What a night! Breaking ranks with a party that was hellbent on denying millions affordable health insurance, Senators Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski and John McCain voted against the so-called “skinny repeal” of Obamacare.
Tanner Curtis at The New York Times has detail on how it all went down:
The hustle and bustle in the Capitol’s hallways faded into stillness as the hours dragged by. Aides, glued to their cellphones as they waited for instructions, paced or sat; others hauled in boxes of pizza. [...] The events played out 52 years after Congress approved legislation creating the Medicare and Medicaid programs, which President Lyndon B. Johnson signed into law on July 30, 1965. A bust of Mr. Johnson, who had served earlier as Senate majority leader and as vice president, is on display in the Capitol. /react-text
Here’s Michael Tomasky at The Daily Beast:
McCain’s vote—and Susan Collins’s and Lisa Murkowski’s; let’s not get so overwhelmed with McCainmania that we forget these brave women—will rightly go down in Senate history. Earlier in the week, James Fallows wrote a terrific piece comparing, unfavorably, McCain to long-ago California Senator Clair Engle, a Democrat, who in 1964 was wheeled into the Senate chamber to cast a vote for civil rights. Engle, too, had cancer. He couldn’t speak. When the clerk called his name, he pointed to his eye to indicate he was voting “aye.”
Ryan Cooper at The Week calls this administration the most self-defeating and incompetent in history:
The continual meltdown of the Trump administration has reached, unbelievably, an even higher pitch over the last few days, with the hiring of financier Anthony Scaramucci as the new White House communications director. And yet, the endless juicy personal drama surrounding President Trump is in some ways covering up for far worse failures and incompetence — particularly surrounding America's nuclear programs and arsenal. The hapless incompetence of this administration is virtually impossible to exaggerate.
Ed Kilgore:
In the shocked Senate chamber after the crucial vote, McConnell seemed near tears, furious at the three apostates who frustrated his Republicans-only process, and completely out of ideas. He instantly canceled the scheduled “vote-a-rama” series of amendments scheduled for the wee hours, and dispensed with any “final passage” vote; with the failure of “skinny repeal,” the only thing on the floor to pass was the House-passed American Health Care Act, the bill Donald Trump himself called “mean.” Even as he bitterly taunted Democrats to come forward with their own ideas, McConnell seemed to take one immediately critical bipartisan idea — funding Cost-Sharing Reduction subsidies to keep individual insurance markets functioning — off the table.
Moving from a failed effort to enact transparently phony legislation to the sabotaging of anything else would indeed be a logical next step for McConnell, and likely would put him in tune with the vengeful, destructive mood we can expect from Donald Trump the next time he approaches his Twitter account. But Republicans earned this defeat a long time ago, when they chose to pretend they could improve health care while denying universal coverage and restoring discrimination against the sick and the poor. They have also earned a long and bitter series of internal recriminations over their failure to bring down the Great White Whale of Obamacare. If the GOP chooses to blame it all on three senators who refused to vote for a bill no one actually wanted to see enacted, their road back to relevance on health-care policy will be very long.
Elise Viebeck at The Washington Post looks at how the Republican party reacted to the two female senators who had signaled they would vote against the bill:
The language of retribution increasingly adopted by Republican men reflects Trump’s influence and underscores the challenges GOP women can face when opposing the consensus of their party, which remains dominated by men, outside experts said. A videotape of Trump surfaced during the campaign revealing him bragging in vulgar terms about groping women, and some believed that opened the gates for further insults and degrading behavior toward women. “Masculine dominance in the Republican Party is not only in numbers but in culture,” said Kelly Dittmar, a scholar at the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University and the author of “Navigating Gendered Terrain: Stereotypes and Strategy in Political Campaigns.”
And here is Eugene Robinson on Trump’s presidency so far:
The Trump administration is, indeed, like the court of some accidental monarch who is tragically unsuited for the duties of his throne. However long it persists, we must never allow ourselves to think of the Trump White House as anything but aberrant. We must fight for the norms of American governance lest we forget them in their absence. [...] Inside the mad king’s court, the internecine battles are becoming ever more brutal. Members of Trump’s inner circle seek his favor by leaking negative information about their rivals. This administration is more hostile to the media than any in recent memory but is also more eager to whisper juicy dirt about the ambitious courtier down the hall.