This is the pattern of Obamacare, which has repeatedly seemed close to death only to limp on. It happened when Ted Kennedy, the Massachusetts senator and longtime universal-health-care advocate, died as the bill was in progress, and Democrats unexpectedly surrendered his seat to Republican Scott Brown. Yet the Democrats managed to resuscitate the bill with wily use of procedural rules, eventually getting a bill to the president's desk. It wasn't the law liberals had dreamed of, but it was a sweeping, progressive law and the biggest change to the American health system since Lyndon Johnson's presidency.

A similar pattern played out in 2012 with the legal challenge to the law. At first, experts derided lawsuits against the ACA as a fringe idea premised on shaky jurisprudential foundations that would never work -- about as likely as Massachusetts electing a Republican to replace Teddy Kennedy. Yet it climbed through the courts, eventually reaching the Supreme Court for a triumphant hearing. The justices were plainly skeptical of the law's constitutionality; worse, Solicitor General Donald Verrilli's performance in oral arguments was so weak that CNN's Jeffrey Toobin likened it to a train wreck mixed with a plane crash. Yet when the decision arrived, it preserved most of the law, albeit stripping out one key element -- the requirement that states expand Medicaid. The law was injured but unquestionably alive.

And now the latest effort has failed, a mirror image of the Supreme Court fight, just as the exchanges go up.

A furious round of activity Monday night brought the House and Senate marginally closer to a deal to prevent a shutdown, but a gaping space remained between them when the clock ran out at midnight. In the early evening, House Republicans sent a bill to the Senate that delayed Obamacare's individual mandate for a year -- a resolution they knew the Senate would never accept. Rep. Pete King, a New York Republican, vowed to gather enough moderate GOP opposition to derail it. Yet instead of 25 moderate votes, he delivered two, and the bill passed. (In a twist, several hardline conservatives joined them, objecting that the bill was far too modest.) Then, as expected, the Senate tabled those conditions, taking matters right back to where they were Friday evening.

Instead of giving up and trying to pass a "clean" CR that didn't include any cuts to Obamacare, Speaker John Boehner had one last trick: He called for a budget conference between the House and Senate to hammer out spending plans. Around 11 p.m., however, Harry Reid spoke on the Senate floor and shot that down. Reid noted that Democrats had repeatedly asked to go to conference since spring, but would not do so now, "with a gun to our head." Reid insisted that he would accept only a clean CR but would happily go to conference once that was passed. Even if the Nevadan had been willing to go to conference, it's hard to see how negotiations could have reached fruition by midnight.