The following podcast contains explicit language.

Hello and welcome to the Slate Political GabFest for June 30th, 2017.

Mitch McConnell really does have a secret plan edition.

I'm David Plotz of Atlas Obscura.

I'm back, but we have lost John Dickerson

now. That's okay because Jacob Weisberg of Trump cast and the head honcho of Slate is here

with us. Hello, Jacob. Hello, David. We haven't lost John. John's just temporarily. He's in

the wilderness of Aspen. It's very confusing there and hard to figure out where you are amidst all the yummy food and beautiful mountains. He'll be back, though.

And that is Emily Bazelon of the New York Times Magazine. Of course, hello, Emily.

Hello, hello. On this week's Gab Fest, is the Senate health care bill dead or is it just resting?

Then a huge week at the Supreme Court, we'll talk about wedding cake baking, travel ban, breaking, Neil Gorsuch, something that rhymes with baking, snaking. Then the White House's war on the press. Yeah, Neil Gorsuch, taking, exactly, or takings, maybe. Then the White House's war on the press is the White House winning that war. Plus, we'll have cocktail chatter. Mitch McConnell delayed a vote on the Senate version of the health care bill this week when it became clear that he lacked the votes to even bring the bill to the floor.

The bill, which was crafted in secret, has faced savage criticism from everyone who cares

about health care from also the poor, old people, people with disabilities, children.

It has 12% support.

Human beings.

There's 12% support in one poll I saw, which is less than lice.

Support for the bill has dropped 24 percent. Wait, who supports lice? Can you talk about that? I don't know. That's interesting.

15 percent of people just support anything or 20 percent. Exactly. Lice? Yeah. What about tics?

Dubious. Dubious fact. I think before the French election, Francois Hollande was down to 4% approval rating. I wonder how that's possible. Yeah. Lice don't have 12%. I don't believe that. Maybe we don't know as much about lice as we think we do. Was that in the same poll as the Senate and House health care bills? Were they like, ACA, Bricka, Lice, Ticks? I just did. The problem was I just read the headline. So I didn't, I didn't dig in. But maybe Kevin will figure this out as we're taping. Among Republicans, support for the bill has dropped 24 points in the past couple of months. The CBO score

released on Monday found that the Senate bill would cost 22 million Americans, their insurance

of just about the same number as the House bill passed earlier this year would. And the Senate

bill does not solve any of the problems Republicans or Donald Trump report to want to solve.

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