The End of the End of Obamacare (Hopefully)

VOX

Last night was, without a doubt, one for the history books. The Senate failed to move an Obamacare repeal bill at 1:30 am, and the chamber's two months of work on legislating (and seven years of campaigning) on the issue all came crashing down.

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Three Republican senators — Susan Collins of Maine, John McCain of Arizona, and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska — voted to block the Senate’s so-called “skinny” repeal bill. It was the bare minimum: The bill failed 49 to 51.

All three senators had their reasons, and they had each hinted for weeks that they would be reluctant to back the Senate’s various Obamacare repeal proposals. By the wee hours of Friday morning, three different Senate plans — a robust repeal-and-replace bill, a cleaner repeal bill, and finally so-called skinny repeal — had failed over three days of debate.

GOP Senators Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski 

Collins and Murkowski voted down all three. They had said for two months that they wouldn’t support a plan that resulted in millions fewer Americans having health coverage. The three health care bills that Republicans tried to pass would have led to between 16 million and 32 million fewer Americans having health insurance, when compared to Obamacare.

McCain, though, was the surprise. Diagnosed with brain cancer and the subject of much speculation after a rousing Senate speech calling for a return to an open and bipartisan process in the Senate, the Arizona Republican joined the other Republican dissenters at the climax of the Senate health care fight — and helped kill the bill.

Republicans refused to vote to roll back Obamacare’s coverage gains.

ELIZABETH DREW, NY REVIEW OF BOOKS

...The greatest outrage was stirred by the provisions ... for deep cuts in Medicaid to make up for a repeal of taxes on the wealthy. This proposed transfer of benefits from the poor to the rich plus the threatened cutoff of coverage to many millions of people had numerous Republican members of Congress hiding from their constituents during recesses.

Fearful of the public reaction to their proposals, and not wanting to allow groups time to mobilize against them, Speaker Ryan and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell most unusually drafted the bills in secret and tried to rush them to a vote in both the House and Senate. No committee hearings, no airing of the proposals to see how they stood up to criticism and challenge;...

VOX

McCain decried the absurd Senate process, and then he ended it

Republican leaders, ...unveiled the bill to the public late Thursday night, just hours before the first vote on it. the so-called “skinny” repeal — eliminating just Obamacare’s individual mandate and a few other provisions. 

Senate leaders, meanwhile, were making a puzzling promise: This bill wasn’t actually intended to become law. It was simply a vehicle to enter conference negotiations with the House.

 This last-ditch attempt bill...was such a poorly designed bill that senators were in the awkward position of asking the House not to pass it in order to secure their support.

The floor vote was dramatic. It became clear something was amiss when McCain spoke briefly with the top Senate Democrat, Chuck Schumer, and Schumer seemed elated. A conversation with the No. 2 Republican, John Cornyn, left Cornyn looking dour.

The showdown was with Vice President Mike Pence, present in the Senate in case he needed to cast a tiebreaker vote to give the “skinny” repeal bill a 51-vote majority. McCain and Pence spoke for nearly 30 minutes, in a conversation that at times seemed friendly but then turned serious. McCain was insistent. Pence huddled with McConnell and left the floor for a time. McCain stepped into a back room, believed to be taking a phone call.

But the Arizona senator was unmoved.

ELIZABETH DREW, NY REVIEW OF BOOKS

As usual with McCain there was a lot more subtlety to his act than has been imputed to him. Democratic leader Chuck Schumer told a reporter for The Guardian afterward that he and McCain had spoken “three or four times” a day for the past few days, and one subject was the secrecy with which the Senate had proceeded. (Schumer knew who he was talking to.) A very few other Republicans were also troubled by what the Senate was about to do—this included McCain’s closest Senate friend, Lindsey Graham. But by casting the deciding vote McCain offered them protection from the fury of the base had they themselves voted against changing Obamacare. And there was another thing: candidate Trump had delivered a particularly low blow to McCain by saying that he had greater respect for military personnel who weren’t captured. He charged McCain with not helping veterans. McCain doesn’t forget such things.  McCain also had long had an at best tense relationship with McConnell — the leading Senate opponent of campaign finance reform. Besides, the rather free-spirited McCain and the grim, win-with-whatever-works McConnell, both of them big figures in the Senate, were rarely in tune.....

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The failure was a testament to what can happen when the party taking control of the government seeks to overturn a major advance by the prior administration without any coherent idea of what it will do instead. In their determination to repeal a law greatly expanding the federal government’s commitment to help people obtain decent health care, the Republicans had gotten out of touch with the opinion of the people.

....Trump badly needed a victory. Six months into his presidency he hasn’t had a single major legislative achievement....Trump’s White House has been a shambles, with its internal warfare increasingly spilling into open ferocity. Moreover, the FBI investigation into his and his campaign’s dealings with Russia in connection with the 2016 election is growing more menacing....It has bothered Trump mightily that Obama was far more popular and had achieved a great deal more at this point in his presidency than Trump has. Trump’s aides have tried to cheer him up by telling him he’s doing great, and it’s possible he believes them. 

The Republicans’ implacable determination to put an end to Obama’s proudest legislative achievement has had to do with disdain for our first black president as well as resistance to such an expansion of government. Thus “Obamacare” was intended as a derogatory nickname. But they didn’t reckon on two things: that the program would become popular once a large number of people signed on to it; and that after two terms Obama would end up one of our most liked presidents.

The Republicans are particularly adept at injecting truisms into the ethos that aren’t true. One example is their insistence that Obamacare had been “rushed through Congress,” had been “shoved down our throats.” In fact, the passage of the bill came after more than a year of deliberation and was the subject of dozens of hearings in both houses and lengthy consideration in several committees. ...

One lesson of the Republicans’ entanglement with health care is that you can’t legislate a slogan. For nearly seven years, the Republicans appealed to their base by promising to get rid of the ACA and thereby raising money from unsuspecting followers. Now they needed a new line of attack. They simply declared Obamacare a failure. This has taken various forms—the program is in a “death spiral”; or this or that county doesn’t have any insurance companies who want to participate in its health care exchange. Trump himself routinely deemed the ACA “dead.” The problem with the Republicans’ arguments, as Ezra Klein pointed out in a searing article in Vox in March, is that they weren’t true. For example, the respected Kaiser Family Foundation has reported that all of thirty-eight counties out of 3,143 nationwide—around 1 percent—are at risk of starting out in 2018 without health care exchanges for lack of participants.

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The Trump administration has taken executive actions to try to cripple the program, and has the right personnel in place to do so: Tom Price, a former congressman who was a fierce opponent of the ACA, serving as the secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, and Mick Mulvaney, a founder of the Freedom Caucus, heading the powerful Office of Management and Budget. Trump himself has sometimes suggested that the government cost-sharing fees wouldn’t be paid to the insurance companies, as a way of forcing Obamacare to collapse—but then he’d back off out of fear of getting the blame. Such threats have created uncertainty about the program’s future and frightened some insurance companies out of participating. The Trump administration recently shut down the centers in major cities that help people sign up for Obamacare and shortened by half the time to shop for coverage in 2018. Trump has said several times that he would like to “let Obamacare fail” and blame the Democrats—presumably for backing the program in the first place.

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Trump’s participation in the health care fight if anything made things worse. During the House debate this spring, Trump held meetings with members at the White House and tried to persuade reluctant ones, but it turned out that he was also an easy mark. (This was much noticed about Trump at the time and later it showed up in some of his foreign dealings.) ... It was evident that the president didn’t much care what the bill contained: he just wanted to sign one. It quickly also became clear to Republican legislators that the president was unfamiliar with the details and evinced little interest in learning them. Word of this spread quickly. Trump is the least informed president in modern history....



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McConnell, a practical man undoubtedly eager to put the long-fought issue behind, said “It’s time to move on.” 

Why the Obamacare Repeal Effort Will Never Disappear People will continue to vote for the party that will strip them of their health care as long as it promises to turn back the clock and “Make America White Again.”

TRUTHDIG

Mosul, liberated

Fadel Senna/AFP/Getty Images

After nine months of fighting, the Iraqi government and US-led coalition have succeeded in their battle to liberate Mosul from ISIS. Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi formally declared victory on Monday, just hours after US-led coalition airstrikes dropped bombs on the terror group’s last stronghold in Mosul’s Old City. [Associated Press / Susannah George] ISIS had control of the city since 2014, when Islamic State fighters conquered Mosul for part of its self-declared caliphate. The group’s territory stretched across parts of Iraq and Syria. [Brookings Institution / Cole Bunzel] At the start of the Iraqi army offensive in November 2016, there were between 3,500 and 5,000 ISIS fighters in Mosul. Their number gradually dropped to a couple hundred before the city was recaptured, according to the US coalition. [CNN / Kara Fox] The fighting has completely reduced parts of a once-bustling city to rubble. More than 5,000 building have been destroyed, and civilians are in desperate need of food, water, and basic shelter. [BBC] The civilian toll has been brutal. Mosul used to be home to 2.5 million residents. More than 800,000 fled as the fighting intensified, but many left behind were either killed by ISIS militants who hid in highly populated areas or accidentally killed by US-led airstrikes. [NBC News / Petra Cahill] Even though physical ISIS territory is being wiped out, the terror group is not likely to go away quietly. [Reuters / Isabel Coles and Stephen Kalin] Iraq is a politically unstable region with a power struggle happening between current Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi and former Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. ISIS fighters using guerrilla-style warfare tactics like suicide bombs could make a tenuous situation even worse. [Foreign Policy / Renad Mansour] There are also fears that ISIS may move to other unstable parts of the Middle East like Libya, or that individual fighters will spread to other countries to carry out smaller attacks. Even though the ISIS caliphate has been dealt a fatal blow, it’s no less active trying to radicalize new recruits over the internet. [CNN / Tim Lister]

CONGRESS PASSES RUSSIA SANCTIONS BILL. WILL TRUMP SIGN IT?

TRUMP'S NEWEST DILEMMA:

-- House lawmakers overwhelmingly voted to advance a Russian sanctions bill yesterday, delivering a foreign-policy brushback to Trump and setting up a veto dilemma for the president. Mike DeBonis and Karoun Demirjian report: “Included in the package, which passed 419 to 3, are new measures targeting key Russian officials … as well as sanctions against Iran and North Korea in response to those nations’ weapons programs. Members of the Trump administration … have resisted the congressional push — in particular a provision attached to the Russian measures that would require Congress to sign off on any move to relieve those sanctions. The legislation was revised last week to address some administration concerns … But the bill passed Tuesday retains the congressional review requirement.”

Lawmakers in both parties urged Trump to sign the bill -- but it remains unclear how the president will respond. “

OBAMACARE REMAINS IN PERIL: MCCONNELL WINS A SENATE VOTE.

GOP dives into health-care debate.                                  

Skinny repeal’ could be the Senate’s health-care bill of last resort

The plan would eliminate the Affordable Care Act's individual mandate and two other key elements of the law. Less cost to the government, less coverage for millions of Americans.

Alex Wong / Getty Images For the past few weeks, the Senate health care bill seemed finished. So many senators disliked the bill so much that four said they would not even vote for a motion to proceed with debate on it. [Vox / Dylan Scott]   [But] Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has managed, after prospects looked dim again and again, to open debate on an Obamacare repeal plan. It’s a huge victory for Senate Republicans' hopes of passing some kind of health care bill, and it puts health insurance for millions of Americans at risk. Every plan Republicans are considering is projected to lead to millions fewer Americans having health insurance. Mitch McConnell is like a quarterback who has just converted on fourth and long. The Senate majority leader kept the drive to repeal Obamacare alive, but he’s still trailing by a touchdown, the game clock keeps ticking down and a win is not inevitable. -- He didn’t have a single vote to spare, but the Kentuckian demonstrated impressive legislative prowess by getting 50 Republican senators to vote for the motion to proceed to debate on the health-care bill. It was high political theater: John McCain, recovering from surgery and battling brain cancer, traveled 2,300 miles from Arizona. McCain’s return to Senate injects momentum into GOP health-care battle”:   As police removed protesters yelling “kill the bill” from the gallery, Wisconsin’s Ron Johnson (who has been a holdout in recent weeks) held off on voting until he saw what the outcome was going to be. Vice President Pence then cast a tiebreaking vote. But Republicans haven’t actually settled on what legislation they are trying to pass at the end of this debate. Bills to cleanly repeal much of Obamacare or to more fully repeal and replace the 2010 health care law don’t currently have the votes necessary to pass. In just the past few days, the idea of a much smaller bill, repealing just a few of Obamacare’s most unpopular provisions, surfaced. The Senate’s process from here is byzantine. The vote on Tuesday was technically to start debate on the House’s health care bill, but nobody expects that to be the actual legislation the Senate ultimately votes on. -- Last night underscored what a tough row to hoe this remains. The rules of the body mean that any senator can now submit amendments that need to be voted on. This leads to what’s called a vote-o-rama, an often chaotic and sometimes unpredictable process. The first item members took up last night was the Better Care Reconciliation Act. That is the carefully negotiated package that McConnell spent weeks crafting, with compromises to get conservatives like Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) and moderates like Rob Portman (R-Ohio) on board. But nine Republicans broke ranks and voted no. The diversity of those who opposed the measure underscored the ideological split within the Republican conference about the best path forward on health care. The group included moderates like Susan Collins (R-Maine) and Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska), as well as conservative purists like Mike Lee (R-Utah) and Rand Paul (R-Ky.). Also voting no were Bob Corker (R-Tenn.), Tom Cotton (R-Ark.), Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), Dean Heller (R-Nev.) and Jerry Moran (R-Kan.). Republican Senator Susan Collins It’s hard to overstate the degree to which White House officials and Senate GOP leaders just want to pass something — really, anything — to show the base that they are keeping their promise to roll back Obamacare. They would happily portray even most modest tweaks to the Affordable Care Act as major successes to save face. As far as they’re concerned, whatever gets passed will be the basis for negotiations with the House. So this is not even a final product. That’s where what’s being called “skinny repeal” comes in. “The ‘skinny repeal’ option would repeal the ACA’s mandates that individuals buy plans and that employers with 50 or more employees provide coverage … as well as eliminate the law’s tax on medical device manufacturers,” Sean Sullivan, Juliet Eilperin and Kelsey Snell explain. “This … strategy would keep the overhaul effort alive but amount to a tacit acknowledgment that broader efforts to revise or repeal the law cannot succeed ... The conservative group Freedom Partners (backed by the Koch political network), urged senators to use the votes to partly repeal the law and then keep pushing for full repeal. … But one key way Senate leaders won Tuesday’s procedural vote was by assuring several centrist Republicans that they may end up with a modest bill.” A skinny repeal bill,...[is the modest bill];] an effort to find a slender majority of votes.” Oliver Contreras/For The Washington Post) “John McCain, maverick of the Senate, did not return to Capitol Hill and suddenly stop the progress of the Republican health-care effort. But the Arizona Republican, now battling an aggressive form of brain cancer, did use his moment in the spotlight Tuesday to deliver a sobering message to colleagues,” Elise Viebeck, Paul Kane and Ed O'Keefe report. “The Senate might be known as the world’s greatest deliberative body, McCain said, but it is not clear it deserves that reputation today. The partisanship, the gridlock and the political subterfuge have dragged down the institution, he said. Senators’ work is ‘more partisan, more tribal more of the time than any other time I remember,’ McCain told a rapt audience on the Senate floor. ‘Our deliberations can still be important and useful, but I think we’d all agree they haven’t been overburdened by greatness lately. And right now, they aren’t producing much for the American people.’” (Read Kane’s column about McCain’s emotional return.) Even though he delivered a pivotal vote to move the health-care debate forward, the 2008 GOP presidential nominee publicly criticized his party’s leaders for their lack of transparency and suggested that a bill may not ultimately pass. “We’ve tried to do this by coming up with a proposal behind closed doors in consultation with the administration, then springing it on skeptical members, trying to convince them it’s better than nothing, asking us to swallow our doubts and force it past a unified opposition,” McCain said. “I don’t think that’s going to work in the end, and it probably shouldn’t … TWO WHO REVERSED THEIR STANCE TO SUPPORT MCCONNELL: Sen. Dean Heller  -- Las Vegas Sun: “[Sen. Dean Heller] voted in support of a motion to push forward with efforts to roll back Obamacare. … He noted that his vote to proceed was not a vote in favor of the GOP bill. … Rep. Jacky Rosen, D-Nev., who is running against Heller next year, said in a statement after today's vote that Heller folded under pressure from President Donald Trump and GOP leaders.” U.S. Sen. Shelley Moore Capito, R-W.Va. -- Charleston Gazette-Mail: “Following the roll call, [Sen. Shelley Moore] Capito said she expects that the final Senate version will put more money into combating the worsening opioid epidemic and beefing up the Patient and State Stability Fund, which would soften the blow of some of the lost federal funding.”

THE INVISIBLE REBOOBLICAN HEALTH CARE BILL

Photo by Mark Wilson/Getty Images

VOX, SARAH CLIFF

Republican senators are set to vote on a bill to repeal the Affordable Care Act tomorrow. They just don't know what's in it. 

It's hard to capture what an absurd and somewhat unbelievable situation this is. Health care is a massive part of the economy. The ACA provides coverage to tens of millions of Americans. The Senate plans to vote on a bill tomorrow affecting all of that. And at this moment — 24 hours or so before they vote — they have no idea what the bill contains.

 There are at least four different draft health care bills floating around right now. There are two that seem most ripe for a vote. These are:

• The Obamacare Repeal Reconciliation Act (ORRA): This bill would repeal the Affordable Care Act without a replacement. It would have the repeal start in 2020, presumably allowing the Senate two years to come up with a replacement they would enact. But if they didn't, the consequences would be dire. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that this bill would cause 32 million Americans to lose coverage.
• The Better Care Reconciliation Act (BCRA): This is the bill that repeals and replaces Obamacare, although the replacement will cover 22 million fewer people by 2026. This bill would repeal the Medicaid expansion and vastly scale back the subsidies middle-income Americans receive in the private market. The BCRA has been through multiple iterations at this point, and we still don't know what is in the latest version. 

Throughout this process, Republicans have struggled to articulate what exactly they want to achieve — aside from delivering on a seven-year campaign promise to repeal and replace Obamacare.

Is the point to wipe Obamacare off the books and go back to the old health insurance system? To come up with a new health system that costs less? Or covers more people? The goal has become finding something that can get 50 votes, with less attention paid to what that policy actually is.

"The debate over the Affordable Care Act is really a debate over wealth redistribution": "Overall, it would be ‘a big transfer. This is a massive tax cut for unpopular industries and wealthy individuals,’ said Andy Slavitt, who was acting administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services during the final years of the Obama administration. ‘It is about cutting care for lower-income people, seniors, people with disabilities and kids to pay for the tax cut.’” —Karen Tumulty, Washington Post

TEXAS GERRYMANDERING GOES TO COURT.

Liberal cities have no representation in Texas

Ron Jenkins/Getty Images

A major gerrymandering case in Texas gets off the ground today, as three judges will decide whether state lawmakers intentionally bypassed thousands of Hispanic and black voters when it drew up voting districts. [Texas Tribune / Cassandra Pollack] Texas is a deeply Republican state, but it also has millions of Hispanic and black voters; white voters have actually been in the racial minority since the mid-2000s. [NPR / Farai Chideya] Hispanic and black voters tend to cast their ballots for Democratic candidates, but Texas’s state legislature and its congressional delegation have remained deeply Republican for decades. [New Yorker / Lawrence Wright] Texas maps have been very advantageous to Republicans, who won four more seats in the US House than they would if they hadn’t tweaked the districts, according to analysis from the Associated Press. [Associated Press / Will Weissert] That’s in large part due to some very confusing voting districts. Most recently, when the time came to redraw voting districts in 2012, lawmakers produced maps with some very squiggly district lines. [Houston Chronicle / Matt Levin] Mandy Blott was surprised to learn that her district, which she considers left-leaning, is represented by a Republican. MARTIN DO NASCIMENTO / KUT The result? Liberal cities like Austin get just a fraction of the representation of more Republican areas, because they are lumped in with conservative areas to dilute the power of Democratic voters. [KUT / Ashley Lopez] Gerrymandering to give one political party an advantage is nothing new. Maps are typically drawn up by state legislatures, so they tend to reflect whichever party is in power. As a result, states that are split pretty evenly between Democrat and Republican voters end up heavily represented by one party or the other. [Vox / Andrew Prokop] The key question in Texas isn’t whether this was done to disadvantage a certain political party; instead, it’s about whether it disadvantages people of a certain race. Hispanic and black voters tend to lean Democratic, so separating them into weakened voting districts can prompt the argument that lawmakers are discriminating on a racial basis. [Washington Post / Robert Barnes] This argument has played out in other states. Most recently, the US Supreme Court ruled that North Carolina’s redistricting was racially motivated and without proper cause, which gave Democrats and voting rights activists alike a major win. That decision could also substantially weaken the Texas legislature’s case for keeping its districts as they are. [Vox / German Lopez] Mark Wilson/Getty Images Three federal judges in San Antonio are set to decide the case in a week. They already decided that the maps violated federal law earlier this year, but the issue is back in court because they want the maps to be redrawn before 2018. [Texas Tribune / Cassandra Pollack]

TRUMP FIRES SPICER, HIRES SCARAMOOCH (Sorry; SCARAMUCCI)

Spicer's infamous  January 21 news conference. That baggy, dated suit! (Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images)

Washington Post; By Amber Phillips

White House press secretary Sean Spicer resigned  amid staffing turmoil.

He was the most visible — and most publicly pummeled  — member of the Trump White House. 

Spicer's job had become nearly impossible. The president routinely undermined his statements, his job and his reputation.

Let’s remember his greatest hits.

From Day One, Spicer became the story instead of delivering the story. Remember when the president told Spicer to hold a Saturday news conference to demand the press report on a bigger crowd size for the inauguration? “This was the largest audience to ever witness an inauguration — period — both in person and around the globe,” Spicer said, which [ of course]  isn't true.

Over the next few months, Spicer would publicly deny that a policy the White House called a travel ban was a travel ban. He misspoke in a reference to Hitler and gas chambers during the Holocaust. He was parodied on “Saturday Night Live.”  He said covfefe meant something. He didn't get invited to meet Pope Francis, the one celebrity he apparently wanted to meet through this job.

When Trump suddenly fired FBI director James B. Comey, The Post's Jenna Johnson reported Spicer “spent several minutes hidden in the darkness among the bushes” before he'd speak with reporters in the darkness, cameras off. Eventually, Spicer wasn't even on camera at all as his deputy, Sarah Huckabee Sanders (who is now his replacement) filled in. Spicer was the most ridiculed man in Washington, and the Fix's Aaron Blake writes forfeited his credibility to do his job. So his departure isn't really surprising.

But why now? Which brings me to: A name you should know: Anthony Scaramucci Anthony Scaramucci, at Trump Tower in November, doesn't mind the spotlight. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post) First, how to pronounce his name: ScAruhmoochey   Who he is: A former hedge fund manager, cable news bulldog and as of  now,  the director of the Trump White House's communications team. ...But Scaramucci won't be on the podium, he will direct communications behind-the-scenes. Did his hiring cause Spicer to leave? The Post's Ashley Parker, Abby Phillip and Damian Paletta report Spicer's resignation was abrupt and angry and caught top West Wing officials off guard. So, reading between the lines, it sure seems like it. Why Scaramucci's hiring matters: He is a Trump ally with conservative credentials and, even though he dissed Trump during the campaign, he's been a "killer" (adviser Kellyanne Conway's words) on TV defending Trump now. But his hiring came at the opposition of senior advisers. He even has a crude name for Trump's chief of staff, whose last name is Priebus. (Think about it...). Bringing Scaramucci on is a clue that Trump believes the answer to his chaotic presidency is to get more combative with the world, not less. Think Trump was tough on Spicer? Nixon once shoved his press secretary.  Ron Ziegler, former President Nixon press secretary (White House Photo Courtesy Richard Nixon Library) Michael Rosenwald, writing for The Post's history-focused blog The Retropolis, explains: In late August 1973, as the Watergate scandal ate away at President Richard Nixon’s psyche and presidency, CBS News correspondent Dan Rather filed an astonishing report on the evening news. “What you are about to see,” Rather said, “is a rare glimpse in public of presidential irritation.” And there it was on tape: The president of the United States grabbing press secretary Ron Ziegler by the shoulders and shoving him away. … He stuck his finger in Ziegler’s chest, turned him around, and then shoved him in the back hard with both hands, saying “I don’t want any press with me and you take care of it.” If there's one kernel of comfort I can offer Spicer and his fans: It could have been worse? (Framepool)

ZOMBIE TRUMPCARE SHOT IN THE HEAD AGAIN.

Mark Wilson / Getty Images

• The Republican Senate bill to repeal and replace Obamacare is dead, and its eleventh-hour bid to repeal Obamacare with no replacement is too. [Vox / Dylan Scott]
• This stunning blow to the Republican legislative agenda all happened in the past 24 hours. [Vox / Dylan Scott]
• Last night, two Republican senators, Mike Lee of Utah and Jerry Moran of Kansas, dealt the BCRA its final blow when they said they would not vote to proceed to debate on the bill. The BCRA had been hanging by a thread of one vote before they made the announcement. [CNN / MJ Lee, Ted Barrett, and Phil Mattingly]



Zach Gibson/Getty Images:             Moran was the sleeper "no" vote. Later explaining his reasoning, the Kansas senator said he believed the BCRA was bad policy, plain and simple. He advocated going back to the drawing board. [NPR / Jim McLean

• 
  Late Monday night, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell called for a vote on so-called “repeal and delay,” where Republicans would repeal the Affordable Care Act immediately and come up with a replacement later. [Vox / Sarah Kliff]



Senator Shelley Moore Capito, center, Republican of West Virginia, said she was opposed to simply repealing the Affordable Care Act without a replacement. CreditDoug Mills/The New York Times                                                                                                As with the BCRA, McConnell could only afford to lose two votes on straight repeal. Over the course of today, Sens. Susan Collins of Maine, Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia, and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska all announced they would block the effort. [NYT / Thomas Kaplan]

• 
  From the beginning, the bill’s problem was that conservative and moderate Republicans simply couldn’t come to a consensus. Read the explainer from Vox's Dylan Scott on the persistent problems with the BCRA. [Vox / Dylan Scott]
• This crushing defeat underscores an uncomfortable reality for the GOP: They have not netted any major policy wins, despite having majorities in all three branches of government. [The Atlantic / Molly Ball]

Trump Tower Russia meeting: At least eight people in the room

• We now know that there was another person at Donald Trump Jr.’s meeting with a Russian lawyer last June. And that person is a former counterintelligence officer for the Soviet Union who could also currently be working for Russian intelligence, per US officials. [NBC News / Ken Dilanian, Nathash Lebedeva, and Hallie Jackson]
• His name is Rinat Akhmetshin, and he’s a Russian-American lobbyist. Today, Akhmetshin told the AP he was at the meeting, but pushed back on reports that he has worked as a spy for the Russians. (Specifically, he said he did work for Soviet counterintelligence but was never trained as a spy). [AP / Desmond Butler and Chad Day]
• Akhmetshin also told reporters about the meeting, which he described as not having much substance. He candidly told one reporter that the situation was a “clusterf***.” [Laura Rozen via Twitter]
• It’s also been reported that there were at least eight people attending the meeting, though only six have been named so far. [CNN]
• The story has changed a lot over the past week, so if you want to check the timeline for yourself, Vox’s Dara Lind has you covered. [Vox / Dara Lind]