The Ricochet Podcast - It's Complicated

Episode Date: June 24, 2017

Summer’s here and that means vacations and that means….guest hosts! Today, Peter Robinson teams up with our podcasting colleagues at The Weekly Standard, Steve Hayes and Fred Barnes. They talk about Georgia’s 6th district race, and of course the new health care bill now in front of the Senate. On the topic, we call on the most knowledgeable person we know on health care law, Avik Roy. Also... Source

We have special news for you. The forgotten men and women of our country will be forgotten no longer. Are you going to send me or anybody that I know to a camp? We have people that are stupid. And my story didn't change. My story was always a straight story. My story was always the truth. Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall. It's the Ricochet Podcast. Rob and James are off today, but we'll be joined instead by the Weekly Standard's Fred Barnes and Steve Hayes. Our guest will be Ovik Roy. I'm Peter Robinson. Let's have ourselves a podcast. Welcome to the Ricochet podcast number 358. James and Rob are off today,

but they've been replaced. Amazing, actually, how easy it was to replace them. They've been replaced by Weekly Standard Editor-in-Chief Steve Hayes and Weekly Standard Executive Editor Fred Barnes. We're doing this crossover show to celebrate the fact that the wonderful suite of Weekly Standard podcasts has now joined the Ricochet Audio Network. The Weekly Standard gals and guys record them, and we at Ricochet Audio Network help to distribute them. We'll talk a little bit about that later in the show. But first, this podcast is being brought to you by the good people at Texture. Why subscribe to just a couple of magazines when you can have all your favorites on your smartphone or tablet all the time for way less?

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So if you're one of the many podcast listeners, and we see the numbers, there are thousands of podcast listeners who aren't full Ricochet members. This gives you an opportunity to support the good work at Ricochet at half the price, $2.50 for you. Gentlemen, Fred and Steve, the last time we saw each other, we were in a studio recording an episode of Uncommon Knowledge. The election was about a month away, and Fred was with certain reservations pro-Trump, and Steve was, without any reservations at all, anti-Trump. Donald Trump is now in his sixth month as President of the United States, and Fred's position is, Fred?

My position is we're going to find out in the next few months whether he has a successful presidency or not. You know, we already know he's got one Supreme Court justice. He may get a second one. We'll see about health care. Let's see, you know, before the Senate right now. And it's pretty dicey. But I think there will be a tax reform bill or at least a tax cut that gets passed. That'll be more than Ronald Reagan achieved in his first year.

Now, I don't say Trump is better than Ronald Reagan, but this could be a mighty important first year. Steve, Steve's position six months into this presidency is? I guess I would call myself Trump skeptical still. I think, you know, look, if you go back to the editorial that I wrote just a couple of days after the election, what I argued was that I hope that I hope to be as wrong about Trump as president as I was about Trump's electoral prospects, because that was pretty wrong about Trump's electoral prospects. And I'd like him to succeed. I think he needs to succeed. The country needs for him to succeed. You know, he's certainly done some some good things he's done in the first hundred plus days. All of the things are many of the things, most of the things that that conservatives might have hoped he would do simply by virtue of the fact that he's president of the united states he's rolled back regulations um he's he's undone president obama's policy

on cuba he sent a clear signal to iran that we're done treating uh the regime there as a potential friend and treating them as the enemy that they are he of course appointed supreme court justice uh supreme court justice neil gorsuch, which I think virtually every conservative would have to applaud. But I think we've seen signs at the same time that he's not been a very good manager, that he hasn't been able to push a Republican Congress to do the kinds of things that Donald Trump said only Donald Trump would be able to get Republicans to do. Now, it's early. It's still possible that he'll pass health care reform, still possible that he'll get

tax reform. But I worry about the same things I worried about with him coming into office. I worry about his temperament. I worry about his decision making. Fred, you said a moment ago you compared Donald Trump with Ronald Reagan. And, you know, I, of course, I was a speechwriter in the Reagan White House. And the caricature of Reagan was all wrong. He was not an amiable dunce.

He was much more decisive, more in charge than people thought at the time. I believe history is – we understand more of this now as history has gone by. But I remember thinking at the time, we speechwriters would get together and say, who – and the contrast in those days, of course, was between Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Carter. And we would hear over and over again, yes, but Carter was so – he was a nuclear physicist. He worked 15 hours a day. People were confusing inputs with outputs. Grant that Ronald Reagan, it wasn't true, but go ahead and grant that Ronald Reagan was an amiable dunce. Who cares as long as he's cutting taxes, rolling back regulations, standing up to the Soviet Union? So is there something of that

argument to be said? Look, let's just for a moment, let's black out the figure of Donald Trump himself and look at what's happening around him. The cabinet, very impressive. What he's doing by executive order, rolling back regulations. The markets erupt. Illegal immigration is down. We have a conservative jurist on the Supreme Court and the United States has set the entire world on notice that it's a serious nation again. What's not to like? Where do the reservations come in? Well, I think the reservations come in because people don't like Trump's style. They don't think it's presidential.

They think it shows problems with his temperament. And that has had some really strong impact. I think that's the main reason why Trump is so unpopular compared to other presidents. And, I mean, there are ideological reasons, too. But look what Trump has done, and Peter, you touched on a lot of it. Trump has adopted the conservative Republican agenda, and he is pushing it through Congress. And all the scare stuff, stuff I worried about, there's only one thing left, I think, to worry about, and that's trade, and a lot of harm can be done there.

But look at immigration. Immigration is now, they're not mass raids to grab people and families and throw them back across the border. What they've done, and particularly by the Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly, who was a great appointment, they've almost completely sealed the border. They're not going to send the dreamers back, you know, the teenagers who were dragged by their illegal parents into the United States. It's a very reasonable immigration policy that obviously Democrats aren't going to give him any credit for that. And even in foreign policy where it was pretty a bad start by Trump, but he's not an isolationist, and I think he's really come on strong there. Now, he does, look, Trump does silly things. There was no reason not to endorse Article 5, the NATO treaty, when he was there in Europe.

It just made the Europeans all mad and a lot of people who work for Trump mad. And then a couple of weeks later, sort of in passing, in the Rose Garden of the White House, when he's having a press conference with the president of Romania. He throws that in. Oh, by the way. Yeah. I mean, that was very poorly done. But when you look at the record, it's a lot better than I expected, that's for sure. Steve, so Trump and the Russians, Trump and Jim Comey. It is fair to say, I think, that Donald Trump himself, almost like a Shakespearean figure, Donald Trump summoned up from the vasty deep a special counsel. If Trump had just let, had fired Comey on the grounds that the deputy attorney general laid out, nothing would have happened. But Trump had to say, oh, no, no, I was going to fire him anyway in that interview with Lester Holt. And the reason I fired him was because of the Russia investigation.

And then he had to taunt James Comey with a tweet, he'd better hope there aren't tapes. And now we have a special counsel. So there we have, as I read it, there's an example, the example of this weird self-destructive impulse in this guy when he pops off. And so the question for you is, do you read it that way? And how bad is this summer going to be? With Watergate summer as a scale, as a 10, and this won't amount to anything as a kind of one, how much of a partisan summer of hearing after hearing after hearing are we in for?

That's a very good question. I think that the hearings will be sort of secondary to what Bob Mueller actually does behind the scenes. So we may not see a lot of the activity that's taking place this summer, but I expect that there will be hearings and Democrats will continue to try to make this a Watergate-like scandal. But I think you're exactly right. I mean, that is the point to pick on what Fred is saying. That's the place where Donald Trump's lack of discipline and his eagerness to engage in all manner of petty fights really has consequences. I mean, this stuff, you can't just sort of shrug it off as a stylistic

problem i think because you know even if people don't like his style if it's something that that doesn't have any consequences well people can get used to that or not or not like him or like him and all that will matter is what he gets done but in this case his style i think will have a direct impact on what he's able to get done he is now going to be dealing with this special counsel. And as you point out, Peter, I mean, if you believe James Comey's testimony, Comey, in effect, leaked the memo that he leaked in order to trigger a special counsel because Donald Trump tweeted about the possibility of having taped in the Oval Office. Now, that may be a somewhat convenient story for Comey to tell. We don't know for sure, but that's what Comey says was the genesis of this special counsel. It's happening now, and what's undeniable is that it's taking up a considerable amount of time and energy,

both in Donald Trump's head, but also among the White House staff, some of whom don't know who they can talk to and what they can talk about. So I was in Washington for the first time in months last week for just a couple of days, visiting my wife's father, who's 91. And I just turned on the television and I read the Washington Post. And I thought to myself, this town has lost its mind. The obsession with the Russia investigations, I'm putting this to both of you so you can correct me if I'm wrong about this, but the obsession with the Russia investigations, you put on CNN and there's Jake Tapper trying to draw out for a whole half hour, two or three segments in a row on what was essentially no news. You flip to Fox and they're from the other side,

there's no news in the investigation, but they somehow or other, they've decided they have to stay on that topic. It was just unbelievable to me. And I did get away from family for one moment and I got together with Haley Barber, our mutual friend, Haley Barber. And Haley said he'd spent most of his professional life in Washington for the last four decades, except when he was governor of Mississippi, and he'd never seen anything like it. This is something new or not? What do you think? Well, I think it's new, and it's new for this reason. They're having this investigation about a collusion between the Trump people and the Russians during the campaign, or at least that's what the investigation is supposed to be about. It's certainly widened beyond that.

And there's no evidence. You're supposed to start, there was a lot of evidence in Watergate, Peter, you'll remember that. But there's no evidence here. The FBI, which is pretty good in investigating things, began their investigation last July, nearly a year ago, and they haven't found anything yet, so far as we know, and yet there's a special counsel, so-called, Bob Mueller, who has fallen, who has been tempted, and he's given into temptation, as special prosecutors have so many times before. He's widening the investigation. He's hiring all these liberal lawyers and Clinton donors to come in. He's supposed to be doing an investigation,

and he seems to be hiring a bunch of lawyers who would be hired to make a case for him, a legal case. I mean, it's already gotten completely out of hand with no real basis for it. There's no underlying crime. New? Totally new? has this great reputation for integrity, and I don't doubt it for a minute, but it's been surprising even by people who know him, like Andy McCarthy, for instance, the lawyer and former federal prosecutor. I've been surprised that he's hired, I mean, obviously, Mueller, he thought he would be sensitive to the idea of the appearance of bias, and yet he's hiring all these people a lawyer who worked for the clinton

foundation uh for heaven's sakes uh i'm just amazed that he would hire them and and uh there's some question about these stories about the his widening of the investigation but i from what i can tell they appear to be true they They're investigating whether Trump shouldn't have really obstructed justice in dealing with Comey and so on. This is not what this investigation was supposed to be, but we've seen this happen before. the whole thing naming a special prosecutor which uh the deputy attorney general did with you know a moment's pressure on him and he caved and and appointed a special prosecutor or a special counsel um and he shouldn't have steve hayes so the man with the the reputation for integrity in all of washington as best i can tell up until at least three weeks ago, would have been Robert Mueller. And now Fred is arguing this. Other than Fred Barnes.

I mean, Fred Barnes, the man with the reputation. Are you going to agree with all of this? Mueller's falling into the trap of all special prosecutors. Go ahead. Yeah, I have a slightly different view. I mean, I agree with Fred entirely on the appearances that Mueller has given by hiring people. And in a political moment like this, at a time when you know that Donald Trump and his supporters are going to attack, that anyone you hire who has any political leanings one way or the other, it just sort of stuns me that Mueller would not have thought through that as one of the most important criteria that he looked for and who he was going to hire to run his investigation. And he didn't, and he's got a

black eye for it. I don't think that means that Mueller is now going to run a political investigation, but it's certainly something that he's going to have to explain while he's conducting his investigation and when he produces results from his investigation. I think on the matter of, the broader matter of what we know, look, the FBI conducted a 10-month investigation, and I'm not confident saying that we know that they didn't produce anything. It's true that there have been lots of leaks from the FBI, but James Comey decided that he was going to continue that investigation into not Donald Trump and collusion necessarily, but overlap between

the Russians and people in Trump's orbit. And he was going to continue that. I assume he did that because he has some evidence of something. Now, maybe not. Maybe I'm wrong and he's hopelessly political and he just decided to continue it because he felt bad for entering the election in the Hillary Clinton controversy. But when he passed that on, Rod Rosenstein decided to continue an investigation and in a sense escalated. And I do think that there are questions about not Trump himself.

I mean, I think it is it's a huge stretch to think that Donald Trump at the time that he's publicly calling for the Russians to hack Hillary Clinton's emails and WikiLeaks to distribute them is at the same time running some nefarious behind the scenes scheme to have that happen. But there are questions about people in his orbit. I think there are real questions about Paul Manafort. This was his campaign chairman. He left five days after The New York Times reported about a secret ledger that he had with some Putin friends, work that Manafort had done in Ukraine. We don't know why he quit, but he certainly hasn't been terribly forthcoming with answers. And I think there are questions about other Trump advisors that should be answers. And they've had a difficult time answering questions, I think, giving straightforward answers to questions

that has continued to sort to accelerate this probe and the public curiosity about it. Okay. Boys, I've got to do a spot, and then we're going to talk about healthcare, and we'll be joined in just a moment by healthcare expert and our friend, Ovik Roy. But first, Bombfell. Bombfell is an online personal styling service for men that helps find the right clothes for you.

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That's spelled, once again, B-O-M-B-F-E-L-L dot com slash ricochet, bombfell.com slash ricochet for $25 off your first purchase. Thanks to the good people at Bombfell for sponsoring the Ricochet podcast. Ovik Roy, are you on? Okay. I'm here. I've gotten a little bit. Ovik, Peter Robinson here. Let me do an interview.

Hey, everybody. Thanks for having me. Yeah, ladies and gentlemen, Ovik Roy. Ovik is the opinion editor at Forbes, and he's advised a number of figures in Congress, including Florida Senator Marco Rubio. In 2015, Ovik was a senior advisor to former Texas Governor Rick Perry, who was then running for president. In 2012, he served as healthcare policy advisor to Mitt Romney, also who ran for president. And he's the co-founder and president,

this is what Ovik is doing right now, of the newly launched Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity, close quote. The other day, Ovik tweeted, quote, just finished reading the Senate healthcare bill. Put simply, if it passes, it'll be the to cut spending by a trillion dollars and reform to entitlements, then you take the booby prize. Otherwise, I win. Okay. So you like this and you like it better than the House version? Absolutely. So one of the things, aside from just the fiscal components of the bill, which are very, very significant and historic, what is it that we've always talked about, Peter, when I've been on this show with you

before, about what it is that a free market health care system would look like? The fundamental building block of a free market health care system is a health care system in which every American has the opportunity to buy health insurance on their own without being dependent on the government or an employer to provide it for them. And what this Republican Senate bill does is it provides the building blocks to make sure that we can have a robust market so that every American can buy health insurance on their own. The House bill didn't do that because the structure of the tax credits in the House bill would not have allowed for that market to work. But the Senate bill does do that, and that's why the Senate bill is so much

better than the House bill. So here are the attacks that are already taking shape. For example, here's a headline from the Washington Post. Greg Sargent wrote a piece, quote, how Trump and Republicans may get away with hurting millions of people, close quote. We're going to cap Medicaid payments, and we're going to hurt millions of people. Ovik, how Trump and Republicans may get away with hurting millions of people, close quote. We're going to cap Medicaid payments and we're going to hurt millions of people. Ovik, how should the GOP respond? Yeah, I mean, that's the polite version of the millions will die argument that you're hearing a lot of Democrats and liberals make on the Internet. You know, I think Elizabeth Warren said something about blood money the other day on the floor of the Senate. So, yeah, look, I mean, you know, there a lot of eye-rolling nonsense going out there from Democrats.

But there's a particular fallacy or factual error. I won't call it a lie because that implies that I know the person's motivations. But it's an egregious factual error to claim that this bill throws people on the ACA Medicaid expansion onto the street. It doesn't do that. It gives them the opportunity to buy privately sponsored, individually purchased, consumer-driven health insurance. And that is major entitlement reform. And it's not only major entitlement reform because it liberates people from Medicaid, a program that has no better health outcomes than people who are uninsured.

But it also gives them a leg up. So if you make more money, you take a second job, you work longer hours, okay, the amount of financial assistance you get might wind down, but you'll be able to keep the insurance plan. You'll be able to keep your doctor. You'll be able to keep the network of hospitals and clinics that you've been going to for years and years. So that continuity is really important. It will do a lot to improve the quality of care, let alone the quality of insurance coverage these individuals have. Ovik, I know you're on with Fred Barnes and Steve Hayes, and I know they both want to ask you some questions and join the conversation. Actually, this is a question for Steve and Fred as well, the politics of the situation. Leader McConnell made the draft legislation public yesterday.

We're talking about an event that happened not much more than 24 hours ago. Within minutes, as best I could tell, and certainly within no more than two hours, four members of his own caucus said publicly they couldn't support the bill in its present form. Rand Paul of Kentucky, Ted Cruz of Texas, Mike Lee of Utah, and a little surprisingly to me, Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, who's not a fire-breathing conservative, as best I can tell. So with only 52 seats in the Senate, Mitch McConnell can only afford to lose two, and he's already lost four.

Ovik? Well, I don't know if I'd use the same tense that you used in the verb to lose, because I don't think they've been lost. They just want to negotiate. I think that their language was very carefully crafted to make clear that they want to support the bill if certain tweaks are made. And by the way, McConnell being the crafty SOB that he is, I wouldn't be surprised if he's planned for that eventuality

and has a lot of amendments and proposals ready to offer to allow these individuals to make the bill move in their direction a little bit and allow them to take credit for some meaningful changes to the bill. Fred, does he have the votes? Go ahead. Well, he doesn't have the votes at the moment, but indeed these four are negotiating that Senator Heller from Nevada looks like he may be lost, but not these four. I think they want to vote for it. Look, they recognize that the choice here is a bill that does all the things we just heard about, and Obamacare, that's what the choice is. It's pretty, I mean, you're going to get a binary choice here. Do you want to be a senator

who quills about a few things in this bill, and we wind up with Obamacare forever? I don't think so. You know, Republicans do have a problem. The problem is they have handled the whole health care issue going back ever since I've been a reporter in Washington so clumsily. They're terrible at it. They're great at taxes and tax reform. But, you know, for instance, when the CBO comes out and says, you know, there'll be 23 million people who won't have health insurance, and you realize what they're calculating is based on so many of the people without the. No, by CBO's estimate, they're merely a lot of them who won't buy health care,

and young people in particular aren't going to buy some big health care program that they don't want. And they'd rather, look, when I was in my 20s, I can't remember ever buying health insurance. And I don't think a lot of young people would like to either, unless it changes and they can get some policy, some cheap catastrophic policy. Steve Hayes, what's the editorial position of the Weekly Standard on this bill? I mean, you just heard Fred. Whatever Fred says is the editorial position of the Weekly Standard. We don't have a magazine-wide editorial position on this, but let me make just a quick comment on the politics, and then I've got a question for Ovik.

On the politics of it, I don't think it's fair to suggest that the four Republicans who have come out as skeptical are doing so primarily for political reasons. These are people who had principled objections to the way that both the process that was unfolding and what they were learning about the process. And remember, Ted Cruz and Mike Lee certainly were involved in these discussions going back months behind closed doors. So they had some idea of what was coming out. And when the 142-page draft discussion or discussion draft came out, they had a pretty good sense of what was in it. And I thought raised substantive and important concerns about it. I do think that there are differences even among those four in terms of who wants to be a yes vote and who wants to be a no vote. I think Rand Paul's perfectly fine being a no vote. I think Mike Lee would like to be a yes vote if you were going to get rid of the Title I regs, but that seems highly unlikely to say at this point. Ted Cruz, I think, would like to be a yes vote if you were going to get rid of the Title I regs, but that seems

highly unlikely to say at this point. Ted Cruz, I think, would like to be a yes, and Ron Johnson would like to be a yes. But there are a couple of other conservatives who are skeptical but didn't join this group in Pat Toomey and Tom Cotton, who could raise, I think, similar kinds of questions that were raised by these four. So the politics of this is dicey. And the more that Mitch McConnell does to satisfy these four and other conservatives, the more he risks alienating the moderates who seem to be on board, at least at the outset.

My question for Obik is, you know, you paint a pretty rosy picture. And Lord knows, I don't want to fight you on the details of this because that's a mismatch. subsidies in the short term, lots more spending for the promise, essentially, of reforming an entitlement that has been dramatically expanded. So it's entitlement reform really in name only. And it requires that you believe, which is the sort of the classic Washington trick, that all of this front loaded spending will buy you reforms a decade later when some of the people involved in crafting this probably won't even be in office. Sure. So first let me say what an honor it is for the first time to share a microphone with both of you, Steve and Fred.

I've been reading Fred since he was a token conservative at the New Republic and I was in college. I'm embarrassed to say I actually subscribed to the New Republic in those days, but it was a much more interesting magazine than it is now. So it's great to be here with both of you. If you're embarrassed to have read it, imagine the way Fred feels to have written for it. It was actually great stuff in those days. I loved it. It was a magazine people read. It was interesting and it was a liberal magazine. It's great being the token

conservative on a liberal magazine. Yeah, totally right. So Steve, I do agree that I didn't mean to suggest that these were unprincipled objections by Senators Lee and Cruz at all. I do agree that they have they're fighting to make this bill more conservative, and I respect them for doing so, and I cheer them on, and I hope they're successful. But I think the details do matter here, because I think a lot of what the political dynamic, the intra-conservative political dynamic is on this bill is because people in the media, people, political commentators and politicians themselves,

all were afraid in 2015 and 2016, 2014, 2013, to say that, look, if we only have 52 Senate seats, we're not going to be able to repeal all of Obamacare. That the reconciliation process doesn't allow us to repeal all of Obamacare. We can only repeal the taxing and spending parts of Obamacare. We can't repeal as much of the regulatory elements of Obamacare through reconciliation. I think there was not a really effective management of expectations. I certainly personally tried to do that, but I often got criticized for it. Like, oh, Vic, you're such a squish. You're saying that

we won't be able to repeal all of Obamacare with 50 votes in the Senate. Didn't Obamacare pass with 50 votes in the Senate? I'm like, no, it didn't. It passed with 60 votes. And so there was just a lot of confusion around that. And I think that's part of this sort of, you know, oh, you know, the sad trumpet, sad trombone. We aren't repealing all of Obamacare in this bill. This bill repeals all of Obamacare's taxes except the Cadillac tax, which it proposes to 2026. It repeals all of Obamacare's Medicaid expansion. And to your critique, Steve, that it replaces the Medicaid expansion with tax credits to buy private

insurance. Well, remember, what Republicans campaigned on was not repealing Obamacare and going home. It was repealing and replacing Obamacare with reforms that worked for the people who've been priced out of the market because of 70 years of dumb federal policies that have made health insurance unaffordable for tens of millions of Americans. So that's very much consistent with what Republicans have done. By the way, on this point of, is this a new entitlement? It absolutely is not a new entitlement. Think about it this way. Republicans are not repealing Obamacare's and Medicare cuts, which are worth about $850 billion over 10 years. So if you net out the fact that they're not repealing the Medicare cuts

with what they're doing on the tax credit side, the end result is a significant spending cut relative to the status quo ante of 2009. And also, I know you said let's not delve into the details here, but the details matter. I think part of the reason why there's been this kind of shrug of the shoulders among conservatives is because there hasn't been yet a full appreciation of some of the subtleties and details of this bill which are going to give states enormous flexibility to get out from under these Obamacare regulations and also the regulations that govern the Medicaid program so states can have more ability and more sovereignty

in the way they manage these safety net programs. Hey, Vic Peter here. I think Steve has one more question. I want to get one in, if I may, myself. Let's assume, let's just dream a big dream here. Let's assume that this passes the Senate next week and that we get some kind of reconciliation or the House simply takes up the Senate. Let's assume that this is on Donald Trump's

desk before the August recess and he signs it and it's done. If that dream were to come true, what difference would the American people feel by the time of the midterm elections in the autumn of 2018? Any? Yeah, great question. So I think you're going to see a number of things. One, the impact of the tax cuts, the repeal of the Obamacare tax cuts will do a lot for economic growth,

will do a lot for the stock market. I think that's going to be a real near-term effect between now and 2018 because Obamacare contains such a large tax on investment income. That's number one in terms of short-term effects. Number two, I think you'll see insurers reenter the individual market because a big part of why they've exited is that these regulations that have driven premiums and driven prices up, some of them will be repealed and rolled back such that premiums can come down, and younger people will reenter the market. So you'll see states like, for example, Texas, where I live, as you know, which didn't expand Medicaid, be able to expand coverage to a lot of people

who are otherwise priced out of the market in ways that are much more market-oriented than what they're allowed to today. So I think there's going to be some effects by the midterm. Of course, a lot of this bill, because it really is designed to take about three years to really fully go into effect. Right. It's kind of like Obamacare did. The challenge is that with health care, it takes a while for the insurance companies

and the other players to actually adjust to the new laws of the land and orient themselves accordingly. So you can't really just dump things on immediately. But I'll tell you this. If this bill passes, like you said, I think it's going to energize the conservative base. It's going to energize Republicans to say, hey, we can actually get things done if we control the levers of government. We can actually move the ball down the field, cut taxes, cut spending, reduce the role of

the federal government in our lives. And I think that that'll be a mandate for further reforms. Steve Hayes, he's persuaded you, hasn't he? Not quite. He's very smart. He's very smart and he makes very good arguments think was very clear-eyed and straightforward about this. And Phil writes, if this bill passes as written, there's very little reason to believe that the long- the fact that Congress will follow through on the hundreds of billions of dollars in spending it's using to sustain Obamacare. And I guess my question, at the risk of oversimplifying, isn't this sort of like me saying to you, I'm going to do nothing but eat wings and drink beer for five years. But in five years, I'm going to go on an all-fish, no-alcohol diet and really get into shape.

I mean, isn't that what this is? You're front-loading the good stuff, you're front-loading the fun stuff, and then the difficulties come down the road. So Phil, as a friend of mine, I have great respect for him, but I find this argument absurd, and I'll tell you why. If we did nothing, if we failed to pass this bill, and the end result was that Obamacare continued to collapse, but it was now Republicans' fault, do we seriously believe that would lead to more spending cuts, that that would lead to more entitlement reform than this bill would achieve?

Absolutely not. I think we've grown so accustomed to losing that we've forgotten what it's like to win, to adopt some of our president's language. I think that's what's really going on. We've become so pessimistic about our own ability to limit government that when the opportunity to limit government is right in front of us, we don't recognize it. And that's what this bill would do. This bill would dramatically reform the system. By the way, it's not like, to your point, Steve, that somehow there's some goodies in the front and there's spending cuts in the back. The spending cuts start pretty early on in this bill. And when the CBO estimate comes out, whether you agree with the CBO or not, it'll show that.

There are spending cuts right away. It's not like there's spending increases in the beginning and then spending cuts later. No, there are spending cuts all the way through the 10-year period that the CBO scores its bill. And that's why liberals are complaining so much about it, right? So I wouldn't agree with that characterization at all. And I do think that it's a very dangerous time for the conservative movement right now that we have forgotten to understand what it's like to win and to move the ball down the field. What is it that the left has been so good at doing for 100 years? They take the half a loaf and they build more of the welfare state. They take another half of a loaf and they build the

welfare state. And we don't think about it at the time because it's just an incremental victory for them. But over decades, over decades, over decades, they've built this gigantic entitlement state. And we haven't been willing to do the same thing. We're insisting on the 80-yard bomb for the touchdown instead of the three yards and a cloud of dust. And we complain about the three yards and a cloud of dust. And we should really recognize what a historic achievement this bill would be. Ovik Roy, thank you very much. Ovik Roy has a plane to catch, but in the meantime, you should all know that he's the smartest man in America on health care and the president of the newly launched Foundation

for Research on Equal Opportunity. Ovik, thank you. I've got to get you in front of my mom sometime, Peter. Okay, deal, deal. Gentlemen, I've got to do another spot, and then I'll come right back to you for a closing chat. Texture. Magazines are more than just something to flip through in the checkout line at the grocery store. They're informative.

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He doesn't have them now. But, you know, I thought Ovik made a great point about Democrats. Democrats realize that politics is a team sport. You know, you're not going to get everything you want. And I don't think these four conservatives, well, they'll some things but they won't get everything uh and and uh and i think i'm not i really think all four of them are going to figure out that um that you know it's still worthwhile uh signing on nobody's better in in the senate that i've seen over the last decades better than putting together a coalition of a party from one end to the other and i can remember when oh i forget what it was on that mcconnell did it a number it has done it a number

of times where he'd start with olympia snow on the left right and wind up with the the most conservative member on the right whether it was ted cruz or somebody else he could put them all together it took a while and i'm not sure whether he will have enough time to do it, but he could bring them together, and that's what has to happen. If some of these conservative, if any of the Republican senators don't vote for the bill just because there's something they don't like about it, that is self-indulgence. We saw some of that in the House when the first time the health care bill came up.

And a lot of the people who were doing the self-indulging went back home and found out that the conservatives back in the hinterlands didn't like what they did. They want to get rid of Obamacare and replace it with something. And anyway, the team sport, this is a team sport and Republicans better act that way in the Senate. Steve Hayes, you now have it from Ovik Roy and your friend and hero Fred Barnes. This is a case in which the perfect could be the enemy of the good and the good is pretty darned good, so they all ought to fall in line and vote for this thing, right? I think that's exactly the argument that Mitch McConnell and others are going to make to

the conservatives who have expressed skepticism and to the moderates who could bail if the conservatives get some of the asks that we know they're going to make here in the next week. I mean, I think it's more complicated than that, to be honest. I mean, you have smart people, thoughtful people who truly believe that this would be worse than doing nothing. Michael Cannon from the Cato Institute wrote an article yesterday, said this would be worse. Republicans wanted to improve health care long term.

They'd be better off not voting for this. Phil Klein, who I mentioned earlier in my discussion with with Ovik, said this bill reads less like an Obamacare repeal and more like an Obamacare rescue package. I think you're going to hear those kinds of arguments consistently from these conservatives. Part of it will be tactical. They're trying to move the bill, the legislation to the right and trying to get these things that, that they've asked for. But part of it is because they believe that and they're making, they have principled objections to this. I,

it, I think it'd be a very tough vote. I think it'd be a very tough vote in the Senate to, to know which one is the right course. And so, so you're saying you, you, if you were a Senator yourself,

you still at, at this moment, you don't know which way you'd vote yourself? I don't know which way I'd vote myself. I think there are compelling arguments. The argument that both Fred Novick made for taking a half-step is a compelling argument if you believe that this is the half-step. I have concerns about the Medicaid reforms, expanding Medicaid, allowing to continuing to allow Medicaid to expand through 2020 and then promising to reform it beyond that while you're providing an additional hundred billion dollars in Obamacare subsidies in the short term. That's a pretty significant tradeoff in the history, certainly of those kinds of deals. Isn't a pretty one in Washington.

Okay, fellas, Fred has to run off to Fox. So here's the last question for you. Well, this is going to be a second to last question. Here's the second to last question. Here's where we might be just a week from today. We may have a healthcare bill that has passed the Senate. We have James Comey. James Comey took his best shot at the president, and there was no evidence of collusion, let alone of impeachable offenses. And they all took their best shot at Jeff Sessions. And Jeff Sessions may have had a fumbly piece of testimony, but there's no crisis that's going to arise because of Jeff Sessions' testimony. We've got foreign affairs where Trump had a, broadly speaking, successful tour of Saudi Arabia. He didn't say everything he should have said in Europe, but he laid down the law for NATO in a way that was reasonable.

They do need to pony up. And now that he's hired his personal lawyer, even the president's tweets are getting tamped down and made more reasonable. So one week from today, we might be in a position in which the sense of crisis has passed. The Republicans in Congress have begun to move legislation and this country could

finally begin to go forward. Steve, how likely is that? I mean, I wouldn't bet on it. There's always a chance of a tweet tomorrow, right? Look, I think that the best way to look at the Trump administration is to assume chaos, right? We're going to continue to have chaos. The rosy scenarios, these sunny outlooks, I think, are not likely to visit us. But that doesn't mean that he can't do something out of chaos. I mean, you know, it becomes a lot harder now that he's moved from his sort of chief executive first 100 days to a place where he's got to push these legislators, these lawmakers to follow his lead. But he's going to try and will this this will be a real test of how the man who wrote the art of the deal is at actually getting the deal done.

Fred, you know, I look, I don't worry about the Republicans on Capitol Hill following Trump. I think Trump needs to follow them. I mean, they're at it toward Trump when it comes to legislation, and whether it's health care or tax reform, is, look, we'll call you when we need you. And I think that message is, they've gotten that to him, whether he will do it or not, I don't know. You know, there's a myth in Washington that somehow because the White

House is chaotic and Trump is whatever he is that nothing can be done on Capitol Hill that Republicans can't win on Capitol Hill because the White House is so I hate the word dysfunctional but

maybe that fits. But in fact, under McConnell, Republicans are moving ahead on health care, and I think tax reform will be a lot easier. Now, look, they may not succeed in these things, but they can certainly try, and when they do, I think Trump will go along with it. So here's the last question. There was a lot of conversation, and we had, the three of us, when you fellows were out here in California and we taped a show together, we had one of these conversations ourselves. And the question was, what effect will Donald Trump have on not just on the Republican Party but on the conservative movement in which Fred Barnes and Steve Hayes and Peter Robinson have spent their whole professional lives? And it looks to me as though his effect is pretty close to zero. Mitch McConnell knows a conservative bill.

You know who's conservative. You know who isn't. There hasn't really been any change in the conservative program. On the contrary, Donald Trump and the cabinet appointments and the legislation he's chosen to support and in his actions overseas and naming Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court. Trump is moving in the is accepting more of the conservative agenda without altering it than I think any of us would have supposed before he was elected. Is that fair, Steve? Peter, I so badly want to keep trying.

At some point, at some point, it's going to happen. No, I don't agree with you at all. I think we've just begun to see the effects that Donald Trump has had on the conservative movement. I think you're right, just from a descriptive standpoint, to say that he's he's been a more conservative president, certainly than I thought. You said then you thought, I think, than than I thought, you said than you thought, I think than Fred thought, but that doesn't mean that he hasn't changed conservatism or that we're not in the midst of a change of conservatism or the understanding of conservatism that is evolving. And look, I think you've had conservatives in Congress, I've had conversations with some of them, members of the House and members of the Senate as well, who said, you know, ask us what a conservative Republican is today.

Is that somebody who agrees with Donald Trump on trade, who wants to pull back from the world the way that Donald Trump talks about, even if he's not doing it on a daily basis? I mean, we've had this sort of ad hoc back and forth on foreign policy. Ask a conservative Republican what that means, and you'll get 20 different definitions. And I think that suggests to me that he'll continue to redefine conservatism as this administration works toward 2020. Fred Barnes, the last word. Well, Peter, I so desperately want to agree with you that I will agree with you. The truth is, look, Steve pointed out on trade, that is the one area where Trump, you know, one thing about Trump, he is not a conservative.

He doesn't have an ideology. but he has adopted on issue after issue except for trade what conservatives have been trying to get for years and maybe he'll succeed I think he's off to a pretty good start there I don't think he's I think we have this wrong it's not that Trump is reshaping conservatism

it's not reshaping conservatism. Conservatism is not reshaping Trump, but it is what has provided him with an agenda. tidy personal life. He's lived in Manhattan his entire, Queens and Manhattan his entire life, and for the purposes of this campaign, or so I thought, he positioned himself as pro-life. He has not budged off that position one inch. He's just stuck with it. Isn't that striking? What does that say? That said, he's imitating

George H.W. Bush, who did the same thing. Actually, Bush did it because that was Reagan's position. He can change his positions on things and adopt new ones that are almost always conservative ones because there's nothing standing in his way. He doesn't have some ideology that he has to check with. Now, wait a minute, can I do this? And I mean, so I think it's remarkable how much he has adopted

in conservatism. Again, the big problem is trade, and there can be big problems there, but we'll see. So far, so good. Ladies and gentlemen, you have just heard Weekly Standard Editor-in-Chief Steve Hayes and Weekly Standard Executive Editor Fred Barnes demonstrate why the Weekly Standard podcast and the Weekly Standard magazine itself are indispensable. These guys disagree, but they do so with civility and a sense of humor and deep information. Fred and Steve, thank you. You're welcome. Steve, Steve, thank you. You're welcome. Steve, thanks for having us. I'm a little more reluctant to thank you, Steve, because you disagree with me so completely, but still,

I find it within my heart to thank you. Thank you, everybody. One of these days. One of these days. This podcast was brought to you by Bombfell and Texture. Please support them for supporting us. Visit the Ricochet store. Lots of great Ricochet swag in there.

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join today on our brand new podcast listener tier, $2.50 a month. That's cheap. One final note, please join us for a special live taping of Uncommon Knowledge with Peter Robinson on Sunday, July 23rd at the Reagan Library in City Valley, California, where Pat Sajak will be interviewing me about Ronald Reagan's 1987, 30 years ago, tear down this wall, Mr. Gorbachev speech.

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Lay back, it's all been done before And if you could only let it be You will see I like you the way you are When we're driving in your car And you're talking to me one on one But you've become somebody else Around everyone else

You're watching your back like you can't relax You're trying to be cool You look like a fool to me Tell me Why do you have to go and make things so complicated? I see the way you're acting like you're somebody else Gets me frustrated Life's like this for you

You fall and you crawl and you break and you take what you get and you turn it into Honesty, promise me I'm never gonna find you begging No, no, no You come over unannounced Dressed up like you're something else Where you are and where it's at. You see, you're making me laugh out when you strike your pose. Take off all your pretty clothes.

You know you're not fooling anyone when you become somebody else. Found everyone else watchingin' your back Like you can't relax Tryin' to be cool You look like a fool to me Tell me Why do you have to tell me Things so complicated

I see no way Ricochet Join the conversation Life's like this You fall and you crawl and you break Ricochet. Join the conversation. No, no, no, no No, no, no No, no, no