Graham said Republicans would now heed those calls and put his and Cassidy’s proposal through a more rigorous process in the hopes of reviving it sometime in 2018. “We can fix the process, and we can improve the substance,” he said. “So that’s why I’m optimistic.”

First, though, Republicans are swiftly moving on to tax reform, where they plan to use the same reconciliation process that failed them on health care. They will have the option of starting reconciliation anew once the new fiscal year begins in October, and their determination to use the procedure for tax reform was a key reason why they wanted to pass Obamacare repeal by September 30. “It wouldn’t be my first preference,” Senator John Kennedy of Louisiana told me about the decision. “But I don’t think the Democrats are interested in working with us.”

Democrats have insisted otherwise. They’ve told Republicans that while they were not going to help them repeal their signature legislative achievement of the last decade, they were willing to work on tax reform if the GOP was serious about targeting the benefits to the middle class instead of the wealthy, and if their plan would not add to the deficit. Republicans, however, don’t want to be boxed in on either demand. And the plan President Trump and congressional leaders will unveil on Wednesday is expected both to spike the deficit and cut taxes for top earners.

So the GOP will plow ahead on a process that will force them, once again, to reconcile the considerable ideological gap between more moderate senators like Murkowski and Susan Collins of Maine on one end and Ted Cruz of Texas, Rand Paul of Kentucky, and Mike Lee of Utah on the other. “There’s no question that there is certainly comfort in margins, and we don’t have margins for error,” Senator John Thune of South Dakota, the third-ranking Republican, told me on Tuesday. “So each individual senator is very empowered when it comes to a big issue like this, and as we’ve seen a couple times, it’s very easy to take a big bill like this down.”

Still, Thune suggested Republicans realistically had no other choice. “I don’t know how you do it without reconciliation, because then you’d have to get 60 votes,” he said.

Inside the Capitol on Tuesday, the demise of the Graham-Cassidy plan brought little of the shock or dismay that followed the previous failures of Obamacare repeal bills in the House and Senate. Republicans have grown accustomed to the health-care slog, and if anything, they were energized by how close they came to succeeding on a bill that few had seriously considered until a week ago. Where lawmakers once saw September 30 as a firm deadline, they now have begun to consider the possibility of using health care for one of the two remaining opportunities for reconciliation they’ll have before the 2018 congressional elections. “We need to keep working until we get it done,” Cruz told reporters. “I think we should use whatever procedural vehicle is necessary, and we should pass it the instant we have the votes to pass it.”