the senate. matt, i will bring you in. i was on capitol hill the week of the shutdown and it started to look like a ghost town. it is a ghost town right now. many of the lawmakers aren t there. there doesn t seem to be any type of conversation happening. has president trump missed opportunities to really put lawmakers on blast, maybe go to the empty capitol, hold a meeting with empty chairs, kind of demonstrate the fact that there appears to be no one talking? i mean you remember, the president really is basically the only person in washington now. that s a good point. you know, donald trump is pretty good at staging theatrics and reality tv, gimmickry, and this time, i think it was a missed opportunity. he s tweeting. he obviously visited the troops. but i think it is otherwise a missed opportunity. is it nancy pelosi, who is in hawaii, i m told. trump could have made a bigger slash, i think, about this, and pointed out, i guess, you know, part of the problem may be, though, that
you put on with the little boy and the magic trick. wait a minute, what s wrong with a magic trick? some magic. you made their funding disappear. look, if there s been some mistake there s no mistake, bill. when you veto their funding that s not a mistake. barbara bush never looked quite like sigourney weaver. let s get back to the border and what sessions said. by the way, i do need to say on the chip, it may be this is just budget gimmickry rather than actually cutting funding. because these are kind of special in case of emergency funds if it comes, item be there. look, we heard the first lady speaking with passion and i m sure sincerity about how we need to protects the most vulnerable
repealed? two things going on there. the first is there are people when the individual mandate goes away, the point is it raises the price of everybody else. if you are buying health care on the exchanges and a whole bunch of people drop out of the market, the prices go up. that s why they want to do this. they are actively trying to destroy the working obamacare exchanges. it s not just that some people won t choose to get health insurance, and it s going to raise the prices for everybody else. the second thing is, you heard mulvaney himself when he described it as a gimmick, and they said they don t want to abide by the absurd rules, and those are rules that require you to pay for your tax cuts. if you look at the rules in the bill, if they pass a bill there will be a direct and immediate cut to medicare because it has to be paid for. these aren t absurd rules. what s happening is they are trying to count on gimmickry and
just as, maybe obamacare could have been made better if it were a bipartisan proposal, this one certainly would have been made better. bret: let s bring back our panel. matt s maybe obamacare could han made better? one of the things that has happened through this process, democrats have had to admit that as it relates to the individual insurance market, obamacare has been a flop, and these are big problems. i think the thing that chuck schumer is doing here that is disingenuous, everybody knows that this is a fake bill. the republicans are lying tonight. this is not real legislation. they don t want it to pass, this is a procedural gimmick. chuck schumer knows that and he is trying to punish them for the gimmickry that they are using.
they just won t go up as much. they might go up by 10%le less. the way it s accomplished is allowing plans not as robust that president obama allowed so, therefore, less expensive plans and brings premiums down. secondly, they are making changes which will change the mix from more elderly to young people and also lowers premiums and makes it like the premiums are going down so a little bit of gimmickry in all of that. to michael steele s point they did have six years but never had a plan. when you re seeing here are the fault lines between people who want to just get rid of it, even though it would put 24 million people plus off of health insurance and those who are realizing it s very hard to unwind a social program of this magnitude after in place six years. to ted cruz s point in the sound bite is what we have been making on this show and joe many times. if you re in the house why take a vote on this and suffer the