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Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell has some news for Paul Ryan and House Republicans: Obamacare was a losing battle. The Kentucky Senator, famous for declaring his party's narrow intent to make Barack Obama a "one-term president," appeared to veer from his colleagues' long-held stance that undoing the Affordable Care Act — a.k.a Obamacare — is politically feasible, even after the package passed in March 2010, was upheld by the Supreme Court in June 2012, and its namesake was re-elected on November 6. "When it came to Obamacare, we gave it everything we had — everything we had — and we just barely lost the legislative fight," McConnell told his audience at the Conservative Political Action Conference on Friday morning. And he reiterated his opposition to the legislation: "Obamacare should be repealed root and branch," he said, adding that people who thought the fight to repeal the plan was dead were "dead wrong." So maybe Ryan, who assumed the repeal of the health-care laws in his 2013 House GOP budget, will have that to hang his hat on.

Continuing on that theme, the Republican leader assailed Obamacare for introducing an array of new regulations. For the duration of his CPAC speech he was flanked by a large stack of paper that, McConnell said, represented the legislation's onerous requirements, and what his party opposed about progressive legislation. "If there were ever a symbol of what we're fighting against, this tower is it," he said, pointing to the sheets of paper, which had been wheeled onstage using a dolly.