Earlier this year, as the Russia scandal heated up, a number of commentators bemoaned Washington’s “obsession” with the story. The Independent’s Andrew Buncombe, noting that “there remains no evidence that the Trump campaign colluded with the Russian government to influence the election,” wrote that “the Siberian Candidate theory is so dangerous is that it is a distraction from more pressing issues. Based on Trump’s first weeks in office, it is clear he is a threat to many things that Americans value.” That complaint persists on the left—and, in a different form, on the right. “Right now the distraction of all things Russia, and all things Trump-Russia, is distracting us from everything right now,” Senator Rand Paul told Reason last week. “I think it has been overplayed.”

Both Buncombe and Paul are right, to a point. Consider the news of late.

As Vox’s Sarah Kliff reported on Monday, “Senate Republicans began to coalesce around the framework of a plan to repeal and replace [Obamacare] last week. Their plan would, like the bill the House passed in May, almost certainly cause millions of low-income Americans to lose coverage by ending the Medicaid expansion. It would help the young and healthy at the expense of the older and the sick.” Later that day, Axios reported that Republicans had no plans to release a draft of their bill. “We aren’t stupid,” a GOP aide said.

Come Tuesday, America’s four most influential papers featured stories about anti-government protests in Russia, Attorney General Jeff Sessions’s then-upcoming Senate testimony, and the possibility that President Donald Trump might fire special counsel Robert Mueller, who is leading the Justice Department’s Russia investigation—but nothing about Republican senators’ coalescing around a health care bill to deprive many millions of Americans of insurance.

Nothing about GOP health bill today on the front pages of any of 4 of America's most influential papers — LA Times; NYT; WashPo; WSJ pic.twitter.com/p85FbL0vDl — Jeff Stein (@JStein_Vox) June 13, 2017

So from a liberal perspective, while the Russia story isn’t precisely a “distraction”—the word implies there’s nothing to see here, which is false—it certainly has overshadowed other “pressing issues” that merit widespread attention, the most urgent of which is the Senate’s secret health care bill. From a GOP perspective, though, the Russia story is precisely a distraction—and Republicans are taking advantage of it by trying to sneak this bill through the Senate before anyone notices.