What is Mitch McConnell's play? I've been trying to figure out the Senate majority leader's thinking during this week's hurry-up-and-wait effort to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare. It seems to me he'll be damned if he does and damned if he doesn't. Then again, maybe I'm underestimating the awesome raw power of lying.

Doing nothing will spark the ire of conservative hard-liners. Doing something will invoke the fury of Republicans who depend on Obamacare. The only way out of this conundrum may be lying to the base, fundraising like hell and, fingers crossed, hoping for the best.

Whatever happens, this I know: Politics is like physics. For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. When the Democrats enacted Obamacare, the electorate reacted, sending the Democrats into the wilderness. But that was nothing compared to what's going to happen next. Obamacare is now rooted. The Republicans attempt taking that away at their peril, and the Democrats know it.

The Better Care Reconciliation Act is not a health care bill. It's a tax bill. If it were a health care bill, it would need 60 votes in the Senate. If that were the case, the bill wouldn't be news at all, because the Democrats would kill it on sight. But as a tax bill, it only needs a majority, or 51 votes, thanks to complex Senate rules. It didn't start out that way, according to the Associated Press, but McConnell saw a historic opportunity that he and the Republicans could not pass up.

The Senate bill cuts more than $770 billion out of Medicaid, the state and federal anti-poverty program. That's never happened before. Safety net programs – food stamps, disability insurance, worker's compensation, Medicaid, Medicare and Social Security – used to be off limits. That's how popular they are. Any Republican who dared touch them would get zapped by the so-called third rail. The last to try was President George W. Bush. After re-election, he spent political capital trying to privatize Social Security. But, eventually, he got zapped, too. If McConnell gets away with cutting billions out of Medicaid without suffering the blowback Bush suffered, he will have done more than repeal and replace Obamacare; he will have paved the way for repealing and replacing the New Deal and Great Society.

It's not at all clear rank-and-file Republicans want that. But it's also not clear what they will do if McConnell succeeds. Polarization is the prevailing force in American politics. It's why, as I argued during the election, that the Republican Party could nominate a hamster, and most Republicans would vote for it. That Donald Trump is profoundly unfit to be president was really beside the point.

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Related to polarization is misinformation. Many people, but particularly Republicans, live in a closed circuit. They get their information from the president, Fox News, Hugh Hewitt and Breitbart. And Trump has succeeded in policing those boundaries, calling everything unfavorable to him "fake news." If you need evidence, consider polling that asked Republican respondents how they felt about their own financial situation. The number who said they felt good about it soared after the inauguration, long before any of Trump's policies could take effect, but at the same time the president was bragging about job creation.

Furthermore, it's unclear that Republican voters really want smaller government. Safety net programs are popular, as are proposals to raise taxes on the very rich. To succeed, however, McConnell and the Republicans must drain the budget in ways that would savage Republican voters. I'm talking about white voters in rural red states, such as Louisiana, Kentucky, Maine and Alaska. These states have huge populations of elderly white voters, who reliably show up to vote, every time, and they can't live without Medicaid.

So it's not just Republican senators facing re-election in 2018 who are in jeopardy if McConnell succeeds – so are the 21 Republican governors who expanded Medicaid. McConnell is forcing them into potentially explaining why voters can no longer afford to put grandma in a nursing home. This has the potential of souring the Republican brand at the state and local levels for a generation or more. The question is: How much are those tax cuts worth?

Evidently, not enough. With growing opposition from his own party, McConnell was forced Tuesday to delay a vote until after Congress' July 4 recess. He didn't have enough yeas to back a procedural vote, so the bill's future remains unclear. He might reconcile conservative and moderate demands over the holiday, but whatever happens, one thing is clear. The Republicans have tried three times to pass a law that would threaten the health and security of 24 million, 23 million and 22 million Americans, respectively. From now on, the Democrats can credibly claim that the Republicans are coming for your health care.

I know, I know. How "uncivil," right? Forbes' Avik Roy has clutched his pearls of late, saying that if the Democrats want to be taken seriously, they should not be scaring people into believing the Republicans are coming for their health care. But if the Democrats were to heed his advice, they would be lying. The Republicans are coming, and they are giving new meaning to an old expression.

"Keep your government hands off my Medicare." That's what a constituent told Bob Inglis during the summer of 2009. During a heated town hall meeting, the former South Carolina representative addressed his constituents' concerns about the proposed Affordable Care Act. And like a lot of people, this constituent, I suspect, was misunderstood.

Most thought he was confused. How could an elected official keep his "government hands" off Medicare? But what he was saying, I imagine, is that he didn't want "his Medicare" to be given to "those people." The term "government" has been for years, thanks to conservative media and Republican campaign rhetoric, a code word for "black." In other words, many white conservative voters value government when it serves them exclusively, but not if it also serves people whom they believe are undeserving of the entitlements they enjoy.

I don't know, but I'm guessing now, years later, that this same constituent has learned nothing has happened to his Medicare. Indeed, many of his loved ones have surely been helped by the historic expansion of health insurance coverage since 2010.