Welcome to the Bloomberg P and L Podcast. I'm Pim Fox along with my co host Lisa Abramowitz. Each day we bring you the most important, noteworthy, and useful interviews for you and your money, whether at the grocery store or the trading floor. Find the Bloomberg P L Podcast on iTunes, SoundCloud and at Bloomberg dot com. Let's now turn to our own Supreme Court reporter for Bloomberg, Greg Store to give us a little bit of detail about this, and Greg, just to bring everyone also up to date.
The Dow Jones Industrial average a lower. Right now, markets are selling off that was down eight tens of a percent. The s also lower by about nineteen points. Greg, maybe you can give us your thoughts as to the tactics of the questioning and whether this will have any effect on the outcome of the nomination vote. Look, Democrats are doing basically what they averagised they were doing, which is first of all, trying to cast him as somebody who
sides with powerful institutions rather than the little guy. Uh. And they're raising questions about the extent of which he would rely on or instead overturned storied precedents like Roe v. Wade. Uh, you know it, this is probably not changing a lot of minds. But there are some Democrats who are still on the fence or havn't said what they'll do. And
I'm sure they're paying close attention. Greg. One particular item that caught my attention with the course it's refused to preview any possible ruling on President Trump's traveled than is this pretty much par for the course that any potential Supreme Court nominee would decline from talking about anything specific about anything unless it sort of setting stone. Yeah, and certainly a case that's in the in the courts right now.
This is a case that he knows there's an excellent chance he will actually have to ruin this in a matter of in a matter of a few months. I thought it was a fascinating exchange there with him and Senator a path lay here democrat from Vermont, where the Senator was trying to give him, you know, slight hypothetical variations like could you hit it all June Jews from entering the country, um, and you know, you know, could
we have a religious test? And uh, you know, generally Judge Gorsch, uh, you know, did try very hard to say. I can't commit myself to, uh, you know anything. There are these principles in the Constitution. There's equal protection, there's due process of law, there's you know, a statute that protects religious freedoms. Those all all make a difference. But I'm not going to tell you how I might rule
in a particular case. Greg can you comment on Senator arn Hatch, Republican from Utah, and his line of questioning in the context of not only this nomination hearing, but the lack of any hearing for the previous nominee to hold the Supreme Court chair, Merrick Garland, who was nominated by former President Barack Obama. Yeah, the I didn't catch all the exchange. But Republicans have been been making the point that, uh, you know this this was different. This
was an election year. We put the you know, it was basically up to the voters to decide do you want Donald Trump silling this seat or do you want Hillary Clinton filling the seat. The Republicans have made the case that, uh, this was a way to give the people a voice and who was going to be on the Supreme Court. Judge Gorset did at kind words about
Mary Garland at this hearing. Um, And I believe at one point one of the senators I'm forgetting which one, one of the Republican senators, forgot who he was talking to and actually referred to him as Judge Garland. Well, I guess that you're not the only one that's forgetting what's who's talking and who's on first, you know, just to put us into perspective, Greg, I mean, in general, do we get anything out of these hearings? Are they basically just an excuse to throw every single question you
could possibly imagine at somebody and see if they mess up. Um, that is a big part of it. Yes, Um, and uh. Of the answers are are fairly predictable, but there are some nuances and for people who are really watching the courts closely, Um, you know there's some good substance in the nitty gritty of of what they say. And in addition, I think you know people who might not agree with
a nominee about some things. Do you think there is some value in having Neil Gorsage say Roe v. Wade is a precedent of the court and it's entitled to respect. Um and uh, you know every nominee who has who has come before the Court, are come before the Judiciary Committee that I can recall has said something along those lines, and that there is some value in just having the person say say out loud that I'm not going to
immediately move to overturn precedents. I wonder if you could tell us a little bit about cases that are going to be coming before the Supreme Court and which ones you believe are going to have the most effect on business, but also on the legal issues that presented by President Donald Trump. Well, the travel band that we've already talked about, of course, is a big one that's hanging out there, and there's an excellent chance that gets to the Supreme
Court one way or another. Uh one. Uh. You know, we're going to see that the Court has been a little slow in taking cases while it's shorthanded. But if Judge Gorstch gets confirmed, I think you can imagine very quickly you'll start to see more cases about class action litigation and efforts to curb that. We may see a new case involving mandatory fees to unions, if you recall the Supreme Court deadlocked on that right after Justice Scalia
died um and we'll probably have issues about arbitration. Um, certainly we'll have more patent cases. You know, there's gonna be a lot of big business cases that Neil Gorcach is gonna have a chance to rule on. Greg Start, we really appreciate you joining us. I'm sure that it's going to be a busy couple of days for you, and frankly a couple of weeks. Great story, Supreme Court reporter for Bloomberg talking about, uh, the Neil Gorcerge confirmation
hearings that we were listening into. He is testifying in front of the Senate about his views and anything under the sun in his path to go to the Supreme Court. In addition to hearings at the Senate Judiciary Committee on the nomination of Judge Neil Gorsuch to take a place on the Supreme Court. There was a meeting today between President Donald Trump and Republican leaders of the House to talk about repeal and replace the American the Affordable Care
Act for Me, sometimes known as Obamacare. Anna Edney is our Bloomberg healthcare reporter and uh, and I'm wondering if you could describe for us exactly what did we learn from that meeting. Well, what we heard that President Trump said was if this healthcare bill doesn't pass, the Republicans are going to lose their seats in the elections. So he basically said, do this or you know, bad things
could happen. And there were Republicans who are against this, UM, who don't want to vote yes for it, and they still feel that way. They don't. I don't think that UM, his please kind of changed that at all. I think they are actually afraid of the opposite if if they do vote for it, that the Republicans are going to lose their majority. So can you put this into perspective as far as what the main issues are that some
of the Republican representatives are fighting back on. Well, the ones who are still against it right now, a lot of them are in a very conservative group of about forty members. They're called the Freedom Caucus, and their biggest issue is they just want a complete repeal of Obamacare UM, and a lot of that isn't in this legislation because of the way that it has to be done to
get through the Senate. They're using this sort of complicated process called reconciliation, and so they're not able to deal with a lot of them, for example, the regular Leasians on insurance companies. UM. That kind of tells them what sort of things they have to cover and things like that, UM, and those won't be repealed in this this piece of what Republicans plan to do. And those who are against it want that done. They don't feel like they have
assurances that it will get done down the line. They don't know that they can um, exactly trust the Desk Secretary to do that on his own through regulation and that something like that would stand up in court. Does the President need these members of which it described the Republican the Freedom Caucus, such as Congressman Mark Meadows in North Carolina? Does he need their votes in order to get this to the Senate? He needs at least some
of their votes. UM. You know, they can't lose any more than twenty one members and so you've got they need to get to to sixteen. UM. And so he does need to flip some of those in, even in
the Freedom Caucus. And you know, right now we don't know they are opposed to it as a block, but we know that UM, a lot of them are opposed to it, and that the chairman who you mentioned Mark Meadows has said, you know, we have enough to block this bill right now, and so somewhere along the line between that one Thursday, Um, you know, Paul Ryan and
Donald Trump are going to have to flip some of them. Well, and you know, talking about Thursday, can you walk us through what happens if President Trump and how Speaker Ryan do not get sufficient votes to get this through on Thursday? What happens next if they don't have enough votes, they're basically just going to have to go back to the drawing board. And you know, but but they have time
to do that. I mean, given that what's going on with with Obamacare and getting the insurance companies queued up for any potential changes, there's not a lot of time to do it at all. Um. But the process I mentioned earlier that they need to get it through the Senate, this thing has to start in the House. So there's really they've to find out what they can give to them, the insurers or I'm sorry to the conservative Republicans to
be able to get this through. That might be something like moving a little quicker on those regulations to undo some of the um the limits on insurers that Tom Prices said he would do, it might be bringing most to light because we haven't seen those yet, and that might give them some sort of assurance that this piece of the puzzle that they've been promised is going to happen.
There any ideas to who would be most affected, meaning the company's most affected, if indeed the plan as it stands is actually passed by the Senate right now, that would be hospitals. They stand to lose, you know, a lot of money because of uncompensated care, which kind of was the case before Obamacare, and Obamacare has been able to decrease that because a lot more people had coverage, a lot more people were able to qualify for Medicaid, and so hospitals we're getting paid when people went to
the emergency room. And under this plan, um in, they'll be twenty four million more people without insurance um than would have been if Obamacare had stayed the law. And so that's a lot of money for hospitals, and they're already stretched very thin and and sort of closing in record numbers. Anna Edney, we really appreciate you taking the time to speak with us. Anna Edney as Bloomberg Healthcare reporter, talking about the GOP's plan to replace Obamacare and what
has to happen on Thursday for this to proceed. Right now, just to cut you up with markets, as Greg Jarrett was saying, you did have a stock sell off that is more significant than we've seen over the past couple of days. Also in the bond market, you could see the sixth day rally in thirty year treasuries is the biggest since September. So definitely a risk off sentiment. Thanks
for listening to the Bloomberg pen L podcast. You can subscribe and listen to interviews at iTunes, SoundCloud, or whatever podcast platform you prefer. I'm Pim Fox. I'm out there on Twitter at pim Fox. I'm out there on Twitter at Lisa Abramo. It's one before the podcast. You can always catch us worldwide on Bloomberg Radio.