Other constituents trained their ire on Trump, demanding to know whether MacArthur would back a special prosecutor to investigate his campaign’s ties to Russia (Not yet, he said) and practically pleading with him to stand up to the president. “Why do you Republicans all sit and listen to Donald Trump lie?” asked one woman. “He lies and lies and lies. You have to know he’s lying.” Trump was the topic MacArthur least wanted to discuss, and he replied with something of a refrain. “I’m neither going to defend nor attack everything the president says,” he answered. At another point, he drew more boos when he said of Trump, “Congress is not the board of directors for the White House, and I’m not going to answer for everything he says or does.”

At the beginning of the event, MacArthur had promised to stay until every question had been asked. And despite a couple of moments when the room nearly deteriorated into shouting, he kept his word. Though the crowd thinned from a couple hundred to a couple dozen as the hours dragged on, the congressman stayed standing, and responding, for nearly five hours.

“You’ve really taken a beating tonight,” a constituent named Ruth Gage told him. For both the congressman and the crowd, that appeared to be the point.

MacArthur kept his cool—mostly. When one constituent shouted him down as “an idiot!” MacArthur complained about the lack of civil discourse. “I wonder,” he said to the crowd, “how any one of you would perform in Congress with that attitude.”

After MacArthur asked them at another point not to be “disrespectful,” one man replied: “Can I be disrespectful on behalf of all the people you’re going to kill?”

* * *

Through it all, however, a strange thing happened: A Republican congressman had a candid, detailed discussion about health-care policy with his constituents. When they spoke up on behalf of a single-payer, Medicare-for-All plan, MacArthur explained why he didn’t support it. When he warned about allowing “government bureaucrats” to make too many health-care decisions, they asked why it would be any worse than insurance company “bureaucrats” doing the same thing now.

The residents who came to give MacArthur a piece of their mind were deeply familiar with the particulars of the bill he supported and the amendment he authored, because they knew it could impact them directly. When one attendee asked people to stand if they had a preexisting condition, nearly everyone in the room rose. They knew that even though MacArthur was correct in saying the GOP maintained the requirement that insurers offer coverage to everyone, his amendment could allow companies in some states to charge them much more money for a policy.

A 39-year-old named Derek described how because of a heart condition he had had since he was 23, he could be priced out of the insurance market if he lost his job and went without coverage for more than two months if the AHCA became law. “This is something that is very real,” he told MacArthur. “Without health-care coverage, I’m dead.”