Thigh-High Politics is an Op-Ed column by Teen Vogue writer Lauren Duca that breaks down the news, provides resources for the resistance, and just generally refuses to accept toxic nonsense.

Shortly after midnight on Friday morning, the GOP Senate failed in its latest attempt to repeal the Affordable Care Act, narrowly losing a rushed attempt at stripping health care from tens of millions of people under the veil of darkness.

Sens. Lisa Murkowski, Susan Collins, and John McCain voted against the bill, ultimately defeating it. The Trumpcare initiative has died and come back to life more times than the villain in a lazy horror movie, but regardless of whether this is the final flatline, one thing is certain: The GOP is attempting to use the system created by the people in order to work against our best interests and presiding public opinion. Moving forward, with the exceptions of Murkowski, Collins, and McCain, the Republican Senate should be considered an active threat to democracy.

This morning’s cloak-and-dagger vote was the result of an extended process of covert manipulation led by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. Rallying votes for his motion to begin debate, McConnell has spent his time alternately sweet-talking and bullying fellow senators, while conspicuously hiding his preferred plan from public scrutiny. Still, the callousness of the GOP remained unobscured. Any potential efforts introduced under McConnell’s “motion to consider” over the past several days would have lead to many millions of people becoming uninsured — a measure the majority of the public does not support.

Make no mistake, if any form of the current GOP health care measures are able to pass, people will die. What is most egregious about all this is the manner in which so many American lives would be stolen. Senate Republicans have spent the past week blatantly abusing parliamentary procedure in order to force through legislation that is opposed by most of the electorate. As part of their effort to limit the influence of public debate, they began fast-tracking repeal attempts through to a vote, with shortcuts like using budget reconciliation as a loophole for altering large swaths of policy. On Thursday, they escalated this strategy, with House Republicans considering invoking “martial law,” under which a Senate-approved bill would be able to be voted on with less than a day’s notice. Then came the early morning vote. The intricacies of these tactics are somewhat complicated, so here’s a blunt translation: They tried to rush this thing through, before anyone could do a damn thing about it.

There’s no question as to whether more breathing room would lead to greater public opposition. A Kaiser Family Foundation poll conducted earlier this month showed that just 28% support the bid to repeal and replace. The health care debate has become so frenzied that we seem to have forgotten the basic function of these senators, who are transparently conspiring to reformulate health care against the wishes of the individuals they are meant to serve. An elected official’s job is to represent the interests of their constituents, and the Republican Senate has explicitly rejected that duty in favor of achieving an astoundingly heartless political win.

At this point, partisan pig-headedness has all but fully consumed establishment conservatives, who long ago abandoned anything even remotely resembling principled conviction. For the past seven years, the GOP has grounded the party’s very existence in aggressive opposition to the Affordable Care Act, beginning with the earliest stages of the law’s creation. Back in 2009, Republicans accused Democrats of sinister secrecy, even though they spent more than 15 months and 44 hearings (split across the House and Senate) vetting and debating the bill. McConnell’s “motion to consider” allowed Republican reform to be up for a Senate vote, even though there have been only two hearings total, both in the House, regarding a different version of the bill. Hypocrisy is truly too weak of a word.