indivisible. . ainsley: under god. steve: same group that has gone to all the republican town halls. what they have done is said okay, this is what you need to do. here is how you need to gum up the works of the senate so everything grinds to a halt. their idea is to bog down the group by filing thousands of nonsense amendments to the bill. meantime the republicans are not helping things because nobody has seen it in public. nobody has any idea what s in it. brian: that s what you normally do when the gang of six, the gang of 8, when you want to redo immigration. get a smaller group, working group, the same thing with simpson bowles, here s the big picture. walk into the meetings and say hey, guys, what are you talking about. chuck schumer can walk into the room and say what are you working on? as jeff flake said yesterday i m not in the group but doesn t mean i don t have access to it. ainsley: i would be surprise
other problems. that doesn t mean that overall the bill hasn t been a big su. drugs are going way too high and we have to fix that. but the overall system is actually getting better. we re actually improving substantially. we had 20 million people getting coverage. the rate of cost increase has come down. that s and quality, by the way, has gone up. infection rate in hospital and other things have gone down. the irony is the public doesn t see it and think it s a bad bill. reality is perception and the way it got passed by forcing it down the throat of the republicans. i reject to that. engender an animosity. we had meetings all through 2009 with republicans. the gang of six, the gang of four and we were negotiating with grasso and a lot of other
interesting thing about this. when we first started hearing rumblings of the nuclear option the last few weeks and started looking at denying the up or down vote the democrats wanted. this was a scene in a play we ve seen before, we re about to see again where harry reid will make the threats. it will come to the wire. then there will be a gang of six, gang of eight, gang of four teen. whatever it is. they ll want to step forward to preserve this in the senate. one is republicans put president obama, they put harry reid, and the democratic party in a position where if they did anything other than what they did today, they would have looked weak. this is a move democrats had to make. republicans put them in a position saying we re not going to honor the power of the president to put his appointees through. they put them in a position they had to do this. but you did not hear in the last few days as this moment drew closer, we did not hear what you ve heard in the past. the mccains and t
well, that s just the interesting thing about this. when we first started hearing rumblings of the nuclear option the last few weeks and started looking at denying the up or down vote the democrats wanted. this was a scene in a play we ve seen before, we re about to see again where harry reid will make the threats. it will come to the wire. then there will be a gang of six, gang of eight, gang of four teen. whatever it is. they ll want to step forward to preserve this in the senate. one is republicans put president obama, they put harry reid, and the democratic party in a position where if they did anything other than what they did today, they would have looked weak. this is a move democrats had to make. republicans put them in a position saying we re not going to honor the power of the president to put his appointees through. they put them in a position they had to do this. but you did not hear in the last few days as this moment drew closer, we did not hear what you ve heard in the
fact that he was a member of the so-called gang of six that beforehand worked three republicans, three democrats to try to work out a compromise unsuccessfully and he dropped out and voted against it. isn t that what legislating is about? legislating is about knowing where to draw the line. certainly at some point we all believe in compromise for the good of the nation. you know, we have the code of the west out in miawyoming. when the president of the united states walks into the room or his allies say we ll impose this program and take over a sixth of the economy, senator enzi s response was to say, all right, let s negotiate about that the right response would have been absolutely not. under no circumstances. frankly, if all of the republicans had done that at the beginning, had stood their ground and refused to negotiate to compromise on this, we probably wouldn t be where we are today. instead you had republicans like senator enzi who gave the president running room and cover an