Democrats tried to refrain from gloating over what appeared—for the moment—to be a major victory in the fight to save the Affordable Care Act. “We are not celebrating. We are relieved,” Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer said.

The McConnell bill, titled the Health Care Freedom Act, would have scrapped Obamacare’s mandates requiring most people to buy insurance and most businesses to offer it to their employees. It would have also defunded Planned Parenthood for a year, delayed for three years an excise tax on medical devices, and increase allowable contributions to health-savings accounts. The proposal would have made it easier for states to obtain waivers from Obamacare requirements, although it would have maintained protections for people with preexisting conditions.

Dubbed the “skinny repeal,” the McConnell plan was a far cry from fulfilling the Republican Party’s longstanding promise to fully repeal and replace former President Barack Obama’s signature legislative achievement. In May, the House narrowly passed a replacement plan that became so unpopular Republican senators rejected it out of hand.

But the task of writing their own proposal proved no easier for the party’s slim majority in the upper chamber. McConnell’s first proposal, drafted in secret and broadly similar to the House bill, faced defections from both moderates and conservatives. It fell seven votes shy of a majority earlier in the week. Republicans similarly voted down an amendment favored by conservatives that would have repealed more of Obamacare without a replacement.

What McConnell came up with instead was, by the party’s own admission, the “lowest common denominator” of what 50 Republican senators could agree to. And in an inversion of ordinary legislative motivations, it only stood a chance of passage once a group of senators secured assurances from House Speaker Paul Ryan that the skinny repeal would not immediately become law.

Late Thursday afternoon, McCain and Senators Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and Ron Johnson of Wisconsin held a surreal press conference to denounce a policy that, just hours later, two of them would vote to advance. They said they would only vote for the skinny repeal as a means to an end—a vehicle to set up a House-Senate conference committee that would allow Republicans another chance to work out a broader replacement bill. “The skinny bill as policy is a disaster. The skinny bill as a replacement for Obamacare is a fraud,” Graham declared.

“I need assurances from the speaker of the House, and his team, that if I vote for the skinny bill, it will not become the final product,” he continued. “If I don’t get those assurances, I am a no, because I am not going to vote for a pig in a poke, and I’m not going to tell people back in South Carolina that this product actually replaces Obamacare, because it does not. It is a fraud.”