Two pale miseries colluding to kill.
Two pale miseries colluding on how best to kill people. Mark Wilson / GETTY

The plan to completely repeal Obamacare just died on the floor of the Senate. One sad laugh is that more Senators voted for the full repeal than for the Better Care Reconciliation Action, aka "the Senate bill," aka the bill 13 white men wrote in total secrecy over the course of two months.

But the full repeal and BCRA were expected to fail—too much death for the so-called "moderates" on the one hand, not enough death for the Tea Party's grim reapers on the other. All hope for the GOP rides now on the “skinny repeal,” which would remove just the right number of regulations from the ACA to send insurers running from healthcare markets in the poorest parts of the country. And, of course, as always, McConnell can and probably will decide at the last moment to switch out the "skinny repeal" for a bill he's crafting behind closed doors, with a trembling Capito and Heller beside him.

The cold joy now for Democrats, and for anyone else who doesn't want to lose a loved one because they can't afford insurance, is the fact that the Republicans today truly failed their own constituents by not doing the thing they say they were elected to do: completely repeal Obamacare. But of course, as Eli mentioned earlier, they never earnestly wanted to repeal Obamacare anyway.

Here's a fun lil Tweet to give you a sense of the teams as they now stand.


The NOs may face some hell from the Koch Brothers and from other members of the rabid but well-to-do Republican donor class, as well as from some astroturf-tending Tea Partiers. But really, the vote allows Tea Party politicians to blame "moderates" for sinking repeal, and it allows "moderates" to blame the Tea Party for trying to kill too many of their own constituents, so everyone's got their ass covered. What kind of fucked up darkworld do I live in where the sentence I just wrote constitutes a viable political strategy?

Anyway, if you're not doing anything at the moment, now would be a good time to call some people in Nevada and West Virginia.