How close the Senate Republicans are to repealing the Affordable Care Act is anyone’s guess. The same holds what for a replacement bill will truly look like. Negotiations, to the horror of anyone with a half-functioning conscience, are occurring in secret, and no Republican will reveal what sort of punishment is in store for the most vulnerable Americans.

Democrats in the Senate, unlike the House, hold some leverage. Republicans can afford to only lose two votes and still pass a bill, and there are enough moderates from swing states to balk at any radical restructuring of American healthcare. The Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, would like to hold a vote before the 4 July recess, doing Donald Trump’s dirty work before vacation time.

To slow the bill’s progress, Chuck Schumer, the leader of the Senate Democrats, will listen to the demands of various progressive groups and slow down the business of the body as much as he can. On Monday night, Democrats held the Senate floor, taking turns bashing Republican repeal efforts.

They are preparing to block lengthy committee hearings, since any senator can stop a hearing from extending past the first two hours of the Senate’s day. They will object to all unanimous consent requests in the Senate, employing various parliamentary maneuvers to call attention to Republican secrecy.

Given the years of Republican obstruction under Barack Obama – unprecedented obstinacy pioneered by McConnell – this is all well-deserved. Democrats should do whatever they can to foil a disastrous, retrogressive austerity agenda. If they don’t, they should quit and find other lines of work. They will be without purpose.

What’s still missing, however, is the alternative vision. It’s the fatal flaw of today’s Democratic party and one that has gone unaddressed since Hillary Clinton’s catastrophic loss. There is no argument for a new healthcare system coming from either side.

Republicans, drunk on fulfilling an idiotic campaign pledge made in the heat of Obama’s presidency, are only promising to make healthcare worse for the people who need it most. Democrats are left with a mealy-mouthed defense of the status quo.

This is a problem, one that Democratic leaders in Congress and the Democratic National Committee aren’t trying to solve. It’s one thing to say you will do whatever it takes to protect a flawed but functional healthcare system that was never overwhelmingly popular to begin with, that still left plenty of people who weren’t desperately poor or sick with expensive healthcare plans. It’s quite another to start telling Americans how you plan to start fixing the system when you return to power.

Democrats are assuming history will take care of them, and in the short term, it probably will. Trump is hated enough to cost his party dearly in the midterms next year and his re-election bid will be a challenge. In just a few years, it’s not out of the realm of possibility that Democrats will have full control of government again, as they did at the dawn of 2009.

But that majority proved fleeting. Building a party around bogeyman Trump and Russia hysteria will mean a party without a core, because these things won’t last.

Bernie Sanders was a folk hero to millennials during the 2016 campaign, yet no other powerful Democrat has seen fit to start aping his message wholesale. No one has said the Democrats will run on single-payer healthcare in 2018, promise to make college tuition free in 2018, or form a coherent anti-war platform in 2018.

To truly slay Trump’s majority and remain in power for years to come, Democrats must not only stand for something but justify their existence in concrete ways to people of all races and classes who will benefit from a rational federal government.

Strangely, Democrats aren’t doing this. Out of power, their argument is still simply: we aren’t Trump, we’re not crazy. The DNC still hasn’t performed an autopsy report on the 2016 election. Beyond Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, no Democrat seems especially concerned with articulating a rationale for the party, a reason millions of Americans should continually vote Democratic.

There’s a certain comfort to being a minority party, an impotent oppositional faction scoring points on Twitter for holding the floor of the Senate. It’s easy. It’s even fun. Trump is a clown, Trump is a maniac, Trump is a Putin stooge – Democrats always win the late night shows, the internet, the memes. MSNBC is a ratings king. Everyone is buying resistance merchandise.

The Democratic party is the younger party, the hipper party, the one that will tell you, again and again, in ever more creative ways, just how destructive Trump is. It just won’t tell you much else.