McConnell delays health vote over McCain's surgery


Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) announced Saturday night his intention to delay the coming week's planned vote on the Senate version of the GOP health-care bill.
McConnell cited as his reason that Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) will be at home, recovering from a Friday surgery in Phoenix to extract a blood clot near his left eye. "While John is recovering, the Senate will continue our work on legislative items and nominations, and will defer consideration of the Better Care Act," McConnell said.
The health-care bill is already on the edge of failure thanks to two GOP defections; as the whip list currently stands, without McCain's vote, it cannot pass. McConnell has not announced a new date for the vote.
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Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.
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