GIVE US THE HOUSE, THEY SAID… GIVE US THE SENATE, GIVE US THE WHITE HOUSE, TOO: The Republican Fight to Repeal Obamacare Is ‘Dead as a Doornail.’

“We don’t have the votes,” said Sen. Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, who along with Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina drafted the latest attempt at scrapping the seven-year-old law. “Am I disappointed? Absolutely.”

Senate leaders said the issue wasn’t the content of the Graham-Cassidy bill, which would have dismantled Medicaid expansion and other Obamacare provisions and hand the funds from those programs over to states via block grants. Graham and Cassidy were insistent that they will eventually get the votes needed to pass the legislation. Leaders said the process through which they were trying to pick the bill through, however, had given a handful of senators pause, including Arizona Sen. John McCain.

“There are 50 votes for the substance,” said Graham. “There are not 50 votes for the process.”

There were no warnings about “process” during the election campaigns of 2010, 2012, 2014, or 2016 — which makes “process” sound and awful lot like “dodge.”