Hurray! There’s only one problem. While the conservatives who helped reanimate this legislative corpse are in no danger of losing their seats come the 2018 midterms, members of the Tuesday Group aren’t so lucky. Their willingness to get to yes shows that today’s Republican moderates are team players. It also shows they suffer from a lack of political imagination that might soon prove politically fatal.

It’s actually a heartwarming story, once you leave aside the fact that the AHCA is, in its current form at least, a pretty terrible bill. Different factions of the party came together to resolve their differences and to achieve a rare moment of Republican unity.

All was lost. Republicans looked clueless. Ryan was sad. The Freedom Caucus had handed him a humiliating defeat, and he was pissed. The message coming out of the House GOP leadership was that Ryan and his allies were serious people who intended to deliver on their promise to repeal and replace Obamacare, but the pesky Freedom Caucus screwed everything up.

To have any hope of passing, the AHCA could only afford a handful of Republican defections. When Paul Ryan struggled to win over the hard-right House Freedom Caucus, with its 30 or so members, the bill’s future was very much in doubt. Worse still, once it became clear that the Freedom Caucus was dragging its feet, moderate Republicans who were already anxious about voting for a profoundly unpopular bill also jumped ship.

The Freedom Caucus, led by Rep. Mark Meadows, wasn’t exactly thrilled with this implication. Its members’ take was that they were happy to figure out how to make the bill more to their liking, if only the House GOP leadership was willing to negotiate in good faith. Being rock-ribbed right-wingers, they didn’t want to be blamed for leaving Obamacare intact. Many of them resented the fact that while many moderate Republicans were just as skeptical about the AHCA, it was the Freedom Caucus that was getting all the blame.

Rep. Mark Meadows (R-NC), chair of the House Freedom Caucus Mark Wilson/Getty Images

So as the Washington Post reports, Meadows decided to team up with a moderate Republican, Rep. Tom MacArthur, to devise a compromise that could satisfy both the right and the left of the House GOP conference. Whereas the initial drafting of the AHCA was a top-down process led by Ryan and his closest allies, here we had a fuzzier, more democratic, bottom-up process, one in which Republican members took it upon themselves to reach out across the intra-GOP ideological divide.

The MacArthur amendment allowed states to waive some of Obamacare’s insurance regulations. The details are tricky—Timothy Jost has described them in great detail over at Health Affairs—and they’ve freaked out many observers who fear they could unravel protections for people with pre-existing conditions. Defenders of the amendment insist that states wouldn’t exactly be eager to nuke politically popular insurance market protections without having a good reason to do so. But that’s obviously not all that reassuring to opponents, who have every reason to focus on the worst-case scenario. Why did the GOP coalesce around an amendment that created such an obvious political vulnerability? The answer is that Republicans were more focused on papering over their internal divides than on crafting a package that would be politically bulletproof or even mildly bullet-resistant.