John McCain diagnosed with brain cancer

Yup, you caught him!

Right now they are just they are just voting for amendments to the what is essentially a blank bill. If they manage to pass any amendments (which seems unlikely) than they’ll have a final vote on the bill including all the amendment.

I think BRCA, with amendments like Cades&Collins and provisions for incentives to get people to buy insurance now instead of waiting until they are sick, would be an improvement over ACA.

In his speech McCain was pretty explicit as to what it would take to earn his final vote.

“I voted for the motion to proceed to allow debate to continue and amendments to be offered. I will not vote for the bill as it is today. It’s a shell of a bill right now. We all know that**. I have changes urged by my state’s governor that will have to be included to earn my support for final passage of any bill**. I know many of you will have to see the bill changed substantially for you to support it.

If the BRCA was adopted (which I believe required 60 votes) then McCain would have submitted an amendment to make the change the governor was urging. At this point, this is all moot.

That would result in tens of millions of people losing health insurance, while also causing premiums to go up.

So no, I don’t think that’s really gonna be an improvement over the ACA.

What, specifically, do you think would improve with that?

No story I’ve read indicates that, and I’ve been looking for it. Hence my confusion.

All of the stories I’ve seen are similar to this by Nate Silver on 538:

Some Surprising GOP Votes On BCRA
Some of the individual votes Tuesday night were surprising. Overall, nine Republicans opposed the amendment, which was a de facto vote on the BCRA.

The “no” votes — in rough order of least to most surprising — were Collins, Paul, Murkowski, Heller, Lee, Moran, Graham, Corker and Cotton.

But “yes” votes included McCain, who had implied in his speech on the Senate floor that he opposed the BCRA, and Capito, who had indicated opposition to an earlier version of it.

For Capito, my theory is that she thinks the BCRA would be bad for West Virginia because of its huge Medicaid cuts, but also knows that Trump is super popular in her state. So an outcome where the bill fails but she winds up supporting Trump’s position is pretty optimal for her. How she would have voted if she were the decisive vote might be harder to say.

By the same token, the fact that the BCRA wasn’t actually close to passage also enabled some potentially token-ish “no” votes. Corker said he voted no because of the lack of a Congressional Budget Office score, for instance — but Corker had voted for the motion to proceed earlier today when McConnell needed his vote despite the irregularity of the process.

As for McCain … I don’t know what to say. My beef is really with how the media covers McCain more than with McCain himself. As we wrote about McCain last week, he’s generally much more interested in foreign policy and national security than domestic policy. So when he actually takes “maverick-y” votes, it’s usually on those issues and not on others like health care.

Still, there’s a question here about how much the media ought to be weighing words or promises to vote a certain way versus actual floor votes. As we learned just now, those are very different things — including for McCain.

Sounds like he’s passing the buck though. It doesn’t seem like Docey is particularly enlightened when it comes to healthcare.

Ok. That helps a little. I still don’t believe he’d vote against a shitty Republican repeal and replace bill, but at least it delays his hypocrisy for a day or two.

Ya, honestly, I don’t even know how that vote worked… because according to the parliamentarian, it would have needed 60 votes to break a filabuster… but that would happen before a vote. So I don’t fully grasp what exactly they were voting on.

Seems like this is intended. The Senate doing what the Senate does: confusing everyone so they can’t be held accountable.

That’s is for sure. It certainly isn’t close to regular order. At this point, I don’t think anything will get adopted, so maybe the next step would actually be regular order. I wonder if they start from scratch how long it will take.

Such a piece of shit.

This is as if, in A Christmas Carol, Ebenezer Scrooge had met all those ghosts and confronted his own mortality and everything, only to come back to the present and kick Tiny Tim’s crutch out from under his tiny little arm.

They’ve successfully distorted order enough that I’m losing track of who voted for what and what’s happening if I turn away for an afternoon now.

I wavered very much in the last couple of days with my withholding of judgement, with all the chaos between procedural versus substantive bills etc., but in the final analysis McCain cast the deciding vote that AFAIK will kill ACA repeal for now. So he allowed his party loyalty to overcome his moderate and maverick instincts for a good chunk of the last decade, but in what I consider a key career defining vote, he came through.

I am a huge sucker for last minute redemption stories, and for old soldiers picking up the sword one last time, so…

John McCain. At the key moment, he was a true maverick.

Also, that was an (IMO intentional) F-U to both McConnell and Trump.

Gotta be, man. Did you see that little flourish when he voted? May as well have just been a middle finger.

The BRCA is not a healthcare bill. It’s a goddamned tax cut for the wealthiest Americans at the expense of millions of vulnerable people.

The guy did good when it counted…
Honestly, it wasn’t a hard call. The bill he was voting on was objectively terrible. It’s more of a damnation of the GOP senators who voted for it.

But he did good, and stood up for not being an asshole.

I am very, very (pleasantly) surprised. Good for you, John. Could have done w/o the crazy drama, but you did the right thing in the end.

49 Senators voted for a bill that many publicly agreed was ‘terrible’. It shouldn’t have been close at all.

Bigger thanks to the other two Republicans, especially the one who held out against Trump threatening to defund her state.

That is an entirely fair point. Murkowski in particular deserves thanks and respect for this, as you say.

Is someone who doesn’t tow the party line frequently. Someone who tows the party line 99.99% of the time is not a maverick.

You’ve already completely divorced yourself from reality because you’re far too much in love with the narrative that exists only in your head.