JOHN KING: Let's close as we always
do-- head around the Inside Politics table,
ask our great reporters to share a little nugget
from their notebooks, get you out ahead of the political news
just around the corner.
Julie Davis?
JULIE DAVIS: Well with all this talk of health care,
there hasn't been a whole lot of attention
to the tax reform effort that's been underway now for months.
The White House is starting to kind of panic
about the prospects of not getting this done this year.
And so what we're seeing, what we're
hearing from these meetings that have been going on
behind the scenes--
Steven Mnuchin, the Treasury Secretary, Gary Cohn, the NEC
director, and the top congressional leaders
on the Republican side--
is that they're sort of starting to think about potentially
trimming their sales, and not doing a big massive tax reform,
but instead a tax cut--
not necessarily getting down all the way to 15%,
but maybe drifting up more toward 20% or higher.
And even then the prospects of that are very much in doubt.
And there's a lot of uncertainty about whether they're
even going to be able to get that this year.
JOHN KING: Whoa, that would be a huge setback.
Tick-tock goes the clock.
Molly Ball?
MOLLY BALL: A bipartisan couple of senators,
Dick Durbin and Lindsey Graham, reintroduced
the Dream Act this week.
This of course, is the proposed legislation
that would grant a form of amnesty
to young illegal immigrants who have been in the country
for a long time and meet certain requirements.
And it might seem like a strange time to be doing that,
but this administration has sent very conflicting signals
about DACA, which is a similar, but executive
program that exists.
There are some state attorney general's
that have imposed a deadline on the administration
to basically tell them whether this is going to go or stay.
They have been issuing work permits.
And so Lindsey Graham at the press conference introducing
this said, you know, President Trump you can really
sort of act against type.
You could solve this problem.
They're hoping that there is a chance for this.
JOHN KING: Hmm, that would be a defining
moment for the President.
Michael?
MICHAEL SHEAR: We talked about Anthony Scaramucci, obviously.
One thing looking forward we might see is--
and this is always depending on Donald Trump himself
and his desires, but there could be an opportunity for a press
reboot over some of the issues that the press corps has been
arguing with the White House for access
to the president, press conferences,
on camera briefings.
There's a new White House Correspondents' Association
president who's coming in as it happens at exactly
the same time that we have a new communications
director and head of the communications shop.
So will the president allow there to be a kind of reboot
on some of these issues?
I guess we'll see.
JOHN KING: We will see.
Time will tell, is that how they say it?
- The NAACP meeting next week starting Monday in Baltimore--
and really kind of beginning the most important stretch
of their annual conference.
The question there, how does the oldest civil rights
organization in the country reboot
and re-imagine themselves in the Trump era,
in the era of Black Lives Matter,
and in the era of resistance.
They invited Donald Trump.
He said, no, he wasn't going to come.
The White House has said that they'd
be happy to work with the organization
and be in touch with the organization.
Who will be there?
Eric Holder will be there.
He'll be talking about gerrymandering--
something that's very important to Democrats particularly.
Also it's being looked at as something of a 20/20 cattle
call.
Also in attendance Cory Booker, Kamala Harris,
and Bernie Sanders.
And Bernie Sanders, of course, struggled a bit
with getting African-American support
when he ran last go-round.
So we'll see what those folks have to offer.
JOHN KING: Fun week ahead. I'll keep an eye on that.
I'll close with this, the past few days
have caused a disturbing chill among a lot of people
from the worker bees to cabinet secretaries
across the executive branch.
The White House shake up just part of it.
More troubling to many was how the President
in that remarkable New York Times interview
so publicly and repeatedly threw one
of his earliest supporters, the Attorney General Jeff Sessions,
under the bus.
Among those who found that unprofessional to say
the least, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson,
the former ExxonMobil CEO.
Secretary Tillerson has a long list of disagreements
with the White House from personnel fights
to big policy disagreements.
That list grew even longer this past week.
His friends outside Washington for some time
have been saying that Tillerson talks
of calling it quits around the holidays so he can say he
gave it a year.
It could be just fresh venting, but keep
an eye on foggy bottom.
In the past day or two, there are rumblings
Secretary Tillerson is actively debating
a much earlier exit strategy.
We'll keep an eye on that.
That's it for Inside Politics.
Again, thanks for sharing your Sunday.
Hope you can join us weekdays as well.
That's noon eastern up.
Next state, of the Union with Jake Tapper
and a live interview with the new man
running the White House communication
shop, Anthony Scaramucci.