Corker: I Wouldn't Support Trump Again
KING: Welcome back. We expect to see the President arrive in Capitol Hill any moment now. And as he arrives, another personnel feud stealing most of the pre-mail (ph) tension. But when the President gets inside, the lunch with Senate Republicans, the goal is to talk tax reform and to plot a strategy that keeps lawmakers and the White House on the same page. Now, follow politics, you know, tax reform has long been a capital P, priority for the Republican Party. But there are already some complications. Now, the President tweeting just yesterday he won't touch a 401 k. That's good for your wallet. His voters probably loved that. But it was a constrained on the tax writers who were trying to say policy. They don't like that interference. President's tweet to some conjures that goes of the Obamacare repeal debate. Which failed in part some Republicans say because the President repeatedly jumped into the policy fights and repeatedly changed his mind. Ask lawmakers now, they understand they better pass tax reform before they go before the voters in 2018.</s>SEN. MARCO RUBIO (R), FLORIDA: Come back to tax reform.</s>UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Yes.</s>RUBIO: I don't know how you as a party continue to run in 2018 unless you get them both done. Now I like to move to Anna (ph). By the way, I agree with that 100 percent. The reason why I came back here, we're not going to do those things, there's no point in being here.</s>KING: If we're not going to do these things, there's really no point in being there. I mean, is that the biggest momentum for tax reform right now? It's not about cutting corporate taxes. It's not about trying to come up with a plan to help the middle class. It's about -- we promised to repeal and replace Obamacare. We didn't. We promised we would repeal tax reform, we haven't yet. If you had the President's promise for infrastructure, that was supposed to happen this year, it won't. That we've had all Republicans in Washington for 10 months now and when it comes to big legislative victories, they have zero.</s>KAPUR: Here's one way to think about this. Republicans say in the next months or two they want to rewrite the tax code. Do the most dramatic revenge since 1986 but we don't even know basic details like where the tax brackets will be. We know there are trillions of dollars short in revenue. They've taken things off the table like the healthcare deduction. They don't want to repeal mortgage interest. They want to keep charitable giving. This is where the money is. How you get that revenue while keeping these things off the table. It's a huge challenge for them. And we barely even seen the lobbying once again. That is when things really get difficult. This is the easy part, you know, passing a budget vehicle that's nonbinding, that disallows them to begin the debate. President Trump is there. I think he has a huge role to play in this. Let's see what he says.</s>JENNA JOHNSON, POLITICAL REPORTER, THE WASHINGTON POST: And the big thing is -- I mean, Republicans needs a victory. They wanted victory for 2018. But the other thing that they need to keep in mind is they need to do something that makes the lives of their voters better. You know, some sort of tax cut that they actually see more money in their household. We're heading into open enrollment season for those who have insurance plans through healthcare.gov. Some people in some states don't even know what insurance companies might be on those exchanges. There's all of the money for advertising, a lot of that has been cut. People aren't really sure where to go. They're not seeing those premiums go down like President Trump had promised them that they would. They want to see their lives change. And in the next 12 months, they just need a little bit of something.</s>KING: Go ahead.</s>WARREN: If the mid terms were presidential election and this were Trump running for re-election, he might actually have something to run on here, at least the economy is doing pretty well. He's done a couple of things on national security. He's gotten Neil Gorsuch passed. The problem is that it's Congress who's up for re-election or at least a bit chunk of Congress for reelection. And so, while you have all of these sort of positive things Republicans could talk about, what they need to have is some kind of legislative win to say, look, we can't just talk about the economy in sort of general strokes. We need to say, we passed these tax reforms and look how it's improved your life.</s>KING: But is there any evidence before us that the lessons of Obamacare, the debacle, is that, a, Republicans on Capitol Hill will learn to compromise on policy which they could not do on Obamacare and, b, the President will learn to moderate his behavior in terms of Donald say negotiations are now open when the speaker tells you this is the best deal I can get. Don't say anything. Don't open the door to negotiations. Or to celebrate a health care bill and then call it mean. After that, we'll vote. It's not just the President. We focus on the President sometimes because he did do things and undermine the Republicans at certain times in the argument. But they also would refuse they couldn't compromise. Now they have very strongly held positions. But you're going to have the same issues whether to state the local from tax reduction for the big state Republicans or somebody saying this doesn't help the middle class enough?</s>BASH: Look, this is different because Democrats would not play ball in anything that is called or even smells like Obamacare repeal. They just wouldn't. Democrats want to play ball on tax reform. If it's done in ways that many of the incumbents endangered Democrats up for reelection next year can say, you know what? I work with in a bipartisan way to make your lives better. To give you more money in your pocket. The question is whether the President can take that ball and run with it. he met last week with some of those Democrats and the way they tell it, he promise on the moon and the stars and, you know, and everything that goes along with it. He made it sound like he was willing to make sure that there's a little pass tax cut into other things that don't appear to be in what is beginning to through the Senate Republican led committees. The question is whether the President can actually bring them together. It is possible.</s>KING: Hold this thought one second. We'll sneak in a quick break because we the President is arriving on Capitol Hill. When he gets there, he'll walk in. We'll get some great drama. We'll get conversation there to report you. The President is up there. Big policy initiative and as we've been discussing, some key personal feuds to settle as well.