What happened to “repeal and replace?” What happened to ripping Obamacare out of the law “root and branch”? Is this surrender?

“I cut a compromise,” Sessions said. “It is a compromise bill that I believe is fair.”

The 61-year-old Texan, now serving his seventh term in the House, is no back-bencher. As chairman of the Rules Committee, he’s a member of the leadership team under Speaker Paul Ryan. And neither he nor Cassidy, who won a Senate seat in 2014 after three terms in the House, are mushy moderates tacking to the center to save their jobs. Sessions ran the House GOP’s campaign arm in 2010, the year Republicans won back the majority on a message of repealing and replacing the just-enacted health care law. When Majority Leader Eric Cantor lost his primary in an upset two years ago, Sessions briefly waged a failed bid to succeed him by positioning himself as the more conservative candidate. (Kevin McCarthy, the heavy favorite, won easily.) In his race for the Senate that same year, Cassidy harped on Senator Mary Landrieu’s support for the health-care law.

So no, Sessions and Cassidy have not had a change of heart on Obamacare. And to a large extent, their bill is merely the latest example of the GOP’s try-anything approach to countering the law, which I wrote about last week. But at least for Sessions, the proposal is a recognition that for both political and policy reasons, scrapping the law and starting from scratch is a virtual impossibility. As Republicans have learned many times over, they need not only Congress but the White House to repeal Obamacare (and they probably need more than a slim majority in the Senate at that). Even if they had the votes to do so, fully repealing the law would still be a Herculean task because, as Sessions explained, Democrats “literally wiped out all law” relating to health care when then enacted the ACA in 2010. “I view that those two options are both very difficult to do,” Sessions said.

The Sessions/Cassidy bill does not leave Obamacare untouched by any means. It eliminates both the individual and employer mandates, although businesses that choose to remain in the current system would be subject to the existing penalties and requirements under the law. Individuals who choose to opt out would not have to buy insurance, but they would not be eligible for the tax credit if they choose to remain uninsured. Many previous Republican proposals have taken a hatchet to Obamacare without repealing it entirely, and the party has succeeded in working with Democrats to make modest changes in the last couple of years. But this latest bill is notable for its vision of adding an entirely new system on top of the Affordable Care Act’s underlying infrastructure. It’s not merely tinkering with Obamacare, but nor is it entirely scrapping it.