For all its imperfections and awkwardness, the Democrat-led legislative process that ended with the passage of the Affordable Care Act in 2010 benefitted from its relative openness (dozens of hearings, continuous debate), duration (more than a year), and honesty of intent. To this day, Republicans have defined that process by its warts, and painted a few of their own onto it.

President Barack Obama, to make the point that the ACA doesn’t interfere with the structure of the employer-sponsored insurance system, promised that people who liked their health plans—and their doctors—could keep them. He should not have said that—or, at least, he should not have been so categorical. And he paid dearly for it. Republicans never let go of Obama’s assertion, and in 2013 Politifact called it the lie of the year.

By contrast, then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s infamous comment—“We have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it”—was wrenched from context in grotesquely dishonest fashion. In the conservative information bubble, it is considered indisputable that Pelosi was, like a cartoon villain, announcing her fiendish plan to conceal the contents of the health care bill from the cameras. But in reality she was merely predicting that the unpopular bill would become popular once it stopped being an abstraction and began to benefit real people.

The Republican depiction of the Obamacare debate, and of the law itself, is shot through with these kinds of caricatures and deceptions. In truth, whatever gamesmanship and spin that Democrats used to pass the ACA was a sideshow to a banal, tortuous effort to make the text of the law match a few simple goals. Though Obamacare doesn’t come close to to solving every problem with the U.S. health care system, it met most of those goals: expanding coverage significantly, and slowing the growth of health care costs. That the process winded on interminably allowed anyone paying attention (Democratic legislators and reporters, for the most part) to familiarize themselves with a head-splitting quantity of minutiae. Democrats could not have coasted on Trumpian panaceas in a climate like that.

Seven years hence, the Republican-led effort to repeal the ACA is so rushed and opaque that bullshit doesn’t merely seep into it, but thrives. Republicans are deploying their false depiction of the Obamacare debate and law as a benchmark for defending their supposedly superior process. If they succeed, they will have perpetrated one of the greatest swindles in the history of legislative politics.