Well, if they couldn’t fly everyone to the deck of the Missouri, this will have to do, I guess. From Vox:

With every Senate Democrat opposed to the bill, the publicly announced opposition of three Senate Republicans — Rand Paul (KY), John McCain (AZ), and Susan Collins (ME) — was enough to ensure it was headed for defeat. So rather than force vulnerable senators to take another politically damaging vote certain to end in failure, McConnell has decided not to hold the vote at all. “We don’t have the votes,” Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-LA), a co-author of the bill, said at a press conference Tuesday. “And since we don’t have the votes, we will postpone that vote.”

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), the other co-author, was publicly optimistic and asserted that his bill would pass eventually. “We’re coming back to this after taxes,” he said. But the cancellation of this week’s vote has major implications. That’s because on Saturday, September 30, Congress’s current “budget reconciliation” instructions, which set up the special process that lets the Senate advance a bill with a simple majority rather than 60 votes, are set to expire.

This is more than simply splashing another rickety aircraft that never took off. In one bill, almost the entire ideological superstructure of modern Republican conservative social policy came apart at the seams. The Graham-Cassidy bill was a dog’s breakfast of misbegotten assumptions and Tenth Amendment wet dreams, all the things that have driven Republican domestic policy since Ronald Reagan descended upon the Capitol. It evinced no more familiarity with how most Americans experience the healthcare system than it did with the proceedings of the Romanian parliament. In fact, it evinced very little familiarity with human beings at all, so much so that even Republican governors ran screaming from it, refusing to take part in a catastrophic suicide mission just because the president* needed a win.

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The bill’s prospects worsened by the day, and Monday was the worst day of all. First, there was the Senate hearing marked by video of protesters in wheelchairs being hauled off by Capitol cops. Then, there was the announcement by Senator Susan Collins that she was the third (and final) no vote. The CBO chimed in with a partial score that was as horrific as all the others have been. Then, the unexpectedly formidable tag team of Amy Klobuchar and Bernie Sanders had Graham and Cassidy for after-dinner mints on CNN. The fact is that this bill never should have been written, never should have gotten out of committee, and certainly never come this close to final passage.

The entire ideological superstructure of modern Republican conservative social policy came apart.

(Among other things, this episode has left in ruins the credibility of Cassidy, a heretofore obscure Louisiana senator and, god help us, a physician himself. His prevarication on behalf of the bill got so frenzied as the time for a decision came closer that, if things had gone on another two days, Cassidy likely would have said that his bill would raise the dead through the “power of the free market.”)

Alas, as should be obvious, this isn’t the last round that we will go on this, at least if and until the Democrats achieve some sort of congressional majority. But the bad faith that surrounded this attempt was so noxious and thick that it makes me dubious of any “bipartisan” plan to fix the ACA that includes any senator beholden to Mitch McConnell. This is probably unfair, but when you see McConnell personally kill an ongoing bipartisan effort—the so-called Alexander-Murray plan—and then blame “the Democrats” for its demise, it’s really hard to accept that he’s going to do anything short of sabotaging any attempt to leave any part of the ACA intact.

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The simple fact is that the ACA places in the federal government powers that most Republicans do not believe it should have, and that it helps people that most Republican believe do not deserve help, either through their own sloth, or through some inscrutable divine selection to be found between the lines of the Book of Deuteronomy. That will not change. They will be back on this—probably after they bungle their attempts to “reform” the tax code so as to shove more of the country’s wealth upwards. And if you think their calculations at the moment don’t include John McCain’s death and Robert Menendez’s criminal trial, you’re fooling yourself. This is politics at its most elemental, dealing with the most elemental thing in every human life—good health.

Cassidy likely would have said his bill would raise the dead through the “power of the free market."

But, for now, all they have left for an alibi is that they “promised” their voters that they would rid those voters of the shackles imposed by the ACA. They are still imprisoned by their fears, perhaps not entirely unfounded, of their party’s enraged base. There will be continuing sabotage at the state level, and more hysterical headlines, and there ever will be lies and an endless parade of strawmen. The fact is, however, that any strategy that involves exhausting the opposition seems doomed to fail. You spend decades building a party on the presumption that government is wrong and then fate gives you a chance to run the thing, and you run it over your own feet, because that’s what you’ve set yourself up to do.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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