Last night Sens. Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski, and John McCain delivered a reprieve not just for millions of people whose health care hung in the balance, but for the institution of the Senate and maybe even the republic. It's impossible to overstate just how not normal this whole fiasco has been. Every false charge Republicans ever leveled against the process Democrats were forced to resort to in order to pass the Affordable Care Act in the first place became the blueprint for how they proceeded over the past months.
The first lie was that Republicans were entirely shut out of the process of crafting Obamacare. That lie has persisted for eight years, since meetings—bipartisan meetings—began on Obamacare in 2009. Just to recap that process, the Senate Health Committee had 60 hours of debate and mark-up for the bill, then the Finance Committee took it up and spent eight days in mark-up—more time than they'd spent on revising and amending a bill in 20 years. There were 130 bipartisan amendments considered, with 79 roll call votes taken. The bill was on the Senate floor for 25 days straight.
For seven years, Republicans have been portraying all that as Democrats shutting them out of the process, writing the bill in a dark room, springing them on it at the last minute, and forcing the vote on Christmas Eve. Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has an entire web page devoted to that fiction with the headline "FLASHBACK: Democrats’ ‘Secret’ Closed Door Obamacare Process" screaming across the top.
That was the fever dream that actually provided the blueprint for McConnell's drive to repeal the ACA.
Democrats were forced to finally pass the bill through budget reconciliation with just 51 votes because, despite all the input Republicans were offered, the opposition was united in blockading it. So what does McConnell do? Decide at the outset that he will use budget reconciliation to shut Democrats out.
That didn't prevent him, however, from having at least a sham legislative process. He could have had the health and finance committees at least meet to pretend like the Senate still mattered as a legislative body. He could have invited his entire conference to bring their ideas to the table. He did not. Instead, he convened his death panel of 13 white men to write a bill in secret. And as it turns out, he didn't even include them in writing the thing. By the way, that's what he gets for shutting women—particularly Collins, who has actually worked on healthcare policy—entirely out of the process. The women beat him.
McConnell could have at least made a show of meeting with stakeholders—the doctors and nurses, the health insurance industry, the patient groups. Particularly the patient groups, like the March of Dimes and the Heart Association and the various cancer associations, which McConnell wouldn't even make staff time for. He didn't want to hear from them, because he wasn't making actual health policy. He was pursuing his blind goal of finally getting the last laugh on President Obama, on ripping out his greatest achievement, "root and branch."
And because the Republican Party has devolved into an entity that is so devoid of principle that it nominated and elected Donald Trump as president, he almost succeeded. His caucus—with the exception of Collins and Murkowski—let him do this. They let him shut them out, they let him force these horrible votes on them. They followed him ever deeper into the abyss. So deep in that a handful of Republicans had a press conference pleading with the House of Representatives to promise they wouldn't let the bill they were all going to vote for become law.
Oh, and when they had that press conference, they still hadn't actually seen the bill. It had been finalized, but it wasn't released until a mere two hours before it was scheduled to be voted on. It was left to Democrats to ask the Congressional Budget Office for analysis of the rumors of what was going to be included in the bill for anyone to know what its actual effects might be.
And it almost passed. Last night was a step back from the brink by just three Republicans. One of those three is almost certainly only there temporarily—McCain is going to have to return home for treatment for his cancer diagnosis. After everything McConnell has done to erode the norms and the rules of the Senate, those three seem to be the only thing standing in the way of the Senate devolving into Mitch McConnell's and Donald Trump's plaything.
Unless … unless the spell was broken last night. Maybe the display of dissent from those three, not to mention the incredible personal and political damage the process has done to individual senators, will break McConnell's hold over them. Don't count on it: McCain's great friend, the supposed institutionalist Sen. Lindsey Graham, is meeting with Trump today, trying to find a way to go forward with Obamacare's destruction.