ANALYSIS/OPINION:

Oh, the grand old Duke of York,

He had ten thousand men;

He marched them up to the top of the hill,

And he marched them down again.

And when they were up, they were up,

And when they were down, they were down,

And when they were only half-way up,

They were neither up nor down.

— English nursery rhyme

Marching the regiment up the hill, with every musket fully loaded, and then down again without firing a shot is no way to inspire an army. Paul Ryan’s Republicans, who boasted for seven years that they couldn’t wait to get their hands on the Democrats and Obamacare, promising to make quick work of repeal and replace, couldn’t even get close enough to fire blanks.

The House, fully controlled now by the Republicans, has demonstrated that it doesn’t know much about “repeal and replace,” but it wrote the book on squander and stall.

The speaker, who fully qualifies for the adjective “embattled,” conceded — in the wake of the humiliation of having to pull his repeal-and-replace bill to avoid having to watch it explode en route to the island of lost dreams — Obamacare survives.

“Obamacare is the law of the land,” he said, surveying the waste of the charge of his light brigade, “and it’s going to remain the law of the land until it’s replaced. We did not have quite the votes to replace this law.”

Barack Obama regards Obamacare, detested as it may be by most Americans, as the signature accomplishment of his legacy. He tried hard (but not too hard) to avoid gloating. He boasted, as if in a dawn tweet from his fortified mansion in Washington’s most fashionable neighborhood, protected by a moat of high security stretching a quarter of a mile along a secluded street, that Obamacare not only added millions to the insurance rolls but he personally saved 100,000 lives with improved hospital care.

“The reality is clear,” he said an hour or so after the House vote was recorded, “America is stronger because of the Affordable Care Act [i.e., Obamacare].” Mr. Ryan conceded that the former president’s signature accomplishment is safe for now. There are no plans to try again on repeal. He expects Obamacare to hit a “death spiral” of soaring costs and fewer customers, though the most recent analysis of the Congressional Budget Office says that’s unlikely to happen.

President Trump is even more sanguine, expecting reality to soon destroy what the Republicans couldn’t repeal and replace. “I’ve been saying for the last year and a half that the best thing we can do politically speaking is to let Obamacare explode.” That’s a bit of revisionist history. Mr. Trump, like the Republicans who campaigned with him, said “for the last year and a half” that if rewarded with the White House, the Senate and the House, they would make quick work of Mr. Obama’s health-care scheme.

The president’s demand for a vote, win or lose, on Friday morning was a bold negotiating stroke, and it failed. The president did not try to make himself a mere spectator at the disaster.

What the president, the speaker and the leader of the majority in the Senate must do now is call the party caucus together, lock the doors, and declare that nobody leaves — no coffee, no drinks, no sandwiches, no potato chips, not even nature-calls breaks — until there’s a repeal and replace agreement. That grand old Duke of York is remembered with neither respect nor affection, and so will timid Republicans be.

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