scott plan. he s traveling the country. our team did some fantastic reporting on ron desantis history when he was in the house of representatives. he did back a plan to replace medicare with a government-subsidized private plans. he told a local newspaper he backs the same thing for social security. and he said it s unsustainable for seniors to retire in their late 60s. not only will joe biden make an issue of this, phil, if ron desantis runs, donald trump will and has. this has been an ideological battle for decades. with bush and privatization and social security, which really kind of created the roadmap for democratic activism to kill anything related to these issues that republicans brought up. every republican before donald trump supported changes to social security and medicare if not eliminating them altogether. there are votes after votes after votes in the house floor under speaker boehner, on the paul ryan plan the freedom caucus the freak caucus the freedom cauc
mitch mcconnell holding a news conference before heading home for the holidays. he said he wasn t a fan of the president s tweeting until this week. it helped that the president was singing his praises over the tax planned and not criticizing him for a lack of legislation. peter doocy is live with more. what else did mcconnell say about working with president trump? rick, the senate majority leader said his good working relationship with the president that is clearly improved than inauguration day is a big part of the reason that the country has started to shift right of center and mcconnell announced today that he and the president and the house speaker paul ryan plan to get together at the white house at the start of 2018 to figure out what else they can do to keep some of the momentum that they think they have for tax reform going through going into the new year. a lot of questions about daca as
tax reform. shepard: tax reform. it s about the money and the message couldn t be more important as you try to get congress on board. the one thing the president has been disciplined on is tax reform. the healthcare bill seemed to be all over the place because one day it was repeal and replace and then repeal and then back to repeal and replace again. the president has been very disciplined, very consistent on this issue with tax reform. the only thing that has really been sort of pliable is where the corporate tax may land. the president said somewhere and 15 to 20%. the paul ryan plan calls for 20%. some people have suggested you can t get it below 25. i ve been told by people in the white house that s crazy. you can get it below 25 and maybe 18 to 20. 15 might be adventurous. you re right. we have the budget in september. tax reform they want to do. the white house still wants to get healthcare reform done. i was talking with the legislative director, mark short that told me t
promiseded that he d do a healthcare plan that would lower premiumses f premiums for everyone and that promise is clearly being broken. instead what he s pursuing is two political objectives and the first is to cut back medicaid. as you said, this is the paul ryan plan and the republican goal for a long time. it s going to hurt people. it s going to devastate a lot of families in this country, but also the real driver here is the desire to cut taxes and this bill is an amazing collection of tax cuts. big breaks to the rich and in fact, a crazy tax cut that allows health insurance companies to deduct executive salaries from their taxes over $500,000. no one can explain to me why that s in there other than health insurance companies and their executives like that provision. take a listen to what donald trump is talking about barack obama s statement on the health bill. it s also unprecedented for a former president to come out the way president trump has. he came out on facebook
cotton? these are people who expressed deep reservation about the house version of this. if this is the house version taken to the left or more moderate or trump might say left meme, you will lose the people. they won t vote for that. they have been outspoken critics of what the house has done to come back and vote in favor of it would be a huge bridge at this point. bret: all right. so do they get it or not? basically, they can get it if theyake it. the easiest way to do this is go back to paul ryan plan a, fake repeal, fake replace. we ll do it later. repeal it now. take the tax revenue back out at the beginning. then we ll replace it later on. when we eventually do repeal it. at that point, rand paul starts ringing the claxon horn and everybody runs for cover. bret: that s what people hate about washington. we are also one election away from solving big things. one election away from solving the big things and if