one other note about kentucky, while vice president mike pence railed against the health care law in kentucky, kentucky has been one of the big success stories under obamacare where the uninsurance rate went from above 20% in 2013 to close to 7% to 8% now, and so you re seeing the trump white house wanting to go into some of the success stories to be able to have a rhetorical argument against it. mark murray good to see you. ruth marcus thanks for sticking around for the show. thanks a lot. we re waiting for the press briefing to start. that will do it for this edition of andrea mitchell reports. tomorrow on this show, an dree why will join us from tokyo. follow the show online on facebook, on twitte twitter @mitchellreports. find me on twitte twitter @chrisjansing. katy tur is up next on msnbc. thank you. good afternoon, everyone. i m katy tur in for craig melvin in new york a two-hour block on msnbc. any moment we re expecting the
slightly unusual for him. here s how he responded to it. i like what he s doing. i ve not been a fan of the extra discussion that he likes to engage in, but we re going to soldier on. we like his positions and we re going to pursue them. extra discussion mark, that s a way of putting it. are the republicans just going to keep stomaching this so long as they can potentially get their agenda going, potentially repeal and replace obamacare, roll back regulations, et cetera? yes, and katy that comment from mitch mcconnell is precisely talking about the distractions, which in some ways as you know, covering the trump campaign over the last year and a half, that that often, those distractions serve a pretty good purpose for him, and we re very successful in a campaign structure, but when you re trying to legislate and bring the entire party together, even peel off a democrat here or
theical klaus. if we learn something before this vote happens all bets are off but at this point it looks like he s likely to be confirmed. the leader mitch mcconnell talked about this a little bit at a press conference with reporters, a pretty wide ranging press conference. he s frustrated with the amount of time it is taking to move the cabinet nominees through. he also spoke at some length about other issues, russia among them. he was asked if he believed donald trump when trump said that his administration to his knowledge didn t have contacts with russia during the course of the campaign, and mcconnell speak being the set of facts said he has no idea whether the trump campaign was in contact with russian officials. so a little bit of news on that front, which is obviously separate from the vote we have going on now. katy? i got to tell you, kasie, you are my favorite pern in the world to watch on tv because usually the question to you is what s going on or do they have a chance
their organizations. if this is purely about leaks, there are inspector generals that each of these agencies have that can assess that. if this goes toward the capabilities and the functionality of the intel community, you really need somebody who understands the community and has spent time in the community. it s incredibly complex. there are 17 different agencies, and some type of analysis or review would be long ranging and really require some special expertise, katy. jon, we touched on this a moment ago but defense secretary james mattis is in europe along with vice president pence, who will be joining them today. talk to me about the tifts they a difficulties they are facing trying to ensure our allies about nato. the challenge both of them have is articulating what exactly u.s. foreign policy is right now. the biggest problem in the absence of a national security adviser whose job it is to bring all the heads of agencies together and come up with a
number two, to be less controversial? i think first of all katy it s important for the order to be more circumscribed and specific. one of the issues around the first order was it ended up catching people unintentional a or inadvertently. i think people with green cards for example, folks who had helped the united states in places luke iraq, they ended up getting caught behind the order. i think it s important that the order be a little bit more specific but in terms o controversy, i m not sure that even if the order is more specific, it still won t be controversial because we are deeply divided over the issue of immigration and even within the republican party will are divisions as to what the right approach it. they can write it to pass constitutional muster. what is donald trump going to do with dreamers, daca, children brought into the country by their parents, are they allowed to stay? he was asked about it yesterday in his press conference. take a listen. it s a very, very