In a muddled editorial for The Week, conservative writer Erica Grieder tries to argue that the Senate health care plan isn’t actually so bad:

The Senate health-care bill is obviously more thoughtful than the House’s version, and not nearly as malign as many Democrats have summarily declared it to be. At first glance, it struck me as the kind of market-based plan conservative policy wonk Avik Roy, who once worked for Mitt Romney, would come up with if asked to replace ObamaCare. And on closer inspection, it is his plan, in key respects. That makes sense, given that Roy is the Republican Party’s go-to expert on health-care policy. And considering the context, his influence on the bill is reassuring; when someone’s expertise is undisputed, some degree of humanity can be safely inferred.

This is such a flawed argument it’s almost not worth the effort of rebutting it. But let’s indulge ourselves: It’s incorrect to say that Roy’s expertise is “undisputed.” People dispute it quite a lot. And even if that weren’t true, and we lived in some grim parallel timeline where Roy reigned over us all as the high priest of Medicaid and his every utterance was holy writ: This has no bearing on the quality of his “humanity.” Experts can be monsters. Eugenicists, for example, were considered “experts” in the fields of medicine and biology. Knowledge and virtue are distinct concepts that do not necessarily have any bearing on one another; a person can know things and apply that knowledge in unethical ways. And this is what Roy has done, declaring that a bill that would leave millions of mostly low-income people without basic health insurance “the greatest policy achievement by a GOP Congress in my lifetime.”

The rest of Grieder’s arguments are similarly broken. She claims that the plan “largely preserves” Obamacare’s protections for people with pre-existing conditions (it doesn’t). She notes that premiums and deductibles have risen under Obamacare, but fails to recognize that the law slowed that rise significantly. She asserts that “the left’s default position is that ObamaCare’s shortcomings are due to Republican obstructionism prior to its passage, and Republicans’ subsequent refusal to cooperate.” That isn’t necessarily true: Many on the left attribute Obamacare’s shortcomings to the law’s market-based approach, and to Democrats who would not support a more progressive law.

And Grieder never reckons with the inevitable consequences of kicking people off their insurance. As Clio Chang noted yesterday, data supports one conclusion: The Senate health care plan will kill people. People die when they cannot afford medical care. And that is not even to mention the myriad other ways this bill will simply make people’s lives more painful. “That’s how markets work,” Grieder responds. Ethical dilemmas are rarely so obvious. Conservatives like Roy and Grieder obfuscate the stakes, and from this you can indeed infer a great deal about their humanity.

On Tuesday afternoon, 4-D Chess Master Mitch McConnell delayed the vote on the bill until after the July 4 recess. It was a move that took even his own team by surprise and The New York Times called it a blow to McConnell’s reputation as a “master tactician.” After a terrible CBO score, it had become clear that the Senate leader simply did not have the votes.

But a setback for Republicans does not mean Obamacare is safe. Earlier this month it was reported by Axios Presented by the MTA that McConnell is “desperate to move on to tax reform and can’t have health care hanging around like a bad smell through the summer.” Delaying the vote means that McConnell is serious about passing the bill. It’s reported that we might see a new draft of the bill as early as Friday.

As Sarah Kliff points out at Vox, a delayed vote for the House bill (remember Trump playing with trucks?) did not stop the GOP in the long run. It’s hard to underestimate how much Republicans want to pass some sort of Obamacare repeal, regardless of individual senators’ bleating. And as Kliff notes, it’s important to remember that House Republicans were not deterred by the fact that nearly everyone—liberals, conservatives, friends, family—absolutely hated the American Health Care Act.

But the delay does give an opening for organizers, who will be able to protest on lawmakers’ front lawns when they return home for the recess. During the fight over the House bill, activists were caught flat-footed after Paul Ryan called off the vote in March, thinking that the bill was dead in the water. Going into the recess, it will be important for Democrats to emphasize that the Senate bill is, in fact, alive and kicking.

Though far from over, the Senate’s path to repealing and replacing Obamacare got more difficult on Tuesday when Mitch McConnell announced that the chamber would not vote on its health care bill, the Better Care Reconciliation Act, before the July 4 recess. But as he did during the House’s effort to pass its health care bill, Trump has tried to present himself as what he pledged he would be on the campaign trail: a dealmaker and closer who makes Washington work. On Tuesday evening, Trump met with Republican senators in the White House and the results were not comforting, regardless of your perspective on the Senate’s (bad) bill. Per The New York Times:

A senator who supports the bill left the meeting at the White House with a sense that the president did not have a grasp of some basic elements of the Senate plan — and seemed especially confused when a moderate Republican complained that opponents of the bill would cast it as a massive tax break for the wealthy, according to an aide who received a detailed readout of the exchange.

Mr. Trump said he planned to tackle tax reform later, ignoring the repeal’s tax implications, the staff member added.

The Senate’s bill, like the House’s, is as much a tax break for the wealthy as it is a health care bill. It’s arguably more of a tax break for the wealthy than a health care bill. This is not even a new development—it has been the defining feature of the GOP’s health care reform, which violates nearly all of Trump’s core promises about what replacing Obamacare would look like, for months. Meanwhile, Trump has spent his mornings live-tweeting Fox & Friends and his weekends golfing at his private clubs.

With ISIS in retreat, the likelihood of a larger American intervention in Syria is increasing rather than decreasing. This is because the various factions fighting ISIS—the remnants of Bashar al-Assad’s regime, as well as Russia, Iran, and the U.S.—are getting ready to maximize their power in the post-ISIS world.

Last night, White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer released an ominous statement warning of future chemical attacks by Assad that the United States would be prepared to answer:

There were reports last night, now denied by the White House, that both CENTCOM and the State Department were caught off guard by Spicer’s statement.

Last night Nikki Haley, the U.S.’s ambassador to the United Nations, also tweeted:

As CBS News reports, “The U.N. Security Council is meeting on Tuesday morning on Syria, expected to be briefed by Special Envoy Staffan de Mistura on political developments ... and Council members will consider new information on chemical weapons attacks.”

The statements by Haley and Spicer, coupled with the U.N. meeting, point to a real possibility of a more intense American intervention, one that could lead to a greater conflict with Iran, Russia, and Syria.

On Monday, three CNN employees resigned after the network retracted a story that alleged that Trump adviser Anthony Scaramucci was on the radar of the Senate Intelligence Committee for meeting with the chief executive of a $10 billion Russian investment fund. According to CNN, the piece was published before it had been properly vetted by an executive editor and the network’s legal team.

Conservative media has unsurprisingly taken this morsel and run with it, holding it up as proof that the mainstream media is out to get Trump and that non-conservative media outlets are “fake news.” On Tuesday morning, Trump did what he does every morning: Watch Fox News, get worked up about it, then tweet:

This morning Trump also retweeted Fox & Friends four times, and retweeted Fox News anchor Eric Bolling promoting his book Drain The Swamp, which was published today.

That Trump would seize on this story is totally in keeping with his modus operandi. But the fact that Trump is simultaneously amplifying Fox News is just as notable. Trump has yet to explain to the public the health care bill that is quickly moving through the Senate. And yet, here are the questions that Fox & Friends asked Trump on Sunday morning:

Trump still botched these softballs. But this shows Trump’s calculus when dealing with the media: If you cover him critically, it’s “fake news,” but if you push his agenda, he’ll pay you back with tweets.

When the Congressional Budget Office published its impact estimate of the Senate Republican health care bill on Monday, I happened to be recording an episode of Primary Concerns with former Kentucky Governor Steve Beshear, and was able to break the top-line news to him: that as written, the legislation would kick 15 million Americans off of their health insurance within a year, and 22 million over 10 years.

His real-time reaction was striking for two reasons. First, as a Democrat governing in a conservative state, he established proof of concept that the Affordable Care Act could be a huge success nationwide: Despite GOP opposition, he effected one of the most successful insurance expansions under the Affordable Care Act in the country. Second, as a Kentucky political eminence and a former rival of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, it isn’t lost on him that the person who seeks to reverse the gains Kentucky made under the ACA is a Kentuckian himself.

“That’s unconscionable,” he told me when I read him CBO’s numbers. But he reserved his strongest criticism for the person who wrote the bill and is now twisting arms to pass it. “It’s really deplorable, when you look at what [McConnell’s] actions, particularly on this bill, will do to his own constituents,” Beshear said. “I mean it is going to not only damage people’s lives. He’s going to cost people their lives. People will die because of legislation like this, if it passes…. He knows exactly what he’s doing and he doesn’t care.”

Beshear argued that there is a contradiction between the Republican Party’s claim to represent religious Christians, and their health policy agenda. Some of these folks talk about how Christian they are,” he told me.

Look, I’m the son of a baptist preacher. I grew up going to church every time the doors opened. But part of that upbringing was, you know, leaving this place a little better off than the way you found it, and living the Golden Rule, as opposed to just quoting it during political campaigns. And man, oh man, how can these folks, you know, call themselves Christian or godly or anything else like they do all the time and then take this kind of attitude and intentionally—intentionally—want to pass stuff that will destroy people’s lives. It’s amazing to me that they can get up and look themselves in the mirror in the morning and not be so ashamed that they have to just go back to bed.

In addition to his brutal assessment of McConnell and the Senate legislation, Beshear’s thoughts on how Democrats can beat back Trumpcare and rebuild a national majority are worth your time as well.

American Medical Association CEO James Madara sent a letter to Senate leaders on Monday expressing his group’s opposition to the Republican health care bill. “Medicine has long operated under the precept of Primum non nocere, or ‘first, do no harm,’” he wrote. “The draft legislation violates that standard on many levels.” With more than 200,000 members, the AMA is a major lobbying group for physicians and medical students.

Madara warned that the likely combination of reduced subsidies and increased waivers of coverage protections “will expose low and middle income patients to higher costs and greater difficulty in affording care.” The AMA also opposes the Senate bill’s provisions to limit the growth of Medicaid—a concern shared by the AARP, which released a strong statement last Thursday pledging to “hold all 100 Senators accountable for their votes on this harmful health care bill.” Executive Vice President Nancy LeaMond said Trumpcare would impose an “age tax” and “allow insurance companies to charge older Americans five times more for coverage than everyone else while reducing tax credits that help make insurance more affordable.” By cutting funding for Medicare and Medicaid, the legislation threatens to “strip health coverage from millions of low-income and vulnerable Americans who depend on the coverage, including 17 million poor seniors and children and adults with disabilities.”

If the GOP moves forward with this bill, it’ll be over the objection of a host of other health groups—including the American Hospital Association, the American Academy of Pediatrics, and the American Cancer Association—who will be the first to remind their members that it was the Republicans who gutted their health care coverage or stripped them of it entirely.