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.”
