Mitch McConnell's strategy when Obama was inaugurated was to ensure that nothing Obama did had any bipartisan support. It was a way of denying consent, running parallel to birtherism, conspiracy theories about ACORN, intimations that he was muslim, and so forth. McConnell even admitted that the point was to keep any appearance of bipartisan support away from Obama for electoral purposes. The party, particularly at that level, never accepted the legitimacy of the 2008 loss.
And they never accepted the legitimacy of the loss on Obamacare itself. Bills pass. They become law. What is unusual about Obamacare is the extent to which the opposing party continues to dedicate itself to fighting that law, without a clear goal of a competing policy. Why? They didn't accept the legitimacy of the loss.
The flip-side of a group of people who don't accept the legitimacy of their losses is that once they come into power under unified government, they believe that they really must win. Under unified government, they are supposed to control everything. This is their time to get whatever they want. With control of the House and Senate comes control of legislative procedure, although that procedural control is rather stronger in the House of Representatives. To a group of people who have spent the last seven years telling themselves that Obamacare was illegitimately passed through procedural shenanigans, they believe that it would be illegitimate for them to not be able to reverse that through their own procedural control. What is the point of having the majority, then, if not to use that procedural control to win? Again, this is about not accepting the legitimacy of the loss.
Right now, John McCain is probably the least popular Republican in the Senate among his colleagues. Rand Paul... is being Rand Paul. Trump made some comments about thinking that he could be won over, and I kind of think Trump is right, if Paul were the swing vote. Collins and Murkowski, at this point, are just sort of accepted as outliers because they are consistently moderate anyway. There are others engaged in back-and-forth negotiations, but McCain... He is the one who killed "skinny repeal," which was the GOP's vehicle for sending a bill to conference, and it looks like he has probably killed Graham-Cassidy, probably alienating his only real friend in the GOP caucus, Lindsey Graham.
What McConnell and the rest of Republican leaders really can't stand is one unexpectedly obstinate person screwing up their plans, causing them to lose when they don't believe that any loss is legitimate. Anderson et al.'s book is about those who lose an election, but it is also important to understand that in this system, even those who are in power don't always get their way. We have a complicated system of checks and balances, and the party that "controls" the legislature frequently does so very weakly. Having a majority doesn't necessarily mean you have the ability to win.
What Anderson et al. do show, which is vitally important, is the necessity of accepting the legitimacy of a loss. Right now, the GOP does not accept any loss as legitimate. Just think back to Trump's rhetoric during the campaign... We saw this during the debate over Obamacare, and the party has fought more vehemently against the law than is normal. By far. Why? They never accepted the legitimacy of the loss, despite the fact that they never bothered to formulate an alternative, leading to the current legislative chaos. And the turmoil in Congress now comes from the fact that this same group of people believes that being in the formal position of power means that they can never, ever, ever lose. Not true. Their fury at McCain is not about policy because they have no policy commitment to Graham-Cassidy. Graham-Cassidy is just some half-assed, unstudied, poorly considered piece of shit that somebody scrawled on the nearest sheet of paper an hour before the homework assignment was due, hoping for partial credit. Just ask Chuck Grassley. No, McConnell, Trump and the rest don't care about the content of Graham-Cassidy. They are pissed at McCain because they don't accept the idea that they can be in the majority and still lose.
Everyone should go read Loser's Consent. Everyone.