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More than half of Californias 14 House Republicans face potentially tough battles in next years midterm election, and while some of them wavered until the last minute, all of them voted for the House healthcare plan in May.

But in the wee hours of Friday morning, the Senate failed in its apparent last-ditch effort to pass any kind of replacement for Obamacare.

For now, it looks as if congressional leaders are moving on from their healthcare reform efforts, but the Californians vote for a plan that would have taken health insurance from as many as 1 in 3 Californians is sure to be kept alive by the dozens of challengers who have signed up to run against them.

Democrats are plotting to use the healthcare vote as a cudgel against vulnerable Republicans in the same way votes for Obamacare were used to sweep Democrats out of the majority in 2010. And winning at least some of California's GOP seats is crucial to Democratic efforts to win back the House.

The party blasted out news releases Friday saying the representatives "can't turn back time and undo the damaging vote they took to kick 23 million Americans off their health insurance and jack up premiums for millions more. ... [They] own the Republican health care disaster and it will haunt them in 2018."

At the time of the House vote, several of Californias Republican representatives said they were keeping their years-long promise to repeal President Obamas signature law. Others said they were trying to move the process forward with the expectation the Senate would make the bill better.

Now they say they're disappointed the Senate couldn't agree on a way to repeal Obamacare, but none is too concerned about the political effects of voting for the House version, which polls have shown was very unpopular.

Rep. Jeff Denham of Turlock initially said he couldnt back the House bill, but voted for it after getting a commitment from GOP leaders to work on access to healthcare, especially in rural areas. He said Friday he was frustrated the Senate couldnt pass anything.

I expect to see this place work," Denham said. Im certainly disappointed that they werent able to move the ball forward."

Sarah D. Wire

Here's how the Republicans of California voted on the House bill to replace Obamacare.

Here's how the Republicans of California voted on the House bill to replace Obamacare. (Sarah D. Wire)

Hours before the Senate's failed vote, Denham held a campaign fundraiser in Washington for his 50th birthday with top House leaders. Denham has drawn at least eight opponents in a district where hes frequently challenged, but said he wasnt worried about being attacked for his healthcare vote.

Yes, [House Minority Leader] Nancy Pelosi will always target me and we will continue to focus on our district issues, and I think when I do that weve been very successful by a wide margin, Denham said. I certainly dont vote because Nancy Pelosi sends people into my district; I focus on my district.

Denham said he expects to meet with doctors, hospitals and patients during the August recess to talk about other potential healthcare legislation.

He and fellow vulnerable Central Valley Republican Rep. David Valadao of Hanford introduced legislation this week to increase the number of doctor training positions available in areas with high Medicaid populations, something that fits the description of their rural districts, where residents saw some of the biggest benefits from the Medi-Cal expansion under the Affordable Care Act.

Valadao said he was disappointed by the Senate's failure, and believes Republicans still have an obligation to do something about Obamacare.

We do have to have some legislation move forward, he said. Hopefully well get an opportunity to get something done soon.

Prior to the House vote, Rep. Darrell Issa of Vista had said the bill could be improved and he was on the fence about how to vote. Hed barely scraped out a win last year by fewer than 2,000 votes, and more opponents were lining up to challenge him again.

He said he ultimately voted for it because he had faith the Senate would send back a better bill. Issa even nudged Senate leadership twice to consider his idea to offer federal employees healthcare plans to more or all Americans. He said in a statement Friday that hell keep pushing colleagues on that idea.

"Its disappointing, but we cant give up now. Obamacare is still failing and we must bring young adults, families, small business and all Americans relief. We need to keep up the fight," he said.

Rep. Steve Knight of Palmdale, the last Republican congressman in Los Angeles County, said the House had done its part and its still up to the Senate to decide what happens next. Asked about the political ramifications of his vote, he laughed.

Democrats targeted my district way before any vote I made, said Knight, who was among the members expected to be greeted by planned healthcare protests in their hometowns as the House embarked on a monthlong recess Friday. This was a very difficult vote, everybody knows that, but were going to move forward.

Rep. Doug LaMalfa (R-Richvale), whose Northern California seat is not considered to be at risk, said members should confidently explain their positions to voters.

Were here to make hard votes, [we]re here to make votes of conscience. Some guys and gals will complain, Oh, now were out on record with a hard vote you know the guys in the tougher districts but at the end of it, you have a reason that you are supposed to be here, LaMalfa said. If you cant justify your position outside the politics, then why are you here?

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California's House Republicans voted for the Obamacare repeal that seems dead. Here's what they're saying now - Los Angeles Times

With border adjustment gone, Republicans are finally united around tax reform. The price for the consensus, though, is that the ultimate tax reform package is bound to be less ambitious than what the GOP originally envisioned.

"Unfortunately we're not going to have fundamental reform and it will make it hard to get the rates down low," Republican California Rep. Devin Nunes told the Washington Examiner Friday. "There are still opportunities out there, they're going to be hard to achieve, but we're going to try and get there."

Nunes was the original author of legislation, later picked up by Ryan and the House Ways and Means Committee, on which Nunes sits, to throw out the corporate income tax altogether and replace it with a cash-flow tax.

Thursday's joint statement from Republicans didn't include many details, but it did explicitly rule out a cash-flow tax along the lines envisioned by Nunes.

Instead, the statement made clear, congressional Republicans will seek to lower tax rates as much as possible by paying for them by eliminating tax breaks. The tax base will stay the same, but will simply be broader.

The statement was enough to bring business on board.

On Friday, the Business Roundtable, a group of big business CEOs, announced a multimillion-dollar effort to help the tax reform effort through cable TV and radio ads.

Previously, business had been split. Retail groups fought the border adjustment out of fear that it could result in higher taxes for imported goods.

Also on Friday, the Koch network of political nonprofits threw its full weight behind tax reform, after working for months to kill border adjustment. Americans for Prosperity and Freedom Partners, two Koch-affiliated free-market groups, announced that they would hold an event Monday promoting tax reform with Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and White House legislative director Marc Short. The group's volunteers also will make calls throughout the summer to lawmakers to push them to pass tax legislation.

Tim Phillips, the president of Americans for Prosperity, said that his group favors lowering tax rates for all businesses.

Yet, without a border-adjusted cash-flow tax, rates cannot go as low.

In a cash-flow system, companies would no longer have to perform hideously complex accounting to determine what their taxable income was each year. Instead, they would simply tally up money in minus money out a totally different tax base.

And when that tax is based on the destination of sales, using border adjustment, the base is larger than the current U.S. corporate tax base, to the tune of about $1 trillion more in tax revenue a year. With that revenue, House Republicans envisioned lowering the corporate tax rate to 20 percent, down from 35 percent now.

Republicans don't have a stated goal for the corporate tax rate, but several experts told the Washington Examiner that a target in the mid-20s would be a good outcome. Originally, Trump had set a goal of 15 percent.

"I think that's the central debate: How big is the tax reform going to be? How big are the tax reductions going to be?" Office of Management and Budget Director Mick Mulvaney said Friday in an interview with CNBC.

Without border adjustment, "it becomes more complicated," said David Schweikert, a member of the Ways and Means Committee. Without the revenue raised by border adjustment, the target corporate tax would be about 31 percent rather than 25 percent, he suggested.

Opponents who killed border adjustment "have an ethical obligation to step up" and propose ways to replace the lost revenue, he said just off the House floor Friday.

There won't be any easy replacements, however. Any break that lawmakers target for elimination would be fiercely defended by the industry or group that it benefits, the same way that retailers fought border adjustment.

"There's not some easy honey pot of money to go after," said Jon Traub, managing principal of Deloitte's Tax Policy Group and a former staff director of the Ways and Means Committee.

Any money lawmakers are able to raise to dedicate to rate cuts, he said, will involve "hand to hand combat, provision after provision."

But even getting to that outcome will be difficult.

And even harder will be including some of the bolder ideas, advanced by Ryan, meant to spur economic growth. Those include ensuring that reform is permanent, so that businesses can plan along 10- or 20-year timelines, and allowing companies to immediately write off all new investments.

The advantage of the vague joint statement is that "it leaves the experts and the taxwriters significant flexibility," said Jeff Kupfer, an adviser to Beacon Global Strategies and a former Bush Treasury official.

That flexibility, however, could undermine momentum for a comprehensive, permanent rewrite of the tax code.

Especially with their failure to pass legislation to repeal Obamacare, Republicans are "under tremendous pressure to get something done on taxes," said Marc Gerson, chairman of the law firm Miller & Chevalier and a former Ways and Means tax counsel. If they start to struggle to do the hard work of comprehensive tax reform, "you could see a pivot to more of a tax cut or a tax relief package."

That would be a letdown, from the perspective of Ryan and other House Republicans who have said that permanence is the goal.

In that sense, it's noteworthy that Thursday's statement said that Republicans would "place a priority" on permanence, but stopped short of saying that a permanent rewrite of the code would be a do-or-die goal.

Using the legislative process known as reconciliation, Republicans can pass a tax bill without Democrats. But under the procedure, a permanent change to taxes could not add to long-term deficits. Some Republicans would rather cut taxes deeply, even if that meant that the changes to the code would have to be temporary.

The statement also stopped short of endorsing "full expensing," or allowing companies to deduct all new investments from their taxable income in the year they are made. Under the current code, companies must depreciate investments over a course of years, according to a complicated schedule.

Ways and Means Committee Chairman Kevin Brady said Thursday that the goal remained full expensing. But he will face pushback on that priority, even with the new consensus.

Phillips said his group would be advocating rate cuts, as opposed to full expensing, both of which cost revenue. "We do think full expensing is not the right way to go, as it chooses a certain kind of economic activity to reward," Phillips said. He noted that start-ups and established companies make differing levels of new investments.

David Drucker contributed to this article.

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Republican tax reform: Less ambitious, more realistic - Washington Examiner

All eyes were on Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., during the razor-thin skinny repeal vote, with eagle-eyed CSPAN watchers reading the tea leaves of his motions across the Senate floor.

But he wasnt the only star of the show.

Sens. Susan Collins, R-Maine, and Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, had adamantly opposed the bill repeatedly during the past month of debate on the issue.

And their "no" votes came before McCain's now-famous thumbs-down motion, officially sinking the bill.

It would be hard for the trio's home states to be farther apart, but they came together on the vote in a devastating way for the Republican Party at large in the wee hours of Friday morning.

Collins and Murkowski have been outspoken in their opposition to the Medicaid cuts, and Collins has come to the defense of Planned Parenthood as well.

In her statement following the vote, Collins stressed the importance of a bipartisan approach for a solution, writing that rather than engaging in partisan exercises, Republicans and Democrats should work together and address these vert serious problems.

And Murkowski posted a tweet, saying, This isnt about winning. This is about service to our state and service to our country.

McCain had not been as vocal about his opposition in the weeks leading up to the vote, having been away from Washington, D.C., for part of the debate. He underwent surgery to remove a blood clot near his eye on July 14 and doctors subsequently discovered a brain tumor, which was announced on July 19.

He returned to Washington on July 25 to cast the decision-making vote in a procedural motion that allowed Thursday night's debate on health care to continue.

In a statement released following his vote early this morning, McCain said that "from the beginning" he has believed that Obamacare should be repealed and replaced in order to lower costs, improve care and increase competition, he said "the so-called 'skinny repeal' amendment the Senate voted on today would not accomplish those goals.

While there was a round of applause -- largely from the Democrats in the Senate -- after McCain made that fatal vote early this morning, all three GOP senators have earned the ire of President Donald Trump.

This morning, he looped the three with the Democrats on Twitter, writing "3 Republicans and 48 Democrats let the American people down. As I said from the beginning, let ObamaCare implode, then deal. Watch!"

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The 3 senators who sank the Republican health care push - ABC News

Protest against U.S. President Donald Trump in New York. Credit: Caitlin Ochs/Sputnik via AP

For me, and I imagine most Americans, the election of Donald Trump raised a host of disturbing questions. Now, six months into this new political era, all the questions but one have been answered: How are we going to rebuild ourpolitical system?

To say that I have been an outspoken Trump opponent would be an understatement. As a Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate, I came out against him early on. Still, immediately after the election I did say that I was willing to give him a chance.

By early February, however, any hope that Trump would become presidential had lapsed. Trump meant every word he said during the campaign. He is a protectionist, an isolationist and a nativist. He has the instincts of an authoritarian who would silence the mainstream media with new libel laws if he could.

I urged Republicans to directly oppose Trump, but to little avail. Today, there are two types of Republican politicians: enthusiastic Trump supporters, and those who submit through their silence. If you dare oppose Trump you are attackedand threatened with a primary opponent.

Republicans have abandoned traditional Reaganite policies such as free trade because their base voters agree with Trump. I have come to accept that I am now the one out of step with Republican voters. It truly is Trumps party now.

Even my hopes that Washington state Republicans could maintain their traditional moderate identity and work with Democrats to get big things done have largely been dashed.

To be sure, the gridlock and dysfunction in Olympia is not nearly as bad as it is in Washington, D.C. Significant bills were passed this year, including bills on paid family leave and greater protections for victims of sexual assault. But by Olympia standards, the 2017 session was a disaster. After three special sessions, the longest legislative meeting in state history, Olympia melted down in partisan rancor.

Republicans demanded that Democrats pass a bill on water rights in rural areas. When Democrats refused, Republicans retaliated by not passing the capital construction budget for the first time in state history. Republicans and Democrats had six months to make a deal on water rights. Because they failed, rural residents face the loss of their property values, and $4 billion in needed projects, including $1 billion in school construction projects, are now on hold.

And what about the agreement they reached on school funding in response to the McCleary case? The legislature did deal with one of the major issues by capping school levies, thus eliminating the inequity between rich school districts and poor school districts. But they failed to fund the salaries of thousands of school staff, and instead gave districts the authority to continue to use levy dollars to pay staff. This is a clear violation of the Supreme Courts 2012 order in this case.

Everywhere you look, our political system is breaking down. No major legislation has passed in Washington, D.C. The debt is still rising. Social Security and Medicare are still going broke. The government will run out of cash in October. Every year sees interminable special sessions in Olympia and vicious mudslinging campaigns.

A recent poll showed that only half of Americans have faith in American democracy. Horrifying as this is, its no great surprise: Why should anyone have faith in a system that is clearly failing to produce results?

But there are glimmers of hope. Not long ago I received an email from a respected, bipartisan national group thatis working to create an offshoot to focus on the brokenness of our political system one which will examine and elevate a discussion as to the causes of, and possible solutions to address, the deteriorating state of our politics.

And there are efforts afoot to reclaim the political center.For the past 160 years, the Republican and Democratic parties have monopolized political power because one was a center-right coalition, and the other was center-left. Third parties espoused fringe ideas and attracted little support. Today it is the major parties that are pushing fringe ideas, and that creates an opportunity.

In Washington, D.C., recently,a new group promoting the election of Centrist Independents met with the national media. The Centrist Projectaims to appeal to the voters Rs and Ds have left behind: fiscally conservative, but socially moderate.

Where does this all lead? Frankly, I dont know. Perhaps one or both parties will regain their sanity and move back toward the center, although that seems increasingly unlikely. Perhaps a centrist third party will form. Perhaps one of our two major parties will fade away as the Federalist and Whig parties did in the 1800s. Perhaps more and more candidates will choose to run as independents.

Whatever happens, I believe we are at one of those moments in American history when our political system is beginning to go through major realignment.

Like the shifting of tectonic plates, these changes happen gradually. It took elevenyears of British abuses before our founders finally agreed on independence. It took 14 years of agitation over slavery to finally cause the creation of the Republican Party. It took several elections for the South to go from solidly Democratic to solidly Republican.

New political movements take time to mature, so dont expect the end of the current party system to happen overnight. But something is stirring. The last six months were just the beginning: 2018 and 2020 are going to be transformational.

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I'm not sure I'm a Republican anymore - Crosscut

Many Republicans on Capitol Hill are praying President Trump doesn't brashly fire Attorney General Jeff Sessions or special counsel Robert Mueller, who's heading up the Trump campaign-Russia investigation.

The House is set to leave Washington Friday for a month-long August recess, while the Senate is slated to take off two weeks later. There's fear that while the nation's lawmakers are away, the president will do more than mess around on Twitter: They're worried he may take advantage of their absence to reshuffle the decks at the Justice Department in an attempt to kill the Russia probe that has enveloped his presidency from day one.

The president's repeated interviews and continued, petty tweets lambasting the attorney general for recusing himself from the Russia investigation have angered Democrats including many who despise Sessions but especially Sessions' former Republican Senate colleagues who say he did the right thing.

"Under the guidelines, the attorney general really had no other choice" than to recuse, Republican Sen. Susan Collins recently told reporters. "His job as chief law enforcement officer of the country is to abide by the guidelines of the Department of Justice when it comes to cases where he may have a real or perceived conflict of interest, and that's what the attorney general did."

If the president did fire Sessions which would be legal, but would strongly suggest the president is trying to bury the investigation the Senate would have to confirm whoever the president picks to replace him. Democrats would cry bloody murder, fearing the president would only tap a loyalist who would try to end the Russia probe altogether.

Democrats opposed Sessions' nomination, citing his history of racism and how he lied under oath, and arguing that he's out of touch for trying to revive the tough-on-crime stance that has American's prisons bursting at the seams and his desire to crack down on marijuana business owners. But now some prominent Democrats are defending him against Trump's attacks.

"All Americans should be wondering: Why is the president publicly publicly demeaning and humiliating such a close friend and supporter, a member of his own cabinet? They should wonder if the president is trying to pry open the office of attorney general to appoint someone during the August recess who will fire special counsel Mueller and shut down the Russia investigation," Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said in a Senate floor speech this week. "Let me say, if such a situation arises, Democrats would use every tool in our toolbox to stymie such a recess appointment."

But even for most Republicans, there doesn't seem to be any appetite to approve a new attorney general. The chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Chuck Grassley, told rreporters he's got enough on his plate with the plethora of judicial nominations before his committee and that he has no plans to hold hearings this fall on a new AG. He said Sessions has his full support and that it's odd the president is tormenting one of his closest ideological allies in his cabinet.

"I've been very clear ... that Sessions is probably the one person in the cabinet who is doing more of the president's agenda than anyone else, and one of the big things that the president wants to accomplish is getting strict constructionists on the courts in the United States and I don't need to spend any more time doing nominations," a gruff Grassley said.

While the president tweets, Republicans on Capitol Hill usually send out gentle nudges to try to keep him in line with his own agenda. But they're becoming blunt as they recognize the immediate political consequences that would likely overwhelm this sporadic freshman president.

"Well it's the president's prerogative, but he is then going to jeopardize, potentially, his ability to get anything else done here," the Senate's number-two Republican, John Cornyn, told reporters. "I don't think that should be his desire or preference."

Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham is going a step further than his colleagues. He said there will be "holy hell to pay" if Trump cans Sessions. He's preparing legislation that he plans to introduce next week to protect Mueller from being fired by the very president he's investigating, unless there's a judicial review that finds good cause.

"Any effort to go after Mueller could be the beginning of the end of the Trump presidency, unless Mueller did something wrong," Sen. Lindsey Graham told reporters on Capitol Hill. "This is not draining the swamp. What he's interjecting is turning democracy upside down."

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Republicans Are Not Thrilled Trump's Toying With Firing Jeff Sessions - RollingStone.com