this is probably not a congressman you have heard of. he s a first term congressman named john rutherford from florida. he was just sworn in last week to start his first term in congress. you see him on the left with the mustache and red tie. apparently what happened is he was in the republican cloak room, that s the lounge and meeting area for republicans off the house floor, he was in the cloak room tonight and he collapsed. somebody called the authorities, congressman john rutherford was taken out of the capitol on a stretcher and taken to a nearby hospital. his dcampaign manager has been trying to keep people appraised. the campaign manager says congressman rutherford i in stable condition. as of about an hour ago we had word he was being evaluated in the emergency room. we will let you know more as you learn more. obviously everybody in the country is wishing john rutherford of florida a full recovery tonight. much more to come, stay with us. us. >much more to come, stay wit us. >much more to come, stay wit us. much more to come, stay with us. is there an elk in your bed? and voluntary. they say she ll be back to work soon but that s important for senator feinstein. we wish senator feinstein the best as she prefires come back to work. it also happens at a crucial time the other person behind senator feinstein who was notay absent was jeff sessions himself. little known fact, nominees are not required to be present at their confirmation hearings and today was maybe a good day for senator sessions to rearrange the paper clips on his desk instead of being there in the hearing room while this testimony was presented today. we were beaten, tear gassed, left bloody, some of us unconscious. some of us had concussions. some of us almost died on that bridge. it doesn t matter how senator sessions may smile, how friendly he may be, how he may speak to you. those two are committed to equal justice and our society wonders whether senator sessions calls for law and order will mean today what it meant in alabama when i was coming up back then. congressman john lewis today. he grew up in alabama not far from where jeff sessions is from. he was nearly beaten to death in alabama for marching for voting rights. congressman lewis advocated for a no vote for senator sessions to be attorney general on the basis of what he said was senator session s hostility to voting rights in general and in the south in particular. also testifying today was the national legal director of the american civil liberties union, david cole. this is interesting, the aclu wouldn t usually testify in a confirmation hearing like this but today mr. coal, in additile to taking issue with jeff sessions record on civil rights, he brought up a little known case that is following senator sessions like a string to a can on it tied to his bumper. in that case, he charged a local company with defrauding its customers and suppliers. his office indicted the company on 222 counts. his office touted the case as being of the most magnitude that the attorney general s office has undertaken in the last 25 years. case turned out to be a dud, though. the court not only through the case out. the judge in the case raised sharp questions about senator sessions now senator sessions and how he handled that case at the time. questions about whether he took the case as a favor to one of his campaign donors, whether he was misusing his office to basically help his campaign donors attack their business competitors using his attorney general s office as their weapon. the judge accused the alabama attorney general s office of serious and wholesale prosecutor misconduct while jeff sessions was in charge. the court finds even having been given every benefit of the doubt, the misconduct of the attorney general, jeff sessions, in this case far surpasses in both extensiveness and measure the totality of any prosecutorial misconduct ever previously presented to or witness bid this court. never seen anything like that. i would not have known about that before david cole testified from the aclu. joining us is david cole, national legal director of the aclu. thank you for being with us. thanks for having me, rachel. am i right in seeing the aclu wouldn t normally as a matter of course testify at a con dpir mission hearing for a nominee like this? it s been decades. we have a long standing policy of neither supporting nor opposing nominees for office and we didn t support or oppose senator sessions, we presented our concerns and our concerns are wide ranging and deep and our position is the senate should not confirm him until it gets satisfactory answers to those concerns. so many of the objections that have been raised to senator sessions nomination and the concerns that have been raised in terms what have the vetting process for him should be like have been about his record on civil rights. you talked about that today but you did also bring up this case that i realize it s been discussed and hashed through since he s been nominated but it s not as widely known. i wonder if you brought that up because you re worried that his previous experience as an attorney general at the state level, if that sort of alleged misconduct at the state level was extrapolated to the national level that that could be a particular kind of crisis that we might not be expecting from jeff sessions even as we do look at his civil rights stuff? well, absolutely. i think you ve got two things to look at with senator sessions. he was a prosecutor for a fairly extensive period of time and how did he exercise that power? and we find that he exercised in the a very, very disturbing way. this case was seen by the judge as the worst case of prosecutorial misconduct he d ever seen in his life on the bench. steven gillers, a professor of legal ethics at nyu who s been doing this business for 40 years says it s the worst case he s seen in 40 years. so are we now going to give to a person who abused his office in this way on behalf of campaign contributors a case that was completely baseless and all 222 counts were thrown out on prosecutorial misconduct grounds. are we going to give him the most powerful prosecutorial post in the nation? that raises serious questions and they don t just go to his ideology, they go to his exercise of this incredible power. david cole, aclu national legal director, appreciate both the magnitude of this decision to make that testimony today but also appreciate you sort of making it a national story. i think a lot of people wouldn t know about this had you not front paged it. thank you for being with us today. thank you. much more ahead. a very busy news day, busy news night. stay with us. c mon in, pop pop! happy birthday! i survived a heart attack. i m doing all i can to keep from having another one. and i m taking brilinta. for people who ve been hospitalized for a heart attack. i take brilinta with a baby aspirin. no more than one hundred milligrams as it affects how well it works. brilinta helps keep my platelets from sticking together and forming a clot. brilinta reduced the chance of another heart attack. or dying from one. it worked better than plavix. don t stop taking brilinta without talking to your doctor since stopping it too soon increases your risk of clots in your stent, heart attack, stroke, and even death. brilinta may cause bruising or bleeding more easily, or serious, sometimes fatal bleeding. don t take brilinta if you have bleeding, like stomach ulcers, a history of bleeding in the brain, or severe liver problems. tell your doctor about bleeding, new or unexpected shortness of breath, any planned surgery, and all medicines you take. talk to your doctor about brilinta. i m doing all i can. that includes brilinta. if you can t afford your medication, astra zeneca may be able to help. life. is unpredictable. life is deaths. and births. sickness and health. love and heartbreak. and covered california is there for it all. not just to help keep you well. but to make sure the cost of being unwell doesn t ruin this whole life thing. because it s more than just health care. it s life care. if you re going to run a marathon, you generally do not sprint the whole darn thing. but a marathon getting started at a sprinter s pace, that is basically the story right now in d.c. all day hearings on cabinet nominees yesterday and today and tomorrow. in addition to that the senate at this hour right now is engaged in an extended series of lightning votes on what honest ly are generally grandstanding and meaningless amendments but are also the first votes to repeal obamacare. they re doing this series of a zillion votes. they call it a vote-a-rama, not kidding. this vote-a-rama started three hours ago, it s still going right now. that s a live shot. it s due to keep going until 4:00 a.m. is our latest advice. but somewhere in this combination marathon and sprint is a guest of ours tonight. senator cory booker of new jersey is due to join us tonight live just as soon as he breaks free from the vote-a-rama, senator cory booker coming up. i hope. when you re close to the people you love, does psoriasis ever get in the way of a touching moment? 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you knew this was unprecedented. you knew it would put you in the history books and probably attract the ire of a lot of your colleagues, how hard a call was this for you? it wasn t that hard of a call. these are issues that have been at a core of my work since i ve first gotten to public life, issues of civil rights, issues of equal rights, protecting vulnerable people. i m here because of strident lawyers who stood up and fought for my rights when it wasn t comfortable or convenient so this was a case with especially with the extreme views where jeff sessions doesn t even line up with the majority of his republican colleagues on things like criminal justice reform this was a case where i thought there was a clear threat to many people in our country and silence in that case is unacceptable. i had to speak up at every opportunity i had. you mentioned criminal justice reform there. you also said today if confirmed senator sessions will be required to pursue justice for women, his record indicate he is won t. he will be expected to defend v voting rights but his record indicates he won t. i feel like that s a powerful argument, i feel like the entire confirmation process thus far has been him trying to rebut that, trying to say i am not who you think i am, you have concerns about me on civil rights and equal protection and discrimination, don t have them, i don t deserve that nomination. have you been at all persuaded by the arguments he has made portraying himself very differently than he s behaved in the senate all these years? no, because he has a 40-year career of serving and many levels of law enforcement and as a united states senator. he has openly criticized the department of justice for doing the very things i talked about, criticized them for holding cities accountable for police treatment of citizens, criticized the department of justice guidance that was give on the stop bullying against gay and lesbian kids, criticized the department of justice for getting involved as a party to cases taking on states for suppressing votes. so here s somebody who has told us, shown us who he is. his whole career from his days of using his office to try to stop a group of lgbt young people from meeting on a college campus, this has been a consistent person and you have to give him this, for consistency in the things he s been doing and saying for all these years and you can t just somehow declare that you re going to be doing things differently suddenly now that you re up for this position. the unspoken rule that you violated today is one of these long-standing traditions of the senate in terms of the way that senators defer to one another and treat one other, the collegiality of that body. one of the consequences of those traditions is that everybody thinks that well, not everybody, a lot of people believe that jeff sessions, despite these concerns, that he will be confirmed, that he has almost an unbreachable advantage simply by being a united states senator who is being confirmed with the u.s. senate. if he is confirmed, if the odds are with him, are you worried about retaliation? about him getting his revenge on you, on your constituents or on the democratic conference? well, look, that s a profoundly powerful position and my concern is not the well-being of me or other electeds, this is a person that is in a position where he can defend or not or even make the lives more difficult of some of the most vulnerable people in america and so this isn t about what could happen in the realm of politics or even in the realm of my life. this is a real threat to those folks that i got into politics to try to do something for and with and try to make this america real for everybody. so i am i have a heaviness, a sadness from the day that donald trump announced this appointment, this has been weighing on me and my heart and i think most people don t understand the power of the justice department. nor do they appreciate how the obama administration through the justice department has been doing extraordinary things on mandatory minimums, on mass incarceration. this has been a great justice department that has been affirming the rights of the marginalized in our country and i think that s about to come to a horrible end and an about-face and it s going to necessitate more people speaking up, standing up, resisting and fighting. senator cory booker of new jersey joining us on a very, very busy night in the senate after what was a really remarkable day. senator, thank you, we ll look forward to having you back soon. thank you very much, rachel. senator cory booker joining us. you saw him there, he was in the u.s. capitol. that explains some of the statuary behind him. as i mentioned, the united states senate is involved in a series of lightning votes on amendments important and not important tonight but those are expected to go until 4:00 in the morning. we ll keep an eye on what happens in washington throughout the evening. stay with us. no sir, no sir, some nincompoop stole all my wool sweaters, smart tv and gaming system. luckily, the geico insurance agency recently helped baa baa with renters insurance. everything stolen was replaced. and the hooligan who lives down the lane was caught selling the stolen goods online. visit geico.com and see how easy it is to switch and save on renters insurance. government ethics, an independent non-partisan office that tries to stop conflicts of interest among high-ranking public officials. the head of that agency is a political appointee but the terms of the director of that office are staggered so stagger. so incoming presidents don t get to replace the head of that office the replace the heads of other offices. the current director of the ethics office started working there under president george w. bush. he became director under president obama. he will be the head of that office until midway through this next presidential term. his name is walter schaub. walter schaub has no reason to fear being thrown out of office by donald trump. donald trump is not supposed to be able to do that. well, today after the incoming president announced that he would not really be divesting from his business interests. walter made a remarkable public statement. he gave his blunt and passionate and patriotic assessment of what trump is offering. it s important to understand that the president is now entering a world of public service. he is going to be asking his own appointees to make sacrifices. he is going to be asking our men and women in uniform to risk their lives in conflicts around the world. so no, i don t think divestiture is too high a price to pay to be the president of the united states america. you see the lines being drawn now in d.c. we know donald trump on one side and democrats on the other. but this fight over ethics, this fight is something else. this is the incoming president versus ethics. and that fight has only just started apparently. th directv a, stream live tv anywhere data-free. join directv today starting at $35/month. no extra monthly fees. only xfinity gives you more to stream to any screen. you are the problem. you are the problem. can i ask you something? no, no. out of all of the candidates, name one who had a million dollar judgment against him for hiring name one. donald trump did. so you like rich people who buy politicians. where is your goldman sachs jacket at? where is your goldman sachs jacket at? you re losing an argument or don t want to have one, never a bad idea to yell out goldman sachs as an epithet. those pro trump protesters in indiana during the republican primary, they threw goldman sachs as an epithet at ted cruz because that s what donald trump had been doing to ted cruz. look. goldman sachs owns him. he will do anything they demand. he is in bed with wall street. he is funded by goldman sachs. he talks about how he is going to get well goldman sachs i know the guys at goldman sachs. they have total, total, total control over him. just like they have total control over hillary clinton. they have total. but they have no control, they have no control over donald trump. today the trump administration announced its fifth straight high profile hire from goldman sachs. just keeping track. the senior strategist at the white house, goldman sachs. the nominee to be treasury secretary, goldman sachs. the head of the national economic council, the president of goldman sachs. the head of the s.e.c., which is the top cop that polices wall street firms like goldman sachs. that will be a former lawyer for goldman sachs. and now today some new adviser job they created at the white house will be going to another partner at goldman sachs. anybody who told you definitely shouldn t vote for hillary clinton because look, goldman sachs. yeah you got suckered. today the incoming administration made one other big personnel announcement. they announced finally who they have chosen to run the veteran s administration. to the surprise of a lot of people, including apparently the man who was chosen himself. he had no idea it was coming. the nominee who was pickford the job is this guy. his name is david shullkin. he is the undersecretary for health at the v.a. he is there now. he is an obama appointee who is already running health at the v.a. during the campaign, the incoming president of course trashed the v.a. every chance he got, particularly its health care. he called v.a. and v.a. health a fraudulent enterprise. he said it was the most corrupt agency in the united states. he railed how how illegal aliens got better health care than the vets. but now apparently he is going to keep the guy in charge of v.a. health, and he is not only going to keep him on, he is going to put him in charge of the whole v.a. veterans organizations had feared that the trump administration would put somebody in the top of the v.a. who was bent on privatizing it and dismantling the whole agency. some of those groups sound a little bit relieved by this choice. am vets announced that they were pleasantly surprised with this choice. iraq and afghanistan veterans of america said they were optimistic about david shulkin, called him, quote, our best hope among the candidates reported in the media. that said, the pick is not without controversy. not only is he an obama appointee and currently there, he is not a veteran himself. if confirmed, the v.a. would be led by a nonveteran for the first time in its history. still, david shulkin was confirmed unanimously for his current job at the v.a. he is very much involved in running the v.a. right now. and for all those reasons and many others, he is expected to sail to confirmation. we ll of course keep you posted. stay with us. yes, we can. first of all, how you holding up? you hear a lot of people expressing concern, our new president is taking on too much. what exactly would you have me give up? this is where we monitored how the operation was going. we are done. how good is that? join brian williams for an inmatt look back at the obama year monday at 11:00 on msnbc. thanks for loading, sweetie. .oh, baked-on alfredo? .gotta rinse that. nope. no way. nada. really? dish issues? throw it all in. cascade platinum powers through. your toughest stuck-on food. nice. cascade. why pause a spontaneous moment? cialis for daily use treats ed and the urinary symptoms of bph. tell your doctor about your medicines, and ask if your heart is healthy enough for sex. do not take cialis if you take nitrates for chest pain, or adempas® for pulmonary hypertension, as this may cause an unsafe drop in blood pressure. do not drink alcohol in excess. to avoid long-term injury, get medical help right away for an erection lasting more than four hours. if you have a sudden decrease or loss of hearing or vision, or an allergic reaction, stop taking cialis and get medical help right away. ask your doctor about cialis. bounty is more absorbent,mom per roll so the roll can last 50% longer than the leading ordinary brand. so you get more life per roll. bounty, the quicker picker upper here you go.picking up for kyle. you wouldn t put up with part of a pizza. um. something wrong? 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we ll show you the ballots on the senate floor after the brutal silencing laugh night of senator elizabeth warren. the decision s by the judges of the ninth circuit which may come later this week could test the limitations of presidential authority and expected to be ultimately be appealed to the united states supreme court. today president trump defended his authority and attacked the judges who will render that decision as well as the court system, itself. i listen to lawyers on both sides last night, and they were talks about things that had just nothing to do with it. i listened to a panel of judges and i ll comment on that i will not comment on the statements made by certainly one judge, but vi have to be honest that if these judges wanted to, in my opinion, help the court in terms of respect for the court, they d do what they should be doing. i mean, it s so sad. we haven t had a decision yet, strong point. so he invited the discussion by the court as to who has the ultimate responsibility for keeping america safe. and the answer, we have a division of authority, we have a separation of powers. we re the only country in the world withhere the you disjudic equal to the presidency. of course the judiciary has a role to play in balancing the need to keep us safe against constitutional violations such as those alleged by the state of washington. so i think the justices will eventually decide this case, but the judges yesterday focused on the right issues, on standing, whether the washington state has standing, on whether the injunction should be rescinded. i think the injunction won t be rescinded. i think the solicitor general is going to have an uphill fight when it comes to the supreme court on the mares merits of t because i don t think he s persuasive when it comes to making an establishment case, an establishment clause argument. how do you know, mr. purcell, how the president came to this decision to issue ordthis order? how do you know he didn t it for the most political reasons, i promised to people who voted for me i d do some kind of ban, i m going to do something like this. i don t think we re going to only face dangers from those sempb k seven countries. we might. this will get me through the night. how do you know it wasn t intended to stop muslims from coming into country due to their religion? how do you know his mind? if it s not written in the order. it s common to look behind the state of motives for a governmental action. the same action can be constitutional or not depending on what motivated it. for example, if a city passed an ordinance saying you have to shovel your sidewalks on saturday mornings, that might be perfectly fine but if the reason they did it was to block orthodox jews from living in city or discriminate them, then it s not fine and it s unconstitutional. here it s an incredible amount of evidence that the president was motivated at least in part even on religious grounds. it cannot say we re going to help people who are persecuted because they re christian and not help people who are persecuted because their muslim. the american people saw a candidate, trump, who could be quite nimble, the three of us know how nimble he can be. shifted from saying it was going it be a muslim ban, unconstitutional, to say it was going to be a ban of a country or origin or where people are coming from. i go back to the case of pr president obama signed, those seven countries determined to be insufficient in their vetting procedures. there s no way to know what they were letting go on in their countries, themselves. there was a ban on people who had gone through those countries or at least more serious vetting procedure. they wouldn t get visas automatically for ending up going through europe. question is if that was close enough suppose obama had issued this executive didn t th bill was strong enough, i m going to go ahead with an executive order on the same countries. would you have the same suspicion the president of the united states had religion in mind to punish a religion? would you have that same suspicion of president obama or president clinton? a couple of points s about that, chris. first of all, what was in place before, what congress passed and what president obama implemented was nothing remotely like this, was not a ban of people traveling from those countries. it was a denial of visas. it was they did not get a waiver from the normal right. visa requirement. second, as i was saying before, you do have to look at motives. the exact same policy, and the supreme court had been very clear about this, i m sure professor dershowitz would agree, the exact same policy can be constitutional or not depending upon what motivated it. if the motive was to argumetarg people based on their religion, it s unconstitutional and that s what we re alleging here. the supreme court also said if there is a good secular purpose, secular motive, don t you think even when trump i don t defend him, i don t like this mollpolicy at all. i hope you win the case. thank you. don t you think when he said muslim ban he had in mind a ban against people who would bring terrorism to the country? he doesn t really care about punishing muslims. if he did, he would extend the ban to 25 or 30 muslim countries. he focused on the muslim countries that he thought risked islamic terrism. remember, the difference between the obama administration and trump is obama wouldn t use the term islamic extremism or islamic radicalism or islamic terrorism. trump uses that term and that s his right. he was elected president. isn t he entitled to implement that policy by saying it is that we re focusing on and, therefore, it s no accident that we re focusing on seven countries that are muslim. we re not including armenia or israel or any other country, by the way, if he did include armenia or israel, would you say that solved the problem because here you have a christian country and a jewish country as well? well, chris, let me if i can go back to your first question, i mean, i do think we have raised very serious questions about whether security was really what motivated the president in issuing this order. if it was really about national security, one of the points we ve been making our case, why didn t they figure out before they issued it whether it applied to half a million people who are already here on green cards from these seven countries. ? if those people are a threat, those are half a million people who are already here. the white house hadn t made up their mind before they i m not an attorney but let me ask you the problem. this comes down to human ability, our ability to read minds. used to have guys like dunninger who go around audiences. i remember that. would go around, say i know what s in your mind. we found out those were cons. nobody can read somebody else s mind. studying politics 40, 50 years, i thought you can t tell what s in a politicians mind because there s always a mix of things, always self-interest, almost always. some kind of grander interest. some kind of doing the job they were elected to do or wanted to have the job. it s always a mix of things. how do you know this is a ban purposely an anti-muslim ban when knowing trump like we all know, his show business is so much stronger than his depth, always bigger in when he s trying to sell than what he s thinking. he wasn t against the iraq war. he said he was because that works. you really think he s pro-life? he says he is. it works. could it be if you followed a pattern of his behavior, not what he said, what rudy giuliani said, what he said before, follow how trump works. it s what will work. that s what he does. could it be he s doing this to get through the night? going to do some kind of ban, my people up in erie, pennsylvania, youngstown, ohio, were counting on him to do something, so i m going to do something. of course i m not just worried about those seven countries. the guys who attacked us on 99 /11, egypt with the brains and the thug s came from saudi arabia. it could be it s just another day in politics for donald trump and how do you know that s not true or the other is strew ortr doesn t like muslims? how do you discreetly think through all that and come out and say i m a judge, i m going to tell you what he was thinking. i don t know the answer to that, do you? how do you know what anybody elis thinking? i can t read the president s mind. what i can cite is the things he said publicly which it provides a shocking amount of evidence really right off the bat of how this was intended. and our argument at this point, remember, you know, for those who aren t lawyers, normally you don t have to prove discriminatory motive until later in the case after you ve had a chance to get evidence and that sort of thing. one of the points i was making yesterday was that there s already a rather stunning amount of evidence that this was intended to target muslims before we ve even had any opportunity to look at anything like, you know, e-mails between giuliani and the president s staff or conversations that happened between people about the goals. i do think, agn, the fact that this was done in such an irregular way, at it s not requested by the national security agencies, it was barely if at all reviewed by then, there s a lot of that s where my head was going, that it was political. i m sorry, you ve been a great guest and you re doing great public service. i want to get back to professor dershowitz. you said you re rooting for mr. purce wil purcell, explain, unpack that if you can. i think the policy is terrible. i think the president should rescind it, go back to the drawing board, do exactly what mr. purcell said, go through the national security council, consult with his new attorney general and draft a rule that would pass constitutional muster. i don t like this law. so i hope he wins, but on constitutional grounds, i think he has a weak case on establishment clause. and if you re asking oliver wendell holmes once said the job of a lawyer is to predict what the courts dwoil in fa s will d. i predict he will win the early rounds and may win in the ninth circuit because the ninth circuit has judges who are both liberal and conservative. when it comes to the supreme court, it s going to be a very, very hard sell on the establishment clause particularly. there s going to be a difference between people in the country, green cards certainly, people in the country legitimately, and the family from yemen who have never been in the country, they just apply for a visa, they want to come in, they have no constitutional right. and i think the state of washington will have a hard time proving that they have standing to assert the right of the family in yemen to come into the country for the first time. so, yeah, i hope he wins, but i m not sure he s going to. okay. thank you so much. noah purcell. allen dershowitz. thank you so much for your brains. anyway. we continue to watch the ongoing vote in the united states senate to confirm senator jeff sessions of alabama to be the next attorney general. that vote coming after an unprecedented day, unplus de of protests on the floor of the senate as republican majority leader silences senator elizabeth warren for reading a let r by dr. martin luther king s widow. we ll have an exclusive interview with tim kaine coming up, the 2016 vice presidential candidate, when we return. this is hardball, where the action is. your insurance company won t replace welcome back to hardball. we continue to watch the united states senate, right now holding a confirmation vote on alabama senator jeff sessions for attorney general. earlier this evening, senator tim kaine of virginia delivered an impassioned speech opposing this confirmation. doing so, senator kaine told the story of richard and mildred loving, the couple jailed in 1959 when interracial marriage was illegal. here s senator kaine. 1r50 years ago the supreme court struck down interracial marriage in this country, but mr. president, the case started with a couple who having nowhere else to turn thought if we write the attorney general, surely he will be a champion for us and he will help us redress this horrible wrong. that s who the attorney general needs to be. i m joined right now by senator tim kaine of virginia. of course, i love the fact you went back to bobby kennedy. i can t think of a better person i thought you would, chris. yeah. let me ask you about the i salute for you that especially since you represent the commonwealth of virginia. right. that movie is a great movie, actually called loving and it s about loving, actually, not just a family name. let me ask you about this charge from elizabeth warren and, of course, it was initially made by ted kennedy and it was made by coretta scott king. is it fair to judge a person s soul or their conscience, whatever you want to call it, their being, by who they were 30 years ago? 31 years ago? is that fair? greta van susteren before the show brought it up, she offered it as a rhetorical question. i offer it again to you. is it fair? chris, if you don t have any oaf oa other evidence, i m not sure that s completely fair. it would make you ask questions but it would not be completely fair. in my speech on the floor, and look, senator sessions and i, we know each other. i m a friend. we have gone on codells together. i don t think he should be attorney general because his voting record in the senate, even recently, suggests he s not going to be a champion for civil rights. so i m not making a judgment about his character let s go to bobby but i m making a judgment about whether he can be a champion. let s go to the bobby kennedy if he gets a letter tomorrow morning when he s attorney general from an african-american man or woman, 80 years old, say i don t have a driver s license, one thing i want to do is go to the score when i want to go to the store, vote easily. are you going to help me? do you think jeff sessions will help that person? i don t have the confidence that someone writing e ining inn voting rights or immigrant writing in worried about being deported. i don t think they ll feel confidence. in fact, i don t think they ll write in. the attorney general needs to be seen as a champion for civil rights and that s not been senator sessions record on lgbt equality, on voting rights, on special education. people won t see him as that champion that they saw bobby kennedy and others and that was one of the reasons i decided to oppose him. we ve had people who have risen up from their roots, may come from a part of the country that was segregated, people like that, klan members, bobmembers. bobby byrd. have risen above the local thinking, parochial thinking. you don t think mr. sessions is capable of that? the deep south. he s not able to transcend that and become a true american lawkeeper? chris, i haven t seen the evidence. here s an example. just a couple years ago the supreme court struck down a big chunk of the voting rights act. i know. section 5. he said that was good news. and when we tried to put together efforts to fix the voting rights act, fix the problem that the court said was a problem, there s an easy fix. he s not been engaged in that. i m with him on the armed services committee. we had a bill to ban torture by any agency of the united states government that got support from more than three-quarters of the senators, very bipartisan. this was a year ago. jeff sessions was one of the handful of people who would not sign on to a torture ban. i don t want an attorney general serving with a president who says he thinks torture is okay, who thinks torture may be fine. an attorney general needs to be a check, independent check against an overreaching executive especially in this case. i just don t see senator sessions as being able to do that. how s it going for you and secretary clinton thesedays? i mean, we think about you. i do once in a while. i wonder because i think you did a good job running and, you know, the zeitgeist wasn t quite right. had more to do with the zeitgeist than anything else. the mood of the country was what is your feeling about the whole election? it seems kind of surreal, chris. i wake up some mornings and it seems like the campaign was a dream and i wake up other mornings and thinking i might be living through some alternate reality now. so it was a this is the reality, senator. this is i got to by the way, we just got the word, 51 senators, majority, just voted for will you be able to work with him? oh, absolutely. i ll be able to work with him. but look, i just you know, for this variety of reasons, i ll go back to the other question, though, for me, the best thing was to go right back to work. like you, i m a religious person. things happen for a reason. even if you can t figure it out. but the one thing i know is i m supposed to be in the senate. and i think the trump presidency is going to be a very important test of all the checks and balances in our system. of a senate with power even in minority. of the power of the press. of the ability to peacefully protest. of the power of the article 3 branch of the courts. every check is going to be tested. and i think the system s going to be vindicated because the checks are going to work. but we re going to have to work hard at it every day. well, as a fellow i tell you something from outside our normal conversation at church, this is from a rabbi. i give this to people who are going through a hard time. he who gave me burdens also gave me shoulders. i love that. yeah, that s a great that is a great we can handle what s thrown at us. thank you so much. it s great to have good work to come back to. thanks, chris. you re lucky to be where you are. we are, too. thank you, tim kaine from the commonwealth of virginia. much more coming up on the hot, hot dispute over senator elizabeth warren. we re going to get into that situation, how it s energizing a lot of people. women especially. not just women. this is sort of like the what do you call it, this is the lighting fluid to the democratic base i think. it s going to light them up. we ll be right back. a meeting? it s a big one. too bad. we are double booked: diarrhea and abdominal pain. why don t you start without me? oh. yeah. if you re living with frequent, unpredictable diarrhea and abdominal pain, you may have irritable bowel syndrome with diarrhea, or ibs-d. a condition that can be really frustrating. talk to your doctor about viberzi, a different way to treat ibs-d. viberzi is a prescription medication you take every day that helps proactively manage both diarrhea and abdominal pain at the same time. so you stay ahead of your symptoms. viberzi can cause new or worsening abdominal pain. do not take viberzi if you have or may have had: pancreas or severe liver problems, problems with alcohol abuse, long-lasting or severe constipation, or a blockage of your bowel or gallbladder. if you are taking viberzi, you should not take medicines that cause constipation. the most common side effects of viberzi include constipation, nausea, and abdominal pain. stay ahead of ibs-d. with viberzi. the leather condemned jeff sessions, then the u.s. attorney for the southern district for alabama, for using what she said was, the awesome power of his office to chill the free exercise of the vote by black citizens. anyway, a few minutes after senator warren read from that letter, the following scene played out. let s watch it. they are mothers, daughters, sisters, fathers, sons and brothers. mr. president they are mr. president. the majority leader. senator impugn the motives and conduct of our colleague from alabama as warned by the chair. said, senator sessions has used the awesome power of the office to chill the free exercise of the vote by black citizens. i call the senator to order under the provisions of rule 19. mr. president, i am surprised that the words of coretta scott king are not suitable for debate in the united states senate. i ask leave of the senate to continue my remarks. is there objection? object. i appeal the ruling objection is heard. the senator will take her seat. the senator will take her seat. well, those words are going to be rumored that rarely used provision, by the way, rule 19 said senator chance not, quote, impu to another senator any conduct or motive unworthy or unbecoming. here s how senator mcconnell defended his action. senator warren was giving a lengthy speech. she had appeared to violate the rule. she was warned. she was given an explanation. nevertheless, she persisted. today senator warren said she didn t think she was violating the rules of the senate. here she is. this is coretta scott king talking about the facts as she saw them, that he used he, jeff sessions, used his office to chill the free exercise of the vote by black citizens. she s not calling names. she s just describing what happened. do you think it the facts may her, but we re not in the united states senate to ignore facts. i m joined right now by senator jack reed of rhode island. thausk y thank you for coming on. looks like the argument whether jeff sessions is attorney general is over. he now is attorney general. he s been confirmed by a majority of the senate voting. what do you make of the argument of rule 19 and elizabeth warren? republicans made a mistake to silence elizabeth warren. americans are aware of coretta scott king s letter. shwas reading a historic document by an icon o the civil rights movement describing the behaviors that she observed so i think it was a vast extension, attempt to all the senators were allowed to read the same letter. i think there was a grave mistake made. what do you make of that letter, the influence on hr thinking? you may have already decided but do you think that letter is condemnatory? what would you say about that letter from mrs. king all those years ago? 31 years ago. i think what the letter describes was coretta scott king s view of senator sessions based upon her experience, her knowledge. i think it was sincere. it is more than 20 years old, perhaps close to 30 years old. but i think it was written with, you know, a meaningful and sincere intent by mrs. king. how do you think this is going to hurt or help your colleague from massachusetts? i would think this is the best thing. you know, however it happened, it seems to me mitch mcconnell, the republican leader, has given her the most national attention in a positive way she could ever get. i don t think anybody is holding against her what she said in quoting mrs. king s letter, in fact, they re saluting herb f i it. on the other hand, people are going to rally to her and say she has punspunk, the stuff we looking for on the democratic side. you re exactly right. showed not only great eloquence but great determination. she didn t want to be seated in silence. she wanted to participate in the debate in the senate. i think she also viewed she was reading a historical record, not making a deliberate personal attack against any other senator. thank you so much. honor to have you on, sir, senator reed of rhode island. anyway, there was strong reaction to senator warren s speech last night and senator mcconnell s rebuke of her. isn t that a nice big liblical ? rebuke. etch even hillary clinton weighed. she was warned, given an explanation, nevertheless, she persisted. clinted added in her own words so must we all. i m joined by washington post s robert costa. both are mns mns political snbc analysts. what was your reaction to this whole thing? first of all, personally, what it meant to you as a womb, an, citizen and what do you think the political fallout is? i thought elizabeth warren could not have done anything on her own to have helped herself as much as mitch mcconnell just helped her. he gave her a massive platform both in terms of her own favorability and personal brand. elizabeth warren up until now had kind of been a little l bbi more silent compared to winn wh snappers that have been trying to harness the progressive energy. it became a trigger point, some of the key bloof the base, bothr african-americans, they felt like he wasn t just silencing her, he was silencing coretta scott king, words of her and also women. it became a flashpoint for women who saw in that a form of bullying. chris, i went on twitter an some of the male trump voters who often troll journalists were using the word, shrill, and words that came up also around clinton she wasn t shrill. let me ask you about women, generally growing up, in school, i m sure you ve been through this. you re a different generation than me. the boys do all the talking. the girls are much more reserved about this. is it that primordial? i think it is. if you recall, that became a flashpoint as well during the campaign with hillary clinton being shushed. who did that? i think it was during a debate. might have even been i think it may have been sanders. it was sanders, yeah, actually. that became something that then helped her with women again. i think, yeah, that that brought back a lot of memories maybe for a certain generation of women who feel like if they are speaking in a certain tone or too aggressively, that it is somehow seen as shrill or yeah, i know. not pleasant for males who may be trying to assert themselves in the same way. that definitely was something hillary clinton expressed during the campaign was that when she felt like when she raised herb voi voice and tried to be impassioned about something, it was viewed differently than when her male counterparts did the same thing. you can see how she adjusted her language after the initial debate when that happened. thank you. let me go to robert costa. this you know, this is stupid politics by mitch mcconnell, i think. unless they want let s be political here for a second, not in terms of bad manners or whatever, male/female relations, whatever, could it be that old mr. wise old al mitch mcconnell wants the democratic progressive left to take over the party because he thinks it s easier to beat in kentucky when the next election is held there? he wants the party to sweep over to the progressive side with senator warren leading the band? that would be a long-term chess play. i think this was an important political moment for the left. for democrats, chris, who saw in 2016 african-american voters across the country in many of these swing states that did not turn out in the traditional numbers along the obama coalition and now you see the democrats not just going after economicssues with people like senator warren but going after the racial issues surrounding the trump presidency. and how does that fit with elizabeth warren? the racial because she was quoting from coretta king. well, she s bringing up the racial issues that surround some of these nominees. right. the one thing that haunts sessions is the 1986 confirmation hearing he had for another judicial post. this is something that beyond the populism and nationalism that sessions represents, he represents also in democrats minds this racially charged element of the republican matter and as they look to 2018 and 2020, they need to rebuild their coalition and part of that rebuilding is getting voters on the left active on these issues again, reminded about the importance of these issues as these confirmations come through. well, both questions, i ll start with you, i m going to go to you, robert, why is trump, the president, why is he jumping on these judges before they rule? he just wants to antagonize these guys. he s been doing this, though, throughout the campaign. it started i see it as not just judges, chris, anybody who gets kind of in his craw. you know? the media, the judges, any institution. the cia. that gets in his craw. well anyway, i ll leave it at that. quickly, robert, you ve been following this guy like a bird dog. why does he make it hard to agree with him? the buck stops on that desk. agree wh that principle with a lot of latitude. here he is talking trash talk to the judges. i find it hard to say, oh, yeah, you re right, keep it up, buddy. it s hard to say because everything for president trump is a fight. you look at his entire career. real estate, television, the tabloids. he relishes a public fight and it s about the negotiation in the public sphere. that s what s it s all about. frank sinatra all over again. thank you. up next, president trump s once again attacking judges. this time the three-judge panel on that ninth circuit court of appeals that is actually weighing right now whether to reinstate his travel ban. it comes as trump continues to paint a dark and many people think a scary picture of the world. a fear appropriate, if not to actual reality, certainly appropriate to his agenda. what he wants. this is hardball, where the action is. uhhh- and i was wondering if your brokerage offers some sort of guarantee? guarantee? where we can get our fees and commissions back if we re not happy. so can you offer me what schwab is offering? what s with all the questions? ask your broker if they re offering $6.95 online equity trades and a satisfaction guarantee. if you don t like their answer, ask again at schwab. trust number one doctor recommended dulcolax constipated? use dulcolax tablets for gentle overnight relief suppositories for relief in minutes and stool softeners for comfortable relief of hard stools. dulcolax, designed for dependable relief my doctor said moving more helps ease fibromyalgia pain. he also prescribed lyric bromyalgia is thought to be the result of overactive nerves. lyrica is believed to calm these nerves. for some, lyrica can significantly relieve fibromyalgia pain and improve function, so i feel better. lyrica may cause serious allergic reactions or suicidal thoughts or actions. tell your doctor right away if you have these, new or worsening depression, or unusual changes in mood or behavior. or swelling, trouble breathing, rash, hives, blisters, muscle pain with fever, tired feeling, or blurry vision. common side effects are dizziness, sleepiness, weight gain and swelling of hands, legs and feet. don t drink alcohol while taking lyrica. don t drive or use machinery until you know how lyrica affects you. those who have had a drug or alcohol problem may be more likely to misuse lyrica. with less pain, i can be more active. ask your doctor about lyrica. court biased, so i won t call it biased. we haven t had a decision yet. but courts seem to be so political and it would be so great for our justice system if they would be able to read a statement and do what s right. right now, we are at risk because of what happened. i listened to a bunch of stuff last night on television that was disgraceful. it was disgraceful. president trump also tweeted this morning that if the u.s. does not win this case, as it so obviously should, we can never have the security and safety to which we are entitled. politics. that s how he ended it. never. this afternoon, democratic senator richard blumenthal from connecticut, of course, met with supreme court nominee neil gorsh. here s what he said gorsuch had to say about the president s comments on the judiciary. he certainly expressed to me that he is disheartened by the demoralizing and abhorrent comments made by president trump about the judiciary. well a spokesman for gorsuch, himself, confirms the nominee did use the words disheartening and demoralizing in regards to what it was doing to judiciary from trump s comments. joining me, angus king, independent from the state of maine. senator king, what do you make of this, because it s not hearsay, apparently we now know gorsuch s people have said, yes, that s what he s said. he s demoralized. e believes it demoralizes the judiciary to be told they re prejudice by the president of the united states. that s what drutrump basically said. if i had a client who was going to bad mouth the judge while the judge was still considering the case, that in itself makes t s no sense. the deeper problem is just a lack of deep understanding or any understanding of the constitution and the separation of powers to deliberately, and i think it clearly was deliberate, he said it, to try to delegitimize an independent co-equal branch of government in doing their job and talk about you didn t play the clip where he said any high school student would know what the right answer is here. it just it s overstepping the bounds. i mean, it as you can tell, m kind of speechl it really is extraordinary and it undermines the whole system. he s preparing a way for people to say, oh, yeah, political judges and all that. these are people appointed by jimmy carter, george w. bush and barack obama. that s the essence of our system, division of power. there has to be some respect to the system, it seems to me. senator king, we have no time tonight. it s a busy night. thank you for coming on from maine. independent voice. absolutely. up next, the democratic resistance may have turned a corner after what happened in the senate overnight. will progressives use it to build a movement? what happened to elizabeth warren against trumpism. could she be the new champion of the resistance, if you will? the hardball roundtable is coming here next. you re watching hardball, where action is. did you know 90% of couples disagree on mattress firmness? enter sleep number. she likes the bed soft. he s more hardcore. you can both adjust the bed for the best sleep of your life. right now, save 50% on the ultimate limited edition bed. go to sleepnumber.com for a store near you. king arthur: ready! washington: charge! empress wu: charge! (in chinese) king arthur: charge! let your reign begin. evony, the mobile game. download now. why pause a spontaneous moment? cialis for daily use treats ed and the urinary symptoms of bph. tell your doctor about your medicines, and ask if your heart is healthy enough for sex. do not take cialis if you take nitrates for chest pain, or adempas® for pulmonary hypertension, as this may cause an unsafe drop in blood pressure. do not drink alcohol in excess. to avoid long-term injury, get medical help right away for an erection lasting more than four hours. if you have a sudden decrease or loss of hearing or vision, or an allergic reaction, stop taking cialis and get medical help right away. ask your doctor about cialis. wheyou wantve somto protect it.e, at legalzoom, our network of attorneys can help you every step of the way. with an estate plan including wills or a living trust that grows along with you and your family. legalzoom. legal help is here. conduct, he should not be rewarded with a federal judgeship. well, democratic criticism of senator sessions was then seen as purely political. listen to the rest. charges that she was making against jeff sessions are demonstrably false. they re slanderous. they re ugly. and it s one of the crutches you know, when the left doesn t have any other arguments, they go and accuse everyone of being a racist. his unpleasantness, that guy, ted cruz, is immeasurable. the latest clash of one of the president s cabinet picks, grassroots opposition continues to grow. i m joined by our round table, david avella, republican consultant, chairman of gopac! have to say it with the exclamation point. michelle bernard, re-elected again. and jonathan, writer for new york magazine, author of a great book audacity: how barack obama devefied his critics and created a legacy that will prevail. who won, who lost with mcconnell, mitch mcconnell rebuking elizabeth warren? who won nthat fight? mcconnell, keeping the vote going for session tonight. elizabeth warren wins because her e-mail list is bigger, her fund-raising has more money in her account. who was right? who was right? elizabeth warren. okay. tell me why. absolutely, elizabeth warren wins and the country wins because her just the appearance of the way he spoke to her and what he said and then you turn on the television this morning, and you see male pundit after pundit saying it has nothing to do with the fact that she s a woman, it doesn t matter, it s just that his constituents don t like her. it does matter. how do they know? i go into this thing with dunninger, this thing about reading minds. judges tell me they can read trump s mind. you can t read anyone s mind but there s something you learn in the law that it is not just i agree. you can t always tell intent but if tsh. i agree with you. michelle, would never said ted kennedy they would have never told him to shut up when he was talking. michelle brings up that men came out and was critical of elizabeth warren and she read mrs. king s letter. let me read you his niece s comment. it s almost like a bait and switch. stir up the emotions in the name of king and my name is alvita ki king and play the race card which she s attempting to do. i want to ask you if you can justify the senate rule. i understand why they have a rule, you can t criticize anoth another senator. when the senator is the nominee, you have rules you can t criticize the person you re debating? isn t that insane? that is the rule. think about everyone else who has been criticized. really just pick out one look at a lot of senate rules and maybe think they are absurd orrcane or out of step, but the reality is they are the les. now if trump they don t always enforce them. if chuck schumer was in charge just as harry reid did last night, he probably would change a rule he didn t like. you let ted cruz you think mcconnell is trying to help elizabeth warren? i don t think he likes her. i don t understand why i thought elizabeth warren 2020, thank you for giving us our first female president. i know, i m a historian around here, i love my jobs go back to 1966, lbj, nixon one time made him the nominee in 68 by attacking him. i compared it to the gag rule in the 19th century. you couldn t it s in your article. that s right. it made the issue bigger because it made the issue about are we allowed to debate this question? it put more attention on it. this is what the democrats are down to. go. they don t have the white house. they don t have the senate. they don t have the house. they only have, what is it, 17 of 50 governors. they only got a mere 31 what s that got to do with look, all they have to do is shout and scream. that s all they ve done. millions of women who showed up to protest on the march. they have the millions of muslims we got to go. many women are supporting donald trump s absolutely. 42% voted for trump. the roundtable is sticking with up. not black women. we voted the right way. that out. we re going to stay, this, by the way, as you can see is where the action is. hey, need fast heartburn relief? try cool mint zantac. it releases a cooling sensation in your mouth and throat. zantac works in as little as 30 minutes. nexium can take 24 hours. try cool mint zantac. no pill relieves heartburn faster. .stop clicking around.travel sites to find a better price. the lowest prices on our hotels are always at hilton.com. so pay less and get more only at hilton.com. dearthere s no other way to say this. it s over. i ve found a permanent escape from monotony. together, we are perfectly balanced, our senses awake, our hearts racing as one. i know this is sudden, but they say: if you love something. set it free. see you around, giulia yesterday in new york, first lady melania trump settled a defamation lawsuit against a blogger for running a false story about her. the defendant in the case issued the following apology. i had no legitimate factual bases to make these false statements and i fully retract them. i acknowledge these false statements were very harmful and hurt to feel mrs. trump and her family and therefore i sincerely apologize to mrs. trump, her son, her husband and her parents for making these false statements. that s all i ve got to say. we ll be right back. from the first moment you met it was love at first touch and all you wanted to do was surround them in comfort and protection that s why only pampers swaddlers is the #1 choice of hospitals to wrap your baby in blanket-like softness and premium protection mom: oh hi baby so all they feel is love wishing you love, sleep and play. pampers but when we brought our daughter home, that was it. now i have nicoderm cq. the nicoderm cq patch with unique extended release technology helps prevent your urge to smoke all day. it s the best thing that ever happened to me. every great why needs a great how. heck, i can get you over $600 in savings. chop, chop. do i look like i ve been hurt before? because i ve been hurt before. um, actually your session is up. hang on. i call this next one junior year abroad. back with the round table. david, tell me something i don t know. in february, a special election in delaware will decide majority control in the state senate. if democrats lose they will be down to a mere five states where they have the governor s office and state legislatures. not good is it? it is for the republicans? not good for the progressive conservatives. and he s smiling. he should, he s a conservative. go ahead. i am going to predict the fifth circuit four, harken back into the 1950s into the 1960s led by three white men all republicans, another white male, a democrat, paved the way for all the civil rights legislation of today, i think the ninth circuit will do the same with the decision on the washington case and immigration ban. fact from my book the share of corporate profits wall street accounted for was 30% before dodd/frank, went down to 17%, almost half. we ll see if it goes back up under trump if he refinancializes the economy. thank you very much jonathan chait, david, and michelle. when we return, let me finish with trump watch. you re watching hardball. trump watch, february actually, february 8, wednesday, 2017. a disturbing thought for tonight. could the cross currents in this case of the trump travel ban have kept us from the central constitutional question? suppose you re a judge and you have to decide whether to step in and stop a president from carrying out an executive order dealing with national security? if it s clearly unconstitutional the answer is easy. if the order says islam is the country s enemy and its beliefs should be kept from our borders the could should act and bluntly. however since the order refers to the same countries the united states congress has already identified as being dangerous, does such an executive order deserve to be denied? i know how hard it is to separate the executive order without reference to the previous statements and mayor giuliani or from who the president is issuing the order but wouldn t it be reasonable for judges to do just that why? no judge no matter how fail or brilliant has the ability to tell what the president s purpose is with any real
we need to slow down and get it right. like mom used to say, you rush and you make mistakes. democrats are going to continue in their head-long rush to pass a government takeover of health care. from where i stand and frankly many republican senators stand who are troubled by the pace is of concern. we should have had more time to digest it. i guess history has a funny way of repeating itself. what a difference eight years doesn t make. republicans today sounding a lot like republicans back in 2009 on health care reform. only this time, they are battling themselves. can president trump and house speaker paul ryan bring their own party on board? this as one new report says at least 15 million people, joe, will lose their health care coverage under the new gop plan. this morning, we are going to speak live with the u.s. secretary of health and human services dr. tom price. plus, the man responsible for whipping votes in the house, republican congressman steve scalise and congressman tim ryan on the democrats game plan. good morning, everyone. it s friday! it s friday, march 10th. with us senior political analyst for nbc news and msnbc mark halpern. political analyst john heilemann. and mark and john have big news to announce and get to that in a moment. congratulations. we love it. joe, you re down in washington for some meetings but you couldn t make it back up because of the weather. did you see the little girl? speaking of the weather. we will explain this to you. oh! we will have that. bill karins will talk about the incredible wind and rough weather across the country j new a moment! she is okay. she s okay. but before we dive into new. joe, what is your take in washington? you had meetings yesterday on where things stand across the board. two big takeaways. one, everybody is questioning why the house did what they did, why they handled health care the way they did. the senators, tom cotton is right. so many senators believing they made a mistake by repeating the mistakes of the democrats in 2009, rushing into this. and the concerns also being whispered in the white house. really surprised that the house gop team didn t have everybody together, that they didn t have the freedom caucus on board. and that they were blindsided the way they were. so a lot of surprise on that respect. on another sort of theme we keep talking about, there is absolutely no evidence as john podhoretz said that anybody who supported donald trump the day of his election does not support him today. in fact, people in the business community are even bigger supporters and more excited about what they believe is going to be sort of financial regulatory and tax relief that they have needed for quite sometime. and, mika, over the past year and a half, you and i ran across a lot of people who were afraid to admit it and they are not afraid to admit it now. they are more in donald trump s camp business community than ever before. all right. we will talk more about that coming up. first, fbi director james comey was on capitol hill yesterday where a congressional source says he met with lawmakers to discuss the alleged wiretapping of trump tower. comey met with the leadership and top ranking members of the intelligence committees on the senate side, as well as in the house. but despite sources saying he pushed the justice department to make a public denial he was tight-lipped when approached by nbc s kasie hunt. are there any people wiretapped in trump tower? mcconnell who know it s not true i have to evidence of it but do an investigation. i thought the best part of that interview yesterday, willie, we haven t played yet when they asked mitch mcconnell, is mexico going to pay for the fall? he goes, ah h, no. he is emerging early as one of our favorites in answering the questions. he is not going to be cow tow to some of the republicans. as you said on the first part of it the about comey visit. so much of this is theater. you say mitch mcconnell knows that the president of the united states did not wiretap trump tower. all of these congressmen and senators know it s an easy phone call to make and easy answer to get. now they are going through the for maladi forities to wait for the official process to play out. we spend one week on this that last saturday morning tweeted this this is a waste of time for the country. we should be getting into the health care bill and focus on important things. the fact this has occupied so much time and space looking into an allegation that patently is untrue if you ask anybody who knows, is a waste of time for the country. mark halpern, though, i think it s an interesting conundrum for the media because i think we move on so much and it s, at some point we have to focus on that and get and answer. so many shiny pennies across the table here we could move on into oblivion. i found when i was in washington and joe found is the business community has really compartmentalized. they are just not focused on things like the president s twitter feed. they are focused on the legislative agenda and on the calendar. mitch mcconnell kind of some days compartmentalizes and some days does not. i think make or break here is health care and you re seeing them adjust to the question of could they get the house this passed through the house quickly? they still think they can but is it a good idea? should they slow down for the sake of the long-term health and prospects of getting it through the senate? the question you ve been putting on the table for weeks now, joe. yeah. nobody is going to convince me this is a smart move. they should start with tax reform, they should start with regulatory reform. mark halpern, i don t think we can underline enough to people in the media that haven t spoken to the business community or people who are marching in the streets or people who are supporting. if you want to get into donald trump s approval ratings, you re going to have to convince a business community that they should be concerned about the tweets, they should be concerned about the bizarre statements, they should be concerned about all of the things that a lot of people in washington in the washington and new york bubble are concerned about, and a lot of americans across the country are concerned about. they are just not. in fact, it is shocking just how little they care about anything other than regulatory reform and tax reform. they have completely compartmentalized everything else. and i just say this. i am just reporting by the way, people that own the media companies that have people that are going around and we are all talking about how shocked and stunned we are at donald trump s lack of respect for constitutional values and presidential traditions. the business people that run the media companies are, obviously, thinking the same thing because i ve yet to meet a business person that is not thrilled he is president of the united states. joe, we should say this extends not just to republican business people. oh, no! but democrats in washington, in new york. a lot of the washington lobbying operations for major firms are run by democrats who are still in their jobs placed there during the obama years, and they are compartmentalized and their focus is on regulatory reform and tax reform and not just jockeying for favorable outcomes but enthusiastic for their companies. it s shocking, mika. last year, when we talked to people and ask who is supporting trump and no one would admit it and come whisper is to us later on. yeah. that s not how it is in 2017. they will tell you right up front, a lot of great things are about to happen. it s kind of surreal. is really is. it s not surprising that, you know, the business community with the prospects of tax reform, the prospects of an administration doesn t care very much about budget deficits and run an inflationary fiscal policy and regulatory reform and tearing down obamacare. it doesn t surprise me that both the stock market and the business community are where they are. they are beyond the tweets. there are realities that are still playing out here especially on the russia front as the story, not the distractions but the actual, as progress occurs and as we learn more day-by-day, that is still a story that the business community may be a lagging indicator on that. if that story ends up progressing and doing fundamental political damage to the administration, the business community will eventually look up and say, okay, we have a problem here. for now their focus compartmentalized way and what affects our bottom line and for now good for them but the reality may catch up to that. the one caveat i would throw in, mika, i ve talked to the head of a large multinational corporation yesterday and the head of a small american-based business who both said this talk of tariffs and protectionism scares the hell out of them and border tax is something they think would be devastating especially to a small company to their bottom line because so much of what they have to make comes from out of the country and if there are tariffs those prices will be passed on to sxurmeds. that i consumers. there is a big picture and long-term consequences to some of the things that have happened in this administration so far. the vice president has weighed in on the revelation that former national security adviser michael flynn performed more than 500,000 dollars worth of lobbying for turkey before election day. flynn registered his work as a foreign agent in paper work filed with the justice department on tuesday, disclosing work performed from august through november 2016. here is press secretary sean spicer, followed by vice president mike pence, reacting to that news that they just learned, apparently, yesterday. was the president aware that lieutenant general michael flynn was acting as a foreign agent when he appointed him to be the national security adviser? i don t believe that that was known. i would refer you to general flynn and to the department of justice in terms of the filings that have been made. had the president had known that, would he have appointed him? i don t know, john. that is a hypothetical i m not prepared to ask. let me say hearing that story today was the first i heard of it and i fully support the decision the president trump made to ask for general flynn s resignation. you re disappointed by the story? the first i heard of it and i think it is it is an affirmation of the president s decision to ask general flynn to resign. joe, what is your take? for me, it seems deeply concerning that they had no clue about this since flynn and trump spent day and many flights and nights together traveling on the campaign trail. this seems impossible. the fact that that man was a foreign agent of turkey, who has been hostile towards u.s. interests for a good part of the syrian civil war and was getting paid at the same time he was delivering a speech trashing hillary clinton at the republican national committee. saying lock her up. yeah. saying he was an agent of a foreign country of turkey throughout the inphases of the campaign, and even when donald trump got elected. it s shocking. i guess it shouldn t be shocking. this is the sort of thing that would not happen in past administrations, but there are apparently, everything goes ethically. by the way, i would like some clarification from the white house at some point. did donald trump fire michael flynn or did michael flynn resign? because if michael flynn resigned, donald trump acted angry and said a good man was hung. right wing websites are still saying that now he fired him. john heilemann, right wing websites are now going out and talking about and right wing columnists are talking about how michael flynn was set up and he had no due process, and he did nothing wrong. well, did he resign or did donald trump fire him? and if donald trump fired him, if these right wing websites are right, then why is he such a weak president and why did he fold the things that aren t true? it is a confusing situation. donald trump and all of his public comments has basically acted as if michael flynn was persecuted. a good man driven from office by the hounds in the mass media and mike pence trying to put a nice gloss and saying that vindicates the president s decision to fire him. this guy was not only acting as a foreign agent, literally as a foreign agent, not metaphor kalli while he was traveling with donald trump and close to donald trump as anybody. he was the person who became the national security adviser and somehow the president and others right now, at least the official explanation, they had no idea that he was acting as a foreign agent when he was appointed to be national security adviser. that is one of the most extraordinarily, if it s true, they did not know, one of the most extraordinary failures of vetting i ve ever heard of. on there are so many unheard truths here it s hard to know what happened on any level with literally anything we have talked about since the show started today. the press needs to follow-up and need to keep asking the question. did they know? if they did know, that is bad as if they didn t know. because if they didn t know, it was one of the most unprofessional sloppy vetting processes that i ve ever heard of in washington getting paid $500,000 by turkey, a hostile gwyn again, the past four, five, six years, a hostile player as it pertains to syria. only becoming more helpful over the past year or two. i mean, isis used turkey to get into syria for the better part of the civil war. and this guiel is getting paid and is a foreign agent of turkey. so staggering. i can t process it. hold on onto it for a a second, halpern. they have made a joke of the entire transition process and this presidency has no credibility where we stand right now. i don t say that with hysteria. i say that with a deep sense of concern how we often cover this story because there are people who believe trump from start to finish and he s not telling the truth. you re not shrill. you re just sad/mad, mika. i m so sad. and know look closely. she is not crying. i know she is a woman. i may not make it to the commercial. maybe you think she is crying but no, she is just pissed. mark halpern, finish your thought. they have to do some soul searching over there because they are still vetting people for top jobs. this guy was at the center of the foreign policy apparatus during the campaign and in the government, and who brought his son, his controversial son with him, and they have got to do some soul searching and put out the facts and have to figure out how could such a thing has happened? i can think of a few examples from previous administrations of things in this direction but literally nothing like this that i ve ever seen. it s important to point out this is not something from his deep dark past. this lobbying was happening from august until november in the heat of the presidential campaign. i m checking four boxes. he wrote an op-ed on this issue that appeared in the washington post on election day advocating for this position. this is a time when donald trump was going around railing as hillary clinton practicing pay to play in the state department and while michael flynn was yelling how hillary clinton should be locked up. the hypocrisy of it is staggering if they knew and if they didn t know. just stop! there will be some required reading for political junkies next year. mark and john will publish the third installment of their best game change series and will focus on donald trump s victory over hillary clinton, plus hbo is planning to turn the new book into a miniseries directed by executive producer jay roach. this will be great, guys. congratulations, fellows. thank you very much. where do you begin? beau bridges is playing willie geist! the only casting decision that we are preparing to announce today. i had that written into the contract. it had to be bridges or you couldn have me in the movie. do we know what the book is called yet? untitled. we probably will change that because untitled is not a great title for a book. we have game change and double down and then tbd. we will see where the reporting goes. wow. still ahead on morning joe, house speaker paul ryan rolls up his sleeves, literally, to get to work to sell the health care plan to sell to his colleagues. we will bring in the u.s. secretary of health and human services. dr. tom price will join us. the man responsible for whipping republican votes in the house, congress steve scalise and congressman tim ryan on the game plan and mcconnell answering the question in his own special way on the issue of who is paying for the wall. we will have that coming up for you. first, bill karins with a check on the forecast. what gout? we have to watch madison again. two things things. how did she hang on to the door handle and not drop the phone that was in her other hand? this is in ohio. wind were gusting up to 60 miles per hour. here comes the gust and there goes madison. she got pinned against the siding of her house and yelling, mom! but look at her right hand. she has the phone in her hand. doesn t drop that and she holds on to the door handle! that is impressive. and she is fine and everyone is laughing about it now. scary moments there for mom as she turned around and saw her daughter acting like a kite. talk about the bad weather. the snow and cold and snowstorm for next week. the snow is breaking out much in state of pennsylvania is covered right now. connecticut, southern portions of new york. hudson val is covered and snow is heading toward new york city he and in an hour or two it will be sticking on the grass, not the roads. 40 million people impacted by enthis storm because 10 million in new york city. here is the snow forecast. about 2 to 3 inches from philadelphia north wards and in the mountains and outside of new york city also. then the big story next week. during the weekend it s very cold in the east. then we are going to deal with the potential for the biggest snowstorm of the winter season it appears coming up the coast and a lot of atlantic moisture available and plenty cold enough for mostly a snow event away from the coastal areas and this should be a really impressive nor easter maybe even slash blizzard type storm on tuesday. if you have travel plans, keep that in mind. could be a big storm as we go throughout the early portions of next week. more details on that in the days ahead. you re watching morning joe. we will be right back. two become one. sleep number bed allows you each to choose the firmness and comfort you want. so every couple can get the best sleep ever. does your bed do that? 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[ laughter ] there are some places along the border where that is probably not the best way to secure the border. but i think general kelly knows what he is doing. i think the president picked an outstanding person to be in charge of homeland security and my suspicion is we will take his advice. reporter: do you believe that mexico will pay for it? no. [ laughter ] in a word. no. mika, mitch mcconnell, we talked about it a couple of weeks ago where i interviewed him and mitch only says what mitch wants to say. he really doesn t care whether the person interviewing him likes it or not. it s one of the things you have to admire about the guy. he is just a very tough guy. i do. mitch mcconnell has decided, over the past several weeks, he is not going to be a dupe for donald trump, and there are a lot of republicans, sadly that i know and respect, who have decided they will be a dupe for donald trump. and that they have got to live with that. but mitch mcconnell is just he is showing, i think, real toughness and a real character, you know, taking the president to task at twitter saying, you know what? there are some other people in washington that pretty good at this politics thing too. and i think that is a good example. i mean, listen. republicans need somebody to look up to and respect in this country that aren t okay with donald trump lying every day, aren t okay with fantastic promises, that aren t okay with him trashing the courts. mitch mcconnell is not okay with him tracker the courts and he said so. not okay with him trashing the press. so we are seeing that is a good sign. i agree completely. and good leadership. good for mitch mcconnell. absolutely. mcconnell s comments come as a new cnn/orc poll shows that majority of americans disapprove of funding the wall. kelly said a 40% drop of illegal crossings along the border since the start of the year and quite frankly, those numbers have been going down for years. that is the whole sort of stupidity of the equation. what is that? willie, listen. willie, again, we have said this before. but look at how the trump i mean, donald trump is setting things up just the opposite way that you want to set things up. on the economy, on illegal immigration, and on crime. he is saying, you know, there is american carnage out there. unemployment is at 4%. so what is it going to be when he runs for re-election and unemployment is at 6% and it s the worst crime in 48 years. no, it s really the lowest crime rate in about 48 years. had a little uptick last year. but historically low. we can expect the crime rate will probably stay the same or go up. so then what does he say if it s the worst in 47 years now what does he say two years from now? same thing with illegal immigration. it s been going down for years now what is he going to say? he has created these ises where these crises don t exist. what happe when we have a slight return tonormalcy? suddenly, he looks terrible. it begs the question do you need the wall, exactly, mr. trump? mr. president since you came into office. incident to take credit for those going down? i m sure he will at some point. also, president obama was known as the deporter in chief and deported more people than anybody. the numbers of people streaming across the border have already been going down so you set yourself up with a strawman of something that is actually not happening and paint yourself in noo a corner now and you have to push for 22 billion dollar wall that will include using eminent domain and all of these things nobody wants to have to use. what do you need the wall if everything is happening without wall? the two academic numbers i think they are most focused on where they think they can see improvement, one is the gdp number getting it closer to 3 than at 2. the other is job creation although we had month after month new jobs adding to the economy but the numbers weren t very big. they believe the job owning they are doing and as well as the policies they are pursuing can get those numbers higher by next year and maybe by the end of this year. i believe we are going to see an increase in economic pace and if listening to all of the business owners and the business community, listening to what they are saying, they are expecting great things ahead. if you can get the gdp out of the 2. it s been anemic over the past eight years on average and we came out of the worst recession since the great depression of the 1930s. if that happens, mika, then, yes, that will be positive. but to believe that you re going to jump up to 5% growth at a consistent rate in a way that is not going to be destabilizing so the economy in the long run, that is a stretch. george w. bush had 5, 6% growth right before the collapse in 2007 and 2008. a lot of big promises and in a lot of areas where we are historically doing as well as we have done in quite sometime on unemployment, crime, and immigration crossings. go ahead. i ll say to me the growth would be great. more jobs would be great. in the end, the number that matters and especially to a lot of donald trump s constituents really matters is real wage growth and so, you know, the question is how growth and tax reform are going to play together. if you have regressive tax reform in the end, if middle class and working class voters see a bigger number on the gdp, that is great. if they see more jobs being created that is also great but if their paycheck is not going up and there is still a question of standard of living. what is happening in my house? i have a feeling that is where the rubber meets the road. up next, selling something to people who are just not buying it. donnie deutsche will join us with his take on how the gop should brand their new piece of legislation. morning joe is back in a moment. it s an important question you ask, but one i think with a simple answer. we have this need to peek over our neighbor s fence. and once we do, we see wonder waiting. every step you take, narrows the influence of narrow minds. bridges continents and brings this world one step closer. so, the question you asked me. what is the key? it s you. everything in one place, so you can travel the world better. it s my decision ito make beauty last. roc® retinol, started visibly reducing my fine lines and wrinkles in one week. and the longer i use it, the better it works. retinol correxion® from roc. methods, not miracles.™ and her new mobile wedding business.tte at first, getting paid was tough. until she got quickbooks. now she sends invoices, sees when they ve been viewed and-ta-dah-paid twice as fast for free. visit quickbooks-dot-com. geand save on a lineup featuring altima. with available intelligent safety shield technologies. that could sense vehicles in your blind spot. take on the unexpected, with six 2017 iihs top safety picks. it s clear why we re america s fastest-growing auto brand. get to nissan now for 0% financing on 11 models & no payments for 90 days. youthat s why you drink ensure. sidelined. with 9 grams of protein and 26 vitamins and minerals. for the strength and energy to get back to doing. .what you love. ensure. always be you. not support it. if we did he wouldn t pass the bill and wouldn t come up in a vote. professor paul ryan giving a seminar yesterday. full steam ahead for republicans pushing their obamacare repeal plan anding seemingly without tr party s conservative members. it advanced through house yesterday and lawmakers working through the night to mark it up. vice president mike pence takes the health care pitch to kentucky tomorrow home of senator rand paul. president trump met with house conservatives at the white house yesterday tweeting from his official white house account, quote, great legislative meeting underway. paul ryan the self-proclaimed showed up at a press briefing yesterday ready to talk business and no jacket and sleeves rolled up and power point presentation and a clicker. this is the closest we will ever get to repealing and replacing obamacare. the time is here. the time is now. this is the moment. and this is the closest this will ever happen. it really comes down to a binary choice. we said in 2016 to our citizens to the american people and our constituents if you give us this chance, this opportunity, this is what we will do. now is our chance and our opportunity to do it. one of the bill s appoints chronicman followed that up tweeting, quote, binary choice. fal la on the senate side, warnings from republicans that the bill making its way through the house is unlikely to pass the upper chamber in its current form. well, i think any time you introduce legislation that is going to remake one-sixth of our economy and affect every american in a personal and intimate way. every other senator is well aware where i and where many senators stand by the bright neck pace this is operation and the bill as written today would not pass the senate because it would not reduce prices for insurance and make care affordable and personalized. when you have a president of a different party, you with freelance all you want to. go at press conferences. you guys show up a ten-point plan to do this or that. but now we have an actual chance to change the country. we have somebody who will sign legislation that we pass. we need to get into a governing mode and start thinking about actually achieving something, rather than new kind of sparring. then there is this report from the brookings institution saying it examines tpects the c estimate 15 million people will lose covage uer the american health care act. president trump tweeted this, quote, health care is coming along great and predicted it will end in, quote, a beautiful picture. joe, a lot to digest there. you have all of these different factions within the republican party but the democrats decide with specific complaints the ones we heard there and add in as well the senators from states that accepted medicaid expansion as part of obamacare and don t want to see that changed. paul ryan out there. again, you got the white house that is asking the question, why is it that paul ryan is getting incoming from all sides of his own members? they are wondering why this wasn t talked through, while the debating and the sparring didn t take place behind closed doors. certainly what i heard yesterday. but donnie deutsche, the ghost of same rayburn has to be scratching his noggin right now going, wait? you go out and you hold a press conference to try to convince members of your own caucus to support what is the most important bill of the term? it was pretty remarkable moment, which i guess just indicates how deeply divided the house republicans are, but this is a first big thing they are doing after america has turned over the keys to all of washington, d.c. to him and it looks like the republican party. as i said yesterday, just not ready for prime time. this would be like a ceo going out and holding a press conference trying to bring members of her board along with her or it s i one of these things i ve never anything like it before. on your most important piece of legislation, you do that behind closed doors. we would get beat up for weeks behind closed doors before leadership would go out with their big bills. and then we were either all together or bite our tongue because we had that time to vent behind closed doors. not here. shoot first and ask questions later. interesting this is not called trump care and that is for a reason. no-win situation for health care. if i m advising trump i say to him keep obamacare as long as you possibly can because as soon as that is gone you don t have nixon to kick around any more or obamacare to kick around any more. if you want to insure 20 million people that don t have insurance, somebody is going to pay for it. the premiums are going to get higher and so on and so forth. in this new plan, by the way, the very people donald trump ran elected him the lower income people in the rust belt are the ones hurt most from this. there is almost no win in this plan. if i m donald trump, a part of me almost wants this can to get kicked down the road. health care is a rubik cube and still called obamacare. donnie identified the biggest problem the question of coverage and the politics and substance taking coverage away from people who have it and not showing any desire through the enactment of the plan to get people covered. their strategy, though, in the short term is what ryan was saying. they thif you take the conservatives in the house saying i m never voting for this thing and tell their constituents this is the vote to get rid of the affordable care act that those members in the end will vote for it. the other thing, john, that i was told yesterday was the third part of the system that reform that they talked about million malpractice reform and to be able to sell insurance over state lines is not part of the original bill. they think that that will appeal to a lot of conservatives and at least give them an excuse to say, if that can be enacted faster, we can get on board with this. right. here is the thing that i think is the bigger conundrum for them and i get all that. if you think that ithis that there is all of this disarray in the house right now and the problem with the right flank that ryan is trying to solve. to me the larger question continues to be what happens if they solve that problem and get something passed through the house? that should be the relatively easier problem. once they get to the senate, you got a much bigger problem waiting for them down the line and it s hard for me to imagine, i continue to think that you can end up with something that will be good enough where ryan can make the sale he is trying to make and get that right flank on board that will have any chance of appealing to the relatively mainstream republicans who are going to determine the fate of this in the upper chamber. john heilemann, you just underlined the biggest problem here is the real problem at the end of the day is not going to be passing this through the house. right. the house is a dictatorship. i say that with all of the love and respect in the world for the house of representatives. it is a dictatorship. it will be passed through the house of representatives one way or another. but the more conservative they make this in the house, the less likely it is to come close to passing and in the senate. some said the members of the house need to tell the senate here is the bill, take it or leave it. this is your best shot. i m sorry. i was in the house. the house has never sent over a bill to the senate that the senate looks at as anything other than an unnecessary distraction that they are going to have to clean up and perfect. fn if that is their message to the senate the senate will throw it away in about five seconds. i m not saying it will work but the three-prong strategy in the senate is figure out to get them and their states and like the obama administration did sweetheart deal and senators say to the house this is your one chance to get rid of the affordable care act. if you vote no and it goes down we are stuck with obamacare. lastly they say you want to get to tax reform? you want tax reform? tax reform will be dead if we don t get health care done. joe, as you understand better than anyone at this table, think about the politics of this. if you re sitting in the house you cast a vote for this bill that potentially could take health care away from some of your constituents and then it dies in the senate, you ve wasted the vote. you re on the record as taking voting for it and taking health care away from your constituents and to no effect whatsoever because you don t ultimately get into law. willie, that was called in my day, that is dtu d. you remember that? i m hearing in it washington right now. clinton pushed the house democrats very hard to pass a btu tax. it was a blood bath. and you had people throwing themselves on the barricade who lost their seats in congress because they supported the btu tax. goes over to the senate and the democratic senate said, oh, no we are not going to do that. so they lost their seats. they lost their careers. all for something that didn t even end up in the final bill. right. and donnie deutsche, it s so funny. people get elected to congress and they think they will be there forever. people get into the white house, they think they are going to be there forever. a lot of democrats get elected in 2008 thought that they were part of this new wave, this new obama majority that would be there for 40 years. they got defeated two years later. wiped out by tea partiers. and you talked about the rust belt. that is important but appalachian. appalachian went for the republican party for the first time. there are millions of people in appalachian that are dependent on obamacare. they are the people who are much of the swing voters that made donald trump president and it put republicans in charge of congress over the past decade as anybody. they are on obamacare. i ve got members of my family on obamacare. they voted for trump. they voted for the republicans. they will not go out and vote in the off year. they won t vote for democrats but they will not vote the off-year election if you take their obamacare away. i was eating my lucky charms the other day and you brought up interesting point to congress. you can go back to your constituents who love trump and say, look. i love trump but i love you guys more. and that is why i did not vote for this bill because i m not letting them take your health care away. if i advise any congressman in any of these areas it s a lose/lose to vote for this bill and win/win to vote against it. if you are a conservative, you can say, wait a second. this is what i d say at my town hall meeting. if somebody stood up and said, oh, you didn t vote to get rid of obamacare! i would say well, if you don t like socialism and you think obamacare is socialism, the only thing they gave us was socialism light so let me get this straight. you re not a socialist. you re a quasi socialist. i tell you what, if you want to run as a quasi socialist in northwest florida you go ahead and do that! i m still a conservative and i m not going to bend over and i m not going to you can finish the sentence right there. just say, if ll-blown socialism is bad for america s medical system then quasi socialism is just as bad and they can vote me out if i want to. i still love america. and that will work. i do too. i love america. go ahead. there are a thousand different ways to say no in a town hall meeting and be more conservative than everybody in washington, d.c. and i think we may find some people doing that. donnie trying to do a southern accent is about as icky as it gets. i love my country! stop! a little rap in there! a little biggie in there. sort of madison and 57th. i m on the south side of there. the government ethics office isn t too happy how the white house handled kellyanne conway televised plug of ivanka trump s clothing line. we will tell but that ahead. plus, there are a lot of numbers in health care reform, including the 218 votes that needs to clear the house. majority whip steve scalise is in charge of making that happen and he joins us straight ahead on morning joe. what if millie dresselhaus, the first woman to win the national medal of science in engineering, were as famous as any celebrity? [millie dresselhaus was seen having lunch today.] [.rumors of the new discovery.] what if we lived in a world like that? (crowd applauding) we know a place that s already working on it. refusal to discipline kellyanne conway for her live television endorsement of ivanka trump s clothing line. is that bad? are you not supposed to do that? wait. are you not supposed to use your position in washington to promote clothes? no, you re really not. no. who could ever guess that? ivanka doesn t want you to do that. no, she doesn t. you re not doing anybody a favor. the ethics director fired off a letter to top members of the oversight committee because in washington, there is really nothing to do so this is important. anyhow. the watch dog said it was disturbed by the administration s, quote, extraordinary assertion that white house employees are exempt from some of those regulations. i will say it s time for her to probably pack it up. the watch dog, they also said that white house was undermining their authority. really? to just brush this aside. let s just say quite unfortunate. it s the wizard of oz and his minions. yet another story that the spokesman is having trouble answering questions about this one on former national security adviser michael flynn s work during the campaign. that is ahead on morning joe. how to win at business. step one: point decisively with the arm of your glasses. abracadabra. the stage is yours. step two: choose la quinta. the only hotel where you can redeem loyalty points for a free night-instantly and win at business. the full value of your totaled new car. the guy says, you picked the wrong insurance plan. no, i picked the wrong insurance company. with new car replacement™, we ll replace the full valuof your car plus depreciation. liberty mutual insurance. how s tcheck it out.t going? lights. meeting configuration. blueprints. call hruska. we ve gotta set up a meeting. sure. how do you spell that? abreu, albert, allen, anderson c, anderson r. you know what? i ll just tell him myself. door. andrade. see why 3,000 companies a month are switching to vonage. in my johnsonville commercial we open up in the forest. hi. i m jeff. i m eating my breakfast and all of a sudden a raccoon come up and ask me, what are you eating? i told him johnsonville breakfast sausage, fully cooked. porcupine comes in and he says, does that come in patties? i said yup wolf comes in and says, how d you learn to talk to animals? and i said books and we had a good laugh about that. [laughter] that s a commercial made the johnsonville way. dearthere s no other way to say this. it s over. i ve found a permanent escape from monotony. together, we are perfectly balanced. r senses awake. our hearts racing as one. i know this is sudden, but they say.if you love something set it free. see you around, giulia but everybody gets dry skin. feel moisturized without feeling your moisturizer with lubriderm. absorbs in seconds. moisturizes for hours. lubriderm. every body care. knowing where you stand. it s never been easier. except when it comes to your retirement plan. but at fidelity, we re making retirement planning clearer. and it all starts with getting your fidelity retirement score. in 60 seconds, you ll know where you stand. and together, we ll help you make decisions for your plan. to keep you on track. time to think of your future it s your retirement. know where you stand. is not. this is not bipartisan. this is your right to do this and you re doing it. but let s not kid ourselves that there is some kind of bipartisan collaboration occurring here and not kid ourselves that this isn t a negotiation with a gun in one hand. second place is one party rule and moving this stuff through faster than lightning speed. this is the closest we will ever get to repealing and replacing obamacare. the time is here. the time is now. this is the moment and this is the closest this will ever happen. wow. eight years same issue but now the shoe is on the other foot. speaker pa ryan singing a very differentu th time around. canhe and president trump unite their party on the issue that has swept them into power? this as one new report says at least 15 million people will lose their health coverage under the new gop plan. this morning, we are going to speak live with the u.s. secretary of health and human services dr. tom price. plus the man keeping count on the bill s votes house majority whip steve scalise and from the democrat side of the aisle, congressman tim ryan on what to make of all of this. welcome to morning joe. it s friday. joe, has it not been the longest week? or are all of them long since this presidency began? all of them are long and they go to rapid pace. look at those clips from 2009 and then today, i m struck by something that mark halpern has said all along, and, mark, we hear this president is a disrupter and that washington is going to change. they are just doing the same exact thing democrats did in 2009. they are getting around in a huddle and they are saying this is our bill, we are drafting it. and we are get it only with republican votes. i understand that is what the democrats did back in 2009 as well. but all they do is set themselves up to have their bill replaced down the road. at what point does somebody in washington have the strength and the vision to say we are going to do what tip o neill and ronald reagan did in 1983 and save social security and save it by locking arms. that would be radical and what the american people actually want to see and in our latest nbc news/ the wall street journal poll 79% of americans say they expect their leaders in congress to compromise with the other side. 79%. 8 in 10. why can t washington do thi whcan t y y here is the deal. obamacare is going down. democrats can say it s not. they know it is. obamacare is broken. the insurers are moving out. large segments of america it s a monopoly already. you only have one provider. why can t they get together and say health care is going break and let s lock arms and get in a room. it s not going to be history but it will make history and we will reform health care in a way that will save the system, and that last the next election. why can t they do that, mark? the biggest contrast years ago president obama spent months to try to get republicans to work with him on health care and it fell apart and this administration and this republican congress didn t even try. they are in danger of repeating both political problem, but also substantive problem, because you can t actually reform health care in a sensible way if it s done in a partisan way. ryan tried to fix this yesterday. a lot of americans look at and say it s not consistent with what america values are in terms of a health care system. i think they are in danger of making the same mistake. what are they doing that americans look at it and say, yeah, that is consistent how we want our health care to work. joe, let me ask you a question and maybe this is the answer. once again, the obamacare gave 20 million people who didn t have insurance, insurance. it gave people are preexisting conditions with insurance and people to have insurance up to 26 years under their parents insurance. i don t know how you continue to do that as a businessman and any way, shape or form make it a for effective health plan. a reason rates went up and people had less choice. i don t know if this is a democrat or republican problem. i just think this is an unsolvable problem iwe as a nation, want to move one sp closer to a benevolent society and give insurance to 20 million people who don t have it. it s an unsofable probllvablf you don t get together and create a system that both sides have bought in on, and when you start to see the system breaking apart, both sides are invested in coming together and instead of giving speeches, coming together and saying, we need to fix that. we are about to lose an insurer. obviously, we have waited this the wrong way. let s get back together and get back into committee. put our heads together. work through it and fix the system. no. this system, as set up is not sustainable and not going to be sustainable for a thousand reasons. even democrats know that. the senator that was architect of it said it s not working any more. this republican plan will not work either. they need to get together and work together. i know that sounds like a fantasy but that is actually the way that hamilton and madison s government was supposed to work. hey mika. this is interesting. i say this to you for you and for the i think approximately 47 million. willie, is it 47 million catholics who watch us across the globe? the most recent numbers last fiscal year, yes. last quarter! 47 million catholics that watch us. we say hi to all of you especially in africa. we know we are huge there. breaking news. this is fascinating as a guy who went to a catholic high school and admires the church. pope francis you just announce, mika, we will get more breaking news on this, that is now considering allowing priests to marry and in so doing, actually strengthen the ranks of the priests because it s been dwindling for sometime and this is something that, obviously, needs to happen for a thousand reasons. if you actually had priests that were married and priests that had children, you would have priests that would be able to relate to the main problems that their parishioners faced. this is pretty darn dramatic. that is extremely dramatic and a lot more to that story. i can t imagine what the reaction to that at the vatican is. fascinating. i m glad they are taking a lead from the tribe. i ve always said my team is always just a quarter of a step ahead. honestly. i know 27 million jews watching this show. more breaking news. the pope watches our show. he says he has now changed his mind since listening to donnie. mika, let s go on to the news. i m expecting him to talk about the role of women in church and birth control. okay. joining the conversation we have white house correspondent for the associated press, julie pace along with donnie and halpern and heilemann is here too. fbi doctor james come yncy onapitol hill yesterday a source said he met with lawmakers to discuss the alleged wiretapping at trump tower and what he spent his day doing yesterday, the head of the fbi. he met with ranking members on the senate side as well as in the house. but despite sources saying he pushed the justice department to make a public denial, he was tight-lipped when approached by nbc s kasie hunt. are there any people wiretapped in trump tower? before his meeting with director comey, republican senate majority leader mitch mcconnell again put distance between himself and president trump s wild accusation against former president barack obama. reporter: do you believe that barack obama wiretapped trump tower. there s no evidence of that. i ve not heard of it before, but that is an appropriate subject for the senate intelligence committee to take a look at, and they are looking at whatever the russians were doing during the election. julie pace, i m wondering among the white house press corps, the conversation between reporters at this point, are you all focused on this question still? and what are the answers that you re getting from the white house about this allegation, besides the tweet speaks for itself, which is backhanded way of backing it up when it appears to be a lie from the president of the united states, calling his predecessor a felon. this is amazing this is something we are talking about but we have to because the president of the united states raised it and it s such an aoive allegation against his predecessor. in the white house the main answer that you get is what we heard from sean spicer at the briefing. the tweet speaks for itself. i talk to people on background or private conversations there, this is an uncomfortable topic for them. when you re sitting in there are you incredulous? i m reading your faces and i see reporters laughing. i see reporters trying to keep themselves from laughing. i see reporters looking at sean spicer like he is from mars. they just can t believe what they are talking about. and i d like you to sort of bring to the forefront how ridiculous this feels and how sad this is for not only your jobs, but for the credibility of the presidency and his press person. like i said it s amazing we have talk about this but we have to because it was raised by the president and not like it was raised by a low level official or on capitol hill. it was raised by the president of the united states. if he is going to put this out here, it s our job to find and answer to get to the bottom of what he is talking about, even know one that we have talked to in the white house or outside of the white house has any evidence to back that up. and the white house is now puttg the burden of making that clear on congress and basically punting the responsibility for clarifying what the president was saying and why he chose to say that. i think it s also important to point out over the last week, a lot of people have said he is creating a distraction. his tweets are distraction and focus on what is important. this is not a distraction. this has focused even more clearly the light on to russia and questions now that because of what he tweeted on saturday morning, we have got more investigations. you have jim comey going to the hill and looking into there was a wiretap and were they wiretapping some russian entity because they believed there was a relationship between the trump campaign and the russian government or someone in wrurus? this is not a distraction. the president of the united states made this accusation about his predecessor and worthy of an investigation. we all believe and what we have heard from people we talked to there was no wiretap. in that sense it s a goose chase and waste of time but if he makes that allegation you have to look into it. how can you believe any word he gives if this distraction is a destructive lie? around the clock news last week was jeff sessions because he had been caught in either two lies or two he defamed president obama to distract from that? look. that story went away. that was a very important story. my other concern is once it s proven, if it s ever proven, that we know this doesn t happen, does the president just go oops? is there any repercussion or any accountability? like, this is what the ridiculous thing. we all know it and all of our hair goes on fire. but then what happens? what is the accountability? what the is cost of doing business for this man when he does such a ridiculously absurd atrocious thing? what is the cost of that? joe? we have been sitting around and saying this every morning since the president got sworn in and was lying about crowd ses and lying about several other thin things, but what i m hearing and what other reporters are hearing and certainly what david ignatius said earlier on our show this week, the business community doesn t care. they say that is donald trump. as long as we get our tax cuts and regulatory relief, we are fine. and david ignatius said foreign leaders have now sort of just balanced it in. they figured it in. china went from being very nervous about donald trump to starting to figure out, well, that is just kind of what he do does. we are going to look at his actions rather than any words rather than his tweets. sounds like they don t take him seriously saying that is the way he is, he lies. i think what they are thinking is what republican leaders are thinking on the hill. we are going to get what we want out of this guy. he is going to be distracted by all of these other things and while he is distracted, we are going to figure out how to work with him in a way that is going to benefit us. i m not listen. i m not justifying any of this. i am with everyone on this set, as we have been since he has been elected president and since he has been tweeting these outrageously false tweets and insulting the germans and french and lying about obama and calling the press enemies of the people and attacking federal judges. it is all shocking. and i think for me right now, what is today? on march the 10th, 2017, the most shocking thing to me is that nobody, nobody in certain communities seems to give a damn that this man lies and whenever he feels like lying, and has never held to account. i do wonder what parents across america are saying to their children. i m not being melodramatic here. i had boys in middle school when bill clinton was caught doing i know where you re going. what he did with monica lewinsky and i can tell you that changed the behavior of middle schoolers and high schoolers. how do i snow? we had meetings at a day school in middle school about things that girls started inexplicably were doing. if bill clinton is shocked by the poor example he set in the white house, don t think that chronic lying coming from the president of the united states is not impacting your children every day. then you re just a fool. and you haven t raised children and you haven t been through what mika and i went through and what every other parent went through with our children in the age of bill clinton. that example matters. the example the president matters so get your damn tax cuts, okay? get your damn regulatory ref, but while you re getting that, talk to your children and let them know that it is not right to denigrate america for the benefit of vladimir putin. it is not right to lie when telling the truth would be easier. it is not right to abuse absolutely everyone who doesn t agree with you. and if you don t want to do that, don t do that but you re the one that is going to be dealing with your kid the rest of your life. joe, that is one of the most important things that has been said in a long time. he is the behavior in chief. that is the tragic thing in all of this. i deal with 2 with my children. the president is our brand he is the logo for our country. great. we have tax cuts, great. it s disgusting. and it s embarrassing. and it angers me, without getting too preachy, as an american. the moral code part of this is horrible and we have just spoken to it. i will just say that what i think we are seeing across the board here potentially threatening to our global security. i agree with you. on every level. and i urge people to read and really make decisions about exactly what they are seeing. i understand why so many people voted for him. i understand where you were coming from. i understand why you liked him. but this man is lying to you. he is dangerous. it s very important. the thing is we sound like republicans from 1998 and 1999. actually, before that. mark halpern, i know you were reporting on bill clinton back in the 90s and you remember this. i had so many democrats laugh about the fact that bill clinton lied and got away with lies like that. it would be like that guy is a dog. he can lie about everything and get away with it. i ve never seen anything like that. saturday night live even had a skit after impeachment. bill clinton laughing saying i m going to go out and smoke and basically smoke pot in the middle of town square and nobody is going to do anything about it. and i guess maybe some of trump s supporters are now doing the same thing. but this does is early ric reminiscent. about the lies his administration told about the transfer of missile technology and a thousand smaller things. jamaica carville and paul begala were the front lines of defending president clinton throughout all of this would say he is a good man who has done a bad thing. i think that is the mindset at a lot of the trump supporters look at some of the things he has done and including white house officials saying he hadn t done them and said them. even that wasn t true. bill clinton lied. his white house lied repeatedly as david said he is an unusual good lier. and democrats accepted that because while he was lying, the democratic party was winning and republicans were losing. well, the shoe is on the other foot now. i m just wondering where all of those outraged republicans were that were rightly outraged in the 1990s, where are they today with donald trump? he is lying. are you going to let him get away with that because you re getting tax cu. i think they believe he is a good man who has done some bad things. there has to be accountability for the past and big test next week when chancellor merkel comes to washington and to see all of the complexity of that visit and whether he can learn from what has happened and make that visit what it need to be which is a strong tie to a key ally. yeah. absolutely. we have a lot of other news to cover and we will. still ahead on morning joe, secretary of health and human services dr. tom price joins the discussion. plus, house majority whip steve scalise saying no doubt the gop s health care bill will pass. democratic congressman tim ryan might agree with that and they both join us. more than two decades since the collapse of hillary care. now some are wondering if republican bill is headed to the same fate. tom brokaw will join us for some historical perspective next on morning joe. tech: at safelite, we know how busy your life can be. mom: oh no. tech: this mom didn t have time to worry about a cracked windshield. so she scheduled at safelite.com and with safelite s exclusive on my way text she knew exactly when i d be there, so she didn t miss a single shot. i replaced her windshield giving her more time for what matters most. tech: how d ya do? 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it really does. i need to go to john heilemann. john, misquoted david given. what was the quote? there are many quotes about bill clinton being a liar. the david given quote to maureen dowd said everyone lies in politic but the clontz lintons easily that it s troubling. the one who said about the quote that president clinton being a good liar was bill carey. from mika, democrats. it still applies at least there were some democrats that would say that about bill clinton. we await republicans saying that about donald trump. thank you. thank you. thank you, both of you. tom brokaw, health care. go. i ve been sitting at home watching a lot recently al day long on msnbc and all of the other outlets about this debate and it is so striking to me because it reminds me of what went on during the clinton administration when hillary clinton went behind closed doors and came up with a schematic to change health care in america and dropped it on the country and got killed, frankly, by it. what is so striking to me about the republican plan is for eight years, they have been saying obamacare just doesn t work. but, suddenly, they have a plan that they have could belbbled t in a hurry and don t have their troops in line. that is striking to me. i ve been talking with the people who met with president trump behind closed doors. these are major health care executives and others. they were quite surprised he was not very familiar at all with the cost structure, with the payment programs that they go through, how medicare is used. i think we need to have a lot more public discussion before this gets jammed through. it doesn t mean that obamacare is perfect by any means. i think that it works for the people from the bottom up, but after that, there are a lot of loose ends that need to be cleaned up. but the final thing is for a of the tlk about getting the budget back in balance, they are going to jam this through before the cbo comes out and says what is the deficit? yeah. i think we have been struck, tom, by exactly what you said. not that there hasn t been more across the aisle work performed on this, but that the troops internally are so divided on it. it s as though it were sprung on them, members of congress, senators, and they said whoa. this is not referabsembling any we would vote for. if you re rob portman in ohio you like the medicaid expansion and don t want it pulled back in two years. there are all of these these that should have been worked out behind closed doors before this rollout that we saw. rand paul is on television more these days than any of us. and he is going after it one chapter and verse on every program that he can get himself on to. that is within their own party. i do think the republicans made a mistake and should have learned a lesson from the obama chain is that there had to be some cross aisle consultation going on. the democrats are now saying, we are opposed to all of this. i don t think that is a good idea either, by the way. this is where having a president with little historical perspective would really help. perhaps somebody who might have been watching what has been going on over the past 12 years closely with health care. so you could then avoid some of these obvious, julie pace, potholes. i mean, i totally cannd why president trump might be not have all of the intricacies down. president obama struggled with this and hard thing to accomplish in recent memory and it wasn t accomplished well and i think everybody agrees with that and now they are doing it all over again with in a rush with a president not connected? one of the ironies of this whole discussion you could see a scenario in which donald trump is uniquely positioned to oversee a bipartisan debate on health care because he is not an deeply tied to the republican positions on this. he could actually put people in a room and probably personally find things on both sides that he likes. but right now there is not a lot of appetite within the republican party to do that and he is not stepping forward to that is the kind of process he wants it lead. wl, look. here is the big question to me. i think we all, if you look back at the experience not just of the health care reform last time but the history going back 40 years. if you re going to do big major social legislation that affects millions of people, a sixth of the economy, if it s going to be stable and work you have to have bipartisan support. one said you have to get 75 senators or never hold up over time. here is the question from my point of view i hear everybody talking about this. how it should be bipartisan. i just don t know any democrats, given everything they went through the last eight years in donald trump or any republican said we want to repeal the affordable care act now will you come along and help us? i don t know any democrats that would be open to that conversation. their attitude, you know what? you guys wouldn t help us eight years ago or six years ago. we are not going to help you now. john, i get that. what i m also saying is i think the republicans should have learned from obama eight years ago and said, look, we got to find a way that we get some people across the aisle come in and say we know it s working from the ground up. should we leave that alone? what are your thoughts about doing this? the other thing we are all talking about this but what we need on these tables frankly are the heads of cleveland clinic, the mayo clinic, the regional health care systems are ever more sophisticated these case dai days. a big movement in health care being rewarded for value and results going on on and that is not built into this system. it s an accounting system. what are the costs of a divided government? what are the costs of hyperpartisanship the past 30 years? the costs are these. you send out a tweet. you accuse the former president of the united states of being a convicted felon. so now you ve gone out of your way to make an enemy of a man who was extraordinarily gracious during the transition. a man you could actuallyring in as obamacare collapses under its own weight. it is collapsing under its own weight. i think it was max balkus said it has to be chajnged or it wil die. you could have republican president donald trump with democratic president barack obama saying we disagree on how this moves forward but the one thing we agree on is americans all need affordable health care. they just can t do it. they can t do it. it s the most serious and complex issue that faces this country right now. it s still 18% of our economy. most people, including people at this table, get their health care through corporate plans of one kind or another. an enormous population out there that is terrified, my guess, at what is going on. can they count on this the next year how they will get the coverage? when i got sick i knew i had a golden plan because it was corporate but i began to think about people who got korns cancer in the middle of america and had a minimal health care plan and what do they do and thinking right now? joe, when you go around the country the first thing you hear, whatever politics no matter who they are for, people say why can t they talk together and why can t we get people in washington to have conversations about these common issues? there is a longing out there. even though they have voted for one side or the other that once they get to washington to have some cross-aisle dialogue. if you have cross-aisle dialogue in this environment, you get killed by your own party. what are you doing talking to that republican? what are you doing talking to that democrat? we have absolutely, at this point, we have calcified the system. it s broken up into all of these different parts, rigid and untenable as i think to go forward in this country. so tom brokaw, to underline what you just said. when you say that or i say that, there may be some people in the political class who are cynics saying, ah, they live in an ivory tower and have no idea what it s like down there. the latest nbc news/ the wall street journal poll has two remarkable statistics. one that 74% of americans believe washington is more divided than ever before. but 79% of americans tell nbc news/ the wall street journal pollsters they expect their elected leaders to compromise in washington, d.c. and work with the other side, proving, once again, winston churchill is right, tom, that americans will always do the right thing in the end after exhausting all other possibilities. let s hope, tom, that our leaders listen to the people and actually do that. ronald reagan famously said inside the white house to jim baker, jim, if i get 7 of what i want, i m going be happy with that and i ll find a wayo create a compromise. it was one of the most successful eight years that any president had ever had in dealing with congress. even though he had to stand up against jack kemp about what they are going to do about taxes when they needed to increase them. he was willing to do that based, partly, on his experience of being governor of california for eight years against a very sophisticated democratic opposition in that state. and he learned. he had a kind of internship, if you will, about what happens when you get to washington. it does help to have some experience governing. tom brokaw, thank you so much. still ahead, when a country sends its pop diplomtop diploma u.s. they are generally greeted by our top diplomat but that was not the case yesterday. that is coming up on morning joe. i said yup wolf comes in and says, how d you learn to talk to animals? and i said books and we had a good laugh about that. [laughter] that s a commercial made the johnsonville way. start here. at fidelity, we let you know where you stand, so when it comes to your retirement plan, you ll always be absolutely.clear. it s your retirement. know where you stand. pipeline. state officials say the former oil chief made the decision back in february. it s unclear exactly why he is recusing himself but the announcement follows a demand from green peace this week for tillerson to step aside from the project and then tillerson is being left out even where he is apparently not asking to be left out. mexico s top diplomat was in washington yesterday discussing contentious immigration and border issues at the white house with senior adviser jared kushner and gary cohn and general h.r. mcmaster. the meetings skipped the normal channels leaving the state department and secretary of state rex tillerson in the dark. david ignatius writes in the washington post this morning, that leaves more power to trp s closest aides, people like steve bannon and maybe americans might want to ask whether they feel more comfortable with steve bannon running u.s. foreign policy or rex tillerson. this is what david ignatius writes. tillerson is off to an agonizingly slow start as secretary of state. that matters because if tillerson doesn t develop a stronger voice, the control of foreign policy is likely to move increasingly towards stephen k. bannon. a truly frightening prospect and, of course, not exactly what the american people expected when donald trump selected rex tillerson as secretary of state. how can a guy who ran exxonmobil so efficiently for so many years, allow himself to be elbowed out smacas much as he h been elbowed out the past several weeks? every administration you see this dynamic. cabinet secretaries in the modern era have to fight to have the kind of influence that they think they are going to have when they sign on, because every function of every cabinet secretary is replicated in the white house and when you ve got a president like this one who is the center of activity and center of all decision making it s going to naturally move towards the white house unless the cabinet secretary really asserts him or herself. tillerson is new to government. he doesn t have any deputies as you had. he in a very tough fight to try to be part of the foreign policy discussion which not just bannon but jared kushner, gary kohn in the white house and that is a huge part of american foreign policy. tillerson has a fight on his hand as every cabinet secretary does but the danger for him if he stays marginalized much longer harder to recover because people start filling the vacuum. he is new to government and learning as he goes. according to a report i have he is talking to feormer secretary of state and learning how unusual he is being treated. i was involved in planning. were you sent here with this leader? of course, i was. he is learning and learning how unusual his role. he is being treated by a hood ornament. he is having problem filling vacancies in the state department. the trump administration has tapped hundreds of officials for position across government, positions that do not require senate confirmation. so they are right in. they are filled by simple appointments by the president. pro publica was able to compile a list of more than 400 official named for these jobs and found some interesting results. seve breitbart contributors and several noted conspiracy theory peddlers. for instance, curtis ellis. is this bad, joe in curtis ellis, a specialist to the secretary at the labor department was a columnist at world net daily who once wrote a column with the headline the radical left ethnic cleansing of america. they also found 36 lobbyists on their list. many of them who lobbied in the same areas by the. is that bad, joe, do you think? it s only bad if you want america to be run well. right. if you only care about the future of this country. if you only believe that public service is actually a noble thing to do. right. no. it s distressing. in past administrations, john heilemann, you have had white houses that have been working hard to fill positions. i know for barack obama eight years ago, the treasury was an especially difficult cabinet or agency to fill up. in this case, this seems to be deliberate. they are deliberately telling rex tillerson, you can t have the number two you want, and we are not going to fill all of these spaces because it gives us more power in the white house. well, i believe it s the case now that the top three civil servants at the state department, the people with the longest running experience there had served democrat and republican administrations going back 30 years, all of them have been dismissed. they are systematically stripping foggy bottom of its bipartisannd historical institutional memory and there is no other way to explain that, other than that it s intentional and this is part of steve bannon s effort to, as he says, you know, destroy the administrative state. this is the foreign policy aspect of that that they are actually just kind of trying to dismantle what has been the traditional diplomatic foreign policy ballast of how the government works. yeah. i just got a great e-mail from my friend joanna coles and she points out that the president s outbursts and lashing out even against the former president and some of the lies that just come out of his mouth on twitter, kids go to the principal s office for that. kids get in trouble. it s wrong. that s all. joining us from capitol hill now democratic congressman tim ryan of ohio. i didn t want to bring you into that, tim. thank you for being on the show. thanks for having me. how is it looking from your perspective? are democrats working on developing their base and getting ready for the future? or fighting out health care? or both? well, hopefully, both. health care is a real opportunity for us to show that trump has really gone back on so many promises that he made during the campaign. i think this particular health care bill will go down as one of the great flip-flops in political history right up there with read my lips, no new taxes. the promises that president trump made in places like ohio about healer and jobs and then turns around and is going to actively support this health care bill is ridiculous. the head of the ohio hospital association just said this is going to cost us about a million people who will lose their health care and about 25% of hospitals in ohio will close. that is in rural areas that trump was in there campaigning and making a lot of promises. so this is a platform for us to say, this is wrong and why we are better. congressman, it s willie geist. just more generally in youngstown and the areas of people you talk to there in ohio. people who voted for donald trump, how do they feel about him 50 days? in health care is part of it. they will be upset if they lose their health care but are they still with him generally? i think as of the last few days, i think there was a wait and see approach for a lot of people that did vote for him. obviously, didn t like his behavior. they don t like the tweeting and don t like the chaos and want him to get focused. don t like . they don t like the chaos. they want him to get focused. with the health care, things are going to turn. the facts are the facts. the fact that a million people in ohio will lose their health care because of this, those 50-year-old men or women are going to get so hammered by this health care bill, it s not funny. there were, you know, obamacare wasn t perfect. we could fix a lot of things in there and we should, but if you are 50 years old in ohio, getting health care, they used to be able to only charge you 3-1 to everyone else in the plan. now, they are going to be able to charge you five times more than the person in the plan. the subsidies aren t going to connect. these people are going to get hammered. that s going to hit the ground as this health care debate happens and he s tweeting. they are going to say, wait, where is the guy th is supposed to be advocatingor us. what do you think the motives are of the architects of the health care plan? keep a political promise they never should have made. they used this obamacare issue for seven or eight years, banging on the president, banging on democrats, getting people riled up. now, they have to hurry up and make a commitment to a political promise. that s driving the policy here. you don t think they think their plan would be better for america than the current law? sounds like even republicans don t think that is the case. i mean, there s no way this makes sense, mark. how are you their main criticism was, the premiums are too high under obamacare. basically, what they are doing now is they are taking out healthy people that are in the risk pool. they are going to cover people who are older and sicker, which means premiums and deductibles are going to go way up. this didn t solve the criticism they kept presenting to the american people. this is a political deal and we need to sit down and we need to stop what s happening now and sit down and fix the things that need to get fixed. congressman, i want to change topics and talk about russia and the administration. you were in a position like a lot of democrats you would like jeff sessions to resign. that s not unusual among democrats and a full 9/11-style commission to investigate the connections with trump campaign and russia. what would it take for those two things to happen? well, it would take a lot of republicans who think this is a major attack on some fundmental institutions in our democracy, our intelligence community, our voting rights, our voting system. republicans, ultimately, at the end of the day have to step up. democrats don t have any power now. that s the problem. do you see size to that? quite frankly, i don t, i don t. it s disappointing. you would hope some issues rise above democrat and republican. i would hope vladimir putin trying to influence an election in the united states, i would hope a bunch of campaign people from one of the political parties having all these conversations with russian diplomats would rise above this garbage that s the traditional democrat/republican food fight we have here. if that doesn t i don t, quite frankly know what will. donny has a question. donny deutsche. you are one of the emerging faces of the democratic party. i m a brand guy. there s a lot written about the democratic party losing its way. how would you define the democratic party now. if i say democrats stand for, x, what is your brand right now? provide opportunity to working class people, black, white, brown, gay, straight. if you are a working class person, if you take a shower after work, the democratic party is the party for you. whether that means you need child care, whether it means you want health care in your later years through the medicare program. we also have to put people back to work, donny. that means rebuilding the country. yes, part of it is roads and bridges. it s also, i want the democratic party to be the party of the future. that means laying down broad band lines all over the country and hiring that steel worker or coal miner to lay fiber. you hear stories about people up in new york laying google fiber making 55 bucks an hour. that s a pretty good job. the democrats should be pushing laying the fiber lines and putting people back to work. a smart grid. making sure the grids are secure and up to date and move into a renewable energy economy. there s so much opportunity in the world now. democrats clearly aren t push thag as much as i would like us to. i think republicans are setting us backwards. we need to be the party of getting working class people back to work. sounlds like the guy running 1600 pennsylvania avenue right now. that s the frustration. he co-opted a democratic message. part is the democrats fault. i m more mad at the democrats than the republicans because we dropped the ball on this stuff. we let our people down. we better get on the stick and this health care is an opportunity to reframe it. we have to have a positive plan. it can t just be anti-trump. yeah, we gotta stop this health care bill. what are we going to do for working class people? how are we going to get wages up and secure the country and provide opportunity for young people. democrats need to lay that out in a positive way because there s so many exciting things happening out in the world. the democrats haven t wrapped our arms around this thing and said this stuff, the future, what america 2.0 looks like, democrats are going to drive that agenda for the country. congressman tim ryan, thank you very much. still ahead, we ll talk to the secretary of health and human services about the strategy moving forward. plus, the fbi director takes the hill. no one is saying much about what he was doing there. we have a pretty good idea. we ll be right back. why do so many businesses rely on the u.s. postal service? because when they ship with us, their business becomes our business. that s why we make more e-commerce deliveries to homes than anyone else in the country. here, there, everywhere. united states postal service priority : you except when it comes to retirement. at fidelity, you get a retirement score in just 60 seconds. and we ll help you make decisions for your plan. to keep you on track. it s your retirement. know where you stand. th.oh, baked-on alfredo?e. .gotta rinse that. nope. no way. nada. really? dish issues? throw it all in. cascade platinum powers through. your toughest stuck-on food. nice. cascade. dearthere s no other way to say this. it s over. i ve found a permanent escape from monotony. together, we are perfectly balanced. our senses awake. our hearts racing as one. i know this is sudden, but they say.if you love something set it free. see you around, giulia may not always be clear. but at t. rowe price, we can help guide your retirement savings. so wherever your retirement journey takes you, we can help you reach your goals. call us or your advisor t. rowe price. invest with confidence. we should have more time to digest it. history has a funny way of doin it. what a difference eight years make. republicans sounding like dims. this time, they are battling themselves. can president trump and speaker ryan bring their own party on board? one report says at least 15 million people, joe, will lose their health care coverage under the new gop plan. this morning, we are going speak live with the u.s. secretary of health and human services, dr. tom price. good morning, everyone. it s friday. friday, march 10th. we have senior political analyst, mark halperin, john heilemann. joe, you are in washington for meetings, but couldn t make it back up because of the weather. speaking of weather, did you see this little girl? we are going to explain it to you. oh! oh! oh! we ll talk about the incredible winds and rough country across the country. she s okay. before we dive into news, joe, what is your take in washington? you had meetings yesterday on where things stand across the board. two big take aways. one, everybody is questioning why the house did what they did. why they handled health care the way they did. the senators, tom cotton is right, so many senators believing they made a mistake repeating the akes of the democrats in 2009, rushing into this. the concerns, also being whispered in the white house really surprised that house gop team didn t have everybody together. they didn t have the freedom caucus on board. they were blindsided by the way they were. a lot of surprise on that respect. on another, sort of thing we keep talking about, there s absolutely no evidence as john said in his column and as i m seeing down here, anybody that supported donald trump day of his election does not support him today. in fact, people in the business community are even more excited about what they believe is going to be sort of financial regulatory tax relief they have needed for quite some time. you know, mika, over the past year and a half, you and i ran across a lot of people that were afraid to admit it. they are not afraid to admit it now. they are more in donald trump s camp, business community, than before. fbi director, james comey was on capitol hill where a congressional source says he met with lawmakers to discuss the alleged wiretapping of trump tower. comey met with leadership and top members on the senate side as well as in the house. despite sources saying he pushed the justice department to make a public denial, he was tight lipped when approached by nbc s casey hunt. were there wiretaps in trump tower? before his meeting with director comey, mitch mcconnell, again, put distance between himself and president trump s allegations against obama. do you believe that barack obama wiretapped trump tower? there s no evidence of that. i ve not heard of it before. but, that s an appropriate subject for the intelligence committee to look at. they are looking at whatever the russians were doing during the election. joe, does there need to be a complete investigation, the senate intelligence committee looking into it? it s what the white house says they want to do. it allows people like mitch mcconnell who knows it s not true, i have no evidence, but we ll do the congressional investigation. i thought, actually, willie geist, the best part when they asked mcconnell, is mexico going to be for the wall, he says, ah, no. i tell you, mitch mcconnell is emerging early as one of our favorites in his answering of the questioning. he is a guy that is not going to kowtow to the president of the united states and go down those rabbit holes as much as some people in the house are willing to do. as you said, the first part of the the comey visit, so much of this is theater. the president of the united states did not wiretap trump tower. the congressmen being asked know. it s an easy phone call to make, an easy answer to get. they are going to go through the formalities to get an official answer. last saturday donald trump tweeted this. it was a waste of time for the country. we should be focused on important things, the health care bill, which we have done. the fact is, it is a waste of time. mark halperin, i think it s an interesting conundrum for the media. i think we move on so much. at some point we have to focus on one question and get that answer. there s so many shiny pennies across the board here, we could move on to oblivion. here are different levels of compartmentalization. we found the business community come partment lized. they are not focused on the twitter feed, it is the legislative agenda and the calendar. mitch mcconnell sometimes compartmentalizes and sometimes not. they are trying to adjust to the question could they get this passed? they think they can. is it a good idea? should they slow down for the sake of the long term health and prospect of getting it through the senate. the question you have been putting on the table for weeks now, joe. nobody is going to convince me this is the smart move. start with tax reform and regulatory reform. mark halperin, i don t think we can underline enough to people in the media that haven t spoken to the business community or people marching the streets or people supporting. if you want to get donald trump s approval ratings, you have to convince the business community they should be concerned about the tweets. they should be concerned about the bizarre statements. they should be concerned about all the things that a lot of people in washington, in the washington and new york bubble are concerned about. a lot of americans across the country are concerned. they are just not. in fact, it is shocking just how little they care about anything other than regulatory reform and tax reform. they have completely compartmentalized everything else. i just say this, i am reporting, by the way, people that own the media companies that have people that are going around and all talking about how shocked and stunned we are at donald trump s lack of respect for constitutional values and presidential traditions. the business people that run the media companies are obviously thinking the same thing. i have yet to meet a business person that s not thrilled he s president of the united states. this extends not just to republican business people. oh, no! democrats in washington and new york. firms are run by democrats still in their jobs during the obama years. they are compartmentalized. not just jockeying for favorable outcomes, but enthusiastic about it. it s shocking. last year, when we talk to people and ask who is supporting trump and nobody would admit it. then they come whisper it to us later on. yeah. that s not how it is in 2017. they will tell you right up front. a lot of great things are about to happen. it s kind of surreal. it really is. it s not surprising that, you know, the business community with the prospects of tax reform, the prospects an administration doesn t care about the budget deficits and going to run a fiscal policy. regulatory reform, tearing down obamacare. doesn t surprise me the stock market and the business community are where they are. again, they are beyond the twooets. there are realities playing out here especially on the russia front where, not the distractions, but the actual, as progress occurs and we learn more day by day, that s still a story that the business community may be a lagging indicator on that. as that progresses and does political damage to the administration, the business community will look up and say we have a problem here. for you, the focus is what affects our bottom line. that s all good for them. the reality may catch up to that. the one kav yacht i throw in is i talk to the head of a large corporation yesterday and the head of a small american based business who both said this talk of taf riffs and protectionism scares them. they think the border is devastating to their bottom line. so much of what they have to make comes from out of the country. if it is implements or tariffs, it is passed on. i m hearing the same thing from the business community. there s a big picture and long-term consequences to some of the thing that is happened in this administration so far. the vice president has waeighed in on it. flynn performs a half million dollars worth of lobbying for turkey before election day. he registered his work as a foreign agent in paperwork filed with the justice department on tuesday, disclosing work performs from august to november, 2016. here is press secretary sean spicer followed by vice president mike pence reacting to the news they just learned yesterday. was the president aware that lieutenant general michael flynn was acting as a foreign agent when he appointed him to be the national security adviser? i don t believe that was known. i would refer you to general flynn and the department of justice in terms of the filings that had been made. had the president known that, would he have known him? i don t know, that s a hypothetical, i m not prepared to answer. hearing that story today was the first i heard of it. i fully support the decision president trump made to ask for general flynn s resignation. disappointed by the story? first i heard of it and i think it is an affirmation of the president s decision to ask general flynn to resign. joe, what is your take? for me, it seems deeply concerning that they had no clue about this since flynn and trump spent day and many flights and nights together traveling on the campaign trail. this seems impossible. the fact that that man was a foreign agent of turkey, who has been hostile toward u.s. interests for a good part of the syrian civil war, and was getting paid at the same time he was delivering a speech trashing hillary clinton at the republican national convention. saying lock her up. he was an agent of foreign country, of turkey throughout the in phases of the campaign and when donald trump got elected, it s shocking. i guess it shouldn t be shocking. this is the sort of thing that would not have happened in past administrations, but there are, apparently, it s everything goes ethically. by the way, i would like some clarification from the white house at some point, did donald trump fire michael flynn or did michael flynn resign? because if he resigned, donald trump acted angry saying a good man was hung. right wing websites are saying now he fired him. john heilemann, right wing welcomeses are now going out and talking about and right wing columnists talking about how michael flynn was set up, no due process, he did nothing wrong. well, did he resign or did donald trump fire him? if donald trump fired him, if the right wing websites are right, why is he such a weak president and fold to things that aren t true? it s a confusing situation. as you said, joe, donald trump and his public comments basically acted as throe michael flynn was persecuted, a good man driven from office by the hounds and the mass media. now you have mike pence trying to put a nice gloss on that saying it s the president s decision to fire him. if this guy was not only acting as a foreign agent, literally as a foreign agent, not metaphorically, while traveling with donald trump, and as close to donald trump as anybody, he became the national security adviser and somehow the president and others, right now, at least the official explanation is they had no idea he was acting as a foreign agent when appointed to be national security adviser. that is one of the most extraordinary if it s true they did not know, an extraordinary version of vetting i have ever heard of. so many untruths here, it s hard to know exactly what happened on any level with anything we talked about since the show started today. the president needs to follow up and ask the question, did they know? if they did know, it s as bad as if they didn t know. if they didn t know, it was one of the most unprofessional vetting processes i have heard of in washington, getting paid $500,000 by turkey, a hostile, again, for the past four, five, six years, a hostile player as it pertains to syria, only becoming more helpful over the past year or two. isis used turkey to get into syria for the better part of the civil war. this guy is getting paid. up next, as the gop fights health care battles on the left and right. health and human service secretary, tom price joins us. first, bill karins with a check on the forecast and the severe winds across the country. bill? the winds were crazy in ohio, the great lakes and ohio. 4-year-old coming home, does what she does, runs home, opens the door, going to head inside. oops, mom foot something. what are y doing madison? whoa! how did she hold on to the phone in her right hand and the phone. she is laughing now whachlt a story she has to tell. dealing with a snowstorm, cold outbreak, then a snowstorm. we are getting the snow on the ground. a lot of roads are doing fine, not many problems will. as we go throughout the rest of the day, we watch mostly the grassy surfaces, not so much areas that are further inland. that s good. snow totals look like this, two to four inches on the grassy surfaces, it will wrap up by 5:00. then this cold outbreak. negative three, negative five, negative four. cold in the great lakes and new england. then a potential nor easter. this is tuesday. this is the biggest snowstorm of the season for the east coast. cold air is in place. that s going to set the stage tuesday, tuesday night from d.c. to the mid-atlantic and the northeast for a potential major snowstorm. time square in new york city, we have the snow. it s doing what it likes, falling, looking pretty and p melting as soon as it hits the pavement. you are watching morning joe. we ll be right back. safety isn t a list of boxes to check. it s taking the best technologies out there and adapting them to work for you. the ultrasound that can see inside patients, can also detect early signs of corrosion at our refineries. high-tech military cameras that see through walls, can inspect our pipelines to prevent leaks. remote-controlled aircraft, can help us identify potential problems and stop them in their tracks. at bp, safety is never being satisfied. and always working to be better. with e trade s powerful trading tools, right at your fingertips, you have access to in-depth analysis, level 2 data, and a team of expeced traders reto help u if you need it. it s like having the power of a trading floor, wherever you are. it s your trade. e trade. start trading today at etrade.com here s to the wildcats this i gotta try .. bendy. spendy weekenders. whatever kind of weekender you are, there s a hilton for you. book your weekend break direct at hilton.com and join the weekenders. in my johnsonville commercial we open up in the forest. hi. i m jeff. i m eating my breakfast and all of a sudden a raccoon come up and ask me, what are you eating? 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[laughter] that s a commercial made the johnsonville way. dearthere s no other way to say this. it s over. i ve found a permanent escape from monotony. together, we are perfectly balanced. our senses awake. our hearts racing as one. i know this is sudden, but they say.if you love something set it free. see you around, giulia that is paul ryan walking through the health care plan. joining us now, the secretary of the u.s. department of health and human services, dr. tom price. mr. secretary, thanks for being with us. good to be with you. thanks so much. happy friday. happy friday to you, too. one of the questions we have been getting from across the country, not in washington or new york, but as they hear the details of the house plan unfold, do i lose my health care on this? it s a question a lot of people want answered. the brookings institute estimate 15 million people would be moved off health care. what is the number you have about how many people would lose their health care under this new plan? we don t want anybody to lose health coverage or health care. the fact is, right now, people are losing their health care and health coverage because of the plan put in place with the previous administration. you have deductibles increasing. you have premiums. one-third of the counties in the country have one insurer offering coverage. five states have one insurer. people are losing their coverage right now. that s an important point because that s the baseline we are looking at. what we want to do is solve that, fix it, put in place a system that makes sure every american has access to health coverage of the highest quality tharks is affordable and provides choices. we don t believe individuals will lose coverage so long as they can select the plan they want. to be clear, initially, if this plan were signed into law, no one would lose their health care? nothing changes for 2017, as you know. in terms of the law that is debated right now. when it s implemented, would anyone lose his or her health care? may be moved from a plan they have that is much more desirable fur them to have. the previous administration forced people to buy health coverage they may not want or forced to use because of the increased premiums and deductibles. what we want and the american people want is a system that allows them to choose the kind of coverage they have for themselves and their family. that s why we need the three parts, three phases. the bill in congress, the one at depament of healthnd services through rules and regulations to make a more vibrant market and phase three, the other bills, many of them insurance changes that they will go through congress. some of them concurrently, but some in the future. mr. secretary, i want to underline this, for a lot of families, this is a life and death question. that s why it s important. if it s repealed, this plan is signed into law through the senate and everything else, there will be no gap? the people currently enjoying the benefits all will be covered by the new plan? that s why the president said in his joint session to congress a few weeks ago, that we want to make certain the transition time line for this works for everybody. we want to make certain nobody falls through cracks, the rug isn t pulled out from anybody. if somebody has a plan, they keep it or transition to a plan that is more responsive for them. our goal is to keep patients at the focus of all this. sadly, we see a system where patients aren t at the focus. the numbers like the 15 million people that have been thrown around that will be moved off the affordable care act are p patently false? i believe those numbers look at this in a siloed situation where they don t look at the kind of reforms and changes that will come about or the options and choices that individuals will have. again, we want nobody to lose coverage or lose access to coverage that currently has that and we want to increase the number of individual that is have access to coverage. there are 20 million folks out there across the land who said to the previous administration and government, we don t want what you have and we are going to pay a penalty or request a waiver. 20 million folks don t have coverage because of the rules too onerous to purchase coverage. mark halperin? who is keith hall and what do you think of him? keith is the cbo director and i worked with him as budget chair. what do you think of him and his judgment? well, congressional budget office is an organization that does their best to get numbers right. god bless them, when they looked at obamacare originally, the aca originally, they said there would be 20 million people getting coverage through the exchange. as you and i both know, that number of folks getting their coverage through the exchange that didn t have coverage before is in the 3 million, 4 million, 5 million range. they have been underperforming when it comes to evaluating health systems. not because they are bad folks, this is challenging stuff. i m sorry to interrupt, if you have so little faith in the cbo, even someone you like and work with, why do we have the cbo? why pay their salaries if you are going to say we can disregard what they decide? it s a little off topic but i put forth a series of budget process reform so we could rely on the number that is camerom cbo. i would urge my former colleagues to pick that up an move forward with it. it is absolutely necessary. the american people need to know and members of congress need to know they can trust the information that s coming from the congressional budget office and the office of management and budget which will have different numbers as it relates to coverage and cost. there are other individuals working on the legislation that is before congress looking at the legislation and going to come forward with their assessment and their modelling of coverage and cost numbers we will see. our goal is to keep patients at the center, have a system that is affordable for everybody, accessible for everybody, the highest quality with the choices the american people demand and deserve. congressman, the last question of people losing coverage, you said transition people, people not lose coverage or not lose access to coverage. i want to ask you the same question i asked other republicans supporting this legislation. who are people who will, consumers who will be worse off than they are under the current law? it s a hypothetical, frankly. what we want are everybody to be better off. we want people to purchase the coverage they want. right now, the american people, if they are buying through the exchange, they are forced to purchase coverage that may or may not work for them. that s one of the important keys why the aca, obamacare failed. it it s dictating. you want everybody to be better off. is there no category of person who you think would be worse off under the new law, if it pass snd. the premise is nobody is worse off right now. the fact of the matter is there are millions of americans who are worse off because of obamacare and the aca. i talked to my former medical colleagues, i m a physician, third to sit in this role in health and human services. i talked to former medical colleagues and patients come in, they make a recommendation and the patient cries because they can t afford that. the deductibles have gone through the roof and i can t afford the deductibles. people have an insurance card, but they aren t getting care. that s the key. we want folks to get the care, not just the card. health and human services secretary, tom price, thank you for being on the show this morning. thanks so much. have a great friday, a great weekend. thank you. that was the sell. donny, what did you think of the sell? tap dancing, there are certain realities that are fact. the people that set up to help the most, the poorest people and people over 60 are going to get hurt from it versus the wealthiest people. the big thing they are taking off the table, the individual mandate is being replaced by a penalty cost of somebody drops out and wants to come back in. the reason it s not going to add up dollars wise is the only people that want to come in and pay the penalty are the people that really need health care. you are taking the people who have been supporting it out of the market and bringing the people in who are the most expensive. you are not helping as far as the individual mandate point of view. the reality is everybody who looked at this, the booking institute said yes. 15 million will lose health care. so, he was doing a lot of dancing. a slight of hand there. he said we want everyone to have access to care. we don t want anyone to lose care. access to care is the mirage. everybody can have access. who is going to lose coverage? there s not a scenario that we are talking about. this version of the bill or one that s contemplated where people are going to lose coverage. the question is how many. you have to be straight about that if you are going to try to get it done. here is the thing about our president. we have been talking throughout the show and i agree with joe, basically nobody who voted for trump changed their mind. a couple years down the road, if some of those people in michigan or ohio start to lose their health care, you are going to see a very different tune. they have been enjoying the benefits of the affordable care act. whether republicans or democrats now, six or seven years. if you take those away, it is going to hurt you politically. you can t say by taking a program this big away, you are not going to lose people and fall through the cracks. there are going to be people who lose their health care. still ahead, the jobs report of the trump era was released moments ago. we ll have the numbers and what they mean, next on morning joe. announcer: get on your feet for the nastiest bull in the state of texas. new neutrogena® rapid wrinkle repair wrinkles? your time is up! with the proven power of retinol. reduces wrinkles in just one week. neutrogena® when i was too busy with the kids to get a repair estimate. i just snapped a photo and got an estimate in 24 hours. my insurance company definitely doesn t have that. you can leave worry behind when liberty stands with you™ liberty mutual insurance all right. we just got the monthly jobs report. let s go to sarah eisen of the yooi yooi stock change chlgt what does it show? healthy job growth. the first full month of jobs under president trump, 235,000 jobs added. it s better than expected. the unemployment rate drops to 4.7% from 4.8%. some signs of wage growth is something we have been looking for throughout the jobs recovery. wages increased 2.8% from the year before. we need to see a number that goes more like 3%, but still, it is healthy to see those gains. a big part of the story here, construction jobs really grew. strongest rate there in terms of job growth in ten years, it was a warmer february. the weather might have had something to do with that. an overall sign that some of the confidence jumps we have seen boast election from businesses and home builders are actually translating into higher, more hiring. i want to bring in labor force participation tipped up a bit to 63%. that s encouraging. perhaps that trend stabilized a bit. as i said, overall, a strong report. what does it mean for the markets? well, next week, there s a big federal reserve meeting. the bet is they are going to raise interest rates next week. this strong jobs report adds fuel to that argument. market seems to be taking it well though. they are looking at this economy as doing a lot better in the first few weeks and month here of the trump presidency. cnc sarah eisen, thank you very much. thank you. john heilemann, what is your take on that? good jobs report. the reality, is you are donald trump, politically it s nice to have good jobs reports. it s not that different from what we saw with president obama. this is not a knock on donald trump, the reality is we are 50 days into the administration. nothing the administration has done is affecting the way american jobs are created. we ll look in six months to see about the climb and policy changes will make their way through the system. these job numbers reflect decision that is were made in hiring back in november, december, around when there was the hangover, the transition between the two administrations. it s good for trump, but he can t say these are my numbers. but he will. joe? go ahead. he can say that. donny is right, he will say that. look at the stock market, there s no doubt, there s a trump rally. a lot of people on wall street say the trump bump. no doubt about that. as far as long term systemic growth, yes, we have to look at the two things that matter the most to working class americans who have been feeling the crunch. what are the wages going to look like over the next 4-8 years, what are his changes going to do and can he bring back manufacting jobsto the united states that left 20 years ago, paying $35 an hour and now come back paying $14 or $15 an hour. those are the systemic changes and challenges that face every new president. we won t know the answer to how his economic policies are impacting those two issues for a decade. joe, you talked earlier in the show about the bullishness of ceos. they think we are at the top of the macht and starting to short. what s built in are the tax cuts, deregulation and uncertainty factor weighs in. a lot of people feel we are at the tippy top of the market. there may be that concern now. i m always very suspect of the stock market. i d rather go to the dog track than invest in the stock market. i think it s at the top. i will say, a lot of people believe regulatory reform, tax reform, is going to drive the market up even more. you have trillions of dollars offshore that will be reinvested in america. that will really make this economy explode. that is the belief, hard to say. also, what impact are we going to have, mika is unemployment falls to 4.7%. what impact are we going to see actually, when interest rates start going up? by the way, as the interest rates go up, the $20 trillion debt suddenly has american taxpayers paying a lot more money, throwing it straight down a rat hole for interest on america s $20 trillion national debt. a lot of problems for this republican congress and the president to confront. up next, the congressman who will be whipping those health care votes in the house. says don t confuse having insurance with having health care. we ll clear it up with steve scalise. he nails down the difference, next. so how old do you want to be when you retire? uhh, i was thinking around 70. alright, and before that? you mean after that? no, i m talking before that. do you have things you want to do before you retire? oh yeah sure. ok, like what? but i thought we were supposed to be talking about investing for retirement? we re absolutely doing that. but there s no law you can t make the most of today. what do you want to do? i d really like to run with the bulls. wow. yea. hope you re fast. i am. get a portfolio that works for you now and as your needs change. investment management services from td ameritrade. new neutrogena® rapid wrinkle repair wrinkles? your time is up! with the proven power of retinol. reduces wrinkles in just one week. neutrogena® why is there not a tax on that? look at the number one cause of skin cancer, it s not tanning beds. do a google search. it s the sun. why have they not proposed a tax on the sun? so, if you are worried about losing your health care, do not worry, it s safely in the hands of the guy googling, why not tax the sun. steve scalise is our next guest. the felon has good numbers and trump says they are great again. we ll be right back. knowing where you stand. it s never been easier. except when it comes to your retirement plan. but at fidelity, we re making retirement planning clearer. and it all starts with getting your fidelity retirement score. in 60 seconds, you ll know where you stand. and together, we ll help you make decisions for your plan. to keep you on track. time to think of your future it s your retirement. know where you stand. time to think of your future or keeping a hotel s guests cuttinconnected.i to 35,000 fans. businesses count on communication, and communication counts on centurylink. it s realizing beauty doesn t stop at my chin. roc® s formula adapts to delicate skin areas. my fine lines here? 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[howling continues] with us now from capitol hill, house majority whip, republican steve scalise of louisiana. it s great to have you here with us. good morning. good to be with ya. let s start with where you guys are as far as the whip count, approximately. would this bill pass if it went to the floor today? the bill is a few weeks from going to the floor. it goes to the budget committee next week. we continue to talk to members about things they would like to see that we are working with the white house on. at the same time, a strong vote out of the ways and means committee and the energy and commerce committee, which have all the factions of our conference. we have tuesday group members, rfc members and freedom caucus members and it passed unanimously with all republicans. the democrats voted against it. what about republicans, some of the more conservative members. we have had several of them on the show say thg is obamacare-lite. this is socialism-lite. how do you move them from where they are now to where you want them supporting the bill? very few members are talking like that. most of our members recognize this bill guts obamacare and starts it whole process of completely repealing and replacing obamacare. keep in mind, this gets rid of the mandate penalties. it starts to open a free market where consumers can buy their own health care insurance. that s at the heart of failures of obamacare. get rid of the mandates and taxes in obamacare. now we have a process where under secretary tom price, consumers can buy the health care plans thelt for their family, which is the health carefree.com people have been asking for for years. this has all the conservative reforms and things like medicaid reform, something we haven t seen in over 50 years. it s really going to help improve the most broken form of health care. congressman, i want to ask you two related questions, the first won t take long. do you agree with me, one of the things president obama did was not be fully honest about who the losers would be under the plan? people who would lose coverage? it was the broken promises, if you like what you have, costs won t go down. he knew, in advance, that some people would lose access and wasn t truthful about that, correct? i know you think that. i know you think that is correct. people wouldn t be able to buy what they wanted. you all are doing what the president did. you know full well that some people will benefit from the house plan, if it passed into law and some people won t. i m wondering, wout it be a good dwroz tell th american people, certain people, old people, people in rural places, some of your constituents will be worst off under your plan? true, right? no, the losers are those who think government bureaucrats have to tell you what you can and can t buy. our bill is about freedom to choose what you want. their bill was about government bureaucrats telling you what you can and can t buy. not one consumer will be worse off under your plan? if somebody is in obamacare and they really like it, it is going to be gone after our transition period, but there will be better options for them. and there s going to be lower costs they will be able to pay for your family. house majority whip, steve scalise, thank you so much. we want to bring into the conversation, author and nbc news contributor, we want to play you something that democratic congressman tim ryan said on our show earlier this morning. take a look. there s so much opportunity out in the world now but democrats clearly aren t pushing that as much as i would like us to. that s the frustration. he co-opted a democratic message and part of it is the democrats fault. i m more mad at the democrats than i am with the republicans because, you know, we dropped the ball on this stuff. we let our people down. so, looking ahead, what do we need to do? it s been a really, really rough and troubling time. a lot of it we do own. is that fair to say? what is true in that comment is, if you step back, i m5 years old. in the course of my lifetime, we have an amazing e of innovation in this country. think of what exists, the phones on our table that did not exist at the time i was born. that has not translated into progress for half the country. we have new data showing 117 million, the bottom half of americans got no raise, on average, since the 70s, as it has world got so amazing. innovation without progress. i think the problem is, donald trump, and that was z, by the way, the beneficiaries were the least vulnerable. donald trump tapped into that anger and instead of redirecting it back to the people who were extracting value from society redirected it to the most vol neshl people. i think the question behind what was said by the congressman is how do we get donald trump to be loyal to the people who voted for him to start with? people who like having health insurance over not having it. people who don t love the big wall street banks hesco siing up to. i was to make him loyal to his people, for starters. joe, where we stand now is a lot of trump supporters believe, even some of the things they are saying that are proven to be false. right. i say that with respect to them. what is happening and, how do how do we operate moving forward? first of all, listen, if you are a trump supporter, i certainly respect your decision to vote for donald trump. if you choose to be ignorant, willfully ignorant as donald trump lies every day about the lies, i don t cut you a break. they might take issue with that, joe. no they didn t. it s very simple. it s very simple. i don t question why people voted for donald trump. i understand why they didn t vote for hillary clinton. yeah. i m just taking i m checking what you just said there. if he s a liar on certain points, everybody has responsibility to call him out on lying. let s talk about the democratic party quickly, mika. the problem is, you are right, donald trump spoke to a certain group of people. the democratic party s problem was, they nominated, instead of bernie sanders, they nominated somebody that was more intertwined with wall street, probably, than any candidate in modern american history. anan, remember when the clinton s said they weren t that rich? because they were worst $100 million, $200 million, because they hung out with billionaires constantly. it doesn t buy you what it used to. of course. how does a democratic party in an age of disruption nominate that candidate instead of bernie sander snsz. that s a good point. i think democratic party has been split by people who tell the story of progress and tom friedman and people, as congressman ryan said we are the party of people who take a shower after work. we need to find a way to tell those stories together. this is an age of amazing, extraordinary. it has been brutal. someone who can tell that story cohesively is going to win that future. mark, real quick. how vulnerable do you think republicans are close to getting rid of the taxes? what s interesting is you have the arguments about social security every time you pass one of these things, there s a war. you can t go back. 30 years later, you try to take away the thing you were fighting against. there s no chance. my son is on obamacare. i m on obamacare. my wife is. my 2-year-old son with a bad stomach virus is on obamacare. i m grateful for obamacare. what you would like them to think about, can they answer your question and give us all and their own constituents their word that nobody is going to lose coverage. they can t. thank you very much.
this is what we do. we protest when we disagree and i don t think there s any reason for people to be told to come together and support this if they don t believe in it. i m not suggesting support tonight s nominee but don t plan the protest before you know who the nominee is. and that is where we are. we re at the point of transparent obstruction on both sides, olivia nuzzi and david jolly, thank you. the rachel maddow show starts right now. good evening, rachel. good evening. thanks, my friend. thank you for joining us at this hour. this is a big important historic news day. good to have you here. thank you for watching the news on a night like this and thank you for watching it here. antonin scalia, nino to his friends, he was beloved by his fellow supreme court justices. even the justices who disagreed with h the most, perhaps escially the justices who disagreed with him the most in terms of their day jobs. they loved his company. justice scalia and justice ruth bader ginsburg they shared a love of opera. justice scalia and justice elena kagan, they went hunting and fishing together. justice scalia was deeply and antagonistally and provocatively conservative. he was also witty, he was also apparently really fun to be with and he lived an active life. he also had heart trouble. and last february almost a year ago he died in his sleep. he was at a swanky hunting lodge in texas only about 30 miles from the u.s./mexico border and it was a shock when he died. it was a very, very sad loss for his family and in friends. it was also, of course, a political shock because his death was a surprise and it opened up a surprise vacancy on the supreme court. and with almost exactly a year left in his presidency we learned that barack obama would get to name a court nominee to fill the seat vie kated on the court by the death of antonin scalia. or not. even before former president obama named his nominee, even before he named judge merrick garland, republicans announced that they would hold open the scalia seat. they would not hold hearings for any obama nominee no matter who the president picked they were not going to consider his nominee. honestly because the president is a democrat and they didn t believe they had to and so they believed they would not thank you very much. and that has never been happened in our country. not like that. but tonight that radical decision, not a radical decision by donald trump but a radical decision by the republican party in the senate, tonight that radical act by congressional republicans it bore fruit awkwardly phrased fruit, a little hiccup in the execution court tonight. they are ready to go even before the name neil gorsuch was announced tonight. they were there to protest this nomination not necessarily because of anything specific about him because nobody knew it was going to be him until 8:00. those protesters were there and set to be there because of the circumstances surrounding this vacancy on the court and surrounding this nomination. democrats in the senate even before neil gorsuch was announced tonight, senate democrats openly mulled whether they should try to reciprocate in kind what the republicans did to president obama with holding this seat open for almost a year. as to whether or not democrats have the power to do that, well, the senator who has led the charge and said that he will lead a filibuster to hold this seat open because this is a stolen seat, that democratic senator is going to be joining us tonight live in just a few minutes. you will want to see that. as for the specifics of this nominee, though, judge gorsuch is most famous nationally for his role in a controversial case bought by the hobby lobby retail chain. the hobby lobby retail chain for years they had provided health insurance to their employees that included coverage for various kinds of birth control. then insurance became a point of controversy in obamacare, in the affordable care act and once that happened hobby lobby decided that they had an objection on religious grounds that they had religious beliefs as a business and those religious beliefs were now being violated by the affordable care act, by the regulations around insurance and the affordable care act even though they had been providing birth control coverage through their employees insurance all along. they just discovered these religious objections once it became a controversial issue in the affordable care act. it was a strange case. it was a controversial case. the retail store s claims succeeded at the supreme court but the way the case got to the supreme court was in court through neil gorsuch s lower court where he sided with them on their religious objections. judge neil gorsuch does not have a subtsunami shl record specifically on the hot button issue of abortion in terms of how both sides react to his nomination. judge neil gorsuch was confirmed to his current seat on the appeals court by a voice vote in 2006. the president described that as a unanimous vote and it s a kind of unanimous vote but it mostly means people don t formally vote, it just got approved. judge gorsuch is from colorado. judge gorsuch s family has a famous political history because his mom ran the epa for ronald reagan in a tenure that ended really, really badly and is a fascinating story. but that was his mom. as for him, how is this going to go? what should we know about him? joining us now is the senior editor and legal correspondent at slate magazine, someone i always want to turn to as nights like this. someone we booked before we knew it was going to be neil gorsuch. doll ya, thank you for being here. great to have you with us. thanks, rachel. i m assuming you booked someone else and it was right down the wire who you called? i was going to summon you both and make you stand hear wearing the same outfit then i was going to have someone in a ball gown pull a spangly curtain reveal one of you but we don t the budget for that kind of thing. neil gorsuch was a we ve known for a few days he was on the shortest short list, that he might be one of the picks, what s your overall view of this choice by the president? in a way it s hugely surprising because if you think about the president s most of hisabinet picks he sked in some sense the most nihilist choice. that is not neil gorsuch. this is not a bomb thrower, someone in any way who doesn t believe in the judicial branch and in that sense it s surprising because i think disrupters are kind of trump s things so this is an incredibly solid respectable conventional pick that anyone would have made. in once sense it s surprising for trump because trump promised us a blue-collar non-ivy non-fancy pants guy and gorsuch was on the short list. so in that sense it s a funny pick but in every other sense conventional. he s sort of in the same way that the president attacked goldman sachs for having captured hillary clinton and having been the great downfall of ted cruz s ties to goldman sachs and then he brings on six people from goldman sachs into the administration. he is famous for the hobby lobby case, for his role at the appeals court level while that case made its way to the supreme court. i described that in a short way. tell me 23 i got that right and why that might be important in terms of controversies or important insight into what he might be like? look, i think you made this point and it s important. the two litmus tests that trump promised on the campaign trail were somebody who was going to support guns and someone who was going to end roe v. wade and in a strange way he picked a guy who has no actual record on those issues. you can dance around them but in a weird way give than he pledged that those were his nominees, unless he knows something we don t know he s put gorsuch in a funny position. there s not a tremendous record. i will say on hobby lobby and abortion we know that gorsuch not only voted as you said against the contraception mandate, we know his academic interest, his big book he s written and thought about all has to do with end-of-life issues, physician assisted suicide, the sanctity of life, a useful template to think about how he might think about abortion but certainly squarely on these issues we don t have a ton of guidance, we know generally he is scalia-like both in his approach, his sort of minimalist textualist approach and scalia-like in his politics but on these issues he s a bit of a cipher. on that, because abortion has been such a point of contention for nominees in both parties and they go through this kabuki theater of pretending like they ve never thought about it before when they re asked about it at their confirmation hearings, we ve been hearing noise that anti-abortion groups might not be totally comfortable with him. that in the ambiguity there might be some concerns on the right that he s insufficiently anti-abortion. is there any reason to suspect that? i don t think there s reason to suspect that but as i suggested, rachel, i think the fact that trump didn t pick someone who looked like a bill pryor who he promised us, a culture warrior who was coming out blazing for roe and he didn t give that. i would not be surprised if some of the anti-roe groups are really pretty perplexed that he didn t make good on the one promise that got them out to the polls for someone that in other ways they didn t like very much at all. dahlia lithwick, senior editor, legal correspondent at slate magazine, i m sure we will be talking more about neil gorsuch in days ahead, thanks for being here, my friend. thanks, rachel. 1789, president george washington got to be the first president to make a nomination to the united states supreme court. 17 1789. there, of course, are benefits to being first. when george washington got to make his supreme court nomination, he got to nominate six justices all at once. brand new court, got to fill it up. when he made those six nominations in two days the united states senate confirmed all six of them. that s how we got the very first supreme court and every president since george washington would love to be treated like that, white? they d love to have everybody confirmed in two days and pick every justice on the court but there will never be another george washington, that said it isn t usually that hard for presidents to get their nominees confirmed speaking as a general matter. in american history the vast majority of supreme court nominees have been confirmed and the vast majority of those confirmed have been confirmed by a lot, by big overwhelming votes, there s only been a handful of enxceptions in moder history. reagan nominee robert bourque was rejected by the senate in 1987. in the george h.w. bush administration, in 1991 clarence thomas was almost rejected by the senate. he squeaked by on a 52-48 vote, the narrowest approval margin for a supreme court justice in modern history. there was also a weird period before that, 1968, 1969, 1970, that was like a bermuda triangle for the supreme court. this was after lbj s triumphant nomination of thurgood marshall to be the first african-american supreme court justice. after that things went off course and over the next few years with johnson at the end of his firm and nixon at the beginning of his time as president between them the two of them air balled on four different nominees for the supreme court who were all rejected or forced to withdraw in scandal. but again i think of that as a weird bermuda triangle period in supreme court nominees. there are exceptions. there was that time period. there was the tough time for clarence thomas, robert bourque, those were exceptions but that proved the more general rule. if you get to the point where the president is nominating you to be a supreme court justice and the senate is considering your nomination to be a supreme court justice you are likely to get through. look at the justices confirmed in the late 20th century. anthony kennedy, 1987. the vote on him was 97-0. david souter, approved in 1990. the vote on him was 90-9. ruth badernsburg, approved in 1993. 96-3. stephen breyer, the following year, his vote was 87-9. that s how the last century ended. overwhelming votes on what supreme court nominees huge votes, 90-vote margins. that s what they used to get. liberals, conservative, didn t matter. everybody got those overwhelming numbers. then we hit the millennium. this century kicked off with bush v. gore. with the bush v. gore decision in the year 2000, the immensely controversial decision in which the supreme court actually chose the president in a 5-4 vote where the votes lined up precisely on ideological lines, conservative justices all voted for the republican, liberal justices all voted for the democrat and because there were five conservatives and only four liberals on the court, that s the reason why we got president george w. bush instead of president al gore. and then to rub salt in the wound, for the first supreme court pick of the 21st century, the first supreme court pick after that, president george w. bush chose one of the lawyers who had advised the bush camp on the florida recount in bush v. gore. talk about chutzpah. ultimately john roberts did very well at his confirmation hearing. he did get confirmed. the vote was 87-22 which is narrower than most votes historically but not bad. then, perhaps a little high on life over how well that went with john roberts despite how bold that pick was maybe a little overconfident, maybe feeling too many of his oats, we then got the harriet miers disaster. what was that about? president george w. bush after his success with john roberts he nominated his old buddy, his old friend from texas whom he had brought to washington to work in the white house counsel s office. nobody had any idea why hemiers than the fact that he liked her and they went way back. that was greet with bipartisan bafflement. conservative groups ran ads going against it. that nomination lasted precisely 24 days before it was withdrawn. and less son learned apparently, we got samuel alito. ultimately when the vote came for alito there were 42 no votes against him, all from democrats. the most no votes against a successful nominee since clarence thomas. then thereafter we got a new president and we got president obama s two nominees, sonia sotomayor and elena kagan, neither of whom was particularly controversial as a pick but more than 30 republicans voted no on each of them anyway. you see the overall trend here, right? no supreme court nomination is exactly like the ones that preceded it but you see the trend here. it has become hardener recent years to get confirmed as a supreme court justice. particularly post-bush v. gore and that process with votes getting more partisan that process was under way before justice antonin scalia died last year unexpectedly on february 13 almost a year ago now. and immediately after justice scalia died, the night of his death republicans said they wouldn t allow a vote on any nominee to replace him. president obama ended up nominating merrick garland anyway. the definition of a non-controversial moderate choice. the republicans never even held a hearing on him. they have held open that seat for more than a year simply because they didn t want a democratic president to appoint someone to the court. several republican senators sid before the presidential election that if hillary clinton won the election they would continue to hold that seat open for four years, for eight years if necessary because hillary clinton is a democrat. new republican rule, democrats don t get to appoint supreme court justices. openly h lly hewing newly defin washington, d.c. principle that only republicans can nominate supreme court justices. the nominating process was already harder than it was historically and way more partisan and that was before the republicans held a seat open for a year for 100% partisan purposes which is the only reason the new president had this seat to fill tonight and now the nomination will go to neil gorsuch. this was going to be hard anyway, just look at the history. now i think it s safe to assume dexs are going to make this as difficult as humanly possible even before we knew who the name of the nominee would be. gorgeou. oh, did i say there s only one special edition? because, actually there s 5. aaaahh!! ooohh!! uh! holy mackerel. wow. nice. strength and style. which one s your favorite? 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i don t think it s that provocative when you compare him to the other two candidates whose names were rooted about. so if you compare him to a pryor or hardiman. but what we have to compare him to is merrick garland. i don t want that to be lost. so we had a supreme court back in the beginning that was very fragile. but let s remember chief justice marshall was careful about husbanding the credibility of the court because it was a weak institution. people used to leave all the time to become state court justices or diplomats, something that would be unthinkable today because it s the most prestigious position the first chief justice left to be a governor. you would never imagine that happening now. so what i m worried about and also chief justice marshall used to insist that opinions be only in because he was so worried that anything less than unanimous opinion would weaken the credibility of an institution. what i worry about when i see those graphs about how conflicted we are with confirmation hearings is that the supreme court may not be the rock of gibraltar that we grew up with. it may not be a completely respected, really the most respected of the three branches if you believe the public opinion polls but may be seen as another partisan institution precisely because with all due respect the president is treating this nomination as a bit of a reality show but also and more deeply the fact that merrick garland didn t get a hearing. it seems the truly radical thing that happened is the merrick garland nomion blanked by the republicans. i didn t feel i didn t mean to say it this bluntly but i don t know any other way to explain the principle to apply to that which is a democratic president shouldn t be allowed to appoint a supreme court nominee, not when republicans are in control of the nomination process because they control the senate. that was the truly radical act. it seems like the choice of judge gorsuch is a relatively mainstream choice you might expect from any republican president but the circumstances around this nomination are radical because of the garland nomination and that partisan precedent or the breaking of non-partisan precedent we ve seen. exactly. and when we get to the game of comparing him to the other two candidates in this particular cycle we re already sort of losing the real debate which is let s compare him to the person who was nominated by the president, merrick garland. and do you think there are things in his history that will be substantively controversial or subject of acute questioning or concern once he goes through this process? absolutely. this hobby lobby decision he was still extremely controversial. it says corporations are persons who can exercise religions and on those grounds can engage in the religious right to discriminate from laws that you or i would have to follow. so there s the health care contraception mandate promulgated by the obama administration and hobby lobby says we don t to adhere to that because of our religious beliefs. that s not the classic religious accommodation claim we believe that is brought forward by individuals. it s a for-profit entity bringing that so that s a troubling decision. this qualified immunity. i don t know if you ve been watching this but there s an increasing drum beat among conservative scholars to get rid of qualified immunity all together because it gives too much of a bye to governmental officials so the qualified immunity case will be controversial then the hobby lobby case is not a stand alone with regard to religious liberties. he dissented from denial of a hearing on bank which is a dissent from a decision not to rehear a case in a little sisters of the poor case which was kind of a crazy case from my perspective so it may be that there s reasonable room to debate this but from my perspective it seems crazy because the obama administration says if you want exemption from the contraception mandate sign this form and the objection from the little sisters of the poor was signing the exemption form itself was a form of complicity so they refused to do it so they were opting out from opting out and he believed they had a case so i do think there s a religious right to discriminate and different rules apply to believers and nonbelievers or people who belong to minority faiths is something we ll hear a lot of in the coming days. kenji yoshino, professor of constitutional law, always incredibly clarifying. thank you so much, we ll be right back. stay with us. do not go gentle into that good night. whether it s connecting one of or bringing wifi to 65,000 fans. campuses. businesses count on communication, and communication counts on centurylink. more doing chores for dad per roll more earning something you love per roll bounty is more absorbent, so the roll can last 50% longer than the leading ordinary brand. so you get more life per roll. bounty, the quicker picker upper don t put off checking out your medicare options until 65. now is a good time to get the ball rolling. medicare only covers about eighty percent of part b medical costs. the rest is up to you. that s where aarp medicare supplement insurance plans insured by unitedhealthcare insurance company come in. like all standardized medicare supplement insurance plans, they could help save you in out-of-pocket medical costs. taking informed steps really makes a difference later. that s what it means to go long™. call now and request this free decision guide and explore the range of aarp medicare supplement plans. all plans like these let you choose any doctor or hospital that accepts medicare patients. these are the only medicare supplement insurance plans endorsed by aarp. call now and request your free decision guide. and start gathering the information you need to help you go long™. we ve been talking about whether democrats will oppose the supreme court nominee just nominated by president trump. elizabeth warren senator of massachusetts announced she will oppose this nomination. quoting from the statement president trump had the chance to select a consensus nominee to the supreme court. to the surprise of absolutely nobody, he failed that test, he carried out his public promise to select a nominee drawn up by a list of far right activist groups financed by big business interest. judge gorsuch has been on the list for four months. before joining the bench he advocated to make it easier for public companies to defraud investors. as a judge he twisted himself into a pretzel to make sure rules favorite giant companies over workers and individual americans, he sided with employers who deny wages, he s ruled against workers in all manner of discrimination access. for years, powerful interests have executed a full scale at salt on the kp assault, they spent millions to keep this seat open and judge gorsuch is their reward. based on the long and well-established record of judge gorsuch, i will oppose his nomination. elizabeth warren putting herself on the record tonight, we re seeing a number of senators come out and say what their intentions are around this nomination. one of the senators who says democrats should hold this seat open, democrats should refuse to vote on any one other than merrick garland for this seat because it s a stolen seat, that democratic senator joins us live next. 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can they pull it off? prior to tonight s announcement about who the nominee would be for the supreme court seat, before we knew it was going to be neil gorsuch republican senate leader mitch mcconnell had a slugs fuggestion for democrats don t filibuster. what i would suggest from our democratic friends is that the nominee be handled similarly to president clinton s two nominees in his first term and president obama s two nominees in his first term. president obama s two nominees in his first term, i d like to get really specific. right? because they don t want to talk about the third nomination that president obama made. no mention of merrick garland, president obama s third nominee who faced this unprecedented black cade by republican senators who refused since last march to even hold a hearing on his nomination despite the fact merrick garland was a completely non-controversial nomination. well, tonight the new republican president announced that supreme court judge neil gorsuch is his choice for that supreme court that merrick garland was supposed to be the nominee for. after gorsuch was announced as the nominee we got this statement from the democratic leader chuck schumer. the senate must insist upon 60 votes for any supreme court nominee, a bar that was met by each of president obama s nominees. the burden is on judge gorsuch to prove himself to be within the legal mainstream and in this new era willing to vigorous ly defend the constitution from the executive branch. the democratic senator affirming they re going to insist on a 60-voter there hold. republicans don t have 60 votes in the senate. this means democrats are going to filibuster. senate democrats were already under intention pressure from democratic voters who have been loudly upset with democrats casting votes for trump cabinet nominees. that pressure will intensify on democrats now that we have a supreme court nomination as well even before we got the name tonight one democratic senator had been standing up loudly and overtly saying he would filibuster pick regardless of who was because, he said, republicans effectively stole the supreme court seat from president obama. the senator who has been making that case all along is oregon senator jeff merkley joining us now. senator, thank you very much for being up late and being here with us on nomination night. you re welcome, rachel, wouldn t miss it. does the announcement of judge gorsuch s name, does that change your mind at all about your desire to fill bust they are nomination? not at all. the point i was making was we must not forget this. this was not a normal consideration. this is a seat that was stolen from the former president, obama, that s never been done in u.s. history before to let this become normal just invites a complete partisan polarization of the court from here to eternity. at what point does a majority say in the future we won t let someone make a nomination two years into their four years or three years into their four years or their entire four years? so i made it clear i was going to insist on a 60-vote standard and that i would vote against closing debates. sos th s thathis is the way you what we refer to as the filibuster and we hope there will be enough votes to shut it down. how many senator do you need to join with you in order to make it so judge gorsuch has to clear 60 votes? you have to have 41 senators vote against closing debate. there are 48 democratic senators. of the 48 you need 41. so we have either 48 who are either democrats or caucusing with the democrats. do you have sense of your colleagues views towards this and whether or not you think you ll clear that 41 vote number. well, i suspect we re going to hear a lot of statements from colleagues but the colleagues who we re waiting to see if possibly the president would nominate someone like merrick garland are going to be sorely disappointed tonight. this is from the extreme right, someone who has said corporations are people, made that case, someone who has proceeded to be against class action suits which the only opportunity for fairness for a lot of citizens. you go case by case by case, this was about the powerful and the privilege and oppressing the righ of people. i think there will be an enormous number of senators who decide that this person is not suitable because they will not honor our we the people vision of government embedded in our constitution. senator merkley, i ve sort of been reading the tea leaves on this a little bit trying to get a sense of where the democrats in the senate are on this and whether or not this is a time when we might expect a democratic effort a big deal, that would be a heavy lift in political terms not just because of the qualifications of this nominee but because it would set a new standard for what it means to get a supreme court justice. i look at the size of those protests in the streets, the mood of the democratic base right now, the reaction of democratic voters and protesters to what the new administration is doing and who they ve nominated to the cabinet and i see a lot of momentum. i see a lot of energy. how do you know whether or not it s going to translate into this working. are you worried if you try and fail democrats will be showing weakness here? i never worry about trying and failing. you have to fight the battle you believe in and that s what enables you to win is to undertake that battle. i can tell you this weekend i had two town halls on saturday. the first had 600 folks crowded into a gym that could only fit about 400. it was almost scary and i thought i am never going to see another town hall like this. i went to my second town hall and 3700 citizens showed up to weigh in about how angry they are, how frustrated they are about how america has gone way off track after just the ten days of this presidential leadership by trump. senator jeff amerimerkley of oregon about to be involved in one of the political fights of your life, sir, thank you for helping us understand, appreciate you being here. this is going to be interesting. what jeff merkley has said will be the democratic strategy is to get 41 democrats to line up with the filibuster. they have 48 democratic or caucusing with the democratic caucus senators in the senate. if they can get 41 of the 48 to side with this strategy they can, at least theoretically, block this nomination from the minority. it would be a radical move, it would change the way that supreme court nominees are approved in this country, sort of been changing on its own anyway but this is going to be a fascinating thing to watch and it will be fascinating to see if those protesters out on the street, people showing up in town hall meetings and all those things over the country if they ll backstop their democratic senators on this strategy. this is going to be a hell of a fight. we ll be right back. that s why i have the spark cash card from capital one. with it, i earn unlimited 2% cash back on all of my purchasing. and that unlimited 2% cash back from spark means thousands of dollars each year going back into my business. which adds fuel to my bottom line. what s in your wallet? 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[second man] how you doing? [ice cracking] [second man] ah,ah, ah. oh no! [first man] saves us some drilling. [burke] and we covered it, february fourteenth, twenty-fifteen. talk to farmers. we know a thing or two because we ve seen a thing or two. we are farmers. bum-pa-dum, bum-bum-bum-bum when i was a kid, i was obsessed with jacques cousteau. pioneer in ocean exploration, he helped invent scuba gear which opened up whole new worlds of human interaction with the sea. he ultimately dedicated himself to documenting the ocean. jacques cousteau films won three oscars, ten em mys. he became a pretty vocal and world famous environmentalist. he testified before congress about a bananas plan that had been developed by the u.s. government, a plan to burn toxic waste at sea. there was a plan that they would set aside a 30 mile by 40 mile rectangle off the coast of delaware and maryland. and that would be the place where we d put one of the nation s biggest waste disposal companies on ships to burn toxic substances. they were going to burn these toxins in huge incinerator ships right off the coast of delaware and maryland. because who cares? it s just the ocean. the amazing thing is that a major proponent of this plan was the epa. they thought it was a great idea. the agency called it well developed and understood technology. if that sounds crazy, it s because that s crazy. and that s what the epa was like under president ronald reagan. and the now mostly forgeten failures and scandals of his time in office, one of the ones we are now remembering is the way the epa was run at the beginning of his presidency, specifically under this epa administrator. she was the first female administrator of the epa. she didn t last long. she had to resign after 22 months on the job. after all, there was the idea to use big swaths of the ocean to burn our toxic waste. one of the biggest controversies of her tenure involved super fund sites because this is how president reagan and his epa administrator handled super fund sites. the people of glenn avon, california, may owe their lives to the big trucks that haul away spring water from the edge of town. the water is laced with lead and pcps and other poisons. and the trucks, paid for by the state of california, weren t hauling off thousands of gallons of water a day now, glenn avon would be uninhabitable. most of the money comes from a special tax on chemical and oil companies. 1$1.6 billion should be raised f but critics say the super fund hasn t been used enough because of political delays political delays, example the springfellow acid pitsny of the been spent yet. as for the charges of going too easy on industry, example, s seymour recycling, seymour, indiana. the philosophy of super fund was to spend now and sue later, sue the companies that polluted. super fund wasn t spent on seymour. instead of suing epa negotiated an agreement with the polluters who promised to spend $8 million to clean it up. this was the kind of coverage around super fund sites during the reagan era of the epa. photos like this running night after night after night on national evening newscasts turned out to be enough to shame somebody into resigning. the handling and the corruption arounds super funds sites under reagan ended up ending the tenure of his epa administrator