see the president is accusing of people of crimes without evidence and pronouncing them guilty and saying they should be in jail. that should wake all of us up with a start. there s been so much that we re numb and that s dangerousing. > the hardball roundtable, michelle goldberg, john pod her rets, and beth fewy senior politics editor for nbc news. thanks for being here. michelle, i m trying to figure out how comey is being received by the public. we put this poll up the other day. if you asked a year ago after the election, all the democrats hated him. trump fired him, all the republicans hated him. he seems to fancy himself as a nonpartisan truth teller. is he coming across that way or as a guy getting in the mud with trump? he comes across that way to me. he comes across as an honorable person to me even though i remain furious what he did in the 2016 election. but i think his actions in the
beth fewy is there for us. talk about the power to the polls this march. well, it s a beautiful day here, too, in las vegas. a little bit chilly, but very sunny, and that attracted a big crowd of women. mostly women, there are men thrown in, as well, but vigorous crowd, young, old, african-american, lots of latino women. we have reverend william barber right now, the civil rights leader, voting rights activist speaking to the crowd. it s a voting rights crowd. they ve come out to talk about how to get more people to the polls in to have an impact on the 2018 election. but, you know, i ve been talking to a lot of people in the audience, and lots of people are very, very frustrated with the lack of progress in washington around even just keeping the government open. they are talking about wanting parties to work together to solve problems, come together, make this country go forward, whether they are democrats or republicans. i spoke to regina ford, a native las vegasen a few minutes a
are going to be there, they count them one by one, that s not the kind of unified republican conversation about health care they need to convince everybody this is the right way to go. yeah. and we may be too far if you will, down that process, beth. because as you know, all the years you re reporting on the beltway here, they were not including key members as they were drafting this. that was the complaint. along the way. thursday, during the markup, almost no major adjustments to the ahca, which was surprising to some here. is it already baked then, because it s too late? they didn t bring in the right stakeholders earlier on? come thursday we re going to see it fail? it s funny. you have seen it handed back and forth. paul ryan says this is a plan we have drafted in the white house. the white house not embracing it, calling it trumpcare, this is congressman ryan s plan. ryan care. ryan care. so in terms of really getting the right people behind it, we need to see that from
problem, in the beltway here. beth, he picked florida. he picked jacksonville. clearly a friendly ground for him as he s coming out with this message. but the question is, when you have strong voices, and we ll go back to those four governors, voices that resonate across america saying ts isot good. they re having a tough tim really trying to bring this together. right. and he didn t go to a state with one of those strong governors. he went down to florida governor, rick scott, did not expand medicaid in this state under obamacare. but as was said, in many other ways, the law is benefitting regular folks in florida, and florida does have many, many retirees in this bill and its scoring and analysis has shown to be it s going to have an abject effect on older people, primarily. it s going to it s going to help younger, healthier people, who are wealthier, frankly, at the expense of older, sicker people. so no doubt that a lot of florida residents are very concerned with this. you
would change here? one thing that would work for both sides of the aisle that this president can then go out and have a little bit of success? well, actually, there is something in this legislation that s $100 billion or so that s aimed for the states. what it s really targeted to do and that can work is increase the subsidies to the middle class and put in place state-based reinsurance pools to defray the risk. remember, over the last seven years, republicans have not only fought against the aca, but they defunded about $10 billion that was intended for rate stabilization. i think if they just started to restore that, and allowed the states to spend that money, i think you would see a nice surgical strike. and remember, the cbo, s&p and others have said that the aca is on stable ground now. so i think there s not major surgery required. i think there s some targeted areas that would really do a lot of good. what do you think of these two? the president and house republican study c