shannon pettypiece, senior white house reporter. and jeff mason, reuters white house correspondent extraordinaire. welcome, all. the president on the south lawn today saying it s about corruption, not about joe biden, and immediately going into joe biden. right, andrea, it was another extraordinary day on the white house south lawn. you saw the president defiant once again, doubling down, frankly, on his calls for ukraine and china to investigate joe biden. as you point out, his new line of argument is, look, this doesn t have to do with politics, this has to do with corruption. but of course those text messages that you talk about cloud that message, and the avalanche of headlines we were all tracking overnight. the question is what becomes of this strategy, it s not clear the white house has one. the president is very resistant
this time i ve heard an honest answer from the white house about the election, meaning it wasn t that they didn t have the ammunition. josh earnest said they didn t have the right economic messenger. we re talking about secretary hillary clinton. clearly he was making the suggestion there have been so out there who suggested their strategy was poor and maybe they depth have the right messenger. if nothing else the message. would certainly argue that the trends have not been good for noncollege graduates for quit some time, despite the rosy picture painted. the message so overwhelmingly positive, then they would have gone along that party line. wild stuff. and great questioning, my friend. kevin cork, white house correspondent extraordinaire. in the meantime, how would now you you to liar in a swank where hotel, and anyone is
confirm which six. that came from pete williams, nbc news justice correspondent and correspondent extraordinaire. we can expect justice bryers. justice sotomayor, the fifth will probably be anthony kennedy who was at the last four of these and i think the sixth will be the chief justice. if you asked me last summer whether chief justice roberts would go to the state of the union message, i would have said, no, never again. after the last dustup last year in the citizens united campaign funding case he said at a university setting he thought the state of the union message was a political pep rally and couldn t understand why any justice would go. he made several comments last year that indicated he had no intention of going again. times have changed. congress wants to show it can be
maybe even to a higher degree as the senate takes a closer look as it makes its way over there. neil: thanks, kevin. our white house correspondent extraordinaire. meanwhile, this go to the united states senate for rand paul. senator, if you were to look at what you ve seen come out of the house and we don t know the details what do you think? you know, the house freedom caucus made the bill a lot less bad. what i m still concerned with, this is the first time that republicans have affirmatively put their stamp of approval on a a program where federal money, taxpayer money, is paid to insurance companies. i really frankly am not excited about subsidizing the profit of insurance companies. they make a lot of profits. they want to quadrant off the individual market where they don t make money and say oh, we