I guess we can talk about the politics of it now. My blood is at a low simmer, finally, a process helped immeasurably by watching Katy Tur put this Chris Collins guy on a spit Thursday afternoon and roast his chestnuts because Collins tried to pretend he knew fck-all about that for which he'd just voted. Am I just paranoid—or perhaps merely still sufficiently medicated—to wonder if these giddy omadhauns who went to the White House kegger on Thursday afternoon did so because they have faith unbroken in voter suppression, gerrymandering, and other activities within the margin of chicanery that has come to mark close elections in this country?

So, 2018? What's that? Beer me up, dude!

Cynical or paranoid? Our lines are open.

By any conventional political calculation, any sane politician would seek the bottom of the Laurentian Abyssal rather than vote for the House bill. The commercials are already busily writing themselves—pregnancy as a pre-existing condition, Jason Chaffetz and his idiot scooter, the fact that the guy who wrote the decisive fig-leaf amendment did so from his beach house on Long Island—and I'm sure they will be highly entertaining. In my experience, no politician with plans for the future and any ordinary sense of self-interest would vote for a bill that will make lives more miserable, and then get filmed grinning like a bonobo on the South Lawn and toasting the vote with some authentic American barley bilge. I know good, smart political consultants from both parties who would throw themselves into the Charles if their clients voted for this abomination and then partied like teenage yobs from Charlestown.

But we have passed so far beyond the conventional that hardly anyone remembers what it's like anymore. Most of the major news organizations are conspicuously adapting to the zany new reality, applying conventional political laws and logic in a context where neither fully apply anymore. And, make no mistake, this did not come in with the current president*. This was a healthcare "reform" bill that, all things being equal, would have passed under President Cruz, or President Kasich, or President Paul.

It is a bill that, in 2017, any Republican Congress would have passed and any Republican president would sign. It is a bill born out of everything into which modern conservatism has transformed modern Republicanism: a punitive view of the poor and unlucky, based in Iron Age concepts of the will of the Lord; magic-asterisk economics; a resolute opposition to empirical data and a scalding contempt for expertise; and an ability to torture the English language to the point of unconsciousness. This is the long way around to the point that I don't trust the Senate, either.

First of all, the Senate majority is now born of that same political DNA. Mitch McConnell's most remarkable talent has been keeping the real wild men at bay, a skill that thus far has eluded Speaker Paul Ryan. Nonetheless, the same essential elements of modern Republicanism remain in play. For example, on Friday, McConnell announced that Senator Lamar (!) Alexander would head up a bipartisan working group of 12 senators to begin work on an alternative that would look a little less like Dickens on downers. There's a lot of deeply furrowed brows and conspicuous concern among the elected. There are also no women, which I do not find promising here in 2017.

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Moreover, whatever the Senate produces—and if it's the vaunted "Collins-Cassidy Plan," that's merely a slightly lower-calorie dog's breakfast—has to go to conference, where the children of the corn back in the House will have a crack at it, and that's where the politics are going to come to beggar's day. Any deal is going to have to get through the fanatics in the Freedom Caucus, many of whom are allied with influential senators like Rand Paul and Ted Cruz, neither of whom likely will sit still for any bill that's substantially less punitive, because this bill is too perfect a product of the system that gave them all careers in politics. It would be like abjuring their faith. They would be sentenced to collectivist hell for all eternity.

No, the end of the Affordable Care Act already is too much of a triumph for the tribe for them to bargain it away in the Senate, or in conference. That's what the puppet show at the White House on Thursday was all about. Conventional politics would say that any victory celebration was hopelessly premature, but, again, these are not conventional times with conventional politics. This is the final, febrile end-stage of the prion disease that has afflicted the Republican Party since Ronald Reagan first fed it the monkeybrains in 1981. I will bet something moderately valuable that a good piece of The Base believes that the president* already has redeemed his campaign promise to "repeal the disaster known as Obamacare."

We have passed so far beyond the conventional that hardly anyone remembers what it's like anymore.

And, as much as I hate to doubt the good heartland people who voted for this guy, I think they'd react worse to losing an illusory victory over Them than they will to losing their actual healthcare. For the foreseeable future, Republican politicians, House and Senate, remain more threatened by the wrath of The Base than they are by any unfortunate mother and child who pop up on the local news. Whatever emerges from this process will be a Republican bill, thickly coated in banalities about freedom and marketplace solutions, but with nothing resembling a commitment to the same goals that animated the passage of the Affordable Care Act.

And, no, I don't have any faith in Republican "moderates" in the Senate. They fold like cardboard in a downpour. They vote as moderates when given permission to do so, and only if there's a safe one in the bag. I have seen the film, Susan Collins: Prisoner of Conscience, so often I can recite the dialogue. The third act is always predictable.

This is what I think about the politics. I think any serious political pressure has to come from outside. (For example, if Jon Ossoff in Georgia and Rob Quist in Montana were to win their congressional races, that would turn up the heat a bit.) But whatever response is marshaled against what happened Thursday cannot tolerate any amnesties. It no longer matters whether or not someone voted for or against the bill. The party itself produced it as a perfect definition of what the party actually believes. No Republican should skate on this. Anger should be focused precisely and applied generally.

This is now a test for that which calls itself The Resistance. There are actual lives on the line on this issue. If The Resistance is going to mean anything at all, it can't wait until 2018. This is the great political fight of the moment. The midterms can wait.

And, of course, with all the voter suppression and gerrymandering…

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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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