After meeting with House Republicans on Wednesday morning, a visibly joyful Vice President-elect Mike Pence stood before a group of reporters on Capitol Hill and announced, with a smile, that plans to dismantle Obamacare are underway. “It will literally begin on Day 1,” Pence declared, explaining that Donald Trump would use his first day in the Oval Office to sign executive orders removing key provisions of President Barack Obama’s sprawling, signature health care law. What those executive orders would entail, exactly, Pence didn’t say. But he did make it clear that his pep talk with G.O.P. lawmakers wasn’t just about how to unwind the law, but also to ensure that Democrats would be blamed for any fallout connected to its repeal. “It’s important that we remind the American people of what they already know about Obamacare—that the promises that were made were all broken,” Pence told reporters. As the vice president-elect spoke, Trump chimed in with his own defense of the strategy on Twitter, writing that the G.O.P. needs to let Democrats “own the failed Obamacare disaster” and not let them control the narrative. “Massive increases of Obamacare will take place this year and Dems are to blame for the mess,” Trump warned. “It will fall of its own weight—be careful!”

The preemptive push to fault Democrats if Trumpcare is a failure is only the latest chess move by Republicans as Washington readies itself for a protracted messaging war—and blame game—over the future of the Affordable Care Act. For years, Republicans agreed on one thing: Obamacare is a disaster and it must be replaced. Now that they find themselves in control of both the White House and Congress, however, G.O.P. lawmakers face the unenviable task of actually governing. And they’re quickly finding that “replace” isn’t as easy as “repeal.”

Most Congressional Republicans agree in theory on a set of market-based principles for how to reform the health insurance system and lower costs, including dropping the individual mandate, giving consumers more choices, allowing them to shop across state lines, and block-granting federal subsidies and programs. Trump himself has said on occasion that he would like to keep some provisions of Obamacare, such as mandatory coverage of pre-existing conditions and allowing people to remain on their parents’ insurance until the age of 26, and has vowed that his administration will “take care of everybody”, although he has not explained how. On Tuesday, senior Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway promised that nobody who is currently covered under Obamacare will lose their insurance when the law is repealed. “We don't want anyone who currently has insurance to not have insurance,” she insisted.

A number of Republicans agree with Democrats that any such solution is effectively impossible, and that any attempt keep only the popular parts of Obamacare, as Trump has suggested, will backfire. “Removing the mandate to buy insurance while leaving in place the dictate that people can wait to buy insurance until after they are ill will only accentuate the bankrupting of the insurance industry,” Kentucky Senator Rand Paul warned his colleagues in an op-ed published Monday, arguing that a piecemeal repeal-and-replace effort would “only accelerate the current chaos and may eventually lead to calls for a taxpayer bailout of insurance companies.” So far, Republican leadership has responded to the problem by proposing a transition period of several years to buy time to create a replacement law, which would keep people insured but maintain the Obamacare status quo.