sessions confirmation hearing testimony and his forgetting his meeting with russians in his confirmation testimony. let s listen to what al franken said on this program about that. there s no other conclusion that you can come to other than that he was lying and was committing perjury. and now let s listen to what donald trump said to the new york times about that very same thing. donald trump said, jeff sessions gave some bad answers. he gave some answers that were simple questions and should have been simple answers, but they weren t. john heilmann, there s the president of the united states coming as close to agreeing with al franken about his own attorney general s confirmation hearing testimony as you could imagine. yeah, and i think, lawrence, that the other thing about which he probably now agrees with senator franken is that i think he now thinks it s time for jeff sessions to resign. you ve made the case for why the attorney general needs to resign
mccain will be okay. lawrence, to reinforce your point that mcconnell seems to want to get rid of this, if he were absolutely trying as a maximum to get those votes, he would delay it for john mccain s presence. i don t think anybody would expect john to come from the terrible thing he s going through now to be there. that s one more example from mcconnell not wanting to do it. can i say one other thing that s very important? i m indebted to donald trump for a long type, we ve had this problem that people disliked government. the health care bill has shown reminded people and donald trump has shown people there is something a lot worse than government. it s not government. that as bad as they might have thought the government was on health care, it s now created the absence of government is even worse. donald trump has done more for getting people to understand the importance of public policy that public needs in an affirmative way than anything we could have done on our own. a qui
hours very much anymore. but john mccain, john mccain is one of the lucky ones. he does have a best friend in the senate. and that best friend is senator lindsey graham. i got a call from rick davis saying you know it s tough news and it is tough. talked to john. said yeah, i m going to have to stay here a little bit longer. take some treatments and i ll be back. and we talked about five minutes you know, it s going to be a tough way forward but he says i ve been through worse. and basically, then we started talking about health care and the nda. literally it wasn t five minutes until he turned away from what i think most people would have a hard time absorbing and focused on what he loves the best. so pray. i don t know god knows how this ends, not me. but i do know this.
democrats have their hearing and we re not going to do a thing to defend donald trump on that tweet, we re not going to step into that at all. we are not ready to come out here and attack donald trump. i mean, maybe if they get a few more of these polls showing his disapproval rates in their own districts, they might be able to do that, but they basically let this hearing go on. they had their separate hearing where they could make noises that sounded like outrage and objection and john heilmann, like they re objecting to something but they weren t objecting to anything that the democrats were actually saying. right. just remember, lawrence, i think it s as important in this context we ve just been discussing that it was as much of a shock to the republicans that comey confirmed the existence of the ongoing investigation as it was to the democrats. so, yes, it s clear that they had decided en masse before hand that all they were going to do is talk about leaks and weren t going to ad
to reduce the benefits and that s going to destroy the medicaid system as we know it. john heilemann, the thing that jumps out here, we have a deal in this new bill for exactly one state. they ve written a deal that applies only to new york state in order to get upstate new york republican members of congress to vote for this thing. that goes back to the deal harry reid tried to make on the medicaid expansion. uniquely, uniquely with louisiana. everybody said that was terrible and scandalous and before you knew it, he had to make that deal with all 50 states. right. and so these kinds of deals when exposed for one state are usually very unpopular in the delegations of 49 other states. yeah, and you remember i think, lawrence, there was another one for ben nelson, right? yes. trying to pick up one vote at a time in making these deals. you know, i don t see