What. Just. Happened.
Reuters reports that Mike Lee and Jerry Moran are out, leaving no more than 48 Republicans willing to back the latest repeal/replace effort, and at least for the moment, McConnell is done trying:
Republicans in the U.S. Congress were in chaos over healthcare legislation after a second attempt to pass a bill in the Senate collapsed late on Monday, with President Donald Trump calling for an outright repeal of Obamacare and others seeking a change in direction toward bipartisanship.
"Regretfully, it is now apparent that the effort to repeal and immediately replace the failure of Obamacare will not be successful," Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said in a statement.
Two of McConnell's Senate conservatives announced just hours earlier that they would not support the Republican leader's latest version of legislation to repeal portions of President Barack Obama's landmark 2010 healthcare law and replace them with new, less costly healthcare provisions.
With Republican Senators Mike Lee and Jerry Moran joining Senators Susan Collins and Rand Paul in opposition - and amid a solid wall of opposition from Democrats - McConnell no longer had enough votes to pass a Republican healthcare bill in the 100-member Senate.
Obviously you can't do the repeal if you lose more than two votes
That statement from McConnell sounds awfully final. It doesn't say they have to go back to the drawing board and craft a different bill that can get 50 votes. It says that's it. ObamaCare will not be repealed and "immediately" replaced.
So now he says he's going to have the Senate vote on a straight repeal bill that will provide a two-year delay to allow time to deal with the inherent problems that will come up. It's the same bill the Senate passed in 2015 when it knew Barack Obama would veto it. Donald Trump now says he will sign it.
Does McConnell really intend this to succeed?
Obviously you can't do the repeal if you lose more than two votes, and both Rand Paul and Susan Collins are almost impossible to get on board for diametrically opposite reasons. But why does the effort itself have to end here just because Lee and Moran decided not to support this particular version? Has McConnell simply concluded that there's no way you can please both the moderates and the conservatives? Have those two groups tried and failed to reach a compromise amongst themselves?
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Does McConnell really want to get rid of ObamaCare? He certainly acts a lot of the time like he doesn't
I don't see how you're going to get to a full repeal, with no replacement, given those same Senate dynamics. It would certainly be better than keeping ObamaCare in place, since it would give both the House and the Senate no fallback for any future failure to get it right. But I don't think the Senate moderates want to do that, and I'm not sure McConnell ever did. He seems more motivated by the legislative calendar and the imperative to "move on to the rest of our agenda" than to seriously deal with what he himself calls the ObamaCare failure.
I can understand Lee and Moran not liking this bill for any number of reasons, particularly the preservation of several ObamaCare taxes - including the one on investment income, which was kept in to mollify nervous moderates who didn't want to be accused of supporting a "tax cut for the rich." A lot of good that did. It still didn't get Susan Collins on board, because Susan Collins seems determined to save ObamaCare at all costs.
Voting on a straight repeal and then coming back later to solve the problems makes a lot more sense than simply leaving it in place. But it does something else, too. If Democrats make significant gains in the 2018 mid-terms, if could give them the upper hand in determining what comes next. Does McConnell really want to get rid of ObamaCare? He certainly acts a lot of the time like he doesn't.
