In the U.S. Senate, the legislative process can take as long as the gestation of a human being. A complicated law entails committee hearings, amendments, rewrites, debate, projections from the Congressional Budget Office, endless buttonholing, and further debate. It is arcane, but necessary.

The health care travesty currently being rushed through the Senate by Sen. Mitch McConnell is not like that.

For months, the majority leader has plotted to ram through a monumentally dangerous replacement of the Affordable Care Act against unified opposition and the will of the American people - ram it through the world's most deliberative body without hearings, markups, or a full CBO report.

It is a parliamentary farce, and time is both McConnell's enemy and ally. The Senate has until Saturday to approve the latest repeal bill - known Graham-Cassidy - with a simple majority, rather than the usual 60 needed for most legislation.

In other words, the Republicans are trying to rewrite a law that could result in the loss of insurance for 20 to 30 million Americans and reconstitute an industry that accounts for one-seventh of the U.S. economy - all in two weeks, without input from hospitals, doctors, insurers, patient advocates, or Democrats.

There were bipartisan options. The Senate Health Committee had a framework that had great promise, according to both chairman Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., and ranking member Patty Murray, D-Wash.

Sen. John McCain, for one, called it the preferred option. "We could do better working together, Republicans and Democrats, and have not yet really tried," he said Friday, when he repudiated Graham-Cassidy.

Ross Baker of Rutgers reminds us there's a lesson in that: "Bipartisanship ends at the committee door," the eminent Senate historian said. "Often overlooked in the toxic polarization in Congress is the bipartisanship on the committee level, and the example of Alexander and Murray is eloquent testimony to that. But then party leaders get involved, and their bottom line is gaining and losing seats, so they'll craft legislation that rallies their base."

So McConnell pulled the plug on Alexander's committee Tuesday, just the latest example of how he has contaminated the institution.

And it was no surprise, because he has come to define the political era in which we now wallow.

In 2008, at a time we were in two wars and dealing with the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, McConnell said his primary task was to limit a newly elected president to one term.

His obstructionist strategy was used to great effect throughout the Obama years, mostly with judiciary appointments. By 2013, he announced his intention to filibuster every nominee to the powerful DC Circuit court. By the end of that year, 81 of Obama's nominees were blocked, compared with 68 in the entire previous history of the republic.

Essentially, McConnell denied Obama's legitimacy as president by forbidding him from carrying out a core constitutional duty, culminating in the stonewalling of Supreme Court nominee Merrick Garland last year.

Chris Hayes of MSNBC once defined the McConnell Doctrine this way: "In an era of extreme polarization and weakening institutions, you can get away with anything you are shameless enough to pursue."

Regardless of how this broadly rejected repeal turns out, the legacy of this GOP leader - whose approval rating is a robust 11 percent - is that of an unyielding partisan. As Baker explains, "There are times when statesmanship must come into play. You can't press the partisan line to the point where it becomes destructive over the process and the institution. And that's what's happened under his leadership."

Put another way, politics can't be about winning for winning's sake. It's also about improving lives, especially when your voting base is economically insecure. It's the mantra for those who use government as a force for good, but anathema to people like Mitch McConnell.

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