1. On "skinny repeal," McCain waited until the last minute to tell everyone that he was voting no. With Graham-Cassidy, he announced his intention with time to spare. Interesting! Why the difference? Best guess: if you are going to vote no on your friend's bill, try not to do it in a "backstabby" way. (Fuck you, spellchecker. I call that a word). Voting yes on Graham-Cassidy after his big speech on "regular order" would have been, well... see this post. He had no qualms about stabbing McConnell in the back because he hates McConnell, but McCain is apparently trying to salvage some consistency here. I wonder if he gave Graham advanced warning...
2. I've been focused on the Senate parliamentarian, saying that the dramatics among Senators were irrelevant if she called Graham-Cassidy out of compliance with the Byrd rule. McCain has now made her nearly irrelevant. It is almost impossible to see any coalition in the Senate supporting Graham-Cassidy. MacDonough will be forced, once again, to feed on carrion rather than slake her thirst on the blood of the living. (What, you thought I'd give up this stuff? Hell, no! Am I calling her a zombie or a vampire now? I'm not even sure anymore, but it's still fun!)
3. This opens the floodgates for further opposition. Graham-Cassidy is custom-made for anyone to oppose for position-taking purposes. Once again, we turn to David Mayhew's Congress: The Electoral Connection. Members of Congress seeking reelection will engage in activities like position-taking, meaning actions that will not serve policy purposes, but will signal to constituents that they hold popular positions. Graham-Cassidy has a lot of components that won't be popular with various constituents. In an earlier post, I speculated that Rand Paul was waiting for MacDonough to kill the bill, leaving him as the purist conservative who always hated it anyway for it not being conservative enough. Maybe he was just waiting for the coalition to collapse, and the same reasoning could apply. We can make the same type of argument for anyone whose state would lose funding, who wants to appeal to those worried about pre-conditions, etc., on the other side. That's the beauty of position-taking. If the bill is doomed anyway, you can say you opposed it for any fucking reason you like, and who is to say otherwise? Once the coalition collapses, more people are likely to come out against it. Murkowski has been squishy about Graham-Cassidy lately, but McCain just made it much safer for her to make it a firm no, which she pretty much was anyway. Just as an example.
4. McCain wants bipartisanship. Lamar Alexander may have killed that. He walked away from negotiations with Patty Murray to try to force Republicans onto the Graham-Cassidy track. I commented on that here. It is very easy, at this point, to imagine that the Democrats will respond to any post-Graham-Cassidy overtures with a resounding "FUCK YOU!" Why? Because as soon as some hare-brained scheme comes along for another attempt at repeal-and-replace, the GOP will walk away from whatever bipartisan negotiations are happening. How do we know this? We saw what Lamar Alexander did. So, what's the point?
5. McCain wants regular order. Everything about the process so far has been predicated on the notion that no bill can survive regular order. Regular order means going through committee, hearings, mark-up, floor debate, amendments, etc. Why would that be so damaging to the bill's chances? Time and open debate on the content. The Republicans are afraid that if they subject their bills to that process, two things will happen. First, any offered compromise they make during the process will be attacked by purists on their own side, even if that compromise never gets into the final bill. I have commented on why this creates incentives for private negotiations. Second, they don't want to let the Democrats do to their bill what Republicans did to the ACA back in 2009 and 2010. Speed and secrecy are their solution. Can a "repeal-and-replace" bill survive regular order? We... have no fucking clue. But, McCain is actually, truly, really serious about this. McCain plus Collins and Murkowski means regular order looks like their only option.
6. The GOP will not stop. I can't actually wrap my brain around the idea that they will stop trying to "repeal-and-replace Obamacare." The logical thing to do, as I have been pointing out since last November's surprise victory by Trump, is a series of small-bore measures that would allow the GOP to claim victory, over, and over, and over again. First, repeal the employer mandate. Yay! We repealed Obamacare! Then, repeal the medical device tax. Yay! We repealed Obamacare! And so forth. They can keep doing this. This was the smart thing to do, all along. They can try things through regular order. There are options here. What, specifically, will they do? I don't know, but they aren't done. So far, though, we haven't seen a lot of evidence that they have come to grips with the practical and political challenges of their situation.
Don't be fooled, though. This is not over. They can even pass a new budget resolution to try reconciliation again! The September 30 deadline is a bullshit deadline! What this truly demonstrates, though, is that sometimes, one old guy can throw everything into disarray. McCain did it on skinny repeal, and he just did it again.
One guy. One guy is making everything weird. I am teaching a Freshman Seminar right now called "Prediction," which addresses the challenges of trying to make predictions. One of those challenges is how a weird, random thing can throw everything into disarray sometimes. The first book on the syllabus is Asimov's Foundation. The second book in the series is Foundation and Empire, which I don't have the students read, but it has one random dude throwing everything into chaos. The Mule. John McCain is the fuckin' Mule. (The Republicans see him as a traitor anyway, so the animal thing almost works!)
