John McCain has
come out against the Graham-Cassidy fuckery, but I think the NY
Times is jumping the gun a bit in describing the proposal as "likely doom[ed]."
There's three other GOP senators in the mix here, namely Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski and Rand Paul. Two of the three must vote no, else the thing passes and the issue gets kicked to a House-Senate Conference Committee, which would have the unenviable job of trying to make a single piece of legislation out of Graham-Cassidy and the knobbish nonsense the House passed earlier this year.
Collins appears to me the most reliable no vote. She appears genuinely uninterested in dumping the ACA for the sake of dumping the ACA, which is about all Graham-Cassidy does.
Paul's stated opposition runs along the same lines as that of the lunatic "Freedom Caucus" in the House,
i.e., Graham-Cassidy doesn't get us close enough to a Hobbesian state of nature. That's consistent with Paul's beloved lolbertarian rhetoric, but the rhetoric generally gives way when it clashes with GOP orthodoxy. Plus, Paul is crazy and kinda stupid, so anyone who counts on him for anything at all does so at his own peril.
The GOP remains convinced that Murkowski's vote can be bought. Back in July, Murkowski
told Bloomberg that there's no point in trying to buy her off by placing Alaska-specific goodies in a repeal bill, since any proposal that's not viable nationwide would screw over her state just the same. That didn't stop the GOP from devising the "
Kodiak Kickback," which ultimately failed.
The GOP leadership's takeway from the last round was not that Murkowski's vote on undoing the ACA is not for sale, but rather that they didn't offer enough last time. The current proposal, supposedly, involves
letting Alaska keep the ACA.