plus literally dialing up the rhetoric. president trump and president putin set to talk as counterpart tomorrow. but who s calling who? keir simmons in new york, kristen welker at the white house. big meeting today, big phone call tomorrow but it s the meeting that s not happening that s grabbing all the headlines, right? that s right. that meeting that was supposed to happen with the president of mexico which was cancelled yesterday after president trump insisted that mexico was going to pay for the wall, the president of mexico said not going to pay for the wall. that is something we have heard him say over and over again. then we learned he cancelled the meeting. president trump tried to cast it as a mutual decision. bottom line, this is a rift in a relation with one of the united states closest allies, its third largest trading partner. what happens next? the administration floating the idea of a possible 20% tax on imports from mexico and, hallie, for a very busy day. keir simmons is in new york. theresa may has to thread this very delicate needle. that s right. in her speech she was able to send a signal to president trump that, if you like, she s on his side, that britain and america see things at the same way and at the same time send a number of messages that will have been picked up and have been picked up back in the u.k. about things like nato, about russia, about iran, about a whole range issues and primarily saying to president trump, america still needs to lead in the world. so that balance she still needs to strike as she prepares to meet with the president at 1:00 eastern today. she still needs to be able to somehow build trust with him while at the same time be her own person. oh, to be a fly on the wall. if people haven t seen her before yesterday, a school mistress type. she s a serious person. why? she got a number of standing ovations but the first laugh didn t happen until about 30 minutes into that speech. so that s the kind of person she is. how will that gel with president trump? you know what she said to british journalists on the flight over here? opposites attract. i was going to ask you about the idea of president trump who is on twitter, theresa may don t even hav a twitter account. will opposites attract in this instance politically? we don t know. she does have an official twitter account. if you take a look at it, all that is on there, posted on there are clips from her speeches and official announcements. it s such a contrast. who knows. when you think about the reagan-thatcher relationship, in some ways reagan was the warm, kind of easy going thatcher was the star owner s daughter, she famously had the handbag, she was famously tough and together that seemed to gel. it s so crucial with international relations. but in a sense, though, hallie, we re talking there about the way things have been and president trump as so far seems to change so much. and that s what s so difficult for world leaders is figuring out how things will work in the future. and the real danger for the british and the real danger for any world leader who chooses to take the road which the british prime minister has is to stay as the british always has really close to washington. the danger is that president trump starts to do things that britain really doesn t agree with and how does she respond to that? fundamentally she knows that if she has washington on side, it really strengthens her negotiations with the european union, but it s full of risks. keir, i think you should hop on a train and get down to washington because there s a lot of anticipation for that meeting. thank you very much, keir simmons at 30 rock. and reaction from another key al ally, mexico. press secretary sean spicer first said there would be a 20% attack on imports. two hours later backing off after some backlash saying that s just one of many options. president trump not backing off his promise that mexico will, in fact, pay for the wall. i ve said many times that the american people will not pay for the wall. and i ve made that clear to the government of mexico. we re working on a tax reform bill that will reduce our trade deficit, increase american exports and will generate revenue from mexico that will pay for the wall if we decide to go that route. reminder, mexico says it is not going to pay for that wall mariana atencio is joining us this morning. you ve been talking to folks there in the capital. what are they saying? reporter: i ve spoken to business leaders who tell me in board rooms across this nation, they are waiting to see what president trump will do. mexicans are angry, appalled at president trump s dismissive tone toward a nation they say has contributed so much to the u.s. economy. i m here with senator armando rios. senator, what will be discussed in this meeting given president trump s executive actions on immigration and the wall? well, we need to hear the minister of economy and the minister of foreign relations. we just went there to the united states last tuesday. we need to hear their report and we need to take some actions for knowing which are the next steps too take regarding security, regarding trade. we need to have a common position with the senate, off course with president pena anyw nieto. what kind of actions are being evaluatevaluated? my position is we should stop negotiating with the united states regarding security issues, regarding anti-terrorism that we ve been working to the for the last years and that now it has no sense to keep on collaborating with an unfriendly government, specifically in the drug enforcement area. of course we need to take a look at what we need to change because we are spending so much money with some kind of relationship that doesn t seem to be in the benefit for us anymore. and what about trade, senator? what concrete actions would you consider taking? we need to change our patterns of consumption. we ve been buying a lot of corns for the states of the corn beds, specifically iowa, some of those. we need to start thinking if he wants to tax our goods that are sold there in the united states, we need to change. probably we can change we can buy the corn now to brazil or to argentina and stop buying it. it s a retaliation regarding what he s saying. thank you so much, senator. i don t want to keep you from the meeting with president pena. you heard it, possible concrete actions regarding the war on drugs and consumer products, as you heard. rachel, we were watching that interview together and you were sort of nodding and said at one point, that s exactly the issue. walk me through what you heard and what stood out to you. i any whthink what we heard there is rising tension with mexico and we can expect representatives in that government are going to feel the need to retaliate, that whether or not concrete actions are taken, we know that rhetoric coming from president trump is having some very tangible effects within mexico. so whether we talking about a trade war, whether we re talking about decreased cooperation at the border, we re talking about problems hitting american consumers, we re talking about problems with combatting the drug trade at the border. this is a partner for the united states. mexico has served as a collaborator and a partner for the last two decades. let s not forget that that want always true. put this into context for me here. i spoke with alfonso aguilar. he said, listen, this lack of a meeting with pena nieto is not a long-term problem, a 20% tax would be. is this a bump in the road or are we going to be talking about this two years ago from a turning point? i don t think that one meeting is a problem. i think over a year of aggressive rhetoric towards mexico is what we can point to as the problem. i think we can say that year of very aggressive rhetoric. every country has the right to defend itself. the united states has the right to secure its borders as it sees fi this rhetoric around we have to build this wall, making this very aggressive and confrontational, i think that s what we ll see as the turning point is the way this is addressed. so if the wall discussion was happening but with a different tone from pluresident trump, do you see that as problematic? i think if president trump was saying i think it s important to find a way to increase borders and find a way to work more closely with our partners in the region to combat drug trade, i think that would be a legitimate discussion. how real is the idea this lift could embolden the liberal wing of mexican politics and put someone into power who is more anti-u.s.? i think we re already seeing massive support for the leading candidate of the opposition, who really advocates for separating from the united states. i absolutely think this could have a very heavy influence, if not jest the wall but specifically the larger relationship. i think you re seeing a sentiment among mexicans if the u.s. doesn t play with us, we don t want to play with them. but how do they play if they re literally not speaking to each other? part what was so insulting about trump s exetive orders was he signed them the day the foreign minister was in the united states talking to his government. to say they re not talking is not true. the foreign minister was on his way to meet with the president there and drove right past and kept on going. this is a country we share 2,000 miles of borders with, over the last 250-some years, w created a relationship with. i think we shouldn t have such short-term memories and we should be worried when we see someone not walking in the door to have that conversation see that has illustrative. much more coming up on president trump s tense relationships with mexico. after the break, we re joined by juan vargas. 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. find out how american here you go.picking up for kyle. you wouldn t put up with part of a pizza. um. something wrong? 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are you having conversations? where do you see an opportunity to work with republicans on this? it s clear the president is not going to simply change his mind like that? it s true. we have to try to work together. independe i m a democrat and i m very progressive, however, we didn t win. he won. unfortunately he s a bit of a caricature president. he doesn t seem to be a real president at the moment but there s a lot of serious people around him and we re trying to work together and we have to work together. we have a long border here. i represent the entire california/mexico border. we have lots of positive things going on. the things happening here along the border have been very good for both sides. we want to make sure that continues. we can t when you get all this heavy, awful rhetoric that is affecting our relation sishipre. i m going to work with the administration as well as i can. i m on the national prayer breakfast on thursday and i ll see him then. what do you plan to say to him when you see them then? chill out! read the bible a little bit. chill out. he s there for a religious person. look at matthew 25. when i was a stranger, you welcomed me. that s what jesus says. why don t you pay attention a little more to the bible. i think it will make things better for everybody. he s been probably hearing that message a little bit as he s been promising this border wall for 18 months, i think. if he moves forward of building this wall, what are your options? we already have the fence. in some areas, we have three walls. so they ve already built these. i kind of laugh when people talk about this. they put these things in saying this was going to stop immigration. it didn t. people got bigger ladders, they tunnelled underneath. unless he wants to put up a fourth fence, a fourth wall somewhere, we already have it. if you start at the ocean, literally 150 yards into the ocean, they have all these gigantic pillars and the three border mountai border fences go to the mountains and they you can t build anything. the first one didn t work, the second one didn t work, the third one didn t work and i assume the fourth one s not going to work either. democratic congressman want vargas of california, we re going to get you on our schedule after that meeting with president trump. right now tens of thousands of people are expected t gather not far from where i m sitting right now near the washington monument for the annual march for life. history being made with vice president pence addressing the crowd. you re looking at live pictures before the rally begins. we ll head there live after the break. i am totally blind. watry.duo fusiong heartburn relief? 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it is the first time i ve been here. i felt like i was drawn here and i was supposed to be here for a reason. i believe this is the reason. and what s your feeling under this new administration? are you feeling more optimistic? we ve heard that from a lot of people. i am feeling more optimistic. i feel like tha the pro-life movement, the agenda, is going to be more heard from. okay. and what do you hope to get out of today? what s the message you d like to tell the rest of america? well, i think the reason i m here is because i honestly believe president trump has brought god back into washington, d.c. and back into the white house and i am just thrilled to be here. and what are you hoping to hear from the vice president today when he speaks? well, i m excited to hear what he has to say. i think it s going to be encouraging and uplifting. it s a new day in our country. that s what we re hearing from a lot of people in the crowd, this sense of optimism moving forward. nbc s kristen dahlgren live for us on the mall. thank you. president trump plans to speak with russian president vladimir putin on the weekend about what the white house is saying about the russian sanctions on the other side of the break. if you have medicare so don t wait. call now to request your free decision guide. it could help you find the aarp medicare supplement plan that works for you. these types of plans have no networks, so you get to choose any doctor who accepts medicare patients. rates are competitive, and they re the only plans of their kind endorsed by aarp. remember - these plans let you apply all year round. so call today. because now s the perfect time to learn more. go long. donald trump had toward putin in the campaign. a lot of eyeballs. i don t know if there s going to be any ears listening in. i doubt they re going to tap their own phone calls but maybe. stranger things have happen. a hint from kellyanne conway. she made it very clear that lifting sanctions on russia would be an option. have a listen. all of that is under consideration and certainly in addition to improving relations with different leaders around the globe. if vladimir putin wants to have a conversation about how to defeat radical islamism, we re listening. two years ago it was then president barack obama who initially had to drag angela merkel along on sanctions with russia because there s so many economic ties between germany and russia. one other quick note on this meeting here, mattis will be meeting in the tank with the joint chiefs and president trump. they had dinner a couple of nights ago, all they white house about a two-hour meeting to discuss a range of issues. so we ll see whether or not there are actually any tasking orders or presidential directives to the present gone saying come up with some new plans to accelerate the plan. and mattis has been sworn in. he got his hair cut at the pentagon. the price is $12. you go in, you ask for a hair cut and they have one question, civilian or military? i ll get back to you on whether he asked for a civilian or military. hans, i don t know what we would do without you. thank you, pal. ambassador, hair cuts aside, i want to get your reaction on what we just heard from kellyanne conway. she said the lifting of sanctions on russia is under consideration. overall reaction to that, perhaps unsurprising maybe? this administration likes to lay out a lot of different options and create leverage for possible concessions. isis remains the priority for president trump and lifting financial sanctions is the priority for mr. putin. you can expect some kind of a combination there. this is the first call they ll have had and i think there will be pleasantries and introductory discussions as well. with president putin, my advice is to engage. there is nothing inevitable between conflict between the conflict with the west. butgage with russia from a position of strength. engage but beware. how does donald trump actually do that and will he do that? will that message from theresa may get through when the president has talked repeatedly about wanting a better and stronger relationship with vladimir putin? we ve also heard president trump talking about rebuilding our nuclear arsenal or updating it, talked about military investment. i think he s going to have a two-track strategy to project m america s defense and military capabilities will be robust but we need an ally in the fight against isis and radical islamic extremism. the challenge is going to be what happens in europe with nato. will there continue to be this tit for tat in overflights and reckless actions by mr. putin on the frontier of europe? in this phone call nato might come up. is there a way that donald trump could step in it with vladimir putin? england and theresa may are no fans of mr. putin. so inevitably i think there are a lot mine fields but i don t think they re going to take place in this phone call. this is going to be an opening gamut. i think that everybody s going to be reading between the lines but this is really going to be about just resetting, a poor choice of words, that s the clinton policy. but reestablishing a rapport with the russian leadership and of course it s going to be fraught with all kind of complications. ambassador stewart holliday. appreciate you being here. president trump talking about waterboarding, talking about how he believes it is actually an effective interrogation methods and experts in the field agree. is he right? 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i thought you s was wearing a wire. haha, what? why would i wear a wire? geico. because saving fifteen percent or more on car insurance is always a great answer. waterboarding used to be used because they said it reall wasn t torture. it was the one step slightly before torture. i mean, torture is realtor ch t. i spoke with people who said absolutely it works. absolutely. that is president trump talking about waterboarding as an effective tool in the war or terror. is he right? when you look at the idea of torture being effect iveffectivo you the experts say ? you look at james mattis who says i never found it effective. and those are the voices from donald trump s own team and donald trump said those voices with matter to him but then you end up going to what obama administration say, director leon panetta saying about water boarding and he ended u admitting that waterboarding was part of how they ended up getting to bin laden. so it was used. you still have so many people on donald trump s team who says it s illegal but possible. here in philadelphia the murder rate has been steady, just terribly increasing. so, mark, is the president right sp. hallie, you look at the numbers. in 1990, there were 500 murders, in 1916, 277. in donald trump s defense, the numbers have gone up very slightly in the past couple of years, but in the totality, philadelphia the crime is much lower than it was a decade or two decades ago. we know the president loves to talk about polls. that s been pretty consistent from the beginning. he s been talking about some that he says americans loved his inaugural speech. he s actually not wrong, right? you look at a gallop poll who said it was excellent or good. in today s environment, 53% sounds good. let s look at the comparison of other presidents and their inaugural addresses. in his second address it was 65% said it was good, his first speech was 81%, president bush s 62%. everything is relative. up next we re talking about the potential political fallout on a tax from mexican imports. what s the blowback going to be if americans start feeling the effects of that tax in their wallets? just like the people who own them, every business is different. but every one of those businesses will need legal help as they age and grow. whether it be help starting your business, vendor contracts or employment agreements. legalzoom s network of attorneys can help you every step of the way so you can focus on what you do. we ll handle the legal stuff that comes up along the way. legalzoom. legal help is here. everything your family touches sticks with them. make sure the germs they bring home don t stick around. use clorox disinfecting products. because no one kills germs better than clorox. 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[ sighs sadly ] try this. but just one aleve can last 12 hours. tylenol and advil can quit after 6. so live whole. not part. with aleve. and check your sunday paper for big savings. it raises prices on consumers goods, consumers in the u.s. will be paying for the wall, not mexicans. is this a huge risk of blowback? it has the potential to start a trade war. one of two things happens if a tariff is placed on a product. that cost will be passed on to a consumer. lindsey graham talked about that in the higher tariff on tequila, which he said made him very sad. he said mucho said. he did. it would not be max exico payin for the wall. americans would. i don t know if vicente fox kicking at the ant hill helps or not. the question is how does it get paid for. the jury is still out on it. hopefully there will be more negotiation that goes into it. aisha, do you see a way that mexico could pay for it or will there be a backlash if prices of avocados and what not go up? no. and i think part of the problem is he s gone through trying to drive forward these executive orders and try and do the things he say he was going to do on the campaign. nothing in this plan is well thought out, the financing is not well thought out. i think he ll find out he can t just bully his way through. americans going to realize he sold us a bill of goods and we re not willing to pay for his bill of good and we re certainly not willing to pay for his call. we know that president trump is headed to the pentagon today the pentagon is making it very clear that general mattis opposes torture. donald trump is going to be speaking with not just russia but also germany, france tomorrow. how do you see his stance on torture playing out? it s already created some problems politically for british prime minister theresa may back across the pond. aisha, i ll start with you and chris, i want your take, too. trump has not consulted with any experts on any of these issues he s talking about. in this case we re talking about torture. he has literally running off of his gut and trying to convince us that this is the right pathway. but i think what we re going to continue to see is other leaders, members of congress, are stopping had and saying, wait a minute, we can t do that. even some of his senior advisers are saying to him that s actually against the law and that s wrong. the thing we should be talking about is how do d we end up in a situation that the president doesn t think we should be seeking counsel of his peers and advisers and other experts? the president has said he ll listen to the voices in his cabinet, people like mattis and mike pompeo, who have expressed real concern about torture. do you buy that? i don t think we should jump to conclusions about whether he s consulted or not. we have no idea who he s talking to. i think he did make se promises or charges on the campaign trail about what s he s going to do regarding torture. when you look at it, he has the same position as leon panetta. and that really does lead to a conclusion from donald trump as a candidate. this could be if you use waterboarding, it talks you to bin laden. you ve got to listen to the john mccains of the world. it s really difficult to arrive at a conclusion that torture is okay. having said that, i am confident that donald trump has surrounded himself with a group of advisers, you are mentioned mattis that, will point him in the right direction. i hope you re right. the campaign rhetoric is not the same thing as being able to govern. it s not but i don t think i m one of the few here either. sanctions, if he does lift sanctions against moscow put in place during the obama administration, what message does that sent? i think it s a good thing to improve relations with country like russia. having said that, russia has shown nothing but hostility toward us. that s why the obama administration put the sanctions in place. until we see that that hostility and those attitudes towards a dismissal of our security and process and our system of government is alleviated it, would be a mistake to unilaterally withdraw the sanctions. last word to you. i completely agree. until he gives us some room on syria and negotiating on ukraine, i don t think we need to drop any sanctions. i agree. thank you both for joining news a rare moment of agreement on our political panel at the end. i appreciate it. a live look at the national mall a week after tens of thousands of people came for president trump s inauguration, thousands of people are here for the march for life. we ll have much more. we ll right back. 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. and for just $15.99big festival of shrimp find out how american express cards and services you can pick 2 of 6 new and classic creations on one plate new flavors like sweet bourbon-brown sugar grilled shrimp and bold firecracker red shrimp are too big to last so hurry in. parts a and b and want more coverage, guess what? 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or us. if you think about it, we would incur this cost. those donald trump signature suits made in mexico, when macy s cost them they cost $300, with this 20%, macy s would have to eat it or you or me, if you wanted to buy your dad that suit, it would cost an extra $60. but made in america is not a new idea, not a new concept. if you look at the way people spend money today, nobody pays retail. everybody wants a discount. the rise of amazon.com is because people want to pay the lowest amount of money and get the greatest amount of goods. to see macy s would eat the cost, macy s just closed 100 stores. margins have shrunk, companies aren t willing to pay. i know america first is a great sound bite but people don t want to spend. it s not mexico who would incur the cost, it would be the united states. and we saw a walk back, a little bit of whiplash from the team saying this was just a buffet of option, this was not the final plan. that s sort of what s extraordinary here, maybe it s a shot across the bow but it leaves so many of us wondering how trade works, it isn t simply a back tax, a tariff. even if mexico were to be hit. it s about wages. labor would move to nicaragua, move to cuba, it could move to haiti. even if you said we re going to hurt mexican companies, we don t just import, we export to mexico. they re a trading partner. they re our third biggest trading partner in the world. the question so many people are asking, does donald trump understand the trickle-down effects? this isn t like a casino owner walking away from a deal. a 20% tax, it could be your avocados, your ford fusion, your bananas. are people willing to spend more? they re definitely not. if mexico gets hit with it, its factories could move to another country. virginia senator and former vice presidential nominee tim kaine is sitting down with chuck
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.
woman we showed a picture of getting $900 a month while dealing meth, her boyfriend was a cocaine dealer. had such an arsenal of weapons, it was enough to outfit a platoon. these people are getting food stamps. this shows exactly why this country, to protect its sovereignty, must be a nation of laws, must be a nation that follows the constitution. under fortunately, under the past president, barack obama, the immigration and customs enforcement regulation, he really watered them down and ransacked that department. as a result those caught entering the country illegally, those caught and deported went way down. david: protesters don t deal with the fact that the deporter in chief was president obama. he deported 3 million people and that averages to about 1,000 a week during his term as president. that s actually much less than what president trump is doing. well, look, i don t want to but that leaves you with a net to the taxpayer of $14,000 per year per immigrant. you re right, david. i hear that i don t think that majority of illegals are criminals. treating like rounding errors. the woman cited arrested, she was in a violent drug gang. she was. where 11 of 25 members. 11 got welfare, 11 of them. so, by the way, two-thirds of illegal households are on some form of welfare and those are estimates coming in. david: that s a lot of money, but, steve, to the other to the protesters point, there is a cost to deportation, i think it s over $3 billion a year. well, that s simply security, david, and that should be irrelevant. the key thing is, does it save lives. this gets to the thing of sanctuary cities where they refuse to allow local law enforcement to work with the federal government, violent criminals in new york. a guy of ms-13 gang, one of the most violent around wouldn t let immigration officials interview this guy, the guy could be released to rikers island and the feds could pick them up. that s outrageous. david: for all the talk of the innocent people being deported, again, under donald trump, under the deportation being criticized by protesters, 75% of those being deported are criminals, unrelated to their illegal activity. these are hardened criminals, those are the people being deported. yeah, and that s as it should be. that s a good start and i applaud the trump administration for doing that. there are 11 million illegals in the united states and what you have to do, because they re there s not an unlimited amount of money, nor cops out there to do all the enforcement to send every one of those 11 million back, you have to prioritize with the violent criminals and felony criminals, and work your way back. at some point there s going to be a cost benefit that no longer works, but let s start with the violent and felonious criminals. and there s also money. the public safety side of this issue and the money side and sometimes they come together. perhaps these deportations will save taxpayers money. yeah, i understand that, but and i know this show is about money, there are two bigger issues here, i think. number one, why do we get to pick and choose what laws we follow, does this mean that every city and state says i don t want to follow this law, i ll follow that law. the law is the law and it must be followed. if you want to change the law, congress needs to pass a different law. i realize that rich is saying 11 million illegal number, but that number has been out there for years, that would imply over the last several years there hasn t been an increase of people coming into the country illegally and i don t buy that. david: bill baldwin, go ahead. i m all in favor of deporting violent criminals here illegally. aren t we all? is there some way we can make this country more welcoming to people who want to come here legally and a lot less pourous for people who don t want to come here legally. i don t think that the president has the answer to that tough question. david: rich, go on. here, here. and you go back through republican and democratic administrations over the last several, and they ve not solved this problem. but you ve got to prioritize. that s all i m saying. you ve got to prioritize, i think we all agree with that. you start with the violent and felonious criminals. david: i ve got to say, mark, that so far, that 75% figure of those being deported being felons, is better than what president obama had. and president obama s best average during his term was 58%, so trump is doing better in terms of focusing on the felons than president obama did. go ahead. but 75% of what figure, david. david: 75% of the folks who have been deported under president trump have been felons. we don t know what that number is. david: president obama had 58% so president obama didn t deport as many felons as trump has. go ahead. so, a couple figures. if there s 11.9 million illegals in the country, the number of people who have committed crimes is more like 2 million. and of those who have committed serious crimes is 800,000, probably or even less. so, i mean, 75% of what figure, 500,000, 600,000? this is a small, small problem in our country and we re no, it s not, people are getting killed. throwing the entire weight of the government behind it. they re going to spend enormous sums. david: e-mack, when people are getting killed, it s a big problem. we ve had on camera a woman whose son was tortured and set on fire by an illegal criminal. i m for passing citizenship for legal and abiding, so is president trump, you can t deport 11 million people, that s ridiculous, and the size of the force you need to do that, no way. so, i think that there s common sense. what trump would like to do. no, he s not going to do 11 million. david: wrap it up, steve. mark did it on the bottom line, 800,000 serious criminals here he will legally and trying to send back 600,000, that s the no-brainer, what s the problem here? and the president says he ll lash our spending, some say go big or go home. it s time to scrap entire agencies. they name which ones next. there are car bombs and drones and a thousand civilians are reportedly walking across the front line to escape the violence. that s a look at news. now, back to forbes. david: unfortunately, the budget that we re inheriting, essentially inheriting is a mess. our moral duty to the taxpayer requires us to make our government leaner and more accountable. david: leaner and more accountable. president trump vowing against this week to cut government waste, reduce the national debt. he says his budget is going to focus on slashing spending, but steve says, the president has to do more than scrap spending piecemeal. he needs to scrap whole departments. we put up three, by the way, steve, as an example you can your expendable, commerce, energy and education, because between the three of them that s over $100 billion there. that s right. he s throwing housing and urban development you ll get more. some of the things the agencies do need to be done, but you re talking 5 or 10 billion out of 120 billion. that s the only way you reduce spending is reducing the scope of what the government does. david: mark, i grew up in washington d.c. and i used to walk through some of the big departments and see people pushing paper from here to there. so much of the money goes to the bureaucracy. that doesn t help taxpayers, does it? it certainly doesn t, david. but i think that trump should, i realize congress passes the budget, not the president, but trump should look to congress. we pay the average congress person $174,000 per year. they worked 101 days last year. they get generous pensions and generous health insurance benefits. this comes at a time where we re asking the average american to tighten their budget. why don t we why doesn t trump say, hey, why should lawmakers get a salary and eliminate that. david: i m in 100% agreement with mark for the first time! let me go to rich. we re talking here hundreds of billions of dollars. what mark suggests is perfectly reasonable, but wouldn t scratch the surface of what needs to be done, right? well, you know, john dillinger the bank robber said, why do you rob banks? because that s where the money is. you know where 80%, four out of five federal dollars, you know where they are, in defense, social security, medicare and medicaid. i don t hear trump talking about cutting those back. i hear about him expanding them. that said, i think his advisor steve bannon talked about deconstructing the administrative state at c-pac, the sludge in businesses. trump people are ready for th that. i love the idea of drain the sludge. you have government workers and unions fighting tooth and nail. the government worker unions are ruining it for the private sector unions, right, in places, sectors like manufacturing. david: mike, this guy paul winfrey does impress me a lot. i m glad he s in charge of putting together a list, again, will they have the follow through? they have a list, will they be able to carry it out? i believe that trump will. i don t think we ve seen a guy like this in a long, long time, david. as for what could be cut? i d love to see 8 billion slated for the 2020 census get slashed. i think the census is unamerican. the last census the woman came to my house and asked me where my grandparents came from and where i came from. david: i know. what race i was. why does that matter. david: we don t need it, we can save money and our own privacy by getting rid of it. steve, again, the follow through of the trump administration, they re up against, you know, a bureaucracy that s been there for decades. do they have the wherewithal to get rid of it? that s a long haul thing, david, and the answer is, i think they will. and by not eliminating at the beginning whole departments, but giving department things in the department is good. what the real problem is, david, it s not just the bureaucracy, it s the congress. each congress person has a subcommittee that has an agency. they have championships and you re taking their toys. david: i d like to say a prayer for paul winfrey, the guy in charge of the budget cuts. one heck of a job in front of him. the cashin in gang ready to roll at the bottom of the hour. eric, what do you have? a congress woman using offensive language to blast president trump s cabinet. imagine if they d used this language for president obama s staff. and kids at school. david: we re not done. up next here, hollywood celebrities and companies may want to tune into this one. lots of americans saying they may tune out if oscar speeches go off on politics. 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. on sunday. before the winners accept their awards they might want to listen to this. the new survey, seven in ten trump voters. they turn out when awards speeches get political. a lot of people who could hurt ratings in future box office sales. we ve been lectured to under the obama administration and i m glad we re out of the teachers faculty lounge. make the oscars great again, no politics at the oscars. david: what do you think? i don t see any problem, hollywood an entertaining. and meryl streep claiming to be a member of the victimized oppressed class. david: talk about meryl streep, i don t know if it s all about box office sales because she got very political and she was nominated for a movie that hollywood reporter says is atrocious and nominated, they say, because of the fact that she had these anti-trump tirades. i haven t seen the movie, david and meryl streep is one of my favorite actresses of all time. i think they re hurting themselves. back to 1998, upwards of 50 million people were tuning into the oscars. the number is down to 35 million today. only hurting themselves. people don t watch entertainment to be preached to. david: that s right. and steve, the fact is that sometimes the politics of these people does affect their judgment, right? it does, indeed. what they should do is take a cue from lady gaga far to the left, but what she did at the super bowl, fantastic entertainment. david: avoided politics entirely. and respected her audience, which hollywood has got to learn to do. david: some people say there s irony because trump himself an entertainer and george clooney mentioned that. he s an entertainer and he is i think he s trying to entertain us in the hollywood. hollywood has been political. jane fonda and hanoi jane. and trump voters half the population and half is hollywood. david: and rich, you re closer to hollywood than any one of us. i think there s false outrage here and i think it s poisoning the culture. i don t agree with tom hank s politics or lebron james or steph curry s in basketball. am i supposed to boycott basketball and movies because of this, absurd. david: and marlon brando got an academy award he didn t accept he sent an indian activist for, i believe for the godfather. the godfather became a popular movie at the box office, one of the best of all time. maybe, but i don t want to be lectured to and why do we have to look at people mimic for a living. david: and we will come away with the winners, but our informers have the picks that are already award winning. ly did start saving. this gap between when we should start saving and when we actually do is one of the reasons why too many of us aren t prepared for retirement. just start as early as you can. it s going to pay off in the future. if we all start saving a little more today, we ll all be better prepared tomorrow. prudential. bring your challenges.
crisis, he will have all elements of being commander in chief. barbara starr, thank you so much and there s nothing more serious in terms of being the president than keeping this nation and its people safe. a reminder as the president-elect and vice president-elect go to the tomb of unknown of that solemn responsibility. back to you, wolf. thanks. we re standing by at the blair house, official guest house for visitors of the president across the street from the white house. you re looking at live pictures momentarily the president-elect and his family will be leaving the blair house, we ll have live pictures, to head over to arlington national cemetery, we ll have coverage of that, we have a really good panel to assess what we have heard today, and david gregory, we have heard what almost five hours of testimony from the secretary of that. he s held up pretty well. do you agree? i think democrats who are hoping to score political points is that for most of these it s really a tail of two nominees, a he said, she said so either steve mnuchin is a guy who raided businesses and got people when they were vulnerable or a guy that stepped up during a financial crisis, rebuilt them and helped them thrive. that s a heroic version and which version will we end up with at the end of the hearing? and we are going to see the first inauguration event. this will be somber in contrast to the concert at the lincoln memorial, this wreath laying peaceful transfer of power. it s really one of the first time where the president-elect, it really starts to dawn on him that he is going to become the president. that he s becoming commander in chief of our armed forces. that has got to be an awesome moment for anyone. and as he thinks about all the enthusiasm for him but no doubt a humbling moment. tim, our cnn presidential historian, we saw a little bit of that at fort andrews, but now this will be more formal. one thing that we have seen wolf with president-elect who have not had military service or have not been associated with military, the military, it s very important for them early on to establish a connection. president-elect obama for example, also paid a visit to arlington during the day before the election before the inauguration. it s very important to send a signal that they understand the seriousness of being commander in chief. it s not a matter of spectacle or performance. it s a matter of lives and security. it s extremely important and i would say a good choice on the part of president-elect trump that he and the vice president-elect are going to arlington today. but this is something that s traditional. all incoming presidents make an appearance, is that right? some have not. some have not. it was very important for president-elect obama not only go to arlington but to visit with the wounded warriors, to send the signal that he was a war president, that he was succeeding another war president. everyone should be watching the symbolism in the next two days, not only is power passing but in a sense the personification of the american presidency is changing and donald trump will change it but there s much that he cannot change. it s tradition. the president-elect, the vice president-elect but for the respective families as well, they ll be included. yes, as tim said, there s so much symbolism in the first two days especially the first lady, we re all waiting to see what kind of role she s going to play and how he s going to use her position as the emotional tenor of the emotional side of the white house. you also get to see your first look at the first children and the children have already been posting a number of photos over the last couple of days as they have said goodbye to their lives in new york as well. we have seen ivanka posting a photo with children in toe and donald trump posted a picture of him and his wife and i think it s having they re really appreciating what they are getting to witness. i think the family is getting ready to leave the blair house right near lafayette park. we ll see some live pictures coming in from blair house. it s a pretty quick drive across the potomac river over to arlington national cemetery. dana, this is a moment i suspect the president-elect is really looking forward to the actual beginning of the formal inauguration events? oh, no question about it. looking forward to it, i would imagine as any human would has trepidation, because donald trump started this out on a lark and look at where he is, about to be the 45th president of the united states. just the awesome weight of having there you go. he s in the doorway there now at the blair house. across the street from the white house. so he s going to be getting in the car at the white house as jake said across the street from the white house and is going to be making his way to arlington national cemetery. something certainly that donald trump ever thought for certainly the first several decades of his life as a real estate magnet an then a reality tv star that he would actually be doing, don t you think jake? i agree. and the weight of the office has a way of changing a person. many former presidents have talked about the moment when they really realize when it really hits them how much responsibility they have. often times it s after they win and have that first security briefing as the president-elect and really hear about everything going on all the threats to the nation. 99% of which most of us never know or hear about, the security apparatus of this country has silent successes that we don t hear about. it was eight years ago and we didn t learn about this until much later that the national security apparatus was really worried about the threat to the obama inaugural in 2009 and hopefully we don t know anything about that going on now, but the office has a way of changing people. there s a reason why presidents in eight years age about 30 years. and their hair gets quite gray. i don t think that s going to happen this time. the gray hair. who knows. who knows. we re off the map here. it s a whole new era. the president-elect getting ready to leave the blair house an staying overnight for the official guests, he will be staying in the white house and will be president of the united states tomorrow with his family. the white house clearly, a lot more impressive. david gregory, you have often taken that drive from here he comes out. the president, melania trump walking out. he looks pretty happy and deeply appreciative of the symbolism of what s about to happen, he s going to go to the arlington ceremony to lay a wreath to the tomb of the unknown. and he s going to come to where you are to the lincoln memorial, this concert that s been put together is going to be a couple of hours and i take it at the end of the hour the president-elect will speak. yes, we are told he will speak. the great america great again welcome celebration has been somewhat controversial in the entertainment community. i don t think i am schooled to say that, toby keith, lee greenwood will be performing as well as the piano guys, and told john voit will be here as well, the hollywood actor not the dentist. and of course the headliner is actually president-elect donald trump who will address the crowd which is starting to gather here and we re at the lincoln memorial and will extend to the washington monument. and we have talked to people from colorado, florida, certainly vips who get the good seating up there, but there are clearly those who were trump supporters and voters who came to be part of this historic event. and just confirmed that woody johnson the new york jets owner, and will be elected to be the ambassador to the united kingdom, so one that s been honored in a distinct way perhaps following in to footsteps of dan rooney who obama named to be ambassador to ireland. we saw michael flynn the three-star retired general the president s national security adviser also walk down those stairs at the blair house getting ready for this event. michael flynn head of the intelligence agency, barbara starr, you have some thoughts on what we re about to see? wolf, as we discussed we are seeing all the elements of being commander in chief beginning to assemble around mr. trump. as they were walking down the steps of the blair house there was a young man in a military uniform, he had a rope on his shoulder like this, and it s usually a signal in a military uniform that that person might be a military aide to the president-elect. i m not sure we have seen that yet. perhaps another sign of military protocol being extended to mr. trump and the beginning of what we have been talking about here, all the elements, the very somber elements of being commander in chief beginning to assemble around the president-elect. as we said the plane he came to washington on, and very much where he is going now. just steps from where we will be at the tomb of the unknown, hundreds if not more troops who have fallen in recent wars especially afghanistan and iraq have been laid to rest. arlington is perhaps the highly visited memorial to visit in washington d.c., millions of people have visited president kennedy s burial site just steps of where mr. trump will be. and the tomb of the unknown where he will lay a wreath that is so representative of so many presidents. it is nearly 100 years old an dates back to world war i. the military refers to the unknown as those known only to god because years ago they didn t have dna people fell on the battlefield, could never be identified and never be returned to their loved ones. it s one of the most somber moments in military protocol and one of the things we know is that before that wreath is laid military personnel will brief mr. trump and mr. pence on military protocol and make sure everything goes smoothly for both of them, wolf. their families, their friends are driving through the streets of washington, they will cross the potomac river to arlington national cemetery, we are standing by for the first official inaugural event. he is now in washington. we ll take a quick break and be right back. motorcade arriving over at the lincoln memorial excuse me, at the arlington national cemetery, going to the lincoln memorial after that for the make america great again celebration. but this much more somber. dedicated to the u.s. military service members at the tomb of the unknown buried without being identified. this is history unfolding right now. in only a matter of hours, tomorrow, donald trump is going to be the 45th president of the united states and as we pointed out he won t be staying at the blair house across the street, he ll be in the white house. i think it s important for everyone watching around the world to keep in mind the american presidency is very unusual, it combines three things, head of chief, head of state, commander in chief and we are going to be able to watch today and tomorrow how donald trump in his serious moments how he s handling those three huge responsibilities, going to arlington is his first major act. not yet president as the future commander in chief. it s a major moment. watch how he acts. look at his facial expressions. look at his stature, his poise. he s going to be doing this a number of times, again and again, but the first time sets precedence. there s nothing more important than being commander in chief, because that commander in chief will have the lives at stake for so many military personal and the national security will be in his hands. when people talk about who is ready to be president? actually only presidents are ready to be president. there s no deputy job that prepares you for it. being vice precedevice precedene same. if we want to know why people age in this job, in this very dangerous world, that s the reason. take a look at president obama eight years ago, four years ago and today. president obama wanted to get the symbolism of the military just right an convey the respect and honor. he famously practiced the salute privately so he can get it just right today, i don t know if donald trump will salute or not but that s one of the gestures and elements of commander in chief. when he landed and walked off the u.s. military plane and as of tomorrow at noon he ll be flaying on air force one which is clearly the mark of the presidency, so he has to get ready. it s remarkable and humbling, you fly in air force one, you realize what a big deal that is, wolf, you have covered presidents, i don t know anyone who is so taken back of realizing what it is to have all that power vested in you and comes at a time while donald trump is a wartime president, some troops committed in afghanistan and iraq, but rethinking what america s role should be in the world and harkened back to a pre-world war ii time, this was a senate that never ratified the treaty that was ston ch against it, he s going to be looking at a very difficult threat for america at the time. he s already receiving these military briefings. he s got to obey certain military protocols as the president-elect at this event at the ceremony at the tomb of the unknowns. that s right. things become much more serious, his words have greater imp implicatio implications. this year has been really crazy for those of us who cover and follow politics and there have been a lot of unprecedented things that in the old days might have been not done, but this is time to get back to some of the pomp and circumstances, here is a guy who tweets but yet is going to be observing the tra digs and protocol today, i think it s very special and a time to come together. you spent a lot of time studying the families and new responsibilities they re going to have, not only the spouse but the kids, the grand kids as well. yes, it s interesting because it s been reported obviously that ivanka is going to have an office in the east wing which traditionally is the first lady s office but today and tomorrow on this stage taking these first steps in this very traditional ceremony, i think it was oleg cassini who designed for mrs. kennedy. it s really one of the largest families i ve seen on this stage i think. all the kids an grandchildren are there and the incoming first lady, emily, she s wearing sunglasses which is not unusual even though it s not all that sunny here in washington but she s got an enormous amount of responsibility as well. it is unusual she s not going to be moving here right away, she wants their son, baron to finish the semester. baron will be at school bright and early monday morning just like any other kid in new york city. it s very interesting what s going to happen with the first family, you saw her moving to d.c., jared will serve in the white house, but the two eldest sons will remain taking care of the trump organization. i m excite today sd to see what first look will look like. there are first lays that have not enjoyed being in washington. margaret truman was a very important helper to president truman, so the fact that the first lady likes to be somewhere other than washington, that s not news. what s going to be interesting is the fact of what is clear is that the president-elect, soon to be president trump has enormous respect for his children s advice. that s what s really different. some people might remember how much trouble president carter got into when he referred to amy s thoughts on nuclear weapons. well, amy was eight or nine years old at the time, but we are already prepared that his children are going to be seen as sources of advice. that s a big difference. ronald reagan s wife played an incredibly important role. but ron jr. was not a source of advice. definitely not. okay. i want to watch this wreath laying ceremony. now let s just listen and watch. both former white house correspo correspondants, no matter how many times you see it you re going to be moved. it s moving to watch as a citizen, it s moving for anybody that s got a role in washington. it s beyond that. it s a different level of humility because of all the pageantry around you, it is your job alone to order men and women to their potential death. there s no way you can sugarcoat it it is part of the job. it s an awesome responsibility and you come face to face with the honor that this represent, the bravery it represents but the painful anonymity that it represents as well that we can have a son or daughter lost in battle. we re seeing some of the staff there, military personnel awaiting the president-elect of the united states walking down the stairs and there we see some of the family members ivanka and jared, some of the adult children of the president-elect of the united states. matt lewis is with us as well. matt, this is a moving moment for them, for the family as well. absolutely. you think about the history, the tradition, the pageantry, the responsibility and then other presidents throughout history, john f. kennedy is buried there, george washington, abraham lincoln, who sent service members into harm s way and donald trump you know maybe he started this as a it s unclear but he s about to put his hand on the bible and about to be the person in charge of those decisions. we see ivanka, jared kushner, an advisor to the president of the united states, the two adult sons, john jr. who will not be in the white house. they will be taking care of the family business, but now we re seeing the family beginning to walk down including melania, the next first lady of the united states. emily, you studied this family for a long time. yes, absolutely, you see the eldest grandchildren of donald trump, you don t see the youngest members. i would find it hard to believe this family has actually visited arlington before today so not only visiting this emotional seen but visiting it as the first family for the first time. that has to be a tremendous amount to take in. the president-elect of the united states and the vice president-elect of the united states will be walking down with military escorts an they will be presiding over this wreath laying ceremony. interesting, wolf, when president kennedy looked at his face and the superintendent of arlington, he said out loud this would be a marvelous place to be buried some day, of course so premature in his own life and of course the kennedy brothers are there as well, so to take in the view as someone who is going to be sworn in as president tomorrow on top of the honor and awesome responsibility this represents again one of the earliest pieces of the pageantry where the president is going to the history, and he was at blair house where he learned of the old kentucky newspaper man who ultimately became an advisor to andrew jackson, living this the house where the get tysbutysbur address resides. the 45th president of the united states tomorrow will be donald trump. every individual who has become our president shapes the office in a certain way. an we have a sense of how donald j. trump here he comes. tomorrow, we ll start seeing it. let s watch the president-elect of the united states. the vice president-elect of the united states as this wreath laying ceremony at arlington national ceremony at the tomb of the unknowns is about to begin. on it again. this is one of the set pieces for the president-elect to pay tribute to the tomb of the unknown, as the trump family look on, some family so young as children, as we watched the obama girls grow up in their time in office, but this is a moment where he really prepares as president-elect trump to become commander in chief and come to grips of the enormous sacrifice of our men and women in the service, and all of the decisions he ll have to make with regard to national security threats and challenges he will have to faces a president and what we know from presidents past and the presidents club known as that they can all appreciate the lonely experience it is to be commander in chief and order people to give the ultimate sacrifice you can give the depth of the difficulty of those decisions is now part of what donald trump will share with others who have come before him. jake tapper is over at the lincoln memorial which will be the next official event. a concert there, what s called a make america great again event. i m anxious on your thoughts, jake. beyond the trade deals, that moment that we just witnessed rarely represents the most serious and consequential trust that a nation can bestow on someone. lives are about to be in donald trump s hands not just the lives of the u.s. service members but as commander in chief his primary responsibility is keeping the american people and homeland safe and secure and what we just witnessed, the wreath laying ceremony at the tomb of the unknowns represents that grave responsibility in a way that words fail to describe, but since we don t have the president-elect with us, let us turn to one of the next best things we have with us with me an dana, tom berrick, the celebration of the 45th presidency, thanks so much for being here. thank you. congratulations on everything that s about to unfold. let me ask you as somebody who knows donald trump and is watching him go from a civilian to the commander in chief, what are you witnessing behind closed doors? goosebumps. the waiting as of the moment of transitioning from candidate to president is momentous. and i think what you re seeing and if you just look in his eyes at arlington, you see in that moment and that anticipation of that peaceful transfer of partisan power that the rhetoric of a campaign moves aside and that responsibility of saying all of these lives as we look is incredibly important and say we re just players on this stage and he s the lead actor where you re going to see a shift from candidate to leader. before coming out we were watching and you were noticing that the guy that you have known for so many decades the look on his eyes and face change, how so, can you be more specific. look, the man is intent. i don t think you have ever had a harder working candidate in history. and instead of showing up for two or three events on thursday or friday, tomorrow, st. johns, coffee and tea with one great president and his wife transcending in three hours to the home an turning that home over to him is a change in attitude of saying i m here because of a constituency in a political campaign and i m going to represent all the constituencies that didn t represent me and that heaviness and burden of being able to communicate with that. you can see in his eyes, he s there, up for it. you also said you don t think he s going to be as glib anymore. not just the coampaigner, but also the tv reality star, you really think so? no the glibness 144 characters, polls are relevant, short kwirp when you don t have to dictate policy is okay, and it s a great tool that he utilized. now he has a cabinet, now he has heavy issues and i think you re going to see him do it as he did selecting his cabinet. thoughtfully, considered. he s got a team, he s going to give them accountability, reresponsibility. and i think it s time for all of us in america to say whatever it was that we did during the campaign, we should follow his lead. let s put it behind us, give him a chance look at the monuments, korea, vietnam, washington, jefferson, lincoln, these were wilt built on the baf peoples lives and spirits and this moment is one in the world in which transfer of power happens in this one way, the one most unbelievable way is coffee an tea, the compassion they must feel for each other, president obama saying hey, pal, you re about to step into something you probably can t imagine, and president-elect trump saying, i have such compassion, respect for what you have done, may not agree with the political issues, but as a man and a leader, thank you. this evening there will be a dinner with president-elect trump, vice president-elect pence, we re told there may be some big names at that dinner. can you fill us in, anyone that we should know about? the big names in trump land are actually the invisible people. if you look at the people who got him elected. it s the waiters, the drivers, the people who are working three shifts when we the beneficiaries are able to celebrate a triumph, all the big donors, big cabinet nominees the congressional leadership, it s who you would expect as a prelude to the next day which is really show time. right? at 11:23 when he steps on to the west platform of the capitol, that moment is an impactive moment so this isn t just a prelude of that community for everybody that s worked for that two-year period to say thank you on his behalf. i think there are a lot of americans out there who would love president-elect trump to rise to the moment you talked about in a way to uniting the country to talk about putting away the divisions of the campaign, that have been disappointed by a lot of things that have happened in the transition. this is not a sunday show, you understand what i m saying, there are a lot of people who would love to rally behind him. he s totally ready and he gets it. and i think what we have to do is give him a chance. he hasn t got his team in place. he s president-elect and if you look at the cabinet selections, people criticize it saying it s all billionaires or only successful people and i say would you like him to have unsuccessful people? if we re having cardiac surgery you go to the best cardiac surgeon in the world or if you re going into a war you would prefer to have a general, general mattis than a west point cadet and that s what s happened and what i would love to see and i think what will happen with him is he now knows he s president for all, i think you re going to see it in spades and in turn all of us need to give him a chance and to say great, now you re the leader, take those 100 days and fabricate that tapestry with congressional leadership, you have 535 people he s got to meld this way, he s not a dictator so that weaving of that tapestry which is his vision which incorporates all the threads of all of us in every walk in life can happen and it can happen if we all get behind it. he ll do it. and his first opportunity to do that his first opportunit that is his big address down on the mall, his inaugural address. have you spoken to him about it, have you seen it, do you feel confident he s going to set the tone you describe in the major address? yes, by the way, he wrote it himself. he s got the best speech writers available to him. he wrote it himself. he s written 13 best sellers. have you seen it? no, he would never share it with any of us, right? probably going to tuse it as a surprise for all of you. it s from his heart, well thought, and i think it will be a message to the world. and what we need to do as a message totd world is say, look, we can never be attacked by the outside if we re together on the inside. so, i think that s the first task. the first 100 days, domestic policies, immigration, tax reform, obamacare, education, he ll nail those and his team will do it. and foreign policy, he was the first president that ever reached out to the domestic diplomatic core. when we start this had he said, look, i want you to reach out to the domestic diplomatic core. i want to know what they think. i researched it, it had never been done. so, he said i want to do it someplace special. he did it in the melon building which he s been a crit of nato. we did it at a building in whic. one reverse mortgage has a great way for you to live a better retirement. it s called a reverse mortgage. call rfree information kityour with no obligation. it answers questions like. how a reverse mortgage works, how much you qualify for, the ways to receive your money and more. plus, when you call now, you ll get this magnifier with led light absolutely free! when you call the experts at one reverse mortgage today you ll learn the benefits of a government-insured reverse mortgage. it will eliminate your monthly mortgage payments and give you tax-free cash from the equity in your home. and here s the best part. you still own yohome. call now! take control of your retirement today! we will hear from the band three doors down. i think it s fair to say president-elect trump will get top billing. the president-elect will speak tonight just hours before he will be sworn in as the 45th commander in chief. we re going to carry this all live, of course. and dana, one of the first people we re going to hear from after a patriotic opening will be the actor john voight who narrated donald trump s biography, the short little film during the republican convention. that s right. he is kind of a staple, a hollywood staple at republican conventions and inaugurations. as we ve been talking about, hollywood does not tend to be very rah-rah republican, especially when it has come to donald trump. but john voight is certainly different from that. the one thing that struck me as we were standing here with tom barak we were just interviewing, the guy who ran this whole thing, the whole inauguration, is that everybody was sitting here on the big screens watching donald trump lay the wreath or at the tomb of the unknown soldiers. it was almost as if you could hear a pin drop here. obviously thousands of people here. we re at the lincoln memorial. behind us in front of us rather is the reflecting pool and the washington monument. there are thousands of people here, fans of president-elect trump. tom making the point this is a celebration, not merely of one man, but a celebration of america, of the peaceful transfer of power, of the fact that we have 220 plus years of such peaceful transfers of power in this nation, something to celebrate. and that this is really a celebration of that. this is really honoring that american tradition. but in addition to john voight, i believe one of the first big ones we re going to have is lee greenwood, of course, is going to be here. for those of us who go to republican and democratic rallies for a live-in, we hear a lot of greenwood.
if the administration was standing by that tweet which sean spicer said the president is, then why could congress then need to investigate if this information already exists? the press secretary talked a little bit about the issu i have to listen to the vshage again, the transcript, but he talked about credibility and the idea there is a separation of powers as well. we also talked a little bit about the idea that hey we are in tax season, tax day is just over month away. will the president release his returns from this most recent year? the president secretary said he would got back to us. and then is the president still under audit for past returns? the press secretary confirming he indeed is. a separation of powers, and they don t want to be perceived as directing congress to investigate in a certain way. harold ford is this going to dog them much longer? it will. the question by halle and the other young lady spelled i out. i think the health care the governors will be the ar about iters, where the rubber meets the road. the republicans and moderates and conservatives alike, but governors will have the phone say in what happens here. two major stories. first health care, the other what exactly is going on with wiretapping. both of those dominating the white house press briefing. and both of those things that my colleague kate snow is going to be talking about in just a moment. i m katy tur. that will do it for me. kate take it away. i feel like i m crashing the party. great discussion. we will take it from here. good afternoon, everyone, i m kate snow. our top stories this hour. seven years in the making, republicans launching a full-court press to promote their new obamacare replacement plan. party leadership, even the white house now getting involved. but not convinced, a big chunk of the gop. this hour, in about 30 minutes from now the house freedom caucus as long with tea party senators will faulk about why they think this isn t the right way the repeal and replace. later on, the carson controversy. in his first address to his new department, housing and urban development, carson referred to slaves as immigrants. a lot of blowback over his comments. we have a lot to get through. our team is in place. chris jansing, kasie hunt, perry bacon, nice to see him again. let s start off with a hard look at what is in this obamacare replacement plan. before we get started here i want to run through the basics of the new bill. no more individual mandate. coverage for individuals with preexisting conditions is still in. young people can remain on their parents coverage until age 26. the expansion of medicaid that happened under obama, that gets frozen in 2020. and people who let their coverage lapse could see their premiums go up by 30%. finally there is still a system of tax credits to help pay for health care on the individual market but those credits are now based on age. that is something we will really dive into. you are going to want to sti with us for in a, what does that look like, how does that work? let me start with our panel, chris janszing at the white house. this hour we are expecting senator rand paul and the freedom caucus from the house who have concerns about this bill we are expecting them up on capitol hill. is the white house feeling confident right now about getting this through congress. when you heard them talk about it, and we finished this briefing that called secretary tom price they said that they are going to work this through and just didn t seem to be concerned about what the obvious problem is with this, and that is that on both side of the house and the senate you have republicans in numbers that threaten this bill who are against it. you mentioned for example, that you have this press conference that is coming up. i talked to rand paul on friday. for him and other like minded conservatives this is nothing more than entire entitlement program. it doesn t accomplish why they wanted to get rid of obamacare in the first place. that was the cost. you heard the acknowledgment they don t have any kind of estimate from the congressional budget office. when mick mull vinny went out for the white house today to talk about it he acknowledged they didn t know what the cost is. and on the senate side you also have four members of the senate who sent a her letter because they are concerned about medicaid expansion in their states. they are worried about people losing coverage. so even though you have this situation where the president it sunds like is completely all in. as sean spicer put it there is going to be a very aggressive laser like focus on this it has involved tweeting, heating with health care people,nd it looks like he will be in charge with when i spoke to him a couple minutes ago. hi mr. vice president. is this plan conservative? i m sorry? this health care plan is it conservative? this is the right plan for america. it is a framework we believe will repeal obamacare which has been a disaster. heritage says it doesn t do that, heritage action. and we ll replace this with a plan that will handwritings the power of the free market, will give states resources and flexibility to reporm medicaid, will help americans be able to purchase health insurance but the cost of health insurance will go down. we are looking forward as i told leaders in the senate today 50i78 going to be meeting with members of congress this afternoon, we really do believe this is a historic opportunity the repeal the failed policies of obamacare and replace it with the kind of reforms that will lower the cost of health insurance en while we insure that the most vulnerable have access to better coverage through medicaid and greater state flexibility. where are conservatives so opposed? i think we are early in the legislative process. and the president has made it clear we are open to ways to improve the bill but we believe the american health care act is the right framework for replacing obamacare. in the days ahead the president and i look forward to making that point the members of congress and the people of america. thank you, i appreciate it. of course the key there they are very early in this process, they seem to be open to making changes or adjustments. but at this point it is becoming more difficult to figure out how they square getting it through the house of representatives where you have pressure from conservatives and then sending it over to the senate where you already have a group of four senators writing letters saying look if you end this medicaid expansion it s going to be really tough on state budgets and potentially hurt low income americans. so that s very difficult. and any one of these political calculations can make something like this completely fall apart. you remember i covered the beginning to the end of passing the affordable care act, obamacare, back in 2009. and that was something that took an incredible amount of arm twisting from nancy pelosi who of course was speaker of the house. she was question that is something that dpemts and republicans agree she is very good at. you had a president who was at the height of his popularity right after the election. those things do not necessarily exist right now for republicans on capitol hill. speaker ryan is dealing with a caucus that s much more kind of fractured. the way he has dealt with them has been to kinds of devolve some power. it s unclear if that strategy is going to work this this case. president trump doesn t have the same popularity nowhat president obama had at the time. and all of that could really put all of thisn jeopardy, kate. perry bacon, you wrote on 538 about all of this, about the seven groups that could complicate gop plans to repeal obamacare. i want to run through your article. you said older americans because they could be charged more than younger people. you said conservative lawmakers, because it doesn t go far enough in getting rid of medication expansion for some of them. you said governors, you say you think some governors think it s stingy on medicaid. another group you are looking at is people getting affordable care act coverage particularly those with low incomes because they might not get as much help as they did. voters, democrats who don t want to see changes to the law because they like obamacare as it is. and people who support abortion rights or planned parenthood because federal plans are cut off to planned parenthood for a year through medicaid. which is the biggest challenge? we are talking about a process in congress. the biggest problem i would say is that moderates in the senate thinking it s too conservative, house members thinking it s not conservative enough. i would say older people. the aarp is organizing against this bill bus it lets you charge older people more than younger people. aarp is an influential group. i think it matters lot, too. one thing in favor of the bill passing, the republican heeders and white house view it this way, custom is that most republicans in congress ran on repealing obamacare. republican leaders view this as we dare you to go on the floor and vote against obamacare after what you promised your constituents. they have with one advantage which is that the republican voted to changing and revealing obamacare and most members don t to vote against an obamacare peal. chris jansing a the white house,ore he took office, president trump said he had an alternative vision, alternate vision for health care reform. he made promises, weapon on 60 minutes and he was asked would it be universal health care, he said yeah i really want to take care of everybody. those were his words. he even said he didn t care if it got him votes or didn t. now he is tweeting he is going to negotiate with congress. mike pence saying this is the beginning of a process. is this a shift away from the big promises he made on the campaign trail? yeah, i mean this was a central focus of his campaign. anybody who went to or saw any of his rallies saw this was one of the bige cheer points. this always got a huge reaction, that he was going to get rid of obamacare. and that he had a plan. i mean, remember, he also gave a newspaper interview where he said he had a plan that was going to cover everybody. in january he talked about that plan. now it looks as though that plan doesn t exist. he is adopting this. and we have heard really, about sort of the genesis of how this all came to be today with the hhs secretary tom price who was asked about his support for this. let s play what he had to say as the voice of this administration right now for this health care change. do you support everything that s in the bill sitting on the table. this is a work progress. it is a legislative process that occurs. we will work with the house and senate. another way to look at it is, kate, this is reality sinking in for this white house that has so few people who have ever been through this process before, that they are realizing how complex this is. you know, there were a lot of people who either laughed or mock the fact when the president said he didn t real how complicated that was going to be. there is no doubt this is one of the most complicated pieces of legislation that we have seen in recent years. and by the way, if it does get repealed, it would be unprecedented. we have never seen a major program like this that affects millions of people that then has been taken off the table. and obviously, that s part of the concern that we have been talking about for some of the lawmakers. chris jansing, kasie hunt, perry bacon, thank you all so much. appreciate it. up next we are going to kick in on one of the fine points in that stack of papers that you saw at the white house. that s the house s obamacare repeal bill. the bigger stack is the old obamacare. we are going to talk about tax credits, which existed in both plans, and what does it mean what they are trying to do now? what exactly will those tax credits look like? how will they work? when we come back. but our past is just that, past. we are pioneers. so our greatest achievements can t lay behind us, because our destiny lies ahead. that s what it means to drive the world forward. that s what it means to dare. 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 guide. it could help you find the aarp medicare supplementlan that works for you. these types of plans have no networks, so you get to choose any doctor who accepts medicare patients. rates are competitive, and they re the only plans of their kind endorsed by aarp. remember - these plans let you apply all year round. so call today. because now s the perfect time to learn more. go long. 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. you are looking live at a shot outside the capitol building. war going to see the freedom caucus there and also conservative senators talking about the white house bill and their reservations i should say representatives. the new republican bill krnly introduced in the house provides tax credits. i want to bring in ali very well shy. you get them up front. a refundable tax credit is generally something you have to file a tax return for. right, you get it litter. this is called an advance refundable tax credit. under obamacare when you sign up for insurance you could apply the tax credit immediately. we haven t gotten the nuts and bolts but this is an advance refund. you get it at the front ends. that s how it s supposed to work. if you are 20 years old you get $20,000 as you get older it increases. now at 20 i ve been looking around. it s hard to get a full $2,000 . of the at 60, there is zero chance you are getting a policy for $4,000. it might be a catastrophic policy but not going to cover nearly everything of as you earn more you will start to see them decrease. for individuals earning $75,000 or couples earning $150,000 they will not get the same size of tax credits. here s the interesting part. under obamacare for a 27-year-old let s say, healthy, earning $20,000, on the low end they had they would get $3325 a year in sub sid sees under obamacare. that person is now going get $2,000. if you are making $20,000 and 27 years he would. $20,000 for a 27-year-old assuming you are relatively healthy. under obamacare you were getting 3225 in subsidies and credits. to put towards health care. right. under the new plan you get 2:2,000. what this leads one to understand after studying it if you are ill don t earn much money or if you are old this is not going to be great for you. there is stuff we haven t touched on yet, medicaid changes that s going to affect a lot of the poor. this is not a great thing for people who don t earn much money are sick or are old. it s hard to generalize because the a lot of the devils are going to be in the details. there are going to be outliars on all sides of this thing but when you generalize this is what you can come up with. this is instructive. just seeing an example of one particular kind of person. ali thank you so much that helps me get my head around it. earlier in the show in fact, now teleprompter is wrong right now. let me talk about who we are going to join next. it s tim live isser who knows a thing or two about one particular group of people that might be affected by this new health care plan. that i people with disabilities. he of course is with the special olympics and joins me now. tim, nice see you. thanks for having me. let s talk about the group you work closely with. people with disability. when you saw this new house plan what was your first thought? are there some good things? are there some concerns? we are all learning. i think it s very early days. i think one of the great things that this president has done is inspired so many people to take an interesting in the legislative process. i suspect this draft will be the most read draft of a piece of legislation in the last ten years, especially by people under 30. we are welcoming the process of elevating the needs of people with issues in abilities in this process. from what we can see there are reasons for concern. when you see caps on medicare expansion. when you see restrictions on some of the benefits that will accrue with people with disabilities you start to get concerned. frankly i think all americans would be concerned by this. they are respectful and decent people they want to look at a person who has down s syndrome and they want their country to be a place where they can get health care. where are you getting those concerns specifically? you mentioned caps, right, potentially on is that what you mentioned? i would say i m not a policy expert in its early days. we are seeing the potential to restrict medicare funding after 2020. medicare funding do as lot of things. you are talking about medicaid. excuse me. i said medicare. medicaid. my mistake. the caps there, some of those services include school based health care services, transportation and early childhood supports that come under medicaid. these are critically important for people with disabilities. they have been expanding in recent years with bipartisan support and we would not want to see those rolled back. let me ask you this. they have preserved key things in obamacare, right, which is if you are 26 up to age 26 you can be on your parents health care plan. and the key thing i would think for the commune of people with disabilities is that preexisting conditions don t count against you when you are treeg to get insurance. that s right. and that was a huge i mean, i consider that one of the great legislative achievements that follow a long list of achievements, ford signing the bill integrating our schools. bush, signing the bill for the americans with disabilities act. deinstitutionalizati deinstitutionalization. this notion of deexcluding people with preexisting conditions opened up this to the world of people with disability. although i don t think most people understood when that was passed it was part of the affordable care act. i think most americans would degree it s important the keep it. there is concern about these families. i think about the caregivers. i have done reporting about people for example, of people with autism, who after 21 they are out of the health care system and their parents have to take time off of work, they have to dedicate their lives to helping their kids. medicaid be that a life line for those families. there is enough fear in the culture already. there is enough bullying in our culture ready. there is enough uncertain for people who have intellectual and developmental challenges and their families. i would hope this process would make sure their stories are told. in the special olympics we have launched a 15 year campaign to develop supports for people with disabilities. extra support from foundations. bipartisan. this is not a right left, red, bluish you. these are americans, donors, volunteers, who want to expand and make the world safe for people who have struggles and challenges but who also have gifts and capacity to give. our hope is that this process won t increase the fear but elevate their stories and make sure they are included in the discussion so that the people on the right and the left will protect the decent and respectful way in which most appearance would want the see them treated. tim schreiber great to see you. up next, ben carson s first full week as secretary of housing and urban development is off to a rough start as he face as flood of backlash for comments he made likening slaves to immigrants. and live shot from outside the capitol where we are waiting for members of the freedom caucus to come to the micro pony with their response to the repeal of obamacare. we will bring you that live as soon as it happens. knowing where you stand has never been easier. 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. to keep you on track. everything your family touches sticks with them. make sure the germs they bring home don t stick around. use clorox disinfecting products. because no one kills germs better than clorox. let s look at our big three stories at the half hour right now. more than two dozen reports of tornadoes touching down across the central u.s. yesterday. hundreds of homes from damaged and destroyed. several people were hurt. none of the injuries are considered life threatening. the threat of severe weather stretched from oklahoma and arkansas northward into minnesota and wisconsin. threats against jewish community centers continued today. facilities in new york, florida, wisconsin a illinois all forced to evacuate following bomb threats. the anti-defamation league also says several of their offices received threats. meanwhile, all 100 u.s. senators urged the trump administration to take action against these threats and vandalism. they send letters to the homeland security deputy the department and the fbi calling for swift action. on friday a former journalist was arrested and charged with at least eight of the threats. however police believe he was a copycat trying to get back at former girlfriend. chance the rapper is being praised after announcing he is donating $1 million to chicago public schools. the rapper, whose real name is chancellor bennett is from the windy city and criticized the governor of illinois after he vetoed funding for public schools. the money is coming from concert ticket sales. and he says he will add $10,000 for every $100,000 raised. ben carson set off a firestorm after referring to slaves as immigrants during his first speech to hud employees on monday. take a listen. that s what america is about, a land of dreams and opportunity. there were other immigrants who came here in the bottom of slave ships, worked even longer, even harder, for less. but they, too, had a dream. for more now i want to bring in roland martin. he is host and managing editor of news one now on tv 1. roland, always good the see you. likewise. i do not need to tell you this has exploded on line. it has blown up. a lot of people are not happy about what he said. your take? well, it s stupid and as nine. the bottom line is ben carson, as politico is reporting has said this for couple of decades, using immigrants, it s simply flat out lie. it is a false. and you simply can t compare the two. i can tell you last night when i heard his interview when he tried to clarify those comments on armstrong williams radio show on sirius xm radio i heard those as well and those were idiotic as well. on his personal facebook page he posted an explanation that made more sense. this is bigger than ben carson. you have seen the efforts in texas to change the textbooks where mac grau hill published the book describing the slaves as workers brought in from america. the tea party wanted to remove that farm owners were slave owners as well. there is this of the by conservatives to somehow soften or redefine slavery. and that s why people are offended by what the secretary had to say. roland, i would ask so many more questions but i think we have to go to capitol hill right now. if you can pause for us. okay. we are expecting republicans now speaking out. this is members of the freedom caucus who have had concerns about the health care bill. let s listen in. campaign with president trump all across north carolina and one of things that he talked about was repeal and replacement. now when he said that, it took on two different meanings. repeal, to many, meant that we would repeal the entire obamacare plan. all the taxes, all the mandates, the medicaid exchanges. and when he talked about replacement, it took on another meaning to others, which it meant that we needed to cover the preexisting conditions, making sure that people didn t get kicked off of their health care plan, making sure that there was an adequate safety net. i can tell you that those two things are still the focus of not only the house freedom caucus but my good friends senator lee, senator rand paul, and senator ted cruz. as we look at this today, we are going to be talking about a number of scores in the upcoming days. cbo scores. and what score, that this means and what does it mean for the american people. i can tell you there is one score that the american people will pay attention to. and that is, does it really lower their health care costs and their premiums? that s the only score that really matters. and if this doesn t do it, then we need to make sure that we find something that does do it. and with that i m going to turn it over to the gentleman from ohio who plans to introduce a piece of legislation that really repeals the affordable care act the gentleman from ohio, jim jordan. our goal is simple to bring down the cost of insurance for working families and middle class families across the country. in an effort to do that, we think you have to get rid of obamacare completely. tomorrow i will introduce the bill that every single republican voted on just 15 months ago, the bill that actually repeals obamacare. our plan has always been repeal in one piece of legislation and replace in another. that replacement we talked about a few weeks ago is the bill sponsored by dr. paul in the senate and mark sanford in the house. there is three plans out there. collins plan, if you like obamacare you can keep obamacare. there was the leadership plan that was brought forward which i believe when you look through it is obamacare in a different form. then there is our plan, the one i think is consistent with what we told the voters we were going do. repeal obamacare, replace it with a market centered patient centered doctor centered plan that brings down the cost of insurance, brings down the cost of health care and prois affordable insurance opportunities for all americans. that s what we are focused on doing. think about this, he put on president obama s desk a bill that repealed obamacare, got rid of every single tax, got rid of the mandates, and now the first thing republicans are bringing forward is a piece of legislation that we are going to put on a republican president s desk that says we repeal it, but keeps medicaid exexpansion and actually expands it, that keeps some of the tax increases. th is not what we promised the american people we were going to do. our plan, repeal it clean repeal, just like we all voted on above. separate legislation to replace what we currently have with a model that we think will bring down the cost of premiums for the hard working people of this country who sent us here to do just that. with that i want to turn it offer to the sponsor of our replacement plan in the senate, dr. rand paul. today i will introduce a companion bill also to congressman jordan s plan to have complete repeal arc clean repeal. we ll be doing this in the senate today as well. there is one thing that has united republicans in 2010 when we won the house, in 2014, when we won the senate, and in 2016 when we witness to white house. this doesn t divide republicans, this brings us together. and that is complete repeal. clean repeal. as congressman jordan said, we voted on this last year and every republican voted for it. that s what we should do again. but we are divided. we have to admit, we are divided on remaysment. we are united on repeal, but we are divided on replacement. what s the best way to get past this impasse? let s vote on what we voted on before, a clean repeal. let s separate out the replacement plans. conservatives have a replacement plan. house leadership has a replacement plan. i m sure democrats would like to go back and vote on the aca again. vote on all the replacement plans and see what happens. let s vote on clean repeal. the only way i think this gets done is to separate the issues. separate out clean repeal from replacement. let s got get it done. repeal unites us. i think we can get tha done. with that i ll intro senor mike lee from utah. what s been introduced in the house in the last 24 hours is not the obamacare replacement plan. not the obamacare repeal plan we have been 40e7ing for. this is instead a step in the wrong direction. and as much as anything it s a missed opportunity. look. we ve seen what happens when congress decides to put forward a plan negotiated behind closed doors where members are told you have got to pass this bill in order to find out what s in it. it s usually not a good product. on this topic i m not speaking about anything that s necessarily inherently democratic or republican or liberal or conservative. this is just a common sense vauchlt that what we ought to have in congress is an it rative process one week start with basic grounding principles. the two parties are in widespread disagreement when it comes to obamacare itself. but there is one plan and only one plan that has so far passed a republican congress. it s this plg plan being reintroduced today. that plan passed with the support of every republican in house of representatives and every republican in the senate. and it did so just in the last 14 months. so i think we ought to put this forward. we ought to got it passed and then let s move the ball forward in an it rative process, a process in which people can propose different ideas that will benefit the american people. that s what we want to do. and that s what this process, this bill, the 2015 repeal bill, would do if we were to pass it right now. it s now my pleasure to introduce my friend and counter-part in the house, congressman mark sanford from south carolina. thank you. about hf an hour ago, maybe less than that, about half an hour ago the produce wrapped up its daily press briefing with the press. in it it was spruinstructive int sean spicer said the health care plan being introduced is a work in progress. it s interrog that secretary price said the same thing at the beginning of the press conference. it is a work in progress. if we liken this sort of to donald trump s world of everything is a negotiation, what we have now is an opening bid. and i think what conservatives are saying is okay that s the opening bid but based on some thing that happened whether in 2015 or principles that conservatives have long advanced might not we constructively look for ways of refining what s been introduced? that s what ultimately this press conference is all about. i think respectfully it s about asking this simple question, which is, do we need to lower the bar in what we believe as conservatives simply because a republican is now in the white house? so the bill that congressman yorn is going to introduce is all about simply not lowering that bar, of saying wait a minute, to their point, 14 months ago something was in there with unanimous accord with republicans on the house and senate side. let s stick with that plan. it s prospectively as well, in looking forward let s not lower what we believe or lower the bar on what we believe simply because a republican is in the white house on new ideas. so you look at the idea of a cadillac bill. cadillac plant that s based in the current bill that s being talked about. i don t know. is that a lowering of the bar? you look at something like the refundable tax credit. is that lowering of the bar? it was ron reagan who said that the closest thing to eternal life is government program. guaranteed eternal life in government is an sbilg men. when we are talking about here is a new entitle men. for a variety of different reasons this is simply about going back to things and principles that long worked on the conservative side and things that republicans espoused and grabbed hold of here within the last 13 months. i m louie gobert, the newest member of the freedom caucus. we are told we re known by our enemies and known by our friends. i m proud to be known by this group of friends. i m glad we finally got a bill out. it is not 2500 pages. it is a starting point. some people asked what i told president trump when he came down the aisle for the state of the union. one of the things i said was you are going told we can t do some of things we did two years ago with obamace. and it was true. it is still true. so as long as we re ae to get amendments to the floor that will fix some huge problems with the bill that s now been filed, then we ll be okay. but there better not be a rule that prevents amendments that are badly needed to fix this flawed bill. that would be a major problem. we don t need as mark said we don t need to start new entitlement programs. and we certainly don t need to have the bottom line effect, what mark meadows was talking about that prices of insurance don t go down. so there are things that have to be on the that have to be included. but we have got a starting point. i think amidst the horse extreatment we can find a upony around here somewhere. that s what we are looking to have, we will have a race horse as long as we can get in good amendments when we re done. aunk all. i think it s helpful to reflect about eight years back in how we started to do health care reform eight years ago. i think you her the heads of the insurance companies walked into the white house looking at their shoes. and something was wrong there. and so eight years later, the head of aetna says we are in a death spiral. and so the health care system they arranged eight years ago obviously didn t work. and so central government, top down government control, especially at the federal level, does not work. we ve seen that. now, interestingly the press comes and says the car is in the ditch, how are you guys going to fix it in two weeks? right. the answer would always be, we should have done free market economics and free market health care in the meantime, over the past, 20 30 years. last time what did we focus on? we focused on 18 million coverage. we didn t focus on prices or the cost of health care. now you have health care costs going up at 25%. the speaker, health insurance premiums, prices cost up 25%. the speaker said the gol is to shift the cost curve hold. all of you in the press corps can hold us accountable to that. what that means is not a reduction in the rate of increase not down to 15% growth in costs. a reduction in bending the cost curve down means costs go down by negative 1%. that s what the american people are dieing to see it. happened in every other market. it happened with cars, cd players started at $300, and now down to $30. if we are lowering costs a $100,000 heart procedure here costs $15,000. that s a radical difference in costs. that s easier to solve if we would have addressed the fries and the cost issue. we currently have $100 trillion unfunded mandatory spending program in this country. we promised $100 trillion to the next generation in programs. the federal government has created that problem. medicare is insolvent, social surt is insolvent. now we are creating another entitlement on top of $100 trillion. i think your reporting needs to be clear. when we create another entitle men in the next generation. one goal we have is i want to push as much of this down to the state level as i can. the federal government has a unique ability to print money and put it on the next generation. the states have to run a balanced bum. i trust them more in the governance to be more fiscally responsible. those are some of the major ideas. it s not tinkering around the edges. there is a philosophical difference what it means to do free markets. and we want to put in the mechanisms to ensure that that becomes reasonable. thank you. thank you, tom garrett from verge s fifth congressional district. i want to thank congressman jordan, senators lee and paul, my cohorts in the freedom caucus for having me here today. this is simply too important to rush through. the proposals that came out yesterday were shrouded in a cloak of secretsy that denied well over half of the house and well over half of the senate the ability to essentially participate in the process. so the debate must be had to fit within the framework envisioned by our founders. would know that historically freer mark don t get me wrong, i understand that health care is not a commodity like sneakers, but freer markts lead the lower costs. and we can do this withoutet contracting a new sboolgt men. about a month and a half ago i believe objection familiar s research came out indicated that the eight wealthiest individuals on the planet earth controlled as much wealth combined as the bottom 50th percentile. that s 8 people, plus 376 billion people had as much welt as 3.6 billion people. to put the united states s current debt, imagine if you will that we can extract every dime from the entire 50th percentile and down of wealth and then the eighth wealthiest people and then apply that to the current standing debt, not unfunded liability, current standing debt. folks, it would pay off under 10%. we hear the usef e word unsustainable again and again and again in this town. and some things really are. and new entitlement programs and spending on top of spending truly is. we can turn the cost curve down ward and do so without encumbering future generations. it s as simple as that. i heard this characterizing this as lot of people playing a game of chicken. we are resolute and we will stand here and do what is right not just for today but for posterity. thank you very much. we ll take some questions. john parkinson, abc, go ahead. i heard you guys using the optimism ahead, you know, the president will negotiate with you. today he had a tweet that said you early theed this as a wonderful bill. do any of you want to use that term, wonderful, and if so, what parts of the bill do you think are wonderful? no. and there are some improvements in the legislation from the leaked draft. but there was a wonderful bill that every single republican voted on just a few months back. and tomorrow senator paul and myself will be introducing that same piece of legislation. and that is exactly as i said earlier consistent with when we told the american people we were going do, repeal obamacare. how about using the bill we all supported? and then replacing it with something we actually believe is going to lower health care costs. mr. jordan, can you talk for a minute, mr. jordan and mr. meadows here about you said mr. meadows you met with the vice president. he said he is open to negotiation here. and the vice president was over in the senate, and he said this is the bill when i hear all of you talk, it sounds like you were trying to get somewhere where you can support a legislative product here at the end of the day. but as you just alluded to, mr. jordan, you said and mr. garrett said this, the wrote this in the dead of night, so on and so forth. so why would you trust them? chad, of course we are trying get somewhere to repeal obamacare. we know what a disaster it has been for the american people. the people spoke loudly and clearly on november 8:. comment right on target. doing it right s important, not just doing it, doing it right. and that s what today s about. that s why we re going to introduce our legislation tomorrow. that s why we think the two pieces of legislation that mode of getting it done is the proper way to proceed, and that s why we re introducing the bill tomorrow and why we have the bill we introduced weeks before. trust what the vice president said of course. this is the bill. yeah, the vice president is an honorable man and we trust him. i think what there s some difference in the context of what s being said is i think the president and the vice president is saying that the foundation there is a good foundation. we might disagree on that, however, we re committed to looking at that foundation and seeing how we can modify it, how we can make sure that we look at really repealing fully and replacing the affordable care act in a meaningful way. and so i don t know that those are mutually exclusive issues as we look at that. we re going to pause just for a moment here to show you on the right side of the skraen. president trump meeting at the white house there and talking a little bit about his health care plan that s come out. let s take a listen to this. we re going to have a lot of victories, a lot of wins, but we have a great team. together we re going to do incredible things for the great citizens of our country. as i said during my joint address to congress, and i think you mostly like that, right? love that. like it a lot. we re witnessing a renewal of the american spirit, a surf optimism and a new national pride which is sweeping across the land. i see it. there s such spirit. whether it s for the business things we re doing or whatever. it that s spirit that we haven t seen in the country in a long time. jobs are pouring back, you saw what happened with exxon where they just announced a massive jobs program. we re going to have fun. we have to remember, obamacare is collapsing. and it s in bad shape. and we re going to take action, there s going to be no slowing down. there s going to be no waiting and no more excuses by anybody. we re all now, i can probably say i m a politician. okay. i am a politician. but we re going to get it done. and you re the leaders that really will get it done for all of us and for the american people. obamacare is in very bad shape. i believe that if we wait two years, it will totally implode. it s really pretty much imploding now, steve, when you think. but it ll implode and people will be like please help us, please help us, and that ll be the democrats asking for help. they already are asking for help in the true sense of the word. because it s a disaster. the insurance companies are fleeing. some states are up over 100% in costs. the deductibles are through the roof. you don t even get to use it. we re going to do something that s great and i m proud to support the replacement plan released by the house of representatives and encouraged by members of both parties, i think really that we re going to have something that s going to be much more understood and much more popular than people can even imagine. if it follows the guidelines i laid out in my congressional address. a plan that will lower costs, expand choices, increase competition, and ensure health care access for all americans. this will be a plan where you n choose your doctor, this will be a plan where you can chse your plan. and you know what the plan is. this is the plan. and we re going to have a tremendous, i think we re going to have a tremendous success. it s a complicated process, but actually it s very simple. it s called good health care. so i want to thank you folks for being with us today, ladies and gentlemen and we will do something really, really important and really good for the american people. i think it s going to go very quickly. i hope it s going to go very quickly. as you know after that we work on the tax cut. we re going to be planning a major tax cut. i know exactly what we re looking at. most of us know exactly the plan. it s going to put our country in great shape and we re going to reduce taxes for companies and for people. and i can use the word again, massively, it s going to be a big tax cut. the biggest since reagan, maybe bigger than reagan. i look forward, i really look forward to working on that. we can t get to that unfortunately because of the way your system works. we can t get to that until we take care of health care. so, we ll take care of the health care. i appreciate your great support and let s get it done. thank you. thank you all. fantastic. thank you. mr. president, thank you for having our deputy whip team to the white house. and thank you for your commitment on following through on what to most americans is probably one of the most important promises that were made not only by you, but by all of us in getting this majority vote in the house and senate and the white house. and that is rescuing the american people from the failures of obamacare. we ve heard the message for years. we ve seen the dramatically skyrocketing costs. double digit increases every year in most parts of the country in health premiums for families. many families are seeing deductibles that rise above the $10,000 range. which means people don t have acce to hlth care. people don t have the ability to choose their own doctor. you talked about this the other night, and just one of the best speeches i ve heard from a president standing out that well in the house chamber when you addressed the joint session and gave an inspirational speech to the country laying out the things that need to happen and that you re going to do to get this country back and track and secure america. but one of the things you talk abouted is how it s wrong that unelected bureaucrats in washington have the ability to tell you what you can and can t buy for your family in health care. one of the most personal decisions families make. this bill finally starts the process of not only repealing obamacare, but also replacing it with reforms that put patients back in charge of their health care decisions. that lower costs for families. let them actually choose the decisions between them and their doctor which are so personal. and so as we start this process, the people in this room, the chief deputy whips are the ones that are going to be working directly with members to ultimately pass this fwoil your desk so that we can quickly provide that relief from obamacare to the people of the united states. and i know we are honored to have our former house colleague and now our vice president of the united states whose been involved in this fight from the beginning as well, vice president mike pence joining us too. thank you, vice president. thank you very much, steve. and again, we re going to work quickly. it s a great bill. we re going to have tremendous i really believe we re going to have tremendous support, i m already seeing the support not only in this room, i m seeing it from everybody and i m seeing it from look now old news i got elected to a certain extent. pretty good little chunk based on the fact, repeal and replace obamacare. and many of you people are in the same boat. very important so let s get it done. thank you all very much for being here. thank you. okay. thank you. thank you. thank you. thank you. okay. let me walk you through what we just saw. that s president trump at the white house meeting with members of the republican house leadership. they call them the whips office. those are the folks on capitol hill who are noent kind of whip up the votes and help pass legislation through the house. you heard from steve scalise, he s the house majority whip and you heard from the president saying we have a lot of support saying that this is a plan that we can back. i m proud to support the replacement plan released by the house were the words of the president just before that though, i would note that we were hearing from members of the house and two senators, members of the freedom caucus, conservatives who have a lot of concerns about this health care plan. we heard them speaking on capitol hill, eight of them spoke before the cameras. i want to bring in now nira tandem. she served in the obama administration as a senior advisor in the health and human services department where she worked on the affordable care act in the beginning. bill ystal, founder and editor of the weekly standard. bill, i want to go to you first, that was quite a jux position what we just heard. members of the house and senate saying we have some problems here. we re not ready to support this, it s too important to rush this through and the president saying everything s fine. a lot of republican members in the house especially are going to have indigestion tonight trying to figure out they don t want to derail the first major piece of legislation tabled by the speaker of the house and supported by the republican president. they had deep concerns about the bill that was just unveiled monday night being rushed through in this way. mark-up is tomorrow, one of the most effective criticisms of obamacare which seems to be all these deals under the table and late at night and rush votes. i wonder what s going to happen. this is a big moment though and you saw serious members of the house, jim jordan and serious senators for the first time breaking with their republican president, president trump. and let me get your take on this, you worked on obamacare, you know how hard it is to make the sausage, right, to get something through. republicans would say, look, they ve got the majorities, they can do this. it might take a while, but they can do it. yeah, i think what you ve seen over the last 24 hours is how difficult this process is. i mean, we passed the affordable care act and there was ewe nam anymorety on the divisions. and it was not an easy feat. it is really hard. but we did not have this level of disagreement. there is not just disagreement between the trump administration and the trump white house and