(Optional Musical Accompaniment To This Post)

On this morning of suddenly boundless schadenfreude, let us nonetheless hold fast, as we always do, to the wise advice of one Winston Wolf. Thanks to the sudden ensemble defection of Jerry Moran of Kansas and Mike Lee, the konztitooshunal skolar from Utah, Mitch McConnell's latest dead fish appears to be not merely dead, but really most sincerely dead. The healthcare provisions of McConnell's big tax cut bill once again proved too much for his Republican majority to swallow. So, in response, McConnell has decided to bluff heavily behind a busted straight. From NBC News:

Instead, he said the Senate would vote on a full repeal of Obamacare, with two years before the repeal goes into effect to allow time to create a new system. The new plan may appear to fulfill a seven-year GOP promise, but it faces extremely difficult odds after many moderate Republican senators have already come out against repeal without an immediate replacement.

This, it should be noted, is a fish that died sometime in 2015. The Republicans passed it knowing that then-President Barack Obama would veto it, and they also knew the votes weren't there to override him. So it was a safe, base-stroking vote for Republicans like Lisa Murkowski of Alaska. Subsequent to the vote, however, the Congressional Budget Office estimated that the 2015 bill would have stripped health insurance away from 33 million Americans. Now, people like Murkowski have to decide if they want to vote to do this for real. Missouri's Roy Blunt already has said that a full repeal that kicks the really monstrous effects down the road past the 2018 midterms wouldn't get 50 votes in the Senate. But, make no mistake, the basic mindset of the Republican majorities is that healthcare is neither a human right nor a responsibility of the people acting together through their government. That has not changed.

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Over the weekend, Tom Price, the Secretary of Health and Human Services, advised health-insurance companies to "dust off" their pre-Obamacare business plans. This probably would keep Price's stock portfolio healthy, but it wouldn't do much good for anyone else. At the end of things, Republicans are still corporate creatures and Puritanism—for other people, anyway—always has been strong among the corporate classes.

Which doesn't mean that all those people who wrote, and called, and sat in, and died in, and marched shouldn't enjoy what happened on Monday night. (Merrick Garland, I suspect, had a spring in his step Tuesday morning.) This was a stunning defeat for McConnell. Not only did his big tax cut bill itself go down, but Moran, for one, made it clear that he wouldn't even vote to begin debate on the newest dead fish. That's not disagreement. That's outright insurrection. There seems to be a strong faction forming within the Republican majority in favor of scrapping the whole mess and going back to, you know, actually legislating, including the possibility of actually working with the Democratic minority. McConnell used this horrible prospect to try and whip votes for the newly deceased fish. That failed, too. Again, now, he may have to do this for real.

The basic mindset of the Republican majorities is that healthcare is neither a human right nor a responsibility of the people acting together through their government.

There are even bigger losers here than McConnell. The House Republicans now alone own their votes for a series of deeply unpopular bills. (Happy 2018, folks!) Senator Dean Heller, Republican of Nevada, futzed around long enough that, once Moran and Lee defected, he was the guy standing when the music stopped. His re-election just got a little tougher. Meanwhile, they've all got the staff of Camp Runamuck at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue heckling them to pass some deeply unpopular bill so the president* can cock-a-doodle-doo a victory on the electric Twitter machine.

I still am wary about this whole matter. I still think McConnell can craft a bill that is punitive enough to get Lee and Rand Paul back on board and, anyway, ni shagu nazad. The problem is that, as Roy Blunt noted, that will cost him more votes than it will pick up. McConnell is now stuck more deeply into the corner with which he's grown quite familiar, and into which he wandered, eyes open, at the bidding of a president* who doesn't know anything about anything. Ignorance and cruelty are the pre-existing conditions here, and the Republicans are finding out they're not covered for those.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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