Hey, everyone. We're here for another GabFest special. I'm pretending that I'm a news reporter.

John actually is a news reporter. David's phone connection didn't work. So it's just the two of us.

Okay. So the House health care bill has been pulled from the floor. It will knock him up for a vote today. John, what happened?

By the way, we should just note that this is our, this is a breaking news of breaking news. This is like our third update. We're basically one step away from being a wire service. So what happened was the Donald Trump said, come hell or high water, he's going to have them take the vote. That was either a big, big gamble, or it was a negotiating posture telling people that, you know, it's kind of the last tool you can use in the negotiator's toolkit. And then it didn't work. They couldn't get the

votes. Paul Ryan went over to the White House, explained that they couldn't get the votes. The

problem was the old bump in the rug problem. Every time they push down the bump in one place,

it shows up in another. So they were taking away the essential health minutes from not taking them

away, but allowing states to have control over them to win over conservative votes. But every time they got a couple over there, they lost moderate votes, including the chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, Freeling Eisen. So they couldn't get it. And so they had to pull the bill rather than have people embarrassed by taking a vote that would be politically painful for no purpose on the thing that died. Now, I'm not sure where we go from here.

Right. And I guess there's the question of substance. Does Obamacare continue without changes? Do the health care exchanges improve or decline? And then there's the

political fallout, which I think would be more immediate and kind of juicier. What are your

thoughts about that? Yeah, the political fallout, what interests me is, is Donald Trump going to

blame Paul Ryan? Now, he's told Robert Costa of the Washington Post, I don't blame Paul. Okay.

So that's what he's the reason this is important is obviously if they want to do anything on health care or anything on anything else, you know, they need to be in sync. And there's been a lot of finger pointing all day. Buses are idling as supporters of the president figure out who to throw under the bus. And most of them have picked Paul Ryan. And they've said, you know, well, Paul Ryan kind of hoodwinked him into this, and this was all Ryan's doing, and Trump put his faith in Ryan. They've been working hand-in-hand or hand-in-glove or in-sync since this started. So you can't really say that. And so the question is, what will the stories, the background stories and the

briefings that fill the papers, what are those going to look like? Is there going to be a lot

of blame of Paul Ryan, or is it going to be blame of the Freedom Caucus and those conservatives

in the Republican ranks who just wouldn't sign on to this bill? I think we see a bright line

that shows us the limitations of the president's power in his own party. That was something that we've learned. And then I think the question is, again, like, well, does he go up this hill again? Or does he move on to tax reform? Tax reform is not going to be any easier. Why not? Well, because you have competing priorities in tax reform the way you do on health care, and you have the lobbyists

getting involved at an even greater level, and the lobbyists raised the money for a lot of the

members. So you're going to have a lot of pushing and pulling. Max Bacchus worked on tax reform

with Dave Camp for five years, bipartisan effort, and it got nowhere because of all the nettlesome, difficult items in it.

And it's going to require this, again, strange marriage between Donald Trump, who likes things to be

pretty simple and straightforward, and Paul Ryan, who recognizes the complexity in some of these things.

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