Even this vampiric motherfucker couldnt revive the vampire bill, at least not this time.
Even this vampiric motherfucker couldn't revive the vampire bill. Mark Wilson / Getty

The repeal and no-replace plan, Mitch McConnell's last-ditch effort to kick millions of people off of healthcare this session, has failed. Apparently, artificially creating a humanitarian disaster for Americans is just a bridge too far for batshit, less-far-right Republican Senators. NYT:

Senators Susan Collins of Maine, Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, all Republicans, immediately declared they could not vote to repeal the Affordable Care Act without a replacement — enough to doom the effort before it could get any momentum.


Republicans, and the living embodiment of rape culture who sits in the the Oval Office and plays a lot of golf, will try to blame the failure of Trumpcare on the Democrats. That bullshit has already begun in the White House. In fact, Trump is already holding millions of American lives hostage over this, literally admitting that he and the Republicans plan to let Obamacare fail even as he claims no ownership over its supposed downfall:

“We’re not going to own it. I’m not going to own it. I can tell you the Republicans are not going to own it. We’ll let Obamacare fail and then the Democrats are going to come to us.”

Do you hear that, "forgotten men and women?" Better find you a Democrat if you don't want to die.

Anyhow, while it's true that no Democrat supported the effort to kick 23 million people off of healthcare, which became the bill to kick 22 million people off healthcare, which became the bill that would probably kick 22 million people off of healthcare but we didn't really know because the CBO score hadn't come out yet, the problem for the Republicans isn't the Democrats, it's other Republicans.

They've had seven years to come up with a plan to replace Obamacare, but they can't even come to agreement on the repealing a bill they campaigned on repealing. They have the House, the Senate, the Oval Office, and the Supreme Court. And still, nothing. This is because the only thing they know how to do, their only idea, is to attempt to cut taxes for wealthy Americans.

McConnell's "Plan C," as the Times calls it, was a punitive measure to embarrass so-called moderate Republican Senators, to remind them that they need to be more horrible if they want to stay in this party. Blaming a lack of votes for the bill shifts the focus off the bad "repeal and replace" policy and onto the Senators who were not evil enough to vote for it this go-around. In this way, though he says otherwise, this move by McConnell preserves the policy at the expense of the Senators who voted against it. This thing will return. It will be wearing something different, but it will return.

In the meantime, now would be an excellent moment for a fresh idea about healthcare to fill this brief vacuum. Eh, Democrats?