Special: How does the closed-door health care debate compare to Obamacare debate?

ROBERT COSTA: Hello. I’m Robert Costa. And this is the Washington Week Extra .

Let’s talk more about the Republican effort to overhaul health care. This really was a behind-closed-doors endeavor. Even the majority of Republican senators were left in the dark. That didn’t sit well with Alaska Senator Lisa Murkowski, who was asked if she had seen the bill before it was made public. She told a reporter Thursday morning, quote, “I’m not a reporter and I’m not a lobbyist, so I’ve seen nothing.” That’s been a rallying cry for Democrats, who oppose the bill. Minority Leader Chuck Schumer has been blasting it and the process as secretive. But back in 2009 when Obamacare was being written, it was Republicans who thought the process was too secretive then. How does the writing process for the current overhaul compare to the original Obamacare legislation seven years ago? That’s a question I’d like to ask you, Sarah.

SARAH KLIFF: Yeah, it is very different. I’ve been here for both at this point, and it is certainly true there was a point in the health care debate in 2009 and 2010 when the Democrats realized they were not going to get any Republican votes; they essentially just started working among themself. But this was after months of trying to get Republicans onboard, of really starting off with this hope of a bipartisan bill. You know, I remember all these attempts to get different senators onboard, they wouldn’t work out, and –

MR. COSTA: The two Maine senators, I remember.

MS. KLIFF: The two Maine senators often playing, like, a very pivotal role in all of this. And I – and we haven’t seen any of that. This effort has started out from start to finish as a partisan effort. There’s been no attempt to really bring any Democrats into it.

The other thing that’s been quite different is just very, very few hearings or markups or any sort of public discussion of the bill. You know, back in 2009/2010, the Senate Finance Committee had an eight-day markup of the health care bill. It was the longest of the committee’s history, you know, tons of discussion. As a reporter, you could write about the hearing. There’s no markups in the Senate this time. The plan is to vote without any sort of a hearing. And I understand the strategy, you know, from the outside, that there’s been much less coverage – it is harder for reporters to cover hearings that are – that are not happening. So it certainly, from my perspective as a reporter, feels like a much more secretive process this time around.

SUSAN DAVIS: Democrats were also proud of the Affordable Care Act and they wanted to talk about it, and they defended it, and there’s not a lot of Republicans doing that. It’s hard to find a Republican on the Hill that’s going to be a champion of this legislation.

MS. KLIFF: There was this answer every Democrat had when you’d ask them a question about why are you working on this bill. They’d say, well, we want to increase coverage and we want to reduce costs; it would be some variation of that. A lot of my colleagues at Vox, you know, they did interviews with eight Republican senators on what they – you know, what is this bill supposed to achieve, and a number said back, well, it’s supposed to get 51 votes. It wasn’t really about, you know, the policy goals, it was about passing something.

MR. COSTA: Kelly, what about the Congressional Budget Office? When they come out with their score of the Senate version of the health care bill, is that going to tilt the process?

KELLY O’DONNELL: Monday, Monday, Monday. I mean, that’s our expectation, that they will have done all of their work, and the numbers will not be very helpful to the Republicans. They understand that it will still be a big number who will be determined to be unlikely to be insured under this sort of a plan, and it will be expensive, and it will talk about the tax shifting. That will be a big part of the dynamic.

Part of the secrecy, I think, comes out of the sort of political culture we have right now. The moment something gets daylight, it’s sort of attacked from all sides, gobbled up, and can’t move forward. And so part of the secrecy was to get something done. Now, Republicans would tell you they had 30 meetings in the last six weeks or something and all members were able to participate. We hear pushback on that from certain members. So they’re trying to have something that survives the daylight in one piece, and then the amendment process can happen. Very different strategy, but it’s in some ways born out of the sort of volatility of our climate.

MR. COSTA: With all the attention on health care in the Senate, what’s on the agenda for the other side of the Capitol? Speaker Paul Ryan has hinted that tax reform is at the top of his to-do list. I’m wondering, are there voters for what he wants to get done? Sue, when you think about Speaker Ryan, who you cover every day, what’s he doing to try to jumpstart the GOP agenda as health care unfolds in the Senate?

MS. DAVIS: You know, he gave a speech this week just about tax reform, and part of the reason why he did that is there was a feeling that maybe the agenda was getting away from them, that they weren’t – as Phil said, you know, there hasn’t been a lot of legislative wins put on the board. Tax reform is a huge priority for the speaker, and arguably a bigger priority for most Republicans in Congress even more than health care. I mean, health care is the thing they promised people they were going to do; tax reform is the thing they really want to do. And the way that they’ve set up the system is they just fundamentally can’t really move on to anything else until they tie the ribbon around the health care bill.

If things go the way they plan, once we resolve this health care debate one way or another, tax reform is going to be the conversation for the rest of this year. Their ambitious agenda – their original ambitious agenda was that the president would be signing this tax overhaul bill in July and health care would have been – the Rose Garden ceremony would have been back in April. The now more ambitious deadline is to get it done by the end of the year. The speaker said recently that he wants to get it done by the Saturday before Thanksgiving because that’s the kickoff of deer hunting season, and he is an avid deer hunter. (Laughter.)

MR. COSTA: I know Speaker Ryan loves to hunt deer, have heard that from his press shop many times. (Laughter.) But, Sue, what about the Freedom Caucus? They’re watching this Senate bill very closely. Do they like it?

MS. DAVIS: You know, everyone’s kind of holding fire because I think they want to see what the Senate finally ultimately comes up with. One issue to keep an eye on that I think is simmering in the background and will become more of a full boil if it goes back over is the House bill had a lot more restrictions on abortion rights, which is a really big issue for a lot of House conservatives. The Senate bill strips some of those out. Specifically, the House bill said you can’t – if you get those tax credits, you can’t use them to buy any insurance plans that cover abortion services. The Senate bill got rid of that, can’t really get through the Senate. I’ve talked to senators – both Republican senators and conservatives in the House who say that could be a really tough pill to swallow for a lot of conservatives.

MR. COSTA: Well, to another issue, mystery solved. President Trump admitted this week that he does not have recordings of his conversations with fired FBI Director James Comey. Forty-one days ago, a tweet the president sent seemed to suggest he did, but this week he cleared this up with another tweet. Quote, “With all of the recently reported electronic surveillance, intercepts, unmasking and illegal leaking of information, I have no idea…” “…whether there are ‘tapes’ or recordings of my conversations with James Comey, but I did not make, and do not have, any such recordings.” Kelly?

MS. O’DONNELL: Well, the bully pulpit is now the bluff pulpit, I think. (Laughter.) And those last few words did not sound like the Donald Trump we’ve all followed on Twitter; that sounded like an attorney – I do not have and did not make. But it was a big moment, and it came right under the deadline, if people aren’t aware, that the House Intelligence Committee had said, put up or shut up; if you have tapes, we want to know about them. So they had to do this. The president then couldn’t leave it at just I did not have any recordings. He brought in one of his common themes that he thinks should get more attention, the notion of surveillance – by whom I’m not sure – and leaking, which he has seized upon James Comey acknowledging that he had shared his own memos through a friend with the media. And so he layered his tweet – a little something that the president likes, a little something that resolved the mystery. It does raise questions about was that tweet originally intended to shape the witness, James Comey, as if he needed any outward pressure. Hard to know where the president’s thinking was at that time, if it was just an impulse, but it’s something he’s had to deal with for more than 40 days. And the predicate for all of this was that in his business life he sometimes recorded conversations, so there was a reason to believe it might be in the realm of possible even though it seemed unlikely.

MR. COSTA: I see you on Pebble Beach all the time. That’s that path of stones at the White House. And you’re reporting, and you see all the aides and officials every day, and they for weeks, Kelly, said they weren’t sure if the president had tapes and they didn’t really want to comment on it. What’s the real view inside of the West Wing about how the president’s handled the tapes?

MS. O’DONNELL: A lot of frustration, and aides learned that they could not go out on a limb making an assumption on behalf of the president without the risk of the president sort of pulling that back and they would suffer sort of in their own career. So they all kind of got in line on this. The one quip from Sarah Huckabee Sanders, I’ll look under the couches to see if there are any recording devices. But there was frustration. This could have been resolved far earlier. It could have even been turned as – into something much more lighthearted; you know, when there was the “covfefe” of, you know, the string of letters tweet, they kind of had a little fun with that. But this they left that sort of ominous Nixonian air, and it’s been frustrating for advisers. I think, now that that piece is done, they are now moving onto the Robert Mueller questions. And so today what we’re learning is that the president believes he has the power to fire Robert Mueller, the special counsel, but has no intention to do so. And we saw the president do two things, to talk about the fact that Comey and Mueller have been friends, and does that raise any objectivity questions, but at the same time he referred to Mueller as an honorable man, and that’s a big piece on integrity and on character. So he is leaving both paths open.

MR. COSTA: Let’s stick with that theme to close up this webcast because all of the tapes versus no tapes back and forth, it stems from this ongoing probe into Russia’s meddling in the U.S. presidential election. And we learned today in The Washington Post just how long government officials have known about Russian President Vladimir Putin’s direct involvement in the cyber campaign to undermine the race. It was last August when President Obama was first briefed by the CIA. Here we are, nearly one year later, and the new president still seems unconvinced by the evidence that Russia was even involved, but that doesn’t mean he’s not following the investigations. There was another report in the Post this morning that detailed President Trump’s obsession with Russia and these ongoing probes: he has early morning phone calls nearly every day with his outside legal team. Phil Rucker wrote that story. Tell us about how the president sees this day to day, this cloud, as he calls it, over his administration.

PHILIP RUCKER: And that’s the word he uses, a “cloud.” He sees it as threatening his presidency. He also sees it as undermining his electoral win. He’s very proud of that Electoral College victory that he had. He hands out maps, including to me when I interviewed him a month or so ago. (Laughter.) He’s proud of it. He feels like Russia, Russia, Russia is just an attempt to attack him, to undermine him, to say he’s an illegitimate president, so he stews about this. And what his White House team is doing is trying to get him to let out that energy early in the morning on the phone with his lawyers, with his outside PR folks, so that by the time he shows up at the – for work in the Oval Office at 9:00 or 10:00 he can focus on the agenda. But we all know Donald Trump. He doesn’t compartmentalize things. He lets it all kind of blend together, and that’s why you see these Twitter rants, you see him speaking out to aides in his meetings in the Oval Office about Russia. It’s just going to be there, I think, for a long time for him, and he’s going to have to learn to manage it and work through it.

MR. COSTA: Phil, we all cover this orbit around President Trump beyond just his staff. Who’s he talking to? Is it Jay Sekulow, the conservative lawyer? It is Mark Corallo or Marc Kasowitz, the legal team and the PR person for the legal team? Who’s he talking to as he vents?

MR. RUCKER: He’s talking to all three of those men. There’s another lawyer, John Dowd, who’s involved, a real Washington fixer. But he’s also talking to a lot of friends. He works the phones. He loves working the phones. You know, he’s got a lot of businessmen who he considers peers who are friends of his in New York or out in California. They don’t know politics. They’re not in this government, but they confide with him. And some of them are worried. I interviewed some of them this week, and they say they see he looks like he’s gained some weight recently, that he looks tired and stressful, with darkness under his eyes, and they really worry for his sort of mental health and physical health, and feel like this is a really heavy burden, the Russia question. So I think they’re all eager to see it move on.

MR. COSTA: The cloud continues. That’s it for this edition of the Washington Week Extra . I’m Robert Costa. We’ll see you next time.