BREAKING: McCain STRIKES AGAIN, Killing Obamacare Repeal Bill

We knew it was too good to be true.

After Congressional Republicans spent most of the year making fools of themselves with their apparent inability to scrounge up either enough votes or a decent enough bill to simply repeal Obamacare — despite promising to do so for nearly a decade — the past couple weeks saw renewed hope in a White House-endorsed plan put forth by Republican Senators Bill Cassidy and Lindsey Graham that was by no means a full repeal, but by most accounts would have done more good than harm in freeing America from the individual mandate and beginning to return health policy power to the states.

And then John McCain came along.

CNBC reports that the Arizona Republican Senator has just renewed his longtime nickname of “Maverick” by announcing he’ll oppose Graham-Cassidy. When combined with the confirmed opposition of libertarian Republican Rand Paul and the probable opposition of liberal Republican Susan Collins, this means the bill is dead in the Senate.

What’s McCain’s reasoning for voting no?

“I would consider supporting legislation similar to that offered by my friends Senators Graham and Cassidy were it the product of extensive hearings, debate and amendment. But that has not been the case. Instead, the specter of September 30th budget reconciliation deadline has hung over this entire process.

“We should not be content to pass health care legislation on a party-line basis, as Democrats did when they rammed Obamacare through Congress in 2009. If we do so, our success could be as short-lived as theirs when the political winds shift, as they regularly do. The issue is too important, and too many lives are at risk, for us to leave the American people guessing from one election to the next whether and how they will acquire health insurance. A bill of this impact requires a bipartisan approach […]

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“I cannot in good conscience vote for the Graham-Cassidy proposal. I believe we could do better working together, Republicans and Democrats, and have not yet really tried. Nor could I support it without knowing how much it will cost, how it will effect insurance premiums, and how many people will be helped or hurt by it. Without a full CBO score, which won’t be available by the end of the month, we won’t have reliable answers to any of those questions.

Translation: McCain doesn’t actually have substantive complaints about the legislation’s contents (and no, the lack of a Congressional Budget Office score doesn’t count; a principled conservative lawmaker would understand that the CBO is a horrendously biased, unreliable entity). McCain is basing this entirely on the juvenile, asinine, unprincipled grounds of “bipartisanship.”

Get it through your heads, Republican Party: the Democrats lost the election, they are not your friends, and they do not have the American people’s best interests at heart. Not only do they deserve no seat at the table, but incorporating their input into any legislation is a guarantee it’ll be half bad, at least. The Democrats get up and go to work every morning for the express purpose of violating their oath to the Constitution, and you were sent to Capitol Hill to protect the country from them, not to salvage leftist ideas the country expressly repudiated at the polls.

Of course, this lecture would fall on deaf ears with a man like McCain, for whom his oath of office and the country’s interests have long been secondary to the adoration of the media and the Left. Case in point:

Thank you @SenJohnMcCain for being a hero again and again and now AGAIN

— Jimmy Kimmel (@jimmykimmel) September 22, 2017

So where does this leave Obamacare repeal? The good news is that the deadline for this bill was somewhat arbitrary, meaning there’s still plenty of time before the 2018 elections to try again, either through an all-new plan or at least a reintroduction of this one with more time taken to iron out its flaws.

The bad news is that there are no signs that the Senate has learned anything from this fiasco, no serious effort to replace the wretched leadership of Mitch McConnell. Come January all the same GOP leaders will be in place, most of the same senators, and the filibuster will still be there. Frankly, a real Republican Rarty would have had an excellent bill already passed, waiting for Donald Trump’s signature on January 20, 2017.

So the bottom line hasn’t changed: repealing and replacing Obamacare won’t happen until we repeal and replace the Republican establishment.

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