So after seven years of promising to end the intrusion of socialized medicine into the American way of life, the GOP Senators just walked away.

Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) says she will not support moving forward with a plan to repeal ObamaCare with a delayed replacement, effectively killing the latest legislative gambit from Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.).

Murkowski, who had balked at the last version of the ObamaCare bill, said she is a no on the motion to proceed to a repeal-only plan. She is the third Republican senator to take that position.

“No. I said back in January that if we’re going to do a repeal there has to be a replacement. There’s enough chaos and uncertainty already,” she told reporters Tuesday.

With Murkowski’s defection, GOP leaders do not have the votes to move forward to an ObamaCare repeal bill that passed the Senate in 2015, but was vetoed by then-President Obama.

Earlier Tuesday, Sens. Susan Collins (R-Maine) and Shelley Moore Capito (R-W.Va.) also said they will not support moving to the repeal-only bill. Republicans can only afford two defections if Vice President Pence breaks a tie.

Do these guys not grasp our economic history? They must know the massive fiscal disasters that Social Security and Medicare have become. These well intentioned programs didn’t start that way but, like everything that Washington touches, they have just turned into enduring debt burden for our children.

Do any of these Senators really believe that by unleashing national healthcare on the nation our economy won’t sooner or later collapse under the burden of all that added debt?

The answer is that they do know exactly what they are doing; they are trying to create short term goodwill for themselves as they kick the can down the road for the next generation to have to pay for. It is called a lack of political courage when one just keeps spending someone else’s money until they are out of office!

We should make anyone who wants to become a Congressman or Senator take a trip to Havana to see the economic devastation that socialism has wrought in Cuba; a philosophy much akin to that that the Democrat Party, with the acquiescence of the Republicans, has forced upon us!

UPDATE (by MacAoidh): An interesting development…

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said Tuesday that the Senate will push forward with trying to repeal ObamaCare.

“Sometime in the near future we’ll have a vote on repealing ObamaCare,” McConnell told reporters after a closed-door caucus lunch.

McConnell acknowledged that his conference does not now have the votes it needs to pass healthcare bill.

The upshot of this appears to be that McConnell will hold Collins, Capito and Murkowski’s feet to the fire in the expectation one of them will crack under his pressure. Which is an entirely reasonable expectation for him to have, given the seven years of promises Republican Senators have made to the American people to repeal Obamacare.

Which includes Capito and Murkowski, who in 2015 voted for a repeal. Getting one of them to stick to that position so as to reach the 50-vote threshold and allow Vice President Mike Pence to break the tie really should be possible.