Forget John McCain – these two Republican women saved Obamacare

The stage of the Senate floor was set on Friday morning to repeal Obamacare. Donald Trump was tweeting encouragement, or a warning – “Go Republican Senators, Go!” – and John McCain told reporters to “wait for the show”.

The show had been started by men, and would end that way.

All eyes were on McCain, the war hero with brain cancer who had come back to Washington DC to cast the “deciding vote”. When the Arizona Senator dropped his thumb at close to 2am, there was an audible gasp in the room. Several people clapped, and were promptly told to stop. That was it. The Republican Party’s second major attempt to bin the Affordable Care Act had been quashed.

But what of the two Republican women who voted no?

The faces of Senator Susan Collins of Maine and Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska were not dominating Twitter on Friday morning, but their votes against the bill have to be recognised for what they were: astonishing bravery.

On the Senate floor, groups of male Republican Senators had crowded around the two rebel women and McCain, isolating their targets one by one. But the female duo remained strong, and just as they almost threatened to halt the confirmation of Betsy DeVos as education secretary, they have now voted three times in the past few days against the total erasure of Obamacare.

We all know what happens to politicians when they don’t toe the party line. They are talked about, ostracised and, in this case, metaphorically challenged to duel. In the boys’ club of the Capitol Hill with its arcane procedures, it is hard enough to be a woman in a position of power, let alone be a woman whose dissent has the power to humiliate the party and anger the President.

Since the vote, Murkowski said she received a “not very pleasant” phone call from Secretary of State Ryan Zinke, who told her the President was “disappointed”. She vowed to continue working on health care “in good faith” and put Alaskans ahead of the party.

The fact that two women arguably saved Obamacare speaks volumes about a male-led effort to scrap a law which funded Planned Parenthood and provided women with no co-pay access to contraception.

As Senator Collins wrote, “Millions of women across the country rely on Planned Parenthood for family planning, cancer screening, and basic preventative health care services. Denying women access to Planned Parenthood not only runs contrary to our goal of letting patients choose the health care provider who best fits their needs, but it could also impede timely access to care.”

Of course, repealing Obamacare without a replacement would have affected millions of young and old people, regardless of their gender. But it would have also had a disproportionate impact on women, who are generally paid less than men, who make up the majority of single parents and of workers who earn minimum wage or less than minimum wage in America.

After Paul Ryan told Trump he did not have enough votes to push through the American Health Care Act in March, Trump blamed the Democrats and said: “We learned a lot about loyalty.”

Loyalty is the President’s prized quality. Breaching it has destroyed the careers of multiple high-profile figures, from close aides to the former Director of the FBI. Murkowski, for one, already knew before Friday morning that she was in the firing line.

“Senator @lisamurkowski of the Great State of Alaska really let the Republicans, and our country, down yesterday. Too bad!” Trump wrote earlier this week.

Trump has targeted many women and men, either directly or in front of more than 32 million Twitter followers. His ire has been provoked by McCain for being captured in Vietnam, “crocodile tears” Chuck Schumer and “beleaguered” Jeff Sessions. But being on the end of Trump’s wrath as a woman must be an even more frightening experience, given the high levels of anonymous trolling, death and rape threats that they receive online, as well as the lack of female allies at the very top.

Collins has released a statement to explain her “no” vote. In essence, the “skinny repeal” was not good enough and defunding Planned Parenthood was “harmful”.

“These problems require a bipartisan solution,” she wrote.

Under her statement, there were hundreds of comments.

Most of them were simple: “Thank you.”