on the house bill and you see their fired up. they think they think republicans on the ropes on repealing and replacing obamacare. on the other hand, maybe not a great day for speaker ryan and the republican leaders as they try to pull this together. this is an ultimatum from president trump. saying look, you get this done the ball s in your court. otherwise i m moving on after you promised the american people you ll repeal and replace obamacare, i m moving on to the rest of my agenda. shannon: fridays are usually quiet and we have other news to tell you about as well. we re hearing devin nunes will speak at 10:30. he s been talking about evidence or information he has seen that potentially suggests there is some kind of surveillance has taken place with the trump team or incidentals of picking up
but this would have worked out better. now we re going for tax reform, which i always liked. you re confident in speaker ryan s leadership and get things done? yes, i am. a lots of different factions. a long history of liking and disliking even within the republican party, long before i got here. but i ve had a great relation ship with the republican party. both sides like trump. that s good. you can see that more clearly than anybody. i m not going to speak badly about anybody within the party. certainly a big history. i think paul really worked hard. i would say that we will probably start going very, very strongly for the big tax cuts and tax reform. that will be next. is it your intention to let obamacare explode?
read a letter from the president and secretary price of health and human services, making commitments of how they could lower premiums in the future, telling them there s no plan b on health care, the vote was coming tomorrow and the president was demanding and requesting their support. now, robert, that s a controversial strategy. usually as you know, you don t put anything out, you don t expose a piece of legislation until you re pretty sure of the nose count and i don t know anyone tonight who is really sure of the nose count. you re exactly right, brian. people from speaker ryan s office are confident butter that shaky. they called a bluff believing if they brought the bill to the floor, people would eventual l rally behind it but the house freedom caucus, even at this late hour, many of them are holding firm, saying no.
when senator rand paul a vociferous critic said they were pulling the wool over their eyes and said the president was being played. we thought for a while there was daylight between the president and speaker. it seemed to have tightened up the last week but do you think what senator paul said had truth to it? they have a lot of smart people in the white house. have you mick mulvaney head of the budget a member of congress until a few weeks ago. tom price who was a member of congress until he was named to be the head of health and human services. they know what s going on in the house. i don t think the president didn t have good advice to how tough the fight was going to be. the interesting question will be if this fails will the president turn on ryan. at this point they re saying no, absolutely not.
lots of members of the white house staff are saying this is ryan s false. if you re throwing ryan overboard and remember this is the same house republican caucus that kicked out john boehner as speaker who would replace him and would he have more ability to herd the cats to get a working majority. it was the problem with boehner and with ryan. they don t have a working majority 218 republicans to pass everything. shannon: the president came in as the song says like a wrecking ball and has done things totally different in washington and we re hearing what the omb director said if it doesn t pass we re done with health care. they ve been running on this since 2010 since the bill got passed. do you think the white house will really walk away from this? do you think the hill will walk away from it if it doesn t work? absolutely. there s no better answer. if you start over it would eat