“This is an epic fail. This is his­toric. This is sev­en years of argu­ing going down the drain.”

— Repub­li­can pun­dit Charles Krauthammer

Repub­li­can efforts to evis­cer­ate or sim­ply get rid of the Patient Pro­tec­tion and Afford­able Care Act have run into a series of fatal road­blocks in the Unit­ed States Sen­ate, which means mil­lions of Amer­i­cans have won a reprieve — at least for now —  from the threat of their health­care being tak­en away from them.

Road­block num­ber one was the col­lapse of Trump­cuts — the leg­is­la­tion that Paul Ryan, Mitch McConnell, and Don­ald Trump bad­ly want­ed to evis­cer­ate the PPA and pro­vide wealth­care for mil­lion­aires and billionaires.

The Sen­ate ver­sion of Trump­cuts implod­ed when two more of McConnel­l’s mem­bers announced they would not vote to pro­ceed with con­sid­er­a­tion of the bill.

(He had already lost Rand Paul and Susan Collins.)

Then McConnell announced he would try anoth­er gam­bit: hold a vote on sim­ply repeal­ing the land­mark leg­is­la­tion, which dates back to 2010.

That plan fell apart when Repub­li­can Sen­a­tors Shel­ley Moore Capi­to, Lisa Murkows­ki, and Susan Collins said they weren’t on board.

“I can­not vote to pro­ceed to repeal the [Patient Pro­tec­tion Act] with­out reform that allows peo­ple the choice they want, the afford­abil­i­ty they need and the qual­i­ty of care they deserve,” Murkows­ki said in a state­ment defend­ing her deci­sion.

After road­block num­ber two appeared, Repub­li­can boss­es were vis­i­bly exasperated.

“This has been a very, very chal­leng­ing expe­ri­ence for all of us,” said a weary McConnell, the top Sen­ate Repub­li­can, who has been try­ing for weeks to fig­ure out a way to take away the health­care of mil­lions of Amer­i­cans but has failed.

“It’s pret­ty obvi­ous that we don’t have fifty mem­bers who can agree on a replace­ment,” McConnell added, fail­ing to admit that he and his par­ty have had sev­en years to devel­op a “replace­ment”, but have utter­ly failed to do so because most of them do not believe that health­care is a human right.

What they have done instead is nois­i­ly com­plain at every turn and scheme end­less­ly to gut the law, through judi­cial, leg­isla­tive, or exec­u­tive action. Don­ald Trump has now sug­gest­ed, in the wake of today’s devel­op­ments, that he will try to use exec­u­tive pow­er to sab­o­tage the law so it can’t work the way Con­gress intend­ed to. If his min­ions car­ry out such threats, though, they can expect litigation.

McConnel­l’s Plan C is to just go through the motions and hope for the best:

McConnell said Tues­day evening that he would hold a vote to pro­ceed to the bill “ear­ly next week,” which would put sen­a­tors on the record even if the vote’s out­come was preordained.

McConnell said the vote was “at the request of the pres­i­dent and vice pres­i­dent and after con­sult­ing with our members.”

Trump is also launch­ing a renewed push to try and revive the GOP’s near-dead efforts to repeal [the Patient Pro­tec­tion Act] by invit­ing all Sen­ate Repub­li­cans to the White House for lunch Wednes­day. He believes he can get an agree­ment to move for­ward by twist­ing arms and nego­ti­at­ing him­self, accord­ing to sources famil­iar with the mat­ter, although Sen­ate Repub­li­cans are not optimistic.

Trump is delu­sion­al. It’s quite appar­ent at this junc­ture that he does­n’t under­stand how to nego­ti­ate or how to gov­ern. Most Amer­i­cans now real­ize this. A large major­i­ty of the vot­ing pub­lic are already sick of his cir­cus act. After near­ly six months in pow­er, Trump is deeply unpop­u­lar and grow­ing more unpop­u­lar by the day.

Sad­ly, as Amer­i­ca does­n’t have the safe­ty valve of snap elec­tions like par­alia­men­tary democ­ra­cies have, there is no way to dis­solve Trump’s dys­func­tion­al regime and allow Amer­i­cans to go back to the polls to choose a more com­pe­tent president.

Trump (and his lieu­tenant Mike Pence) could be removed from office through impeach­ment and con­vic­tion, but that would require that Con­gress be run by Trump’s oppo­si­tion as opposed to his stooges. That’s not the case today.

What is tru­ly iron­ic about all of this is that the Patient Pro­tec­tion Act is a most­ly Repub­li­can approach to health­care that was adopt­ed by Barack Oba­ma and bicon­cep­tu­al Democ­rats. The law is based in large part on ideas that Repub­li­can Mitt Rom­ney cham­pi­oned and imple­ment­ed while as gov­er­nor of Massachusetts.

Con­gres­sion­al Democ­rats — includ­ing Pat­ty Mur­ray, who appeared on MSNBC’s Meet the Press Dai­ly today — have become very com­fort­able defend­ing the sta­tus quo that the Patient Pro­tec­tion Act now represents.

But the sta­tus quo isn’t good enough. The PPA has helped mil­lions of peo­ple, but it did not pro­vide for a sys­tem of uni­ver­sal cov­er­age. We still need that.

If Democ­rats want to return to pow­er in Con­gress in 2018, they should cam­paign on a plat­form of sin­gle pay­er, uni­ver­sal health­care cov­er­age for all, which is some­thing that’s actu­al­ly in many Demo­c­ra­t­ic plat­forms, but which most con­gres­sion­al Democ­rats regret­tably don’t talk about all that often — or ever.

NPI’s research has found that ful­ly half of Wash­ing­ton State’s elec­torate strong­ly sup­ports the idea of Medicare for all, with anoth­er chunk of vot­ers some­what sup­port­ive. Nation­al sur­veys have found sim­i­lar enthu­si­asm.

If Demo­c­ra­t­ic lead­ers like Chuck Schumer and Nan­cy Pelosi tru­ly want to get out of the polit­i­cal wilder­ness, then they must embrace the idea of uni­ver­sal health­care cov­er­age. Not just tol­er­ate it, but embrace it. Love it. Cham­pi­on it. Ask all Demo­c­ra­t­ic con­gres­sion­al can­di­dates to run on it.

It’s a sure­fire way to draw an effec­tive con­trast with the Repub­li­cans, intrigue inde­pen­dent vot­ers, and moti­vate the base to turn out.