week. you know, he has four basic options, martha. and it sounded like from his news conference today he might take two at the same time. let s look at those four options. one would be to appeal to a larger panel of the ninth circuit. it s called an en banc hearing. 11 judges picked randomly from the remaining 26 judges in the ninth circuit. he could appeal to the u.s. supreme court and he could try the case on its merits in district court. he seemed to suggest he would do that by saying that he will win eventually. the fourth option would be to rewrite the executive order. make it clear that legal permanent residents such as green card holders are not affected by the travel ban. the white house counsel tried to clarify that when it comes to enforcement. but it was after the fact. so, if the case goes back to judge robart, we know that a schedule could happen as soon as next week where we have briefs and judge robart as i said, in his ruling, in issuing the t.r.o. said it is likely that the state of washington would win on the merits of its case. let s hear from bob ferguson the attorney general of washington. after the ruling last night he gave the president his own suggestion. the president does have a choice. he can continue to fight this or he can tear up this executive order and start over. i would strongly encourage him to consider the latter course of action. and here s the catch, martha. if the president does issue a new executive order, there is nothing to say that bob ferguson and other states wouldn t sue for blocking that one as well. so we will have to see how it plays out, what the trump administration does next. martha? martha: dan, thank you. so attacks on president trump coming fast and furious. moments after that decision was announced, within minutes hillary clinton tweeted 3-0 a reference to the unanimous decision of the three-judge panel to continue the block on the president s orders. the counselor to the president kellyanne conway fired back this way, pennsylvania, wisconsin, michigan, period. she wrote. a reference to the three states that clinton lost, costing her the white house. chris wallace, host of fox news sunday here on that said it had not been rolled out prope properly. he took responsibility for anything in washington unusual to say blame me for it. it wasn t his. it was mostly the white house. and the top aides around president trump. but, yes, it was sloppy. it was sloppy in the way it was draft dollars, in the way it was rolled out. the lack of consultation with top administration officials. the top of consultation with congressional leaders. and, again, we have spent a week, a third of the presidency on this subject. there are so many things that this president wants to accomplish and i wonder is this the most important? martha: steps on the message. let s move on to some those other issues. today he met with prime minister abe from japan. he is bringing him this evening back to mar-a-lago to play some golf. you know, it s an interesting way of dealing with these foreign leaders. and he is building relationships with china as well. he went back on the one-china statement that he made right after he became president. what s your take on how he is doing on that front, chris? up. martha: all right. chris, thank you so much. you bet. martha: good to see you. don t miss chris this week on fox news sunday he has interview with ben cardin ranking member. that airs on fnc at 2:00 and 10:00. also tonight california pressing the feds for answers as fears grow that the west coast could be seeing a major immigration crackdown. is that really what s happening? pete hoekstra and richard fouler up next on that. plus, voters are making new demands of republican lawmakers. and they are not being shy about what they want. see what that means for the country. outcome ward moment straight ahead. fees? what did you have in mind? i don t know. $6.95 per trade? uhhh- and i was wondering if your brokerage offers some sort of guarantee? guarantee? where we can get our fees and commissions back if we re not happy. so can you offer me what schwab is offering? what s with all the questions? ask your broker if they re offering distraction, take attention away from a loss incredibly important loss but a win for the people of the united states that the constitution and its values still stand. martha: so there is that. for more on this we go to correspondent adam housley in our west coast bureau. hi, adam. hi, martha. immigration and customs enforcement ice says business as usual. they are going after the criminal elements specifically in southern california. basically that nothing has changed with the addition of a new administration. now, this revelation comes as protests continue in california. this protest tying up downtown los angeles and shutting down a major freeway. immigration activists say they will continue to disrupt, protest, do what they can to insist this is unlawful raids and treatment of immigrants is unlawful. most recent raids in southern california resulting in about 100 people detained. we do not want to have this be common in our community, not in los angeles, not in california. and every time that they re going to take these kind of actions you are going to receive this kind of response from us. all this comes the day after the deportation in arizona of grad lupe garcia. the mother of two convicted of felony identity theft in 2009 and ordered to volume voluntarily deport in 2013. after checking in with ice they took her into custody and released her in the next morning. while some say she shouldn t have broken the law in the first place her family says they will continue to fight for her. i m here to see my mom because last night it was i felt so i feel like she should have done it legally. i do. i mean, it s sad that she had to leave her family and stuff, that makes my heart really sad. but, we have laws for a reason. we have laws for a reason. that s how i feel. now, president trump did change with an executive order the priorities, since he came into office. it says that any person who has committed any criminal offense or were subject to a final order of removal and that s what s happened with her. that s apparently what s been happening across the region here. but the raids haven t changed, martha. martha: adam, thank you very much. joining us now former michigan congressman pete hoekstra who served as house intelligence committee chairman and richard fowler a nationally i understand syndicated fox news host and fox news contributor. good to have both of you tonight. happy friday. > martha: richard, you kind of get both sides of the argument. that woman at the end who said look, it s sad but the fact of the matter is that a judge reported her to leave the country back in 2013. so she has overstayed that by several years. well, don t get me wrong, i think this is a very, very sad turn of affairs which should push our members of congress to find a way to have exrefn immigration reform. this is an economic question for me, martha. think about it so quad loop she has two children both american citizens who no longer have a member to take care of them. meaning the american people are going to be stuck on the line to take care of them. the numbers we are seeing is estimates that it could cost us if we follow donald trump s executive order to the t it could cost us $118 billion just to take care of those children who live in mixed status households. households where the parent is undocumented but the children are citizens so when the parents get documented their children become wards of the state. martha: i think people would be interested to know according to pew research 1 million illegal immigrants in los angeles and orange county. and pete hoekstra, there are plenty of people who come from countries all around the world who get deportation notices and they pack their dollars bags and eventually have to leave the country and go back to their country and work on getting back in legally. and so it seems to me just reading this story and going through it that s what s happening is the implementation of the law is starting to be adhered to. that s exactly right. that s the irony here is that, wow, we actually have a president who said he was going to implement the law when he was running for office. he is now president. he is now implementing the law. the american people and others who live here and some who live here illegally have figured this out. they are now protesting. this is not an economic issue or anything like that. this is an issue of the law. and richard is exactly right. congress now needs to get the message because the law is going to be enforced. if congress doesn t like it and they don t like the executive actions that the president is taking, it s time for them it s going to change. we re either going to work through this transition in an organized way or it s going to be a very, very difficult way. but the president is signaling to congress and to the american people we are going to enforce the law. i m willing to work with democrats and congress to change the law. but if you don t change the law, i m going to use the powers that i have as president to implement the law as it s written. martha: do you see that happening, richard, lawmakers starting to get together and say let s try to work on comprehensive immigration legislation? i feel like i have heard this my entire life. i feel like i have heard the same thing, martha. as we know barack obama deported more illegal immigrants than any other president in american history. he probably will be topped by donald trump in the next coming weeks. martha: they are following the laws that are currently on the books. there is nothing radical. this is follows the laws on the book. i m not disagreeing with that they absolutely are following the laws on the book. that s why it s time for congressman to change those laws. hopefully get comprehensive immigration reform done. this is like i said once again for american people to understand this is economic question we have to ask ourself why members of congress have to get stuff done. right? truth of the matter is 2.4 million mortgages are held bup by undocumented workers. if they get deported that s going to cost our economy $4.7 trillion in the g.d.p. martha: first you implement the law and then perhaps what you are talking about nudges congress to act. i have got to leave it there. hopefully. martha: gentlemen, thank you so much. richard and pete hoekstra thank you so much for being here tonight. also tonight as the left preaches tolerance are they practicing something quite different? wait until we show you the videotape of what happened earlier today to secretary betsy devos. plus the courts now deciding our national security. and if so, what does that mean for america? chris stirewalt, alex, and julie rojuly. it is interim ruling and fully confident that now we will get our day in court and have an opportunity to argue this on the merits that we will prevail. coaching means making tough choices. jim! you re in! but when you have high blood pressure and need cold medicine that works fast, the choice is simple. coricidin hbp is the only brand that gives powerful cold symptom relief without raising your blood pressure. coricidin hbp. what are you doing? getting your quarter back. fountains don t earn interest, david. you know i work at ally. i was being romantic. you know what i find romantic? a robust annual percentage yield that s what i find romantic. this is literally throwing your money away. i think it s over there. that way? yeah, a little further up. what year was that quarter? what year is that one? 98 that s the one. you got it! nothing stops us from doing right by our customers. ally. do it right. let s get out of that water. mosquitoes and sequence their dna to fight disease. there are over 100 million pieces of dna in every sample. with the microsoft cloud, we can analyze the data faster than ever before. if we can detect new viruses before they spread, we may someday prevent outbreaks before they begin. of 11 judges. the court is asking both the department of justice and the states of washington and minnesota to submit briefs on whether the case should be reconsidered. the states won the decision so clearly they don t want a new hearing. and earlier the white house said it would not appeal to the ninth circuit or the supreme court. then later said it might appeal to the supreme court. but this breaking news from the ninth circuit may, again, change the white house strategy. we will have breaking news updates throughout the evening. i m trace gallagher. now back to the first 100 days. martha: seven years after anti-obamacare town halls took aim at democratic members, republicans are now getting an ear-full from frustrated constituents. voices concerns from everything over government inaction to executive orders to now ironically the appeal of obamacare is the source of these raucous town halls. this video comes from utah where house oversight chair jason chaffetz went to speak to what he thought was going to be a friendly group of local voters. joining me now is molly hemmingway and former d.c. congressman. welcome to both of you. good to have you here. molly, let me start with you. pay back appears to be what s happening to jason chaffetz and others out there. i m not entirely sure that s true. it s always a good idea to pay attention to large protest movements. but this has a feel of something else entirely. jason chaffetz won re-election with 73.5% of the vote. so people interviewed that were at this were not local constituents they came in from scottsdale, arizona driving over 600 miles to protest him. this is something all together different. it has a bit of a feel of grassroots, of astro turf instead of grassroots activism. and it, you know, it s definitely something real that s happening. there is a lot of outrage on the left. but this is a little bit too incoherent to be compared to a tea party protest. martha: just staying with you for a second, molly, are they all democrats and liberals or some of these people never trumpers? we saw what happened in utah during the presidential election and perhaps some of them weren t happy with him for sort of the flip flop on president trump? right. well, another place where there was a protest was tennessee where diane black had her town hall protested. that s a state that went overwhelmingly for trump. whereas with utah even though he beat hillary clinton by almost 20 points, there was a large anti-trump vote in utah. still, this does not strike me as the kind of principled opposition to trump that you saw. even though there will be a call for jason chaffetz for his role as oversight chairman to do a good job in holding the trump administration accountable. martha: what do you think of these protests? look, feelings are wrong. people feeling disenfranchised or upset or disappointed. we have got to find a way to appeaappear appeal to our highe. the focus is on the president and his team to be uniters as opposed to dividers. through some the cabinet picks there is an opportunity to rise above all. this. martha: wow. what a novel concept. i think that s important. look, there are going to be people who want to fight no matter what. but we have got a loot of work to do in this country. and ways to bring all of us together. i think the president can do that. martha: yeah. very important point. i want to show everybody the video of betsy devos as she cardinal sin of trying to go visit a school in washington, d.c. in her new role as secretary of education. she was blocked at the door by protesters and had to turn around and leave, molly. sad situation for sure. this is another situation where people are really not thinking through how their protest appears to many people. this isn t the first time democrats have blocked doors to a public school. and it won t be the last. it s exactly the kind of thing that people don t like seeing. almost a met for fort situation with teacher s unions, supporters of teacher s unions don t want to let people into the schools who want to change the system or improve educational outcomes for poor students whose parents just can t afford to get them sent to an expensive private school. martha: that s a great point. i always point out in the protests not the parents out there blocking, believe me. they would probably like for her to come in and a lot of them want their kids to have the advantages and alternatives that she is talking about in many cases. kevin, what do you make of it? well, look, democrats aren t the only ones that block doors. george wallace famously blocked some doors in alabama we talk about. but, i tell you this. i m disappointed that the protesters are doing this to secretary devos. this is an opportunity to challenge that outrage towards what really needs to be focused on in education. every 42 seconds a kid drops out of school in america. 60% of our yawts are neither college or career-ready. there should be a sense of outrage about the educational outputs in america. i think secretary devos can help cheer that people need to focus on the real deal. we are not educating our most precious resource and that s america s children. martha: you both make great points. thank you so much for being here today. kevin and molly, great to see you. so, as soon as palm price was sworn in earlier today, we started hearing warnings that obamacare is on its way out. dr. marc siegel here on what happens then. plus, president donald trump simultaneously fighting leaks and the court up next we re going to talk to former white house press secretary ari fleischer and democratic strategist mark alderman on reports that the president is frustrated. you have never seen so much paper on a president s desk. [laughter] that s because we are negotiating lots of deals for our country which would be tremendous. toujeo® is a long-acting insulin from the makers of lantus®. it releases slowly, providing consistent insulin levels for a full 24 hours, proven full 24-hour blood sugar control, and significant a1c reduction. and along with toujeo®, i m eating better and moving more. toujeo® is a long-acting, man-made insulin used to control high blood sugar in adults with diabetes. it contains 3 times as much insulin in 1 milliliter as standard insulin. don t use toujeo® to treat diabetic ketoacidosis, during episodes of low blood sugar, or if you re allergic to insulin. allergic reaction may occur and may be life threatening. don t reuse needles or share insulin pens, even if the needle has been changed. the most common side effect is low blood sugar, which can be serious and life threatening. it may cause shaking, sweating, fast heartbeat, and blurred vision. check your blood sugar levels daily while using toujeo®. injection site reactions may occur. don t change your dose or type of insulin without talking to your doctor. tell your doctor if you take other medicines and about all your medical conditions. insulins, including toujeo®, in combination with tzds (thiazolidinediones) may cause serious side effects like heart failure that can lead to death, even if you ve never had heart failure before. don t dilute or mix toujeo® with other insulins or solutions as it may not work as intended and you may lose blood sugar control, which could be serious. toujeo® helps me stay on track with my blood sugar. ask your doctor about toujeo®. leaks has really pushed back upon them in no uncertain terms as well he should. i don t think that the leaks came from certain people because they would have been unflattering and they certainly didn t come from the white house. martha: that was president trump s top counselor kellyanne conway at the start of this week addressing the numerous leaks that have plagued the administration in only the first three weeks in office. the week ended with mr. trump finding himself on the wrong side of a court decision. insiders claim that both of those situations are examples of a president who just wants to get things done. while slowly coming to grips with the immense size and checks of the government bureaucracy. joining us now ari fleischer former white house press secretary and mark alderman a democratic strategist. gentlemen, welcome tonight. good to have you with us. thank you. ari, a lot of this comes from a politico piece which has a ton of those, you know, leaky elements all over its pages in this piece. how much do you believe in this? how does it look like they are doing so far to you? well, i think there is a lot of truth to this. i think it is difficult to be outsider and take the reins of the government and make it work smooth. it s a balance, martha. if you say you want traditional politician someone who has been there all their lives and know what is they are doing to run the federal government today. we settled that in november. the answer was no. the american people did not want that. i think it would probably be smoother in some respects, the bureaucracies would like the white house better if you had hillary or traditional politician. but donald trump was not elected to be smooth. he was elected to change washington. and it s going to be bumpy. he is going to learn as he goes. his staff will learn as he goes. this is what the american people voted for and frankly i m much more comfortable comfoe with this than inside hand that knows what they are doing. i want washington to change myself. martha: i talked to some people across the country when we were covering the course of the election. i would ask them who do you support and why? those who say they supported donald trump. i said why? why do you support him? he said i want someone to shake things up. i m tired of the status quo. i m tired of everything else. so what if it s not smooth. it s not working for me. is that what we re seeing here? well, martha, it s never too soon to expect competence from the commander-in-chief. this is a serious job. and trump plainly has no patience for his position. he is like an adolescent who got hold of his parent s car keys but never learned to drive. so you can change personnel. you can plug these leaks. you can give it some more time, but unless and until donald trump grows into this role, we re going to have the apprentice for four years. martha: well, when you take a look at the dow jones industrials, it seems like there are elements of this economy who are actually quite satisfied. ari, do you think that s fair criticism from mark? yes and no. i think it is if you were insider. it s a fair criticism if you like the way things have been and you want that to continue. if your highest premium is making the interagency review process work smoothly. if you are one of those people who lives in middle america who says that for decades nothing has worked for you, the economy is poor. you haven t gotten a raise, no politician has listened to you, and along comes outsider donald trump and can relate to you and all of a sudden you realize here is the outsider who cares about me, yes, that s where donald trump is invested. that s where he is ultimately, martha, going to be judged a success or failure. if he gets the economy moving faster instead of zero to 1% g.d.p. growth. if he gets median wages up for working class americans, especially, this is what it means to make america great again in the eyes of many who have been suffering. their region of america isn t doing so great. martha: clearly a lot of ruffled feathers. forgive me for interrupting. so what if is he ruffling feathers inside washington. mark, your thought? martha, may i observe that it is funny that for eight years in a stock market that more than doubled, the republicans gave president obama no credit for that. and here we are 20 days into the trump administration and he is, of course, responsible for the rise of the market. i think. mark, those gains went to the top. those gains were not shared universally, especially with working class people. the rich benefited nicely from the obama years. martha: thanks, you guys. we have got to leave this there. we will have a lot more to talk about in the weeks and months to come. glad to have you here tonight. thank you. president trump s brand new hhs secretary ready to go with his plan to repeal and replace obamacare. this is a huge deal in the words of someone we all remember from the prior administration. dr. marc siegel is here to tell us what it means at your doctor s office. plus, we will take a look back at this week that was when chris stirewalt, alex and julie roginski give a grade to the week when we come back. the slopes like i used to. i even accept i have a higher risk of stroke due to afib, a type of irregular heartbeat not caused by a heart valve problem. but whatever trail i take, i go for my best. so if there s something better than warfarin, i ll go for that too. eliquis. eliquis reduced the risk of stroke better than warfarin, plus had less major bleeding than warfarin. eliquis had both. don t stop taking eliquis unless your doctor tells you to, as stopping increases your risk of having a stroke. eliquis can cause serious and in rare cases fatal bleeding. don t take eliquis if you have an artificial heart valve or abnormal bleeding. while taking eliquis, you may bruise more easily. .and it may take longer than usual for any bleeding to stop. seek immediate medical care for sudden signs of bleeding, like unusual bruising. eliquis may increase your bleeding risk if you take certain medicines. tell your doctor about all planned medical or dental procedures. i m still going for my best. and for eliquis. ask your doctor about eliquis. martha: developing tonight vice president mike pence s swearing in for tom price as the new secretary of health and human services. and with pryce now i obamacare s days may be numbered. for more on the brewing battle in washington let s go to chief political correspondent carl cammeron who joins us this evening. hi, carl. hi, martha. getting price sworn in will probably speed up the obamacare repeal and care and replace process. there is still one open spot on the administration s healthcare team. price was pretty careful during his confirmation hearings to give mostly boilerplate earn about what the g.o.p. plan and process is going to be. the new health and human service is the a position. when he was in congress he did develop a healthcare replacement plan of his own. there is no consensus among his house former colleagues. the president has said that the actual replacement may not be implemented until next year while speaker ryan has indicated that the house is going to take another big step in about seven weeks. but we want to be moving our obamacare legislation by the end of the first quarter. well, that open healthcare slot is a key one. the administrator of the center for medicare and medicaid services. trump s nominee confirmation hearing is next week. reforming medicare and medicaid are a huge part of this puzzle. during price s confirmation hearing suggested those who rely on those kinds of services don t have to worry. our commitment is to make it so that they have that coverage or greater. that s a commitment you are making. that s a commitment. and that s when democrats are going to try to hold him to. there is an awful lot of work to this. during the campaign, candidate trump said he would make everyone s overall healthcare cheaper and better. his full-team should be in place maybe five weeks from now, something like that. then real decisions are going to start and that s when the real battling is going to intensify. martha. martha: carl, thank you very much. you bet. martha: joining us us is marc siegel and professor of medicine. good to see you tonight. good to see you, martha. martha: repeal and replace is the big question. we have seen protests already breaking out across the country. people saying their healthcare is going to be taken away from them. you know dr. price and now hhs secretary dr. price. how is he going to do it. well, i think he is going to be a point person for this. as carl cammeron is just saying we don t know the pace this is going to roll out. is he committed to restoring the doctor-patient relationship as front and center for healthcare decisions. he doesn t assume, dr. price, that insurance is always the answer or government is always the answer. i can tell you in the doctor s office a lot of times somebody comes in with insurance, like obamacare and they don t necessarily get the services they need. dr. price is aware of that. he is a practicing orthopedickist for 20 years. he has been talking about this since you obamacare was initially passed. he is very aware in the future we need something there is more choice involved. there is health savings accounts where patients can pay out-of-pocket for more things. where there is tax deductions. he put for the a proposal where you get tax credits and use that to buy insurance with. as well as directly services. martha: that s a comprehensive plan very different than what we got in obamacare. so the big question is how do you give the new program and how do you get it started while protecting people and making sure that you don t have those gaps in between? because that s the biggest concern that people have. i think you add, rather than take away right away. i think, again, in the clip that carl just showed you see some of that. you have medicaid expansion. i don t believe the administration is going to remove medicaid expansion. it may add a private option to it. it may switch it to block grants. same as medicare. they may add a private option to medicare. i always said add a catastrophic option. right now have you a situation where the government is subsidizing everything. you go to the state exchanges and two thirds of the policies sold there are subsidized two thirds of it and then you get to the doctor s office and you can t necessarily buy care. i think you will see more price transparency and competition. president trump has said insurance will be available across state lines. that means repealing a law that s been in place for many years. martha: go ahead, what the key is real quick. the key here you have got a physician for the third time in history running hhs. he also has the fda under his jurisdiction. an actual doctor who know what is doctors and patients face. that s new. martha: how long is it going to take in your opinion. i would like to see some of it right away. if you know president trump, some of it will be right await a minute the individual mandate is practically unenforceable. maybe that will be gotten rid of. martha: okay. essential benefits package. mandates. premiums going up. catastrophic option might be added. some changes can be done right away. martha: dr. marc siegel thank you very much. great to sigh. martha: coming up, quite a week for the trump administration. we have said that for three weeks and true every time. chris stirewalt, at electriand o update. he is free to speak his mind. part of the reason the president got elected he speaks his mind. he doesn t hold it back. is he authentic. he is not going to sit back when he feels very passionately about something. there s no party like a lobster party, and this is the lobster party. red lobster s lobsterfest is back with 9 irresistible lobster dishes. yeah, it s a lot. try tender lobster lover s dream and see how sweet a lobster dream can be. or pick two delicious lobster tails with new lobster mix and match. the only thing more tempting than one succulent lobster tail, is two. is your mouth watering yet? good. because there s something for everyone, and everyone s invited. so come in today. 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. contributor. great to have all of you here. let s take it on. 21 days in, it feels like we have been here for about 1,000. so much has happened. chris, what s your take on what looked like this week for the trump administration? well, we are still in the early going and there were definitely misses. but there were some successes. there were pretty notable successes. one is we saw bipartisan agreement on the position of the administration startinged to rough out last week on iran where you saw democrats and republicans coming together on sanctions that was a sign on the foreign policy front things could be moving in a good direction. something you heard echoed today when he was with the prime minister of japan talking about agreement with china and so on and so on. you are starting to see good things there. as you pointed out, the ninth circuit in that decision and the constant outrage surrounding that issue not so good. martha: what grade would you give the week, chris? i m going it had been a b but then i have got to say that the nordstrom stuff takes him down to c plus for the week. martha: elaborate on do people care about that is my question? no. that s the point. martha: we all obsess over it and i talked to kellyanne conway about it last night. do you think people care about it in america. no they do not. nor should the president talk about it nor his spokesperson or leading strategist discuss the issue. focus on the business of the people. that cost him a half a letter grade. martha: he is such a tough grader. alex, i m glad i didn t have chris. alex, what do you think of the week. chris is a smart guy. i really disagree with him. i give the president a slightly better grade. i give him a b. the early days are all about setting up pros cease cease and personnel. he had a lot of success with personnel. getting key cabinet officials confirmed. my sources in the white house tell me that the processes are being put in place to have better executive orders moving forward so we don t have these sort of legal fights that the president and the white house have lost this week and last. so i think that they are moving in the right direction. therefore, i give him a solid b. martha: julie roginski is going to give him an a plus i just know it. so close. martha: such fan. julie, what did you think? how did he do this week. chris is right. did he have some successes and alex is right as well. he did get his people confirmed. there is question of betsy devos she was confirmed. in that sense it was a good win for the white house. i will say the most troubling thing to me this week is actually what happened yesterday and this morning with michael flynn which is a problem that could potentially last much longer than just the week where michael flynn seemingly forced the vice president to come out and say something that charity tabbably could be called several untruths about whether he discussed sanctions with the russian ambassador prior to him becoming national security advisor. and so that becomes a big problem that potentially could open this administration up to hearings on the issue. and so as a result of that, i would give him a c minus. martha: c s from julie and chris. chris, how big a deal is this michael flynn, russia question? we have a very leaky administration right now. and it is springing leaks on all sides. that is a big problem. every administration leaks. this one leaks a lot. and how much of this is due to infighting, we don t know. but oftentimes that is the root cause. and if there is a schism in the administration or there are people who don t trust flynn on or about flynn doesn t trust them and stuff springing out of that space. that could be on the going forward basis a big problem. martha: on the substance of it, alex, chris is talking about the political ramifications which are very real. on the substance of it is it problematic, alex? it could be problematic. this is all coming about because apparently the fbi is looking into these calls. martha: he said there was nothing illegal in them. that s the latest. and if nothing is illegal in this i think it will be quickly forgotten and chalked up to early mistake, early miscommunication within the administration. if there is more to it, yes, it s absolutely a problem. when the vice president goes on tv, as he did on cbs s face the nation a couple weeks ago and asserts something that is then reported to be not true, that is an issue that the administration will have to deal with at some point. martha: yeah. i mean, the story is that he mentioned to a high level russian official not to worry about the sanctions or something along those lines. we don t know exactly what he said but there was an indication that maybe there would be relief in the future which instantly reminded me of the moment that president obama said that to like don t worry, as soon as i get reelected. more flexibility. martha: we will have more flexible, julie. what s the difference. the difference first and foremost he was not supposed to be talking policy before we have a national security advisor. one president at a time. secondly a larger pattern of potential russian interference in the election whether michael flynn who had acknowledged accepting payments from russia today which is propaganda arm of the putin administration. this is not a democratic issue. have you senators like senator mccain and senator graham and others who are very serious about looking into this. if this is the predicate for that kind of investigation to be launched, that could be a massive headache for the trump administration going forward. martha: so going back quickly to the nordstrom question, chris because i know you are a big shopper. you can tell. martha: i m going to give you the last word on this here. what do they need to do to make sure because this is going to happen again and again with business and interest. they need to be on the same page they white house, do they not, about how they are going to respond to these kind of questions? not only do they have to be on the same page of the white house but they must not steal the president s central message something we would say in west virginia jay rock follow ler came down there to be senator, he is too rich to steal. make sure that is carried forward. donald trump is seen as doing the people s business and not enriching himself and family even if it s a dad being nice to his daughter. martha: you guys are great, thank you so much. thank you martha. martha: here is the quote of the night from this friday sent to us from a viewmplet we have gotten so many good ones this is from richie skaggs. a person who never made a mistake never tried anything
suitorman, senior editor at reason magazine. kasie, let me start with you. we ve already seen far right groups like heritage action criticize the plan, club for growth as well, freedom works, rand paul calling it obamacare light. you tweeted this a few hours ago. here it is, it is still early so caveats apply but events of today suggest gop health care bill is already on life support, if not dead on arrival. how can that be so early, kasie? reporter: well look, craig, this bill has run into extraordinary opposition just in the first handful of hours that it has been out in the public, and you re saying you tick through some of the groups that have come out and opposed this, the heritage action went so far as to say this doesn t repeal obamacare. that of course kind of the cardinal sin for a party that has spent the last however many years campaigning specifically on repealing obamacare. so the people who are to younger people and less generous to older people. there would be a cap so that really high income people wouldn t be able to get access to it at all, but really the question here is what are republicans trying to do with this bill, and i m not sure they know, except to say we have a bill that has repealed and replaced obamacare, because it s really not clear who the constituency is for this legislation, and the fact that so many major conservative groups have already come out in opposition. heritage action, freedom works, americans for prosperity, this bill was supposed to unite the right which was really fractured about health care, going into this process. and they have united the right in opposition to the bill. one of the chief complaints, peter, as you know to obamacare, it was rammed down our throats so fast. no one had time to read it. it was 1200 pages, we couldn t get our heads around it. no cbo scoring, no public hearings, markup on the bill set for tomorrow. why the rush? the secrecy surrounding the writing of this bill is really telling. it just does not inspire confidence that this bill was locked in a room, that senators, republican senators who want to repeal obamacare were not allowed to see the bill last week, and that they have decided to forego the cbo process early on here. they say that the cbo will have a score at some point, perhaps by easter, but that s a ways off here and the cbo score is really what sort of rallies people. the cbo is imperfect and it doesn t always get things right but at the same time what it does is it provides a singular number for coveragestimates, for effects on the budget for cost. singular number that essentially everyone has to either agree to or provide a really good reason why they are not agreeing to and the fact that republicans aren t going to with that, aren t going through that process is really telling. kasie, let s pivot here and talk about today s hearing for deputy attorney general romney rod rosenstein. lot had to do with the performance of attorney general jeff sessions. i want to play this fiery exchange between republican chuck grassley, the chairman of the judiciary committee and al franken of wisconsin. as i remember senator franken asking his question of senator sessions, he referred to something that there had just been something come on cnn that obviously, and franken said that senator sessions wouldn t know what it was and he was going to take that into consideration that it would have been all right for you to ask your question, and you probably should have given him a chance to get the information you had and reflect on it, and give an answer in writing. now the way i tend to, and you both of you know that i said this to you when you were in the privacy of my office. if i was going to ask you a gotcha question, i was going to tell you about it ahead of time and i consider what senator franken asked sessions at that late moment that that story just come out is a gotcha question. it was not a gotcha question, sir. it was, from the standpoint that he didn t know what you were asking about. but i said that as i was asking the question. senator, no. you haven t heard this and i don t expect you have heard it. senator tillis? look at the tape mr. chairman, please. a testy exchange the likes of which we do not see often in the upper chambe kasie hunt. the big question onrosenstein today was would hupport an independent counsel to investigate the election in the trump/russia ties. what did he say to that? reporter: right. that obviously the sessions, the question to sessions that franken asked is what ultimately has resulted in a chain of events that has led to anybody having any idea who mr. rosenstein is at this stage in the game, because sessions of course ended up having to recuse himself from anything related to the trump campaign and democrats have focused on the deputy attorney general slot as the one that will ultimately be making decisions about prosecutions and other issues around any inquiries into the trump campaign and ties to russia. so at this point, mr. rosenstein did not commit one way or the other to having a special prosecutor. he says he s potentially open to it, that no decisions have been made. so we re going to have to see if that s good enough for some of the democrats who interest threatened to hold up his nomination over this. in the blumenthal of connecticut saying he doesn t want to allow this to go forward without that commitment. it only takes one senator to do that. craig? senator blumenthal standing by for us, we ll talk to him in a few moments. matt, as we watch this hearing play out here in real time it s ongoing, we just saw texas senator ted cruz asking some questions. you worked at the doj under eric holder, tell us about this man named rod rosenstein. what s he like? he s a straight arrow. he s a prosecutor s prosecutor. i think he s about as good a choice as we can expect for deputy attorney general. personally i wish he was the attorney general rather than jeff sessions. if rod rosenstein was left to investigate this russia question or appointed a special counsel to iestigate the question he would do a good job. the deputy attorney general regularly sits in the situation room with the president. long with others is vying for influence with the president, is asking the president to pass judgment on things, policy things the department of justice is doing on investigations and so it s difficult at the same time you re constantly interacting with the president and members of the white house to be investigating the president s campaign and expect that to be done fairly. this is such a tenuous time in the department of justice s history, after the incident with loretta lynch and the meeting with bill clinton, with jim comey s actions last year in july, and then right before the election, and then of course sessions recusal. there are a lot of americans asking whether the department of justice can investigate political matters fairly and independently, and in a situation like this it s so damaging for the department s credibility. i think the only solution is to follow kind of the press decede that happened in the bush administration when ross rosenstein s predecessor appointed a special counsel to investigate the white house, the only situation that would allow americans to believe this was being handled fairly. matt thank you. senator richard blumenthal democrat from connecticut sits on the judiciary committee. let me show you, show everyone what you tweeted on sunday, i ll use every possible tool to block doj deputy ag nominee unless he commits to appoint independent special prosecutor. let me play who rod rosenstein said today when asked that question. are you willing to auto point a special counsel to examine russiainterferences in elections and other criminal activity? i m willing to appoint a special counsel whenever i determine appropriate based on the policies and procedures of the justice department. after what you heard today, will you block him? i will use every tool available to block him, because he has failed to commit to appoint a special prosecutor, and make no mistake. we know enough right now to see that this nation is careening toward a constitutional crisis. the russians meddled in our electoral process, our democracy, the intelligence agencies are all in a consensus on that point and donald trump seems to have accepted it. there are clear evidence of ties between the trump campaign, the trump transition team, the trump administration and the russians. there are false statements made by now attorney general jeff sessions during his nomination proceedings, false statements that could lead to a coverup, all of these threats demand an independent objective impartial investigation that is seen by the american public as credible and trustworthy, not just in fact trustworthy and credible, and so i think that he must commit to a special prosecutor, and when i asked him again today about that commitment, he really failed to commit himself. senator, for those of us who are watching and listening, who might not be as familiar with parliamentary procedure there in the upper chamber, precisely how will you go about blocking this nomination? there are ways that we can ask for delays in votes. there are procedures we can use on the floorthe united states senate, all of the technical details may be obtuse but they are not unlimited, so the ultimate ability to block the nomination may not be unlimited either, and so i will do everything in my power because i believe so strongly the nation needs an independent special prosecutor. i support the intelligence committee doing its investigation. i support the creation of a select committee, and also a special commission that can produce findings and recommendations in a report that s fully transparent. only a prosecutor can pursue criminal wrongdoing, whether it s false statements or other violations of the law. let s talk in a moment here about the house plan to fix health care. i imagine that you ve had an opportunity to thumb through it, to a a certain extent. on its face, is this something that is a legislative starting point or is this dead on arrival? it seems like less coverage at higher cost, fewer people covered, and higher payments, which seems like a recipe for disaster in health care. the ones who suffer most are older folks, children, women. it would be devastating to women s health care by defunding planned parenthood and that is an abhorrent sacrifice that i will oppose with every ounce of energy that i have, and the ones who seem to be better off are the insurance companies and the healthy. that also seems to me to make it highly suspect, and so i think with seven of my colleagues here, republicans opposing it right now, it s pretty much a nonstarter. let s talk about the travel ban that was announced yesterday. not so much whether you agree with it as a matter of policy. considering the changes that have been made by the administration, do you think that it will at least pass constitutional muster? it raises the same constitutional questions as the senator, hang on one second. i want to get back into the judiciary hearing to listen to your colleagues for a second. cnn just published a story and i m telling you this about a news story that s just been published, i m not expecting you to know whether or not it s true, but cnn just published a story alleging that the intelligence community provided documents to the president-elect last week that included information that russian operatives claimed to have compromising personal and financial information about mr. trump. these documents also allegedly say there was a continuing exchange of information during the campaign between trump s surrogates and intermediaries for the russian government. now again, i m telling you this as it s coming out, just so you know, but if it s true, it s obviously extremely serious, and if there is any evidence that anyone affiliated with the trump campaign communicated with the russian government in the course of this campaign, what will you do? i think that was a fair question and certainly not a gotcha question, and he didn t answer my question. what he said to that question was, senators franken, allegations get made about candidates all the time and they ve been made about president-elect trump lots of times. most of them virtually wait a minute, i am sorry. i m not aware of any of these activities. i ve been called a surrogate at a time or two in that campaign, and i did not have communications with the russians and i m unable to comment on it. so in other words, it can t be a gotcha question if he didn t understand the question. so the thing that got him was him saying that he had not met with russians, but that wasn t even my question. my question was just if this is and i asked it of mr. rosenstein, which is if it turns out to be the case that members of the mpaign, of the tru campaign have met with russians and you know, includclud kohl cd with them, it was not a gotcha question. that s all i want to say. if you go back and look at the tape i have to say i couldn t have been nicer. i couldn t have been sweeter. really. so that s that. mr. rosenstein, i want to ask you a question. the. s former national security adviser, michael flynn, resigned his position because he misled senior administration officials regarding his communications with the russian ambassador, and it s been reported sally yates, who once held the position you are looking to fill and was acting attorney general earlier in the trump administration warned the white house that mr. flynn could be vulnerable to blackmail because of his coverup. mr. rosenstein, knowing what we know now, do you think ms. yates was right to be concerned? senator, i hope i ve been clear on this point throughout my testimony. i appreciate the opportunity to clarify it. at this point, i believe as a lawyer, and as a justice department official currently and potentially in the future, it s important for me to limit my testimony to matters of which i know both the facts and the law, and where i ve consulted with the department of justice professionals who are engaged in handling the matter, so on issues like that one i appreciate senate whitehouse sharing his perspective earlier that you need to know the facts and the relevant information. you can t prejudge matters. there s currently an acting attorney general dana boente in that position with regard to any investigation that may be occurring. with regard to yr specific question, my answer is, senator, that i do not know the details of what the basis was for that, and i wouldn t reach any opinion about it just based on what i read in the newspaper. senator from hawaii? thank you, mr. chairman. there are more than 18,000 law enforcement agencies all right, senator blumenthal you heard that exchange. what say you, got cha question? not a gotcha question? not a gotcha question at all. in fact, the point senator franken was making essentially is that then senator sessions offered an answer that wasn t even required by the question. he on his own offered that he never met with the russians, and so he really dug himself this hole, and the question when it was gotcha or whatever, didn t necessarily require that answer. and i think there is overriding need for an independent special prosecutor precisely because all of these political headwinds are going to hit whoever does this investigation, and it better be someone who is independent and is not investigating his own boss as mr. rosenstein would do, if he were the one doing the investigation. senator richard blumenthal of connecticut, senator, thank you for your time this afternoon. thank you so much. thank you. trumpcare versus obamacare. how different are they, and what would the new plan mean for you? we ll take a deep dive on that, and roughly 15 minutes or so from now, sean spicer set to take that podium there in the white house briefing room. you see the screens that have become commonplace for reporters to appear via skype. there was also a small table next to the podium. we are expecting props. where s frank? it s league night! saved money on motorcycle insurance with geico! goin up the country. bowl without me. frank. i m going to get nachos. snack bar s closed. gah! ah, ah ah. i m goin up the country, baby don t you wanna go? i m goin up the country, baby don t you wanna go? geico motorcycle, great rates for great rides. know where you stand instantly. visit quickbooks-dot-com. termites, feasting on homes twenty-four-seven. we re on the move. roger. hey rick, all good? oh ya, we re good! we re good. termites never stop trying to get in, we never stop working to keep them out. terminix. defenders of home. the search for relief often leads here.s, today there s drug-free aleve direct therapy. a high intensity tens device that uses technology once only in doctors offices. for deep penetrating relief at the source. aleve direct therapy. say. lot of times say they re lower 25% they can t afford private. universal health care. i ll take care of everybody. we begin by repealing the awful taxes, the mandate penalties and subsidies in obamacare. when all is said and done will the republican health care plan cover more americans or less americans than obamacare? we really think it will cover more. after years of railing against obamacare, we now have the republican s plan. so what might it mean for you? let s bring in ali velshi to break it down for us. what s in the new plan, sir? i ll tell you what is in it and out of it. i ll try to make this as simple as possible. there are tax credits now to pay for insurance instead of the mandate. there s been an expansion of health savings accounts and flexible spending accounts. i ll show you about that in a second. there are very big changes come to federal medicaid payments. this is going to affect the poorest americans, and the elimination of planned parenthood funding largely because of planned parenthood s relationship with abortion. tax credits everybody gets a tax credit whether or not you earn income or you don t, they are going to be based on your age, not your income. so a 20-year-old $2,000 tax credit per year, that can probably get you a good piece of insurance. 60-year-old will get $4,000, nd me a 60-year-old who can buy an insurance policy other than catastrophic care for 4,000 bucks. these tax ritz will be reduced as you go higher up the income scale. individuals making $75,000 or more will start to see them going down, couples making $150,000 or more. health savings accounts and flexible spending accounts are going to get a bit of a boost. this tends to favor people who have that extra money that they can save. tends to not be so good for poor people but they will double the allowed contribution starting in 2018. so an individual will be putting 6,500 bucks in, a family can put 13,100. this is what replaces the mandate, a 30% penalty or premium on top of your health insurance premium if you let coverage lapse. if you don t buy new coverage because ir not feeling very flush or don t think you re going to get sick and try to buy it again, 30% more expensive. that s meant to have people stay in insurance and make that pool bigger. what s not in there? the employer mandate and individual mandate. no one is forced to buy insurance for themselves or their employees. government subsidies to pay for insurance we re getting refundable tax credits to everyone and selling insurance across state lines was supposed to be in here donald trump tweeted that s going to come in a later phase. here are the losers as we look at it, the elderly, because they re not getting enough of a tax credit, the poor because of those changes to medicaid, and the sick who always get the short end of the stick. winners right now are the young, because they get this great subsidy and generally healthy, wealthy people who are seeing their taxes go down as it relates to health care, and health insurers who are benefiting from this. so it s complicated, it s meaty but that s what it looks like. one of the big questions continues to be can aealth care system remainsustainable, remain solvent perhaps even if there is no penalty? if there s not a requirement to carry insurance? president obama didn t want the penalty or the mandate, mitt romney didn t want the penalty or mandate. this is not philosophical. it s mathematical. it s actuarial. you cannot insure people who are high risk without forcing people who are low risk to be in that insurance. anyone who lives in coastal america and has to buy a wind or a flood policy knows how this works. think about this as a wind or flood policy. this is very hard to sustain it without forcing people to be in it. ali velshi our numbers guy, always good to have you. my pleasure. republicans divided. now that we know the details of their plan to replace obamacare will gop leaders get the party united behind it? and can they sell it to the american people? we are still waiting for sean spicer to take that podium. we re told it s going to happen any moment. it will be his first formal press briefing in more than a week. look closely. hidden in every swing, every chip, and every putt, is data that can make the difference between winning and losing. golfers like me have played these holes thousands of times, generating countless data points. the microsoft cloud helps me turn that data into insight that used to be invisible. here, intuition would tell me to lay up with a 3-iron, but the analysis from the cloud tells me to go for it, and use a driver for a 12 percent higher chance of birdie. there are countless points of data in the pga tour. the microsoft cloud makes sense of it, helping them transform their business, so players, and fans, will experience the game in a whole new way. the microsoft cloud gives you thwer to turn infoation to insight. additional wave of threats to jewish community centers and anti-defamation league offices. according to some reports over 100 bombing threats phoned in to jewish institutions since the start of this year alone lp. as the president said at the beginning we re a country that stands you nighted in condemning hate and ooefl in all its forms. we denounce this. it is saddening i have to continue to share these disturbing reports with you and i share the president s thoughts he hopes we don t have to continue to share these reports with you but as long as they do condemn the and look at ways we can stop them. on to the news of the day you saw president trump continue to deliver on two of his most significant campaign promises, protecting the country against radical islamic terrorism and repealing and replacing obamacare with a patient-centric alternative. we talked about the executive order protecting the nation from foreign terrorist entry into the you state yesterday and on to, i introduce tom price to talk about the plan to repeal and replace obamacare. dr. price. good afternoon. first let me just share what an honor it is to share with the secretary of human and health services. i m the third of 23 who had the privilege of serving and the mission at our department is to improve the health and safety and well-being of the american people and we take that mission very, very seriously. for many americans right now, their ability to gain health care or health coverage is a real challenge. for most americans they receive their health coverage through their employer, it s about 175 million folks, those individuals will see no significant change other than there won t be a penalty for not purchasing coverage. for the folks in the medicare system there will be no changes at all in the current law. but we re talking about those people in the individual and small group market, the moms and pops, the folks who run the corner grocery store, the corner cleaners, those individuals out there are having huge challenges gaining care and gaining coverage, and medicaid is a program that by and large has decreased the ability for folks to gain access to care and we want to make certain we address that. this is about patience. this is n aboutmoney. this is not about something this is about patience, and sadly, the costs are going up for those folks and the individual in small group market, the access is going down and only getting worse. you know the stories. premiums increased 25% over the last year on average. arizona had an increase of 116%. deductibles are going up for many, many folks, if you re a mom or a dad out there, and you make $40,000, 50,000, 60,000 your deductible oftentimes is 8,000, 10,000, 12,000 a year. what that means is that you ve got an insurance card but you don t get care, because you can t afford the deductible, and we know this is happening by talking to the folks out there trying to provide the care. third of the counties in the united states, one-third of the counties in the united states have only one insurer offering coverage on the exchange. five states only have one insurer offering coverage on the exchange. one insurer is not a choice. so we need to make certain we correct that. in tennessee this morning, it was announced that there are a number of counties that have no insurer offering coverage on the exchange. insurers are leaving the market on the exchange. last year there were 232 insurers that were providing coverage, offering coverage on the exchange. now there are 167. that s a loss of about 30% in one year alone. and all of this means that patients are not getting the care that they need. now the principles we have as our guiding star are affordability. we want a system that s affordable for everybody, accessibility, a system of the highest quality, a system that incentivizes innovation in a health care system and a system that empowers patients through transparency and accountability. the president spoke last tuesday to a joint session of congress and laid out h principles. first wanted to make certain those with preexisting illness and injury were not priced out of the market. nobody ought to lose their coverage because they get a bad diagnosis. in terms of affordability, health savings accounts growing choices for patients is incredibly important. tax credits that allow individuals to be able to purchase the kind of coverage that they want, not that the government forces them to buy, we ve always talked about in terms of what kinds of reforms need to be put in place that they need to equalize the tax treatment for the purchase of coverage. those again in the employer sponsored market they get a tax benefit for buying health coverage. those folks that are out there in the individual small group market know tax benefit and that s what this plan would do. state flexibility it s incredibly important that we allow the states to be the ones that are defining what health coverage, have the flexibility in the medicaid program to be able to respond to their vulnerable population. lawsuit abuse, the president mentioned and it s incredibly important the practice of defensive medicine wastes billions of dollars every single year and we need to address that as well. president talked about a glide path and appropriate transition to this new phase for health care for our country, and that s important as well. so that nobody falls through the cracks. buying insurance across state lines. the. the talked about this on the campaign over and over. american people understand the common sense nature of purchasing across state lines, and it increases competition and we need to make certain that that happens and then addressing the incredible increase in drug prices. there are three phases of this plan. one is the bill that was introduced last evening in the house of representatives, that s the start of all of this. second are all the regulatory modifications and changes that can be put into place, as you all well know the previous administration used regulations to fairly well. there were 192 specific rules that were put out as they relate to obamacare. over 5,000 letters of guidance and the like, and we are going to go through every single one of those and make certain that if they help patients, then we need to continue them. if they harm patients or increase costs, then obviously they need to be addressed. and then there s other legislation that will need to be addressed that can t be done through the reconciliation process. so the goal of all of this is patient-centered health care for patient and families and doctors making medical decisions and not the federal government. we commend the house for the introduction of the bill yesterday and we look forward to working with all individuals in this process and look forward to a few questions. you re familiar with the conservative groups like the club for growth and heritage action have with rank and file members. what does it say about this legislation that these groups are already out with opposition to it? well, i think that this is the beginning of the process, and we look forward to working with them and others to make certain that again we come up with that process that aligns with the principles that we ve defined, that they actually adhere to or agree with as well and that is that we need a system that s affordable for folks, a system that s accessible for individuals, that s of the highest quality, that incentivizes innovation, and that empowers patients and so we look forward to working with them through this process. reporter: secretary, americans had to foregoe a new iphone to pay for health care and have to make these choices. does the administration agree with that? will americans under this plan, will they need to make sacrifice other goods to pay for their health care? this is an important question. what s happening right now is that the american people are having to sacrifice in order to purchase coverage, and as i mentioned many individuals can t afford the kind of coverage that they have right now. so they veot that insurance card, but they don t have care. what our desire is to drive down the health care costs for everybody and the way that you do that is to increase choices for folks, increase competition, return the regulation of health care, where it ought to be, which is at the state level, not at the federal level. all of these things that take it in their aggregate will decrease the cost of health care, and health coverage and that will allow folks to be able to purchase the coverage that they want. yes, sir? reporter: thank you, dr. price. two questions for you. first has to do with guarantees that you can make as the administration s point person on this legislation. can you guarantee that whatever legislation emerges it makes it to the president s desk will allow individuals if they like their doctor they can keep their doctor and the second guarantee is can you also guarantee that health care premiums for individuals will come down with this new legislation? again, a remarkably important question, because as you ll recall the promise from if the last administration was if you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor. if you like your plan, you can keep your plan. both of those promises turned out to be not true. we think it s incredibly important for the american people to be able to select the physician and the place where they re treated in themselves, that the government ought not be involved in that process, and so our goal is to absolutely make certain that individuals have the opportunity to select their physician. in terms of premiums, we believe strongly that through this whole process and as it takes effect, that we ll see a decrease in not only the premiums individuals will see but decrease in the cost of health care for folks. remember there was another promise that the previous administration made that you d see a decrease in $2500 on average for families across this land. in fact they ve seen an increase of $2500 or $3,000. we re going to go in the other direction, in a direction that empowers patients and holds down costs. mr. secretary, you are quite a distance away from conservatives with this plan and the central part of it, which is tax credits. they see as yet another entitlement, very similar to the entitlement of obamacare but different in form. how do you convince them, since it s going to take tax credits to make this work, that they need to swallow this and move forward with the bill? an awful lot of opposition in the central tenet of this whole thing. this is all about patience, and in order to provide that transition and in order to make it so that nobody falls through the cracks we ve got to have a system that allows for individuals to gain the kind of coverage that they want. and we conservatives and others have said for a long time that we believe it s important to equalize the tax treatment for those purchasing coverage, gaining coverage through their employer and those not, and the tax credit is the opportunity to be able to equalize that tax treatment. folks who talked about this for many years actually, so there s not a distortion in the tax code for who is able to gain a benefit from being able to purchase coverage and not. yes, ma am? mr. secretary, you were talking about making sure people don t fall through the cracks. last administration obamacare focused in on making sure the underserved were part of the equation. what is the safety net or the safe harbors you have to make sure to ensure people don t fall through the cracks beyond the tax incentives but also for the underserved, who are now part of many are part of the program that weren t before prior to. this is extremely important as well, and the current system as you likely know for those vulnerable in our population pecially in theedicaid population is a system that s broken. you ve got a third of the physicians in this country, one-third of the doctors in this country that would be eligible to see medicaid patients, who aren t seeing medicaid patients right now. not because they ve forgotten how to take care of patients. it s because of the rules in place that make it too difficult for them to see medicaid patients. we believe it s important to allow states to fashion the program for their vulnerable population that actually responds to that population in a way that gives them the authority, them the choices, them the opportunity to gain coverage and the care that they believe most appropriate. what did you find out that that is not happening when you goive to the sat? is there some type of punishment or some type of piece that you re going to put in place to make sure that that happens, that they follow through on your intent? absolutely. there s accountability throughout the plan that we have, that would allow for the secretary and the department to be certain that the individuals that we believe need to be cared for are being cared for in the state at the appropriate level. but we believe this is a partnership. this is about patience and partnership. the previous administration tended to make it about government. we believe it s about patience and partnership and we want to partner with every single person in this land who wants to make certain we allow the kind of choices and quality to exist. yes, ma am? the president tweeted earlier today he described this bill as our wonderful new health care bill. there s been a little bit of confusion. does this wonderful new health care bill. there has been confusion. does this represent the administration s bill? and is there anything this bill that the administration cannot support. this has been a work in progress. as you know, this has been going on for over a year. the work that i had the privilege of participating in when i served in the house of representatives in the last congress was open and transparent. and we invited folks in to give their ideas. and tens if not hundreds of people had input into that process. this grew out of tt, and over the past number of weeks we have been having conversations with folks on the hill, in the house, and in the senate and other stakeholders. this is a work product that is a result of that, all of that process. the president and the administration support this step in the right in what we believe is in the right direction, a step that reveals obamacare and gets us moving in the direction of those principles that i outlined. do you support everything that s in the bill sitting on the table, sir? this is a work in progress. we will work with the house and the senate in this process. as you know it is a legislative process that occurs. i m glad you pointed out the bills on the table there. as you will see this bill right here was the bill that was introduced in 2009 and 10 by the previous administration. notice how thick that is. some of you recall i actually turned the pages and went through that piece of legislation in a you tube. the bill the pile on the right is the current bill. what it means is we are making certain that the process, that the decisions that are going to be made are not going to be made by the federal government. they are going to be made by patients and families and doctors. given the opposition that has been brought up today, does this plan already need to be salvaged in your view? how do you do it? e no. you know what happens with these things. you start you start at a starting point. people engage, and they get involved in the process, sometimes to a greater degree. nothing focuses the mind like a bill that s currently on the table and is a work in progress or in process. and we ll work through it. this is the starting point here? this is an important process to be had. the american people have said to their elected leaders, the obamacare process for them gaing coverage andare is not working. that s what they have said. so we believe it s important to respond to the american people and provide a health care system that allows for them to purchase the kind of coverage and care that they desire. you said in your letter to the house chairman that necessary and appropriate and technical changes might need to be made for this bill to reach the president s desk. what specific changes is the white house and the administration looking for in this bill? as i mentioned their three phases to this process. one is this bill, this legislation that s working through under the rules of reconciliation, which is a fancy term to mean that there are only certain things that you can do from a budgetary standpoint, has to affect either spending or revenue. there are things that you can t do in this bill. and those we plan on doing across the horizon in phase two, which is the regulatory portion and then in phase three, which is another piece of legislation that would be going through the house and the senate with a majority super majority in the senate. that process will incorporate all of the kinds of things that we believe are absolutely in to reconstitute that individual and small group market and to get us in a position again where patients and families and doctors are making these decisions. cvs score isn t out yet, can you guarantee that this plan will not have a marginally negative impact on the deficit or result in millions of americans losing insurance? what i can say the goal and the desire i know of the individuals on the hill is to make sure that this does not increase the cost to the government. two elements of the bill, i have questions about how they control costs and how they help with access. the medicaid per capita block grant to the states, how is that sort of fundally different from the obamacare regime on medicaid in terms of expanding access. the second point, why doesn t thisill do away with the cost sharing community ratings version that obamacare has. to the per capita cap, the medicaid is a system that doesn t work for patients. you have got folks out there who need care, who need to see particular physician who is aren t able to see them. all americans should be saddened by the situation that we have when there are patients out there that can t get the care that they need. we believe one of the keys to providing appropriate care in the medicaid population is allowing the states to have the flexibility to address that medicaid population. remember, medicaid population is four different demographic groups. it s those who are disabled. it s those who are srd. it s healthy moms and kids by and large. those are the four main demographic groups. and we the federal government force states mostly to take care of those individuals in exactly the same way. if you describe that to the folks back home on main street they say that doesn t make sense at all. you need a program that s different for the healthy moms and kids to respond to their needs to that s different from the folks who are disabled and seniors. what we believe is appropriate is to say to the states you know your population best, know best how to care for your vulnerable population. we are going to watch you and make certain that you do so, but know how you do that. that will decrease costs markedly in the medicaid program. we are wasting significant amounts of money. not that folks are getting too much care. we re wasting out because it s significant abuse in the system and it s insignificant. cost sharing measures are being addressed. it s important we run through that process. thises the process wheree felt the previous administration was spending money they didn have the authority to spend. and congress is working through that to make certain that the rightful holders of the authority to spend money in this nation, which is the congress of the united states, exercises that authority. mr. secretary how does the white house and you feel about the label, trump care? i ll let others provide a description for it. i prefer the call it patient care. this is about patients at the end of the day. this isn t about politicians. this isn t about insurance companies. this is about patients. and patients in this nation, especially those in the individual and small group market. these are the folks. i had the privilege of going to cincinnati last week with the vice president to a small business round table. and one of the business owners, one of the small business owners there said he had 18 employees last year at this time. this year he has 15 employees because of the cost of health coverage for those individuals forced him, forced him to let three people go. now, they are being forced to let three people go because the federal government has put in place rules and regulations that make it virtually impossible for folks in the individual and small group market to provide coverage for their employees. this is a system that s not working for people. so if you if we focus on the patients i ll call it patient care. if you focus on the patients, we ll get to the right answer. a major complaint of concern sorry. a major complaint of conservatives with phase one of the obamacare repeal and replace is that it is missing a measure that would allow health care to be sold across state lines. now, the president said this morning that that would be in either phase two or phase three. is that something that you believe the president could do through executive action or you yourself to do or is that something that needs to be addressed legislatively. there are different aspects across state lines that will allow patients the care they want. some of it might be done from a regulatory or rules standpoint. some of it might require legislation. that s where we are going to need assistance from our friends on the other side of the aisle. american people have demanded that they be able to to purchase across state lines. whether it s through association health plans who allows individuals in small business groups to pool together nationally to be able to purchase coverage or whether it s mom and dad who don t gain coverage through their employer that allows folks to pool together solely for the purpose of purchasing coverage even though they are not economically align. there are 18 million folks in that individual and small business government. that would give them the purchasing power of millions. that s huge four and authority that we want to put into the hands of people, of patients. some of that may in fact require legislation. yes, sir. mr. secretary, thank you. two questions. first, congressman john faso of new york has said that the issue of denying federal funds to planned parenthood should be separate from whatever health care bill finally emerges from congress and is signed into law by the president. is that the administration s position as well? and my second question is this, you mentioned earlier the people who had their health care plans canceled when they thought they could keep it. i believe in your state of georgia more unanimous a million people had that experience. will some of the plans that were canceled be able to come back under the new health care plan? yeah, in terms of planned parenthood, we think it s important that t legislature
praise, you talked only about taxes. you said essentially that you have pushed this item for local property taxpayers for the region that albany was very proactive in pushing thistaxpay faso only talked about the environment. this is to eliminate and save new york 19 property taxpayers millions of dollars. if this is about reforming medicaid, why are and you your colleagues only talking about tax cuts? you re praising tax cuts. i wholly support john faso and mr. collins amendment. here in western new york, people are leaving in droves because they can t pay their bills and take care of their homes. what we should do is put the burden on the state capitol because they control how this program is delivered at the local level. new york is one of the only states that puts it on the taxpayers to foot the bill. from my perspective, this is a great amendment that needs to be supported and reduce the $145 million in my low income areas across this district are going to be relieved. that s the right thing to do. it s not a low income district. we re essentially talking about a more affluent district that s wrong. put back up the faso tweet because it talks about the amount of money they would save. this is significant amounts of tax money, meaning these are affluent homeowners. wouldn t it be more honest so say, we don t want tax dollars, our tax dollars to go to pay for low income health care? we just don t want it to happen, and it isn t about reform. it s about what you have praised. making sure that taxpayers don t have to pay for low income health care. that s absolutely false. in my district, the average is alary is about $30,000 a year. to say that s affluent is hogwash, and you don t know the facts. we are talking about a program that is unstable and going bankrupt, and it s crushing our local american taxpayers across the board. we need to do better than that, joy. i m all about trying to put the pressure where the pressure needs to be. the powers decide how this operates and they need to bear the pressure and burden of making sure they are doing the most efficient and effective way possible. you re right about your district. i stand corrected on that, but the amendment that you supported is that essentially, you are saying that you don t believe that taxpayers should pay for it, which by the way, is not going bankrupt. impeerically, it s not. what you are saying is you want to take the money out of medicaid. the plain fact here is this is not about medicaid reform. you, sir, believe that medicaid should just receive less money, and it shouldn t be getting its money from property taxpayers, right? absolutely not correct. it will be a taxpayer-funded with less money in it. having a hard time. of course. what you have to do is make sure you don t reward inefficiency like we do now. this is what the problem of the program is. the more they serve, and the more money they spend and get from the american taxpayer. we need to change that formula, and make sure that the form rewards doing more with less, and not encourage us to do more ineffective, inefficient delivery of health care. let s talk about the medicaid expansion because this has become one of the sticking points. this isn t about whether or not medicaid spends more minute. this is literally about adding millions of people to the eligibility to get it at all. if the medicaid expansion is rolled back, the people that fit into the new formula, they get medicaid at all, that means that group of people just doesn t get medicaid at all. what should happen to those people? how should they get health care? that s exactly when you are talking to people of 100% of the poverty level or less will get medicaid. you want to get rid of the expansion. what what happens to those people? they won t have insurance. how do you believe those people should get health care? we have to make sure we design the tax credits and health care system that delivers lower cost and get the cost of health care under control so that health care cost go under control and people have act sce to health care. the people before the expansion didn t have a policy at all. they didn t have an insurance card to go to the doctor. more efficiency in the system won t change anything. they won t have insurance. how will those people get health care at all? absolutely, and that s where the republican plan puts the tax plan in place to provide them health insurance and the whole idea is to get the health care cost under control. that s the third step of our process. these are not people who are itemizing reduction. you re talking about the 25% of the populous. that s not a lot of money. actually, joy that s wrong. these are refundable tax credits where folks get them up front, and they can relieve the premium cost that they will be absorbing in that policy. as we phase out, that is what we re replacing it with. just so we understand, you want to give a very substantial tax cut, in your case. you don t want to taxpayers in your district to fund medicaid at all. you re rolling that back making it unlawful to fund medicaid, and cutover all cost, which means they get less money, and give them tax credits. that s the plan? that s the fundamental essence, is empower people. rather than expanding government to where it s not sustainable. american taxpayers can t foot this bill because they are tapped out. all right. i m sorry. one second. we have a guest here who is whispering to my ear that she wants to ask you a question. i m going to let one of my guests in. you seem to have a question for the congressman, and if you don t mind, i want to let her ask that question. well, the tax credits are less under the senate bill, so they are lower, so while you re taking away medicaid for those people, they won t be eligible for the same level of tax credits they would have been eligible for before. you re giving them less. because where we re going to end up, they have to do their amendment process. our tax credits in the house were based on age. the senate took a step in the right direction when you incorporate income, and that has to be the corner stone, and that s a sweet spot to the finish line. you re acknowledging for those people who won t be eligible for medicaid anymore, that the tax credit they receive is less, this would put a greater financial burden on them in terms of purchasing insurance. no. they will have they will have access to a tax credit that they can access themselves. that s lower. and find thainsurance that ws for them. it s through government and themselves as individuals. i think we understand where you are going with this. you want people to essentially it is a rollback of medicaid. it s a decrease, and i want to ask you this question in the end. do you stand by, in the end, the idea that the wealthiest people in this country, as a result of this bill, if it is signed into law, will get a tax cut, if that if they are in the richest 1% is more than the average in your district? the richest will get $37,230? is that fair to get acted into law? there is nothing wrong with reducing the tax burden, and that what we have done here in this bill. and you know what foots the bill, are the hard working americans, and from my perspective, anything we can do to alleviate tax burdens is the right direction. you have made it clear. congressman tom reed. thank you for doing this. we appreciate it. i appreciate the debate. thank you so much. when we come back, tara and the rest of my panel weighs in. you don t want to miss it. a million times. and you always laugh like you re hearing it for the first time. at lincoln financial, we get there are some responsibilities of love you gotta do on your own. and some you shouldn t have to shoulder alone. like ensuring he s well-taken care of. even as you build your own plans for retirement. ask a financial advisor how lincoln can help protect your savings from the impact of long-term care expenses. but when we brought our daughter home, that was it. now i have nicoderm cq. the nicoderm cq patch with unique extended release technology helps prevent your urge to smoke all day. it s the best thing that ever happened to me. every great why needs a great how. this clean was like pow! everything well? my teeth are glowing. they are so white. step 1 cleans. step 2 whitens. crest [hd]. 6x cleaning , 6x whitening á i would switch to crest [hd] over what i was using before. but i keep it growing by making every dollar count. that s why i have the spark cash card from capital one. with it, i earn unlimited 2% cash back on all of my purchasing. and that unlimited 2% cash back from spark means thousands of dollars each year going back into my business. which adds fuel to my bottom line. what s in your wallet? elizabeth warren had choice words about her colleague s new health care bill. medicaid is the program in this country that provides health insurance to one in five americans. to 30 million kids to nearly two out of every three people in a nursing home. these cuts are blood money. people will die. let s be very clear. senate republicans are paying for tax cuts for the wealthy with american lives. now let s bring in my panel political marketing consultant tara, investigative reporter david k. jonston, and president of the foundation for research and equal opportunity and former health care policy adviser, mitt romney. i m going to start with you on this. i applaud congressman tom reed for coming on. it s hard for them to come on, and he came on, and i thought in the end, he was quite honest about something. which is that if you are a middle class sort of homeowner taxpayer in upstate new york, and your congressman says to you as they did in this e-mail praising their compromise they gave which said it would be unlawful, essentially, to tax those middle class homeowners to pay for medicaid for the urban poor. if you are that homeowner, you re saying, if my congressman is going to give me $265, and i don t have to pay for those people, i don t even know, you might actually say that s a fair trade-off, that all you personally care about is your little $265 tax rebate that your taxes will go down, that you don t have to pay for those people. isn t what the republicans are doing essentially is pitting americans who may not need, not have a catastrophic health emergency now. so right now to them, it s, like, yeah. get rid of medicaid. they only find out that a refundable tax credit may not be great when mom goes in a nursing home five or six years from now, but by then, mitch mcconnell will have passed his bill, right? i think there were a lot of factual deficiencies in the discussion with the congressman. it s important to understand that $882 billion in reductions in medicaid spending, 85% of that comes from the phase-out of obamacare s expansion of medicaid. it doesn t touch the traditional medicaid. there are reforms as well. we can get to that. but the vast majority of that dollar figure is the phase-out of the aca s expansion of medicaid which is replaced in this senate bill, with robust refundable advanceable tax credits that are structured similarly to the affordable care act s exchanges. pretty much the same kind of mechanism to deliver coverage to that same population. that was on the medicaid expansion before. so in texas where i live, there are going to be millions more with health insurance as a result of this bill because texas didn t expand medicaid, but these tax credits will be available to everyone in texas who is under 100% or 138% of the poverty line. how does the cbo get to the fact 20 million fewer will have health insurance? most of that figure, the medicaid expansion if you repeal it, the raw number of people were made eligible for it become ineligible. they lose their medicaid card. so if what you re saying is no, they are just trading in their medicaid card for a different kind of insurance that s a tax credit, how does the cbo get to 20 million people losing their health insurance? we don t of course have the score of the senate bill yet. the house version is similar. right. i think so too. and the vast majority of the cbo s coverage score is driven by one thing, joy. it s the repeal of the mandate of the 23 million who will lose coverage, about 18 million of that is accounted for in the cbo s model by the fact you are repealing the mandate, i.e., 18 million of those people are only signing up for coverage because they are forced to by a fine. you re saying 20 million do not want to be covered by health n. that s what the cbo says. i don t think so but let s david respond. can we step back out of the deep weeds here? please. think about health care. donald trump once said to me, health care should be like the roads. we already have a rube goldberg machine. let s simplify all of this. we need to reform health care. no reasonable student of this fails to understand that our health care system isn t a health care system. it s a non-system, sick care system. it kills people, it s inefficient, and allows people to game the system. and let me give a simple number. we spend 6 percentage points of our economy more than the french who have the best health care system in the world with no out-of-pocket costs or virtually. if we had the french system it would be the equivalent of everybody who makes less than 5 $500,000, a year paying no income taxes. that s how much we would save. if tax savings is the goal here then let s go adopt the french system and transfer into it and we can eliminate the income tax for 99% of all americans. the idea that we re going to these tax credits, why are tax credits always the solution to every problem? why not have a simple system. you re an american, you have a card, you need health care, you go and get health care. and then the debate is simply how robustly do we want to fund it. are we going to make people wait two hours to see a doctor or two days? and that s a debate that s easy to have. and by the way what s important to know i do want to ask that question of you because we had debates about other issues. typically, your response to what you would say reforming systems in the country, whether it s health care or others is tax credits, meaning that people spend out the money out of their pocket i m assuming, then at april 15th tax time no. they fill out and get money back. or sending people a check? tax credits are the go-to sort of conservative solution for everything. joy, this is a really, really important point. i m glad you raise this. the subsidies that people get in the obamacare exchanges to buy health insurance are tax credits, they are advanceable refundable tax credits. and so why i think this bill is such an advance, is just to david s point, i agree with him. i like the swiss model, but not the french model. but we have a lot to learn from europe. this is a system that switzerland has. instead of medicaid and the exchanges, you have to disenroll and enroll with different doctors and different networks and different co-pays. put them on the same system, where if your income goes up and down, you re on the same exchange, with the same tax credits. maybe your financial assistance goes up and down based on income but otherwise you re in one system. that s going to provide better care to these individuals, going to allow them to stay with one physician and one set of people who are caring for them. and i think that s going to be a much better, have much better health outcome as a result of that continuity of care. that s one of the reasons this bill is better than the status quo. let me ask you this one question, tara. you were a business owner in addition. and one of the targets for republicans, one of the reasons that i think they are sort of succeeding in pitting different elements of society against each other and the poor and the elderly and the sick and children don t really have they aren t the most powerful constituency in the world. they are on the losing end of this battle. on the winning end not just the homeowner who wants his $265. i don t care what happens with those people far away from me. you have business owners who the one place i will give agree with ovik in some of the people that would lose health care, i talk to small business owners who feel it is a burden on them to have to provide health care to employees. so if you have somebody who s got 20 employees and they don t want to foot the bill under the obamacare mandate, they, in theory, could free 20 people in their mind. quote/unquote free them because they we have to pay for their health care. so isn t that what is happening. it s pitting people who may not want to do this, they may not want to provide this care to employees against people who needed. right. well no, that s exactly what this is. this is all about picking winners and losers, right? and pitting people against one another and also playing on people s fears, right? and also misinformation. so for one thing, i am a small business owner who has purchased a gold plan recently on the obamacare exchange for one of my employees where i cover 100% of the premium of that cost and there s no deductible on the plan. so let me be clear about where i stand on that. but, with respect to small business owners, if you have 50 employees or fewer, you do not have to comply with the mandate. so if you have 50 employees or more, then you are doing very well. i have, i m in the 10 employees or fewer range of this. so that s number one. so a lot of small business owners don t have to. if you choose to provide it as i have, i am eligible because i have 25 employees or fewer to receive a tax credit which helps me as a small business owner. the other point here is with the individual mandate, this is something i think is missing here. when you take away the individual mandate what s going to happen is healthier, younger people are not going to sign up. that is why it was put in place. so by definition, costs will go up without them helping to subsidize the sicker people who need to sign up. this is a great debate. i think we should bring you guys all back and do it again. it s hard to get around the data that s coming out of the cbo that says empirically, ovik, saying 20 voluntary get off but you re talking about medicaid that i don t think there is any one who is on it that wants to lose it. we can continue to have the debate. and i appreciate you guys doing it. tara will be back later. thank you. we ll bring you guys back. up next, the pelosi blame game. stay with us. 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(vo) introducing the subaru impreza. the longest-lasting vehicle in its class. more than a car, it s a subaru. not the only thing. republican karen handle s victory of the special house election in georgia turned democrats into armchair quarterbacks. liberal dem leaders had a host of reasons for what went wrong. to the party s candidate 30-year-old jon ossoff and some even reached all the way to the house of representatives to blame the party s minority leader in that body, nancy pelosi. her supposedly toxic image weighing down democrats. what s often lost in the blame game however, is the political reality of a republican district that hasn t sent a democrat to congress in 39 years. back with me at the table joining me is jimy williams, and strate strategist jason johnson, so this is, like, the perfect panel for this. i do believe all you, he s not going to win. but the main he s not going to win guy is my buddy jimmy. what happened? you said he wasn t going to win. you want to say i told you so for three minutes or explain what happened? no, simple. it s a very republican district and it doesn t matter how much money what is it? $20 million? the dccc spent 6 million in that district and ran ads with pelosi. set the pelosi thing aside. that may have had an influence. that s not my problem. my problem is the dccc blew its entire like bank account but you get my point, on a race of a 30-year-old who didn t live in the district, who had never run for office before, against a very bad candidate, and by the way, the campaign put out a postmortem memo that said ossoff never went below a 50% approval rating. he lost. why would the dccc spend $6 million on that race when on the same day, about 150 miles away in south carolina, in the old john sprat seat, archie parnell was running he lost that race by 2700 votes. eight votes per precinct. how much did they spend there, around $275,000. they sent out mailers, none of which had archie s name on them. did radio, they did tv, they did facebook. they did all kinds of things. heck, they even wired $145,000 to the south carolina democratic party who then proceeded to wire it back to them for some unknown reason. i don t understand that. what i do understand is this. mm-hmm. what i do understand is this. the democratic party, the dccc and the leadership, made a huge massive mistake, they could have elected at least one democrat last week, and they made the mistake and didn t do it. or the other way you could say is that they lost the ossoff race. they could have lost the ossoff race for free is what you are saying. that s right. i wanted quickly you wrote what i thought, before i get to your piece just the stats, the political report looked at the rating of the georgia six race and it s r plus 8. 71 republican held districts have a smaller gop lean than that, and democrats need 24 seats to take control of the house. to the point that was made, the ossoff campaign put out a memo where they did a postmortem. georgia 6 a deeply red district. tom price was consistently elected by double digit margins. i think 23 points last time. there are twice as many republicans as democrats. there is no path to victory here without independents and some republicans. in this environment, fighting right wing groups. your thoughts on that postmortem? i thought it was reasonable. there was one thing that they were missing, joy, the lesson that could have been learned from south carolina. there s this crazy idea that like when you want to win an election you should spend money on your own people and not trying to convince people who don t like you. the ossoff campaign if there is one mistake they made, they didn t spend enough money in the african-american and latino community in georgia 6. it s not a guarantee they were going to win but they left that to a lot of outside groups. now the reality is with so much early turnout and so much attention being paid, republicans came out and voted early. the right-leaning independents came out and voted early. ossoff overperformed and you speak to anybody there and that s what they say. they still missed the boat, you need to focus on black men, black women, latinos and single people. more because that s the future of the democratic party. not a bunch of soccer moms that are never going to vote for you. jason did write, it s a great piece if anybody hasn t read it. white people generally don t vote for democratic party in georgia or any other southern state. three need to team up with black voters to send a message to trump from georgia. it was a fantasy created by the blue screen, and cgi who wanted a happy ending to the trump narrative. democrats are crying over losing in montana, kansas, south carolina and georgia. and they are acting as if there was some way they could have won when this they, to jason s point, are paying sole attention to flipping white voters who are republicans. right. and so you know where i stand on this, joy. you know we had this conversation many times. i am a big believer in, if you cannot maximize turnout which jon ossoff did, i don t want to but if you cannot maximize fully turnout among your own people, then it is pointless to then if you can t convince the people who are already ideologically, primarily aligned with you, and just may not be motivated to vote, you re going to have a heck of a time trying to convince people who are not predisposed to your position. so i do think that the thing the democrats need to focus on in my mind is massive voter registration and i think that let the outside groups do what what they do but you need have your campaign need as process for that as well. voter suppression is still an issue in this country and it s not getting enough attention and it s only getting worse. so you have jerry gerrymandered districts already in an uphill battle. combine that with the fact they are active and aggressive efforts going on to disenfranchise people and black, brown, asian, but not just that, white voters who align with the democratic party are having trouble. college students are not being able to use student i.d., gun owner s permit is eligible. early voting being cut. there is a massive assault on voting rights in this country and that s something that democrats need to aggressively attack. jason, to that point the thing the democrats do in that vain is say john lewis or do an ad or have barack obama cut a radio ad and then don t do anything in terms of mobilizing black voters. exactly. in john lewis is great and everybody heard his stories and he is wonderful but there is this problem. this is the difference, what they did in south carolina. it was very experimental. let s be fair. if the democrats have focused on south carolina it would have gotten blown out. the reason they did well is it stuck up on the candidate. what they decided to do is develop more targeted messages for african-americans. he didn t just talk about the aca, but you said look, this affects heart disease which affects the black community. turnout has to be specific tike the people that you re talking to. and all too often democrats seem to think that telling black folk and telling hispanic hey there is an election is enough. that is the lesson that should be learned. it s not nancy pelosi s fault, not jon ossoff s fault. it had nothing to do with him living outside the district. it had to do with the basic facts. one last thing, when you poll someone out of congress to join your administration you only poll from safe districts. trump wasn t going to pull anyone from a purple district. i think that s the other point. bringing nancy pelosi into it assumes that voters are sort of helpless victims of propaganda like you can just say nonsay employee say, and they say, oh, my god. i can t vote for them. isn t it also the case, you talk about ina lot, nationalizing these elections isn t also the way to go. you need to pick the district. who fits the district, run somebody and spend some money. right? let me follow up on something jason said. the dnc did do that money to south carolina 05 and it worked pretty well. to that point though, yes, look, nancy pelosi you can blame her all day long. if i have hemorrhoids, it s not nancy employpelosi s fault. however i m also never running for an office no matter what so no one is going to be able to blame nancy pelosi for that fact. in georgia that did work to a large degree. in south carolina, even if south carolina, the democratic party here, had spent that money before they sent it back that would have never shown up on the fec reports until the middle of july well after archie parnell had been sworn in as a member of congress, so the pelosi effect wouldn t have mattered in south carolina. it simply wouldn t have. you do have to listen. tara is right. jason s right. voter registration, calling out suppression, that stuff has to be a priority for the parties, building parties means building people. if you don t do that you can t win in south carolina, and so do the the dccc, they failed in both of these. i like the fact that you called out the dccc. they exist. nancy pelosi doesn t run these, it s the dccc s job to win these elections. and just one more editorial thing. spending all of that money on tv as opposed to spending it on voter registration and ground game might be a problem too. if you did have hemorrhoids i bet you nancy would send you a designer pillow. that s how she that s how you know, she s going to send you something. i have a designer pillow. thank you. you guys are great. tara, jason, wish you were all here. coming up, former actor or acting attorney general sally yates jimy threw me off with those comments. i m sorry. details next. i tried hard to quit smoking. but when we brought our daughter home, that was it. now i have nicoderm cq. the nicoderm cq patch with unique extended release technology helps prevent your urge to smoke all day. it s the best thing that ever happened to me. every great why needs a great how. what s the best way to get v8 or a fancy juice store?s? 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well, you know the administration started on inauguration day talking about carnage in our cities and the country is at historic low in violent crime. there are a handful of cities that have seen a rise but this attorney general is using fear mongering to he wrote another op ed in the washington post i think as a result of criticism that he was getting, a lot from conservative colleagues who are pointing to evidence to the contrary, that actually violent crime is down at historic lows and there is no evident that exists to establish that violent crime upticks in a handful of cities that we re seeing has anything to do with the fact that people with drug convictions aren t serving long sentences. it just defies the imagination, it seems like a highly politicized rhetoric that he s using and it has dangerous consequences. and i feel like it is very ideological. jeff sessions when he was in the senate was known to be fixated on immigration and some of the issues and this idea that there is all of the violent crime in the cities and the op ed that he wrote and that sally yates was responding to said it is time to get tough again and he is claiming that somehow the i guess he s presuming the previous administration was tough on soft on crime. let s listen to a may 25th speech that sessions gave in front of law enforcement officers in memphis, tennessee. every one of our citis, no matter who they are or where they live, have a right to be safe in their homes and in their communities. safe from gangs and rapists and carjackers and drug dealers. we must act to reverse this surge in violent crime and keep our country and every single community safe. and he s also claiming that the federal government softened its approach to drug enforcement and crime surge saying that about the administration you are part of. how do you respond? you know, again, it is highly ideological. in fact, i would say that attorney general holder, when he instituted smart on crime, which was aimed at a reserve of federal law enforcement resources to prosecute the most serious crimes and complex crimes, was really actually following the suit of countless states in the last several years, red states, blue states, that had recognized that we needed to have more evidence and data-driven policies really driving our criminal justice system rather than a set of ideology that promoted mass incarceration for the last several years and the smart on crime instituted at the justice department were aimed at the most serious offenses and about trying to take away the really harsh mandatory minimums that tied the hasn ts of federal judges. you have federal judges resign over the fact that the inability to calibrate sentences according to the facts of any driven crime had just tied the hands of judges and resulted in a grossly unfair racially disproportionate system. and so to say that somehow this was soft on crime is really ignoring the fact that crime continued to go down even while the federal prison population started to go down. and that it is really important for a federal prosecutor to be able to have use their discretion to calibrate sentences and to not impose long, severe sentences for low-level drug crimes that has been the case for far too long in this country. and i want to put up this chart that shows the violent crime rate in 1991, and now standing at 366 which is about cut in half. but as we close. are you concerned about the message that this sends to law enforcement, even though we are talking federal law enforcement, but local law enforcement. we just saw the fiphilando caste verdict come back and some pummelled by law enforcement officers ab are you worried about what this is sending to law enforcement about themselves and how they should behave versus the citizenry. i m very worried about this. the attorney general doesn t just have a say so over federal law enforcement, he has a bully pulpit and funding dollars that go to state and local and his rhetoric is taking us back to 1980s policy and undoing the police reform work that has been so important. the good news is i think reform is going to continue because people see the attorney general for what he is and we have to continue with data driven policies that make our communities safe. thank you. much appreciated. thank you. and that is our show for today. join us tomorrow at 10:00 a.m. for am joy. keep it right here on msnbc. card from capital one. with it, i earn unlimited 2% cash back on all of my purchasing. and that unlimited 2% cash back from spark means thousands of dollars each year going back into my business. which adds fuel to my bottom line. what s in your wallet? 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here. and the white house ought to explain why that wasn t followed here, but there is a good way to answer these questions and we will do our best to answer these questions but we will not lose sight of the russia investigation and we are going to keep focus on that. yes? has there been any uptick in attacks on your or your staffers computers or i.t. networks since this investigation has been going on? i m not aware of anything like that. thank withdrew veyou very much. thank you. okay. steve kornacki in new york. that is adam schiff. just finishing up u a press conference there on capitol hill. adam schiff the ranking democrat on the house intelligence committee, of course, the house intelligence committee had been pursuing interference of the status of that committee s investigation now some quwhat i question. there s been all sorts of controversy about actions, about statements from the republican chairman, devin nunes, in that statement you just heard there, that press conference, rather, that you just saw there, from adam schiff coming on the heels of an explosive report a few hours ago from the new york times, a report that has all of washington talking right now. the white house saying nothing. what is the times reporting? the times naming two trump administration officials that it says played a role in providing information to devin nunes, chairman of the house intelligence committee. that information leading nunes to announce that president trump may have been surveilled by the obama administration before he took office. now, those officials, again, according to the reporting of the new york times here, this is not reporting from nbc news, but according to the new york times, as the senior director for the intelligence at the national security council, he was appointed he was brought in, rather, by ousted national security adviser michael flynn. also named by the times, michael ellis, a lawyer who works on national security issues at the white house counsel s office. now, he previously worked for devin nunes. remember, key to point out here, the announcement from nunes set off a firestorm of controversy around him and around his committee s investigation into russian interference. nunes had briefed the president before sharing that material with his democratic colleagues on the intelligence committee. of course, those colleagues supposed to be working hand in hand with him here. that led to accusations that nunes was working with the white house and lending some to lend some credibility to trump s claims that he was wiretapped. this new report from the new york times, if true, could certainly inflame those accusations. we should say this reporting from the times based on sources described only as several current american officials. as i mentioned before, nbc has not independently confirmed the report. the report also says that these officials, played a role in providing the information. that they assisted in the disclosure of the intelligence reports. it is not clear what precisely that entails or how precisely they would have been involved. in a statement, a spokesman for chairman nunes telling nbc news, as he has stated many times, chairman nunes will not confirm or deny speculation about his sources identity. he will not respond to speculation from anonymous sources. a lot going on here. a lot of confusion. kasie hunt is on capitol hill. she was at that press conference that adam schiff just held. she asked him some questions. so, kasie, we have that report from the new york times, what exactly are we hearing from adam schiff, from the top democrat in the intelligence committee right now? reporter: confusion, i think, is still the word for what is going on with this investigation, steve. even the ranking member here was asked if he had information he had promised earlier. he said, you know what, this day completely got away from me and like many days on this investigation, i think we all feel that way a little bit. so, if you just want to reset here for a minute, clearly this schiff said today. he said that he just received this letter basically as spicer was talking about it in the briefing. here s what schiff had to say. on the same day that the new york times broke a story saying that the source of the materials that were provided to our chairman was, in fact, national security council staff, i was informed in a letter from white house counsel that white house excuse me, national security council staff found these materials in the ordinary course of business. now, that timing concerns me. if, in fact, the national security council staff that discovered these materials reportedly in the ordinary course of business or the same national security staff that provided them to the chairman to be provided to the president, it raises a profound question why they were not directly provided to the white house by the national security staff and instead were provided through a route involving the chairman. reporter: so, again, another twist in this saga that raises questions about the credibility of this house intelligence committee investigation. now, adam schiff says he wants to maintain the credibility of the investigation, but, again, that he has concerns about it. he also said he is available any time as soon as possible to go down to the white house and view whatever these materials turn out to be. steve? all right, kasie hunt on capitol hill. a very unexpectedly busy day. kasie hunt, thank you for that. reporter: story of my life. let s go to the white house now for that side of the story. kelly o donnell standing by there. kelly, this report from the new york times hit just before sean spicer and his regular daily briefing were set to begin in the white house there. what is the white house saying in response to what the new york times is reporting? reporter: very little. sean spicer would not confirm anything in that report, would not engage on it, not taking questions that relate to it, but as kasie just outlined and certainly congressman adam schiff also made this nexus between the timing of the new york times report and this letter inviting the intelligence top officials from the house and senate committees to view this material. so, clearly sean spicer, the spokesman for the president, knew this was coming. he was prepared for this. and did not want to take questions that would help us to understand if there is anything to the recording in terms of the white house being willing to confirm or refute elements of that story. one of the big questions comes down to not only white house staffers, what may they have done or not done, but the president, himself, after he sort of set up first the tweeted claim of being wiretapped, which has been roundly discounted by officials with the ability to know if there had been any so-called wiretap, when he brought broadened that to more surveillance. in a televised interview, the president said more information would be coming and it would be good stuff. today our colleague, kristen welker, put this question to the white house press secretary any potential that the president had a hand or any knowledge of what has transpired. did the president direct anyone in this white house or in his national security team to try to find information or intelligence to back up his assertion about wiretapping? i don t i m not aware of anything directly. i d have to look into that in terms of again, there s two sides of this. one is the information side, and two is the policy and the activities and the legal piece of what happened. and i don t there s those are big buckets, if you will. so it s possible? i m not going to comment on it. reporter: so, one thing the sean spicer was not prepared was to bring in the degree to which the president may or may not have been involved on this question of this incidental surveillance and this intelligence product or intelligence data that may be now available for review for the intelligence top officials from capitol hill. it will be important to revisit that question later on to see if the president might have had any direct knowledge of this. certainly he raised the issue, himself, by talking about surveillance, and by suggesting there would be more information brought to the public. he said that on television. and so that question that our colleague, kristen, asked, seemed to have real merit in the moment, and so far, the white house is not able to go into any detail to give us an answer on that. steve? all right. kelly o donnell at the white house. kelly, thank you for that. let s bring in now david french, he s a writer at the national review. and david, i know you have you re a conservative voice, though, who has been saying republicans and conserve ti ati need to be taking this issue of russian interference in the election very seriously. i m just wondering what you make of the events today. we have this report in the new york times saying, hey, there were people at the white house, two people in the administration, who played some role, according to the times, in getting this information to nunes. we know nunes took the information to the president, we know democrats on the committee said he should have shared it with us. we have the white house offering this letter now saying, hey, there s some information gleaned in the ordinary course of work by the national security council, we want you to come view it. what do you make of all the pieces that are suddenly floating around out there? here s the problem. the origin of this confusion lies with the trump tweets. where trump has said, he was wiretapped, it s as bad as watergaets, it s a huge scandal, then began to seek external validation for this tweet. for this argument. he didn t come forward with evidence. and so here s the fundamental problem. there s two fundamental problems with what nunes did. fundamental problem number one, it s looking increasingly like the white house fed him information that he turned around and fed back to the white house in a manner that led everyone to believe independently discovered it and it was information that didn t confirm trump s tweet but he was able to use to say he felt validated. that s a problem. that s not his role as chairman of the committee. here s the second problem. he s not sharing that information with his own committee. instead, he s talking in these vague terms like he doesn t disclose source and methods, sources and methods like he s a member of a spy agency, himself. like he had some sort of clandestine meeting that nobody needs to know about. but, again, let s remember, he s the chairman of the house intelligence committee. he is not an employee, he is not a lawyer for the president. it s not his job to make the president s tweets look better. and so when you take all of these reports together, it creates an impression of a chairman of a house committee essentially working to backfill the president of the united states tweeting and that is not his role and it s created an enormous amount of confusion and has caused further loss of confidence in the work of the committee. and we know by all appearances, the work of that house committee right now seems stalled. there was talk there from adam schiff, the ranking democrat, that proposed witness lists are being passed back and forthright now. there have been some proceedings for this week that were put off. going forward, based on everything you just said right there, can you see a scenario where nunes recovers his credibility with the democrats on the committee? recovers enough sort of standing to proceed with this investigation and have the results, whatever they may be, accepted by both sides? well, i mean, you know, there s a lot of second acts in american politics. and i can t imagine a course correction, one where he says here is the information that i viewed. i m going to make it available to my committee, which is all clear to view secret information, top-secret information. so he does what he s supposed to do. he apologizes for going outside the normal course of business. and then he rolls forward. i haven t seen any indication that that s happening, instead, you know, the news is changing every five minutes, but my last understanding is he s still not even sharing with his own committee what he found, what he saw, and how can you be a committee chair of an intelligence committee when you re not sharing with your own committee the intelligence that you re viewing? and that s a core problem and i do think that there is a way for him to move through this and move out of this. i just don t see that that s happening. all right. david french with the national review. thank you for joining us. appreciate the time. thanks so much for having me. okay. again, a very busy day here. we ve been pulled in all sorts of directions trying to cover politics today. we re going to cover all the bases throughout this hour. please stay patient and bear with us as we take a very quick break here. on the other side, president trump also today, this would normally be the major headline in politics, but so many other things happened today. president trump all but declaring war on members of his own party who he says are standing in the way of his plan to repeal and replace obamacare and maybe much more. how far is the president willing to go to try to get these republican s on? we re going to take you through all of that in just a moment. plus, also this, new controversy out of the state of north carolina. over that controversial bathroom law down there. the state assembly just voted to repeal part of it. measure now awaiting the governor s signature. some opponents still aren t satisfied. this isn t a victory for anyone, but most especially not for the lgbt community. grown man now. i don t want to pry. dad. but have you made a decision? i m going with the $1000 in cash back. my son. .a cash man. dad, are you crying? nah, just something in my eye. the volkswagen 3 and easy event. .where you can choose one of three easy ways to get a $1000 offer. hurry in to your volkswagen dealer now and you can get $1000 as an apr bonus, a lease bonus, or cash back. had helped the pig with homeowners insurance. he had replacement cost coverage, so his house was rebuilt, good as new. the big bad wolf now has a job on a wind farm. call geico and see how easy it is to switch and save on homeowners insurance. obamacare. with republican legislation. trump now issuing a threat on twitter this morning. take a look at this. the president tweeting out, the freedom caucus will hurt the entire republican agenda if they don t get on the team. and fast. we must fight them and dems in to 2018. the house freedom caucus, very conservative wing on the republican side, now as much in the eyes of trump the enemy as the democrats at least if they don t get behind his agenda. sean spicer, white house spokesman, suggesting that house members may still fall in line. there s a few members of the freedom caucus prior to last friday s vote and since then who is expressed a willingness to want to work with him, rather than necessarily as a bloc. and i think that there continues to be some promising signs in that with with that. so, again, i think part of it is i think people are more concerned with voting as a bloc, then, in what s the best interest to their constituents and american people, he s hoping people will see the bigger picture, the goals that we outlined and sometimes not let the really good be the enemy of the perfect. we talked about this earlier this week with the freedom caucus being resistant on health care, potentially doing the same thing on future big fights, it leaves trump with two possible courses of action. one, can he freeze out the freedom caucus? can he write them off if? if he does that, he would have to compromise with democrats. option two, he would try to essentially break the freedom caucus to make them fall in line with him and to pass legislation with only republican votes based on that tweet now, it appears the president is going with the latter option. the question, if he does go down that road, can he actually strong arm dissenting members of his own party into getting onboard with him in the future? want to bring in michael steele, msnbc political analyst, former chair of the republican national committee, and howard dean, msnbc contributor, former governor of vermont, also former chair of the dnc. the two former chairs here. michael steele, i will start with you. the freedom caucus has been bedevilling republican leaders in washington for years, doing this before donald trump was president. what donald trump is suggesting in that tweet today, could he have any success in strong arming them? i, you know, it s kind of hard to say. i don t think that that s the best tactic to take with these guys. these folks have a principled orientation. they have a very strong view on government spending and government programs and the role of government. that s how they got elected. i know firsthand because i helped get them elected in 2010. so i understand very much where they re coming from and this idea that they re just going to roll over is just it s d disingenuous to believe that. it s not something that s going to happen. instead of fighting with them, figure out how you create the sweet spot. one thing the ryan team could have done was instead of going down the road with the legislation they did, was just reintroduce the bill that all republicans signed off in the house and signed off in the senate and presented it to president obama, they presented that bill to this white house, it would have moved forward and then you d be in a different operating space at this point. instead of creating a relationship built around tension, you would have had one built around cooperation right from the start. if you wanted to pursue health care first. the threats have a limited purpose here, i think, and in the long run, does not serve the administration, nor the party any good. now, the house speaker, paul ryan, he s somebody, he s had his own frustrations trying to deal with the house freedom caucus. he said today he understands where the president is coming from, essentially said he thinks the president was venting with what he said. but of course, if the president does not find a way, if republican leaders like ryan do not find a way to get all republicans on the same page, the only way to pass legislation would be working with democrats, but on that possibility of reaching out to the other side, here s what paul ryan had to say this morning. wouldhat i worry about, noraf we don t do this, he ll go work with democrats to try and change obamacare, and that s not going that s hardly a conservative thing. by the way, paul ryan sniffing at the idea of working with democrats prompted this unusual reply, bob corker, republican senator from tennessee, he went on twitter, he said, we ve come a long way in our country when the speaker of one party urges a president not to work with the other party to solve a problem. howard dean, i read what paul ryan was saying there in the interview, though, essentially as a threat to the house freedom caucus. hey, if you i guys don t get onboard, we re going to have democrats writing our own legislation. is that how you interpret it ? yeah, this is really complicated. i don t agree with michael. i don t think they can pass the same bill because they can t do it in reconciliation, they re never going to pass that through the senate. this bill is toxic. i mean, this bill is not just the in some ways the freedom caucus saved the republican party in 2018. if you had done this, you would have put out a put a whole lot of people who voted for donald trump and voted republican the last election out of their health insurance. you would have had people dying of cancer because of what the republicans did. so it s just as well for the republicans that this thing didn t pass. i have no idea i ve never seen anything like this, of course, we ve said that about a lot of things drup druonald tru done. i have no idea what they re going to try to do. i think it would be fine if they work with the democrats but would get a position that s much more mainstream as far as the american people were concerned. the american people do not support what paul ryan wants. michael steele, another question, a bigger picture question about the house freedom caucus, it seems to me watching them over the last few years part of their appeal to their base, part of the appeal to the voters who sent them there, is this idea that they are standing up not just to democrats but to their own party, and does that create its own obstacle, the idea there s an incentive there for them to oppose anything the president, anything republican leadership tries to do just to show that they are standing up? no. not really. i mean, they don t oppose this for the sake of opposing. they oppose on principle. they oppose on the fundamental value system that republicans have articulated for over a generation. certainly going back to ronald reagan s time. and a lot of these folks feel that we moved away from that. big government republicanism has no place with these people. and so this idea that you re going to spend your way into prosperity on the backs of future generations is an athema to them. they push back because they were asked to be in the room to make sure that government is responsive to the needs of people and to howard s point about the health care bill, i think that s a valid point. about that particular bill. which is why over the last seven years of the wasted opportunity to actually craft a bill that s not only anchored in these principles but actually would be received well by the american people, if your true intention was to replace obamacare. another piece of news we are just getting right now, and howard dean, i want to get you to respond to this, joe manchin, senator, democratic senator from west virginia, just announcing in last few minutes he plans to vote yes on the confirmation of neil gorsuch to the supreme court. the backdrop, you have this, chucklead ers hinting at the pocket of mounting a filibuster against the nomination, trying to force republicans to come up with 6 f f 0 votes. he s one of the more announcement by the democrat, joe manclihin, what does this d to the question of a filibuster on the democratic side? nothing. that s baked in. i expect two or three or four democrats to vote for judge gorsuch. what their constituency wants. i can tell you right now, if gorsuch is confirmed by democrats, that is unless we force mcconnell to exercise the nuclear option, if he s confirmed straight up with 60 votes, 10 of which are democratic, the democratic senatorial committee might as well hang it up because they ll never raise any money from our base. all right. howard dean, former governor of vermont, former dnc chair. michael steele, former rnc chair. thank you to both for joining us. appreciate that. we re going to take a quick break here. on the other side, amid all that turmoil among the house intelligence committee and its chairman devin nunes, the senate intelligence committee held its first public hearing on russia today. americans should be concerned because right now, foreign country, whether they realize it or not, is pitting them against their neighbor, other political parties, ramping up divisions based on things that aren t true. more on that hearing next. plus, response from russian president vladimir putin today when asked about his country s interference in the election. ady 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. time now u for a check of the headlines at the half hour. a very busy hour in washington. the senate just in the last few minutes voting 51-50 to overturn an obama-era rule that prevents states from defunding planned parenthood clinics because they provide abortion services. 51-50 because it was a 50-50 tie then vice president mike pence acting as the president of the senate cast the tie breaking vote. also in washington, the senate intelligence committee holding its first hearing today on allegations of russian interference in last year s presidential election. one witness telling committee members that russia targeted all of the republican presidential candidates. we re going to have much more on that hearing, what was said in just a minute. also, the justice department says it will continue to fight for president trump s temporary ban on travel to the u.s. by people from six predominantly muslim countries. this coming after a federal judge out in hawaii granted the state s request to extend an order blocking the government from implementing that travel ban. and the white house says president trump and the chinese president will hold its first meeting at trump s mar-a-lago report april 6th and april 7th, expected to discuss trade, north korea and tensions in the north china sea. federal investigatorors searching for the cause of yesterday s deadly bus crash in central texas, 13 members of a church were killed when the small bus they r traveling on collided head of hn win with a truck when heading home for a church retreat. lawmakers in north carolina voting again in the last hour to repeal the controversial and costly bathroom bill. excuse me, voted earlier today and governor roy cooper announcing just moments ago that h he has now signed that legislation. this is legislation that repeals the original law. it leaves lawmakers in charge of bathroom policies for public buildings and temporarily bars local governments from approving nondiscrimination ordinances. governor making a public statement just moments ago. this was more than about sports and jobs. it was about discrimination and it was about north carolina s reputation and it was about wanting us to work toward ending discrimination and i could not tolerate having house bill 2 be the law of the land in north carolina. governor mentioning sports and jobs there because of the boycotts that were that came as a result of this law being passed and signed last year. the ncaa said that it would not hold any of its college championship events in the state of north carolina until and unless the law was removed from the books. the nba also pulled this year s all-star game from charlotte, companies had pulled back on plans to invest in the state as well. mariana is standing by in the state capitol in raleigh. so, mariana, obviously the backdrop to all of this, big sort of money at stake here in terms of boycotts from the state. is this legislation going to satisfy, do we know, those boycotts? reporter: we don t know, steve, and actually the ncaa had a previously scheduled press conference, that s happening at 6:30 p.m. eastern today, so we ll be looking out for reaction from them to this replacement bill. but as you mentioned, this replacement bill 142 is kind of like a compromise bill. neither side seems particularly happy with the outcome. on the one hand, you have lgbt activists who still feel that this replacement bill leaves room for discrimination because of the issues that you mentioned. and then on the other, you have conservatives here who didn t want to repeal hb-2 in the first place. but, again, as you said, the state s economic interests took precedent. that s the feeling that we got here today. the state had already lost so much. you mentioned the nba championship, paypal also pulled out of north carolina. they were supposed to build a big facility here that would create hundreds of jobs. you had arists like bruce spr g springsteen canceling their concerts. when that happens, it s the working class person in north carolina, the person who was going to work in the hotel or sell pretzels at the concert that gets affected. we got a feeling today that that was really in some lawmakers minds today when they voted to repeal hb-2 and put in this replacement bill. no doubt, however, that the big winner here today was democratic governor roy cooper. he, of course, campaigned against hb-2, won the governorship, you know, razor thin margin and then today he, you know, was basically one of the architects that credits himself with repealing hb-2 and putting this replacement bill in place. he tweeted about the repeal, he said, today we repealed hb-2. it wasn t a perfect deal, or my preferred solution, but an important first step for our state. so in that tweet, he s even admitting that this was a compromise bill. that hb-2 might be gone, but the issue still remains here in north carolina. steve? all right. mariana in raleigh, north carolina. thank you for that. let s go back now to the nation s capitol, capitol hill, leaders of the senate intelligence committee today renewing their promise to conduct an independent and nonpartisan or bipartisan investigation into alleged russian interference in the presidential election, and potential ties between the trump campaign and russia. this comes amid all of those questions about whether the separate investigation being run by the house intelligence committee can remain on course in light of a visit that republican chairman devin nunes made to the white house. now today s senate hearing focusing on alleged russian interference, here s what some of the committee members and some of the witnesses had to say. the takeaway from today s hearing, we re all targets of a sophisticated and capable adversary. this is not fake news. this is actually what happened to us. deception and active measures have long been and will remain a staple of russian dealings. has russia conducted other similar campaigns in other countries? yes, the commander in chief has used russian active measures at times against his opponent. he claims that the election could be rigged. that was the number one theme pushed by r.t. s news, outlets all the way up to the election. was this an act of war? it s definitely a part of the cold war system that we knew 20, 30 years ago. and joining me now, michael crowley, senior foreign affairs correspondent for politico. the timing on this is interesting because you have the controversy around the house investigation for the moment. that seems stalled in terms of actually calling witnesses and sort of the traditional investigative measures they d be taking. now the senate sort of getting in on this. what is the key difference you see between how that senate committee is functioning and how the house committee is sort of maybe not functioning right now? well, i mean, ts looks like partisanship and professionalism, competence. those are the two key things and i think they go somewhat hand in hand. on the house side, you really have kind of a partisan fight and it does look like, you know, devin nunes has handled this a little less than like a pro. he s already had to apologize to his colleagues once for the way he s gone about this, and the two sides on that committee, particularly nunes and his couldn counterpart, adam schiff, are dug into separate bunkers. it has a partisan veneer. nunes has not conducted it competently, professionally. the story line further clouded today with the revelation it appears two national security staffers at the white house may have helped provide him with documents that he talked about before, talking to his colleagues on the committee about surveillance of trump officials being picked up in secret surveillance of foreign diplomats and on the senate side, briefly, what you seem to have is comedy, professionalism, a smooth process. the chairman and the ranking member are getting along. it s kind of like the adults finally showing up. it was interesting watching some of that testimony before the senate committee, though, today, it did strike me that in piecing this together in trying to draw, ultimately trying to draw conclusions about the level of russian interference, the effect of russian interference in the election, that sort of thing, it might be a less precise question than maybe we assume, and what i mean in particular, one of the witnesses there was talks about an instance where donald trump on the campaign trail had cited a fake news article you could trace back to russia, but then in the same sort of line of thought, he got all the way to birtherism and claims of a rigged election saying these are things russians would like people in the united states to be talks abouing about. it seems that may be true. seems there could be a million other reasons trump got into birtherism in the first place or got into sort of claims about rigged elections to make the case that this was from russia, that this is the direct connection to russia. it seems like there may be some gray area in this, a lot of gray area. yeah, steve, i follow these english language russian news outlets pretty closely. you have a chicken and egg issue. trump will start talking about something and these outlets will pick up on it and run with it so it s not clear to me, you know, where it came from. so that is a pretty heavy inference at this point and i think the idea that, you know, trump was intentionally parroting russian propaganda loins, that would be at the far end of the range of possibility of what happened in this election. it s a pretty dramatic interpretation of the possibilities. i think that right now, you know, the focus of the investigation seems to be at a lower level, trump associates, did they have meetings in european countries with people who had ties to the kremlin? you know, was julian assange, was there some intermediary between wikileaks and roger stone? how did that work? so to go to the idea that trump, himself, was sort of relying on russian propaganda is a pretty big leap. again, as you say, this committee, this hearing today was trying to set the context, lay the groundwork. i think a useful way, steve, because the coverage has really gotten bogged down in the blow-by-blow process questions that are important, but reminding people of the first principles here, the major core issues at stake which is the potential interference in the election. and i want to make sure to get this in as well, vladimir putin, he was asked about this idea of russian interference. this is what vladimir putin is saying. you and the russian government did never try to influence the outcome of the u.s. presidential election and there will be no evidence found? translator: ronald reagan once debating about taxes and addressing the americans said, watch my lips, he said, no, watch my lips, no. wow. reagan s vice president george h.w. bush who said that. putin i m curious behind the scenes, do we have a sense, if vladimir putin was trying to influence the election in this country, if trump was his preferred candidate, if he had high hopes for what a trump presidency would mean for the american/russian relationship, just given how this has become the all-consuming controversy in american politics right now, does he feel he s going to get the benefits of the trump presidency that he was looking for? yeah, you know, an interesting point that i ve heard made, you know, if this was the sort of most dastardly effective russian operation of all-time, it actually was too effective, too blunt, too blatant because there s a backlash now. it s going to be really difficult for donald trump to do some kind of deal with vladimir putin that putin might have been hoping for. you know, if trump had kind of come in not talking so much about russia, these ties had not been exposed, he could have flown under the radar and cut some deals and would have been people who were upset but wouldn t have had the public outcry you re going to have now. the prospects for a new relationship with russia are really back burnered. by the way, i want to point out, that famous quote, read my lips, no new taxes which was uttered by george h.w. bush, of course the most famous thing about that, he broke that promise. it was not a very binding promise and not a wise one to cite, steve. but, look, i think that vladimir putin probably is frustrated right now. he probably felt that donald trump was somebody who could give him some things he wanted like lifting sanctions over ukraine and some things to do with nato on its eastern flank near russia s border and now i just don t think it s very likely that much of that is going to materialize. in fact, you can see a scenario where trump and putin have to kind of puff out their chests at one another. you could get in a dangerous cycle of escalation. i talked to some experts, it s actually possible the relationship could get worse from here. michael crowley of politico. thanks for the time. thank you, steve. okay. president trump, now paul ryan, both suggesting they may be willing to revisit health care after that colossal failure last week. there is a lot of uncertainty, obviously, about what a final bill might look like if they choose to revive it. up next, we re going to show you what a possible obamacare replacement could mean for millions of americans. per roll from engineering and manufacturing. to stealth bombers. to next-generation fighters. to landing an unmanned vehicle on a carrier for the first time in history. just wait till you see what s next. that s the value of performance. northrop grumman all right. legislatively, it was an absolute debacle last week. republicans withdrawing their plan to repeal and replace obamacare. now, though, president trump suggesting he may revive the issue. house speaker paul ryan suggesting republicans may still come up with a plachb n of thein and replace the existing law. which options would republicans have, which options might democrats have if there were a chance to work with republicans? what are the options for health care reform from this point forward? jolene kent takes a look. hey, steve. here in washington at the health care drama continues as politicians are grappling with what would come next, what s on the cable? at the same time, americans all across the country of every political persuasion are waiting to find out what s going to happen with them when they visit the doctor next. president trump threatening the future of health care. just minutes after the gop bill was pulled last week. i ve been saying for the last year and a half that the best thing we can do politically speaking is let obamacare explode. it is exploding right now. reporter: now this week, an aboutface. i know we re all going to make a deal on health care. that s such an easy one. reporter: all of this back and forth in washington has left consumers and the health insurance industry desperate for answers. the exchanges are stable icing, according to the nonpartisan cbo. but could health care for an estimated 11 million americans americans other rely on these exchanges actually explode? it depends on what the government does next. president trump recently said that he expects obamacare to explode. he thinks over the next year or two, out of pockets premiums and deductibles will get so high that increasingly, exchanges will be thrown into a death spiral. do i think that is at all feasible and likely to happen? no. i think the exchanges will stabilize. option two. president trump undercuts the law by halting subsidies or stopping enforcement of the mandate to buy insurance the secretary in hhs has a lot of discretion. they can decide how much they ll spoken advertising. they can decide whether or not they ll challenge the cost sharing subsidies, if they persian gulf them. which they have the ability to do. it will have a very bad effect on the exchanges and that s within their power. if that happens, many who depend on the subsidies may no longer be able to afford health insurance whatsoever. and another scenario. uncertainty and pullout regardless of what the government does. we went inside this meeting of insurance underwriters scrambling as some are facing a summer deadline. we need on stabilize the marketplace now. because we have so many insurance carriers that are either leaving the states that they participated in, or they have raised their premiums to such levels that it has become very difficult to find decent coverage at a decent price. if insurers keep losing confidence in the system, more companies could exit the market with one or perhaps zero options. that s already the case for greg in tennessee where insurance coils are dropping out sflfl we just want the opportunity to buy health insurance that s affordable to us. that s all we re asking. it is not a liberal or conservative issue. the bottom line, insurance companies are scratching their heads about what s next leaving millions of patients wondering if they ll have health care at all. there s a new reuters poll that shows 80% of republican dozen want their party to try repealing and replacing once again but president trump has yet to outline any specifics on how to succeed or how exactly the second attempt will differ from the first. all right. let s get a check on what happened on wall street. we gains over wall street. the dow gaining 69 points. a record close for nasdaq climbing 16 points. today we had banks, financial shares leading the rally coming back from the worst week we ve seen so far this week. and it is all corporate profits. they should be jump bush administration quarter in this season. that s the latest from cnbc, first in business worldwide. 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. to landing an unmanned vehicle on a carrier for the first time in history. just wait till you see what s next. that s the value of performance. northrop grumman people don t take with to being bullied. do you think, is this an actual negotiating tactic by the president? is this a constructive way to do it? it s constructive in fifth grade. it may allow a child to get his way. but that s not how our government works of. just in, amash there, a republican member of congress calling the republican president childish and why is it? because of this tweet that donald trump sent out saying the freedom caucus will hurt the entire republican agenda if they don t get on the team and fast. we must fight them, and dems, in 2018. the president suggesting he wants to fight members of his own party who are in the freedom caucus. amash is in the freedom caucus. and the president is saying if they don t get on board, i m ready to go after them politically. that takes us to today s most important number of the day. there are 27 republican who s are members of the house freedom caucus who we know are members of the house freedom caucus. has the group that doesn t actually release a list of its members names. but there are 27 who we know are members and who are not at the time the health care vote was coming due last week. and who were not publicly yes votes. some of them were no. some of them were still undecided. some said they were leaning no. the point is when it all came to a head, these 27 members of the house freedom caucus were not yet on board. so these the people presumably donald trump is really talking about when he says they have to get on board or maybe we ll come after them. so if donald trump were to come after some or all of these freedom caucus members in the elections next year, in 2018, what would that mean? something to keep in mind, most come from very safe republican districts. districts where in the general election, they win by blowouts. here s a comparison. in their districts, in these 27 districts last november, when donald trump was running against hillary clinton. how did he do? he won by an average of 25 points. not a shock. generally very republican districts. how does that 25-the point average margin for trump compare to how the 27 republican members of congress did? he won by 25 on average in their district. what were they winning by? on average, they are winning their own districts by 31 points. so they did a little bit better than donald trump in their districts. keep in mind, what does that mean? it was a general election. maybe they just attracted more democratic votes than donald trump definitely we don t really know. the key is, when they re both winning by that much, the real threat would be the republican primary. if there was a republican primary, some of these guys would be running. how many votes in the primary could he sway? we don t really know for sure. donald trump won most of these districts in the republican primary. not all of them. in some cases, by big margins, some by small margins. the primary is where the primary would be if there is a threat. our most important number, 27.
night last week we were talking on the show about the siberian energy group on the right and we accidentally showed the website of the siberian energy group on the left. i m sorry about that. you can understand why we might mix those up. the live siberian energy group versus the dead siberian energy group. interesting. the reason we even know we made that mistake and put up the website is this article on politico.com concerning the murky origins of half a million dollars paid to former security advisor mike flynn. the siberian group is the only publicly traded gas and exploration company in the u.s. that has 100% of its assets in russia. siberian energy group. part of what politico talked about last week and we told you on the show, there is a link between the ceo of that now defunct siberian energy group and the guy who paid mike flynn more than half a million dollars mike flynn did not disclose on his security clearance application in washington. this is the money that was paid to flynn that caused him to retroactively register as an agent of a foreign power after he was fired from the white house. the guy that paid flynn that money has his own business history in russia as reported by politico, reporting at least one financing deal personally approved by vladamir putin. this is an interesting thing about the flynn story, right? that link from the guy who paid flynn to his russian business dealings that personally involve putin, does that mean the money used to pay national security advisor mike flynn might have its origins in russia while russia at that very time was attacking the u.s. election to help trump win? that s the question, people trying to figure out the trump russia story by following the money that s what makes this whole question red hot. that s why this is so important. the prospect when flynn was being paid during the campaign this possibility has been raised maybe who was paying flynn maybe the source of his foreign money were the same people attacking the election on trump s behalf. it s a red hot question and an important question particularly there is this new observable phenomenon in washington, d.c. where republicans in positions of authority find themselves getting up close and personal to the flynn side of the trump investigation those republicans keep poofing. they keep finding reasons to absent themselves from the investigation. congressman nunes and sally yates and what they told mike flynn and told the white house, devin nunes canceled that hearing and got himself kicked off entirely and jason chaffetz, disclosing about money for sources. before that happened, he announced he was quitting congress and up and left town without any warning to go get foot surgery for an old injury and said he wouldn t be back for weeks. then, right after that the day after it was made public the department of defense inspector general was taking its own independent investigation of mike flynn and foreign payments the day after that the attorney general of the united states, jeff sessions announced for the first time he was out of this, too, he would recuse himself from any justice department investigation that touched on mike flynn. something about the investigation into mike flynn makes republicans turn tail and run away from these investigations. the question of mike flynn and these foreign payments makes republicans faint. that makes the question of flynn s foreign payments very interesting. it is extraordinary enough the national security advisor was fired. it s extraordinary enough the national security advisor was fired for lying about his contacts with the foreign government. it is extraordinary enough he did not report his payments from foreign sources on his security clearance application. it is extraordinary enough as nbc news reported friday night the trump transition knew about mike flynn s foreign payments and they hired him as national security advisor anyway. it is sfroor enough that the sitting attorney general and the sitting vice president head of the transition, they both now deny there was any way they could have known about those foreign payments to mike flynn at the time. even though it s clear the white house and transition absolutely did know about those foreign payments to mike flynn at the time. the whole thing is extraordinary enough already before you get to the question whether or not the on for payments that came to mike flynn during the campaign might have come from putin connected sources. the guy who paid mike flynn denies the money came from putin connected sources although he himself has had russian business dealings directly with vladamir putin. the link between that guy who paid flynn and the siberian energy guy is through a couple of d.c.-based nonprofit groups that lobby on turkish interests. both of these men have loose ties to those turkish organizations and deny having played a key role in founding them. the exsiberian energy ceo denies any connection to flynn or connection to the man who paid flynn or vladamir putin and doesn t want anybody to think of him as a russian linked oligarch, that said he had a gas company withholdings in russia. as his lawyers wrote to us to make his denials and said they were bidding at a public auction they left out from their defiant lawyer letter to us all the stuff from this is old bio-on his siberian company website about all the years he spent working with the russian government including the part he literally brags about his quote extensive ties to russia s business community as well as federal government and regional authorities. whether or not he is ultimately going to turn out to be tied to these payments to mike flynn as politico suggested and we talked about last week, he says he s not. his denial to politico and now to us he has any connections whatsoever to the putin government, his denial he has connections to the putin government is a little undercut by his previous public boasting about his previous extensive ties to the putin government. the mike flynn story kind of pulls it as red hot at the center of this bullseye. the official story about it is getting more and more upsetting to more and more people. we re hearing about it in more and more different kinds of ways everyday. the central story what happened to mike flynn and where that money came from and why he was paid and who he told about it and how it affected his employment at the white house and how the white house responded when they were told what they were told about his contacts with foreign government and russian officials, none of that makes any sense. fbi director james comey testified he was nauseated by the knowledge the election result might have been affected by his choice to talk before the election about the fbi investigation into hillary clinton s e-mail server and his choice to not talk until after the election about the fbi s counter-intelligence investigation into the trump campaign and the possibility they colluded with the russian attack. tomorrow, james comey and mike rogers will testify behind closed doors to the house intelligence committee, the investigation from which chairman nunes has now been recused, then on monday there will be another open hearing in the senate. that one will involve sally yates fired by the trump white house for refusing to defend the muslim ban in court a couple days after she went to the white house to tell them about mike flynn s contacts with the russian government and lying about those contacts and potentially vulnerable to russian blackmail. that mike flynn issue is what she is going to be testifying about in the senate on monday. depending how that hearing goes maybe we will learn more at that hearing about the murky origins of the foreign funding that went to michael flynn during the campaign while russia was attacking our election on behalf of trump s interests. maybe we will hear more about why the white house story about that money and michael flynn just doesn t add up. if we do get closer to the truth on that figuring out why the white house has not been telling the truth about that thus far i fully expect we will see at least one more d.c. republican faint from the shock thus requiring him or her to be immediately excused from this investigation. at that point i will also fully expect more threatening letters from lawyers. even so, we will stay on it, no matter what, i promise. today we also got a grand new display how the trump party will fight against the investigation. where is all this speculation about collusion coming from? in january buzzfeed published a dossier spinning wild conspiracy theories about the trump campaign. buzzfeed acknowledged the claims were unverified and some of the details were clearly wrong. buzzfeed has since been sued for publishing them. since then much of the dossier has been proven wrong and many of his outlandish claims have failed to gain traction. republican senator chuck grassley today trying to make the annual fbi oversight hearing this year focus on what he s now characterizing as a scandal the fact the fbi has used the dossier intelligence gathered by former fbi agent christopher steel as part of its trump investigation. the public needs to know what role the dossier has played and where it came from. we need to know more about it, how much the nvi relied on it. according to press reports, the fbi has relied on the document to testify its current investigation. there have been reports the fbi agreed to pay the author of the dossier. the author of the dossier is someone who a long standing relationship with the fbi, a key version who worked with the fbi on investigation that led to multiple arrests an indictments of international soccer that happened all over the world and substantially prosecuted here in the united states the least soccer major country there is was prosecuted here because the fbi and the u.s. justice department nailed the corruption in that multi-billion dollars organization because they worked with mi6 agent christopher steel to do it. the republican party has just taken a turn on the trump russia investigation, they decided to defend against the trump russia investigation by attacking christopher steel and attacking the fbi once again with this british intelligence officer the fbi has had a long standing productive intelligence relationship in the past led to very high profile criminal indictments. in order to make that turn, in order to try to discredit and turn against the trump-russia investigation on this basis, republicans have to reach. since the dossier came out, piece after piece of it have been corroborated by the free press, which is very inconvenient for them for this argument. here s cnn, u.s. investigators corroborate some aspects of the russia dossier. the bbc, trump rush dossier key claim verified. one of the claims in the dossier was a trump advisor s trip to moscow during the campaign. the trump campaign itself verified that one. the new york times reported key american allies, british and dutch corroborated information trump campaign figures having meetings during the campaign with russian officials. cnn reported parts of this dossier passed mustereen in federal court when the dossier was used in part to justify a secret fisa court warrant for u.s. surveillance on a trump campaign advisor. it s going to be an uphill battle for republicans to make the pivot on this and denounce and defend against the whole trump-russia investigation as if it is somehow tainted or suspicious because it includes this dossier. the republican claim today is the dossier has been increasingly discredited. that s not true in terms of the public record about the dossier, quite the opposite. as time goes on more and more pieces do get independently corroborated. that s apparently what they decided on. in fact what has to be one of the greatest political smoke bombs of all time. the republicans today started today to claim the dossier itself between the trump campaign and russians, they started to claim today that claim itself is a russian op. what? that s what they re going to say now. are you familiar with fusion? i know the name. okay. are they part of the russian intelligence apparatus? i can t say. do you agree with me if fusion was involved with preparing a dossier against trump that would be interfering against the elections with the republicans? i can t say -with the russians. they want to let you know the new defense against the trump russia investigation is that the trump russia investigation is a russian operation which is amazing but that really is what they started arguing publicly today. on monday, next week, lindsey graham will be the one chairing that committee hearing in the senate where sally yates will testify what she and the justice department found out about mike flynn and foreign contacts and on for conversation and how the white house handle that information. lindsey graham also apparently invited former obama national security advisor susan rice to testify at that same hearing because why just have the hearing on the trump russia investigation when you can also muddy the waters with the president s claims the obama administration was secretly wiretapping trump tower and susan rice must have been up to no good. susan rice is declining to testify at that hearing on monday. she called the request a diversion from what is supposedly the topic of the hearing, the trump campaign and russia and noted the invitation came just from the republican side of that committee and the ranking democrat of the committee said the white house backed her up on that saying it was not actually a bipartisan request to testify and he supports her decision to say know. there s a lot going on right now, just in washington right now. the house vote on repealing obamacare is likely to take place sometime early tomorrow, early to midday tomorrow. we have the latest on that coming up next. the trump administration may also be about to lose yet another senior nominee for the new administration. this is somebody who replaced their previous nominee. they may be losing their new nominee for that same job as well. that story ahead tonight as well. on the trump russia investigation, all of a sudden we are in full pushback mode in terms of the other side of this. the smoke bombs are flying, counter-allegations and diversions are flying, republicans with ambitions are jumping out of the investigation anywhere they can and lawyer letters coming down like rain. this is a new phase of this game here. this took a turn today. republicans are no longer just saying if trump and russia colluded, that s a serious thing, a game changer we need to get to the bottom of it, they are pushing back on the concept of this being investigated. this took a turn today. everybody on your toes now. it s. .it s how well you mow fast. woooh! it 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(i wanted him to eat healthy., so i feed jake purina cat chow naturals indoor, a nutritious formula with no artificial flavors. made specifically for indoor cats. purina cat chow. nutrition to build better lives. for years, centurylink has been promising fast internet to small businesses. but for many businesses, it s out of reach. why promise something you can t deliver? comcast business is different. we deliver super-fast internet with speeds of 250 megabits per second across our entire network, to more companies, in more locations, than centurylink. we do business where you do business. at the end of this week congress leaves for 11 days off. an 11 day weekend, yeah. that s the only thing that s ever made me want to run for congress. i never want to run for congress. 11 day weekend. not for a thing. why do we have an 11 day weekend. before their next tax funded payer vacation. the question is will house republicans try again for a third time to kill obamacare. tonight we learned the answer is very likely yes. going forward tomorrow? we re going tomorrow, yes, we are. do you have the votes? yes, we do. do you have the votes? house republican kevin mccarthy saying they do have the votes to kill the affordable care act supposed to occur between 12:30 and 1:00 p.m. eastern time tomorrow. i would caution that is subject to change depending how confident they are in vote total and twisting of arms. one remarkable thing about this planned vote, they are not going to get the bill scored before they vote on it. you might remember the last time they tried to appeal obamacare the cbo score came back and said the republican bill would result in 24 million americans losing health insurance. that s a hard thing to sell and that failed of the score came in. now they re going back at it. in order to win over more conservative votes they made the bill more draconian this time raising the possibility when the score does come in on this one we could be looking at more than 24 million americans losing their health insurance because of this iteration of the republican bill. the republicans apparently learned their lesson. they decided to solve that attack problem this time by just not waiting for the score. before they go ahead and vote on this version of the bill. this new version of the bill allows individual states to opt out of the coverage requirements mandated by the affordable care act. that sounds boring. what it means is if you have a preexisting condition of any kind, get ready to go back to the time when you can be denied health insurance for that or at least charged more for your coverage. reacting to tonight s announcement of a vote, house democratic leader nancy pelosi said tomorrow, house republicans are going to tattoo this moral monstrosity to their foreheads and the american people will hold them accountable. assuming the republicans are right and they do have the votes to pass healthcare tomorrow constituents will have immediately 11 days at home with their member of congress starting the end of the week to start that holding accountable process. joining us from new york magazine the author of audacity how bo denied his critics and created a legacy that will prevail. thank you for being here. thank you for having me. is the affordable care act going to be a legacy that will prevail? they seem closer than ever to killing it. they are although the senate is not going to pass the bill going into the house tomorrow. it s not clear they will pass anything, not clear they will pass anything i think will be much weaker and leave a large chunk of the aca s achievements into place. we will have to see how it plays out. i wouldn t rest on that. you should hope the house doesn t pass it and don t get the chance. it was always the easy process for them. do you think it will pass and kevin mccarthy is right they will put it up tomorrow and it will pass? i think so. they re bad at counting votes. i wouldn t stick my life on it. i would on pelosi. the republicans lose these votes sometimes but i would bet on them winning. in terms of the political fallout of this, one of the things we ve seen is the home state resistance to this specific thing republicans are doing right now. it resulted in republicans not just moderate and swing state republicans but republicans of every stripe being a little shaken in their conviction they thought previously might have been an easy vote republicans have been saying for six or seven years they wanted to repeal obamacare and voting impotently to do that over and over again while in opposition. the home state dynamics changed since they had the power to do it. what happens to that now? that s a great question. just like you say, i think they sold themselves and drank their own cool laid on this and convinced themselves it was unpopular and always unpopular and nobody benefitted from it and came face-to-face with people benefitting from it. obamacare became popular and that was before they took out what s popular in the bill, 20% still protected in preexisting conditions and now vulnerable to say insurance companies can discriminate against people who get sick. i think they decided their political interest lies in being seen as strong. the worst thing for them is to be seen as failing. that overrides any of the specifics of this terrible piece of legislation. to be clear on preexisting conditions obviously that is a heart rending thing for all sorts of people. you watch those confrontations to people and their member of congress, people born with genetic disorders, people who have cancer, every gamut, run the entire things that could have gone in their life through no fault of their own that makes insurance unaffordable. republicans today saying we fixed that, taking account of that. we know you like that in obamacare and keeping that here. they ve been saying that from president trump to paul ryan all the way on down. what s the rebuttal to that and will this be one of those alternative facts fights nobody agrees what s really in the bill? it will be to some extent. their solution is shunt people into preexisting conditions special pools that only sell policies to people who are very sick. those pools have never worked. they ve always been underfunded. they have a small number of people and they have terrible limits. limits who can get in and how much money can be spent on them and waiting lists and all kinds of problems and they don t have money to make that a workable solution. the two sides will argue whether it works. people are cynical about washington and i think they won t believe republicans they will take care of sick people because they don t believe republicans like to do things like that because they don t. jonathan chait, new york magazine writer. in terms of timing there, republicans are saying that vote to repeal the affordable care act will happen around 1:30 eastern time tomorrow. expect that to change. they are close at their votes and not good at counting them. as soon as they think they have got it they will be rushing it to the floor. a lot of people will be on the ender hooks. stay with us. does psoriasis ever get in the way of a touching moment? 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one of the many brand new worlds we have stepped into for this administration. joining us now is jody cantor who wrote this jaw dropping piece for the new york times given access to the first daughter. thank you for being here. thank you so much. we have interesting reporting about the white house sending their minders io the agency. they sent somebody fm the campaign to the epa and stef mnuchin s office and how they were annoyed. the guy at the epa piped up too much and steve mnuchin put his minder in the basement of the treasury. if a person in the federal government does not want to be working with ivanka trump, does not want her making decisions in her area of expertise, how is that handle? she s such a different kind of senior advisor? when we saw her last week in the white house she s open about the fact she doesn t know government, a newcomer in washington and doesn t have legislative experience, et cetera. i think on the one hand it could be very disconcerting with somebody with no subject matter experience, 35 years old is asking you very consequential questions about your job. on the other hand, i think it honestly could be helpful because i think if you want to have influence with the president, get through to his daughter could be very effective for cabinet secretaries. or the opposite. right? if you can t get along with his 35-year-old daughter who has no subject matter expertise, who comes to this with an inherited real estate business background in jewelry marketing and all this stuff, she doesn t like your idea for the federal reserve restructuring or something, that she ll never be fired. she will never be fired. one of the big questions here is what the accountability level is with both ivanka trump and jared kushner. for most white house staff if you don t do a good job however you define it the president let s you go gently or harshly. the likely they will ever be treated that way seems very very small. what we were really struck by in our visits with her were the lack of parameters on her portfolio. it s really wide ranging. she did not appear to see any limits on what subject matter she would deal with. i thought part of the headline of our story was she was going to review executive orders before they wear signed. to see if she thought they were a good idea? to what end? well, part of this is a reaction to bannon, right? part of it is sort of like her presenting herself as the anti-bannon in the white house. she was pretty open with us about the idea that she is there to be a kind of not rating force. she said even if i can t kill certain policies, i can t stop certain things, i can sand down the edges of these policies. we said, okay, please give us examples because if we re going to represent that in the new york times we really need to know what you re talking about. she said, oh, no no no. i can t because my influence is contingent on me doing it silently. if i went out and spoke out against what the administration is doing i would not be able to be effective with my father. so the thing people say is kind of unique in the ivanka trump-donald trump relationship is that apparently she is able to give him criticism. this is not a president who is very open to criticism at all, that probably one of the most interesting moments in our reporting is maggie and i were on the phone with jared kushner talking about this. we asked him to describe the interactions in the west wing between the president and ivanka trump. he said they go into the oval office together and talk. they re alone together. his implication and other aides supported this basically nobody really knows what s going on there in between father and daughter. if she s the only person who can criticize her father, she s the only person who can deliver a no for sharp criticism to her dad, that makes it really important that we know if she s getting good information, if she has true beliefs about the world, if she has conflicts of interest driving her to advise her father in a way that aren t in the country s best interests. what do we know about what she knows and where she comes from? she describes herself as a not particularly idea lolg call person, pro business, socially liberal moderate. that s an important question and the other important question is is she really able to challenge her father. with that we went to biography. there are no answers in the white house, this is only her second week in the west wing. we looked at her life in the trajectory. this is not a kid who has ever really distanced herself from or visibly challenged her father. plenty of people grow up when they have a moment and say to their parents, i m not like you in some way, i will live my life differently going on my own path. ivanka trump did not have that. she nestled within the trump family brand and trump family name, even her own company is interesting in terms of what we re talking about as well. it was sort of adjacent to the trump organization. she used their payroll and internal resources. she essentially set herself up as a part of the trump organization. in what is supposedly an independent business environment. i struggle with this because i m not a biography driven political analyst. i don t believe you can look into anybody s eyes or look into their biography or parents and divine whether or not they re good for the country or not. i tend to believe you have to judge people by their actions, not who they are. with her, she has no overt actions. with jared kushner he has no overt actions other than what they have done in the business world. what ivanka trump has done in the business world she s this champion of women s rights, she wasn t marketing these things and the only thing she s done is run a sub sid air aye of her dad s organization. i want to tell you a story reported by my colleague, rachel abrams. let s look back at her support for women s issues, she s saying she wants gender her thing in the white house, will fight for family leave and childcare. i want to stipulate there are a lot of people out there who want paid family leave and affordable childcare by any means necessary. they do not care who passes it. the question is does she believe in it and can she execute it? does she have the legislative skills to move on something like this. we went back and looked at her first interest in gender issues. what it was when she launched her own apparel brand and other brands she wanted to become more relatable to regular women so she launched this women who work initiative. the sandberg book had just come out and ideas very popular. it was really a branding campaign, a hashtag. behind the scenes she officially had not offered maternity leave to her employees who wanted it, later came wake up plan. this hashtag didn t involve any policy, there wasn t like some agenda?anthropic activity. yeah. exactly. it really had nothing t doith improving women s lives in a substantive way, it was about the image of being a contemporary working woman. aligning herself with that as an idea purposes. literally for branding purposing. it s just an incredibly curious trajectory from feminism as kind of marketing campaign to supposedly feminist policy. one really striking thing about her with our encounter with her in the white house, some of her words sounded so surprisingly like hillary clinton s. a lot of the classic clintonisms don t belong to hillary only. when people talk about wanting to empower women, obviously that s very broad language. but some of the things she said about the way women could power the economy and how women had to live up to their full economic potential, it was the language was so close that i think the skeptical question there is she trying to appropriate rate clintonism, even though of course hillary clinton has been an advocate for women her entire life? and are people going to be happy with that? for people that are really upset that clinton lost, ivanka s work on gender in the white house going to be at all a satisfying substitute? particularly as contraception coverage is going to get gutted tomorrow by this executive order that her dad is about to sign. it s a fascinating again, biographical approaches to this kind of stuff is not usually the way i approach these things. but with the children as presidential advisers, it s the only way in. jodi kantor, co-author of this remarkable new piece on ivanka trump in the new york times. a remarkable piece. thanks. we ll be right back. stay with us. across the state. new roads and bridges. new mass transit. new business friendly environment. new lower taxes. and new university partnerships to grow the businesses of tomorrow today. learn more at esd.ny.gov i start at the new carfax.comar. show me minivans with no reported accidents. boom. love it. [struggles] show me the carfax. start your used car search at the all-new carfax.com. it s your glass of willpower that helps keep cravings. .far, far away. feel less hungry with the natural fiber in clinically. .proven meta appetite control. from metamucil. vita coco coconut water, hydration comes naturally. start your day with the number one choice of dentists. philips sonicare removes significantly more plaque versus oral-b 7000. experience this amazing feel of clean. innovation and you. philips sonicare. save now when you buy philips sonicare. this is tennessee state senator mark green. until recently, he was running for governor in tennessee. but he quit that race because he got a better gig. donald trump nominated him to be the new secretary of the united states army. that nomination coming after the first trump nominee for that job dropped out amid conflict of interest concerns and after news that he recently punched a guy out at an expensive horse auction. huh? i know. it s kind of weird. but now it looks like trump s plan b pick to be secretary of the army looks like he may be in serious trouble as well. since he was tapped for this gig last month, his past public statements have made for fun reading. mark green, for example, has said that being transgender is a disease. he has said the reason more latinos are registering to vote in his state is because they are, quote, being bussed here probably. he has been an outspoken crusader against evolution, which he destroys in arguments with he destroys in arguments with metaphors like these. quote. if you put a lawnmower out in your yard and 100 years come back, it s rusted and falling apart. you can t put parts out there and 100 years later it s going to come back together. boom, evolution, dead. but the pressure against his nomination is now mounting on capitol hill. reporting today is he may be withdrawing from consideration any minute now. senator john mccain heads up the armed services committee that will have to sign off on and approve his nomination.