Politics: The Senate will vote to start its repeal of Obamacare in a few hours — and the process is still in chaos

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is set to begin the debate on the Senate's Obamacare repeal-and-replace plan on Tuesday.

On Monday night, Sen. John McCain said he would return to Washington to vote on key issues — most notably the Senate's push to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act.

McCain's dramatic return a week after announcing his diagnosis of brain cancer seems to indicate that the vote on the Senate healthcare push, expected on Tuesday, is extremely close for Republican leaders.

At the same time, though, no one is quite sure of what they're pushing.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said on the Senate floor on Monday that there would be a vote on a motion to proceed with the House healthcare bill, the first step in a likely multiday process of debate and dealmaking in an attempt to fulfill a longtime Republican promise to repeal the law, also known as Obamacare.

The question is whether McConnell's plan is to bring up the Better Care Reconciliation Act, the bill to repeal and replace the law; the Obamacare Repeal Reconciliation Act, the bill to repeal now and replace later; or some modified version of either.

(If you want a full breakdown of the three major pathways and their potential effects, Business Insider's Lydia Ramsey has everything you need to know here.)

Each of these plans is likely to be brought up at some point, but which one McConnell will push is anyone's guess — even for Republican senators.

"If you don't know of those things before you go in, you're sort of voting in a blind fashion," Sen Rand Paul, a conservative-leaning member of the conference, said on Monday. "I think we need more information. CBO needs to have scored the whole bill."

"I don't have a clue what we're gonna be voting on," said Sen. Ron Johnson, a Republican from Wisconsin. "I just need to know what I'm going to vote on. I'm not real happy with the process."

Despite the confusion, McConnell is set to push forward with a vote on Tuesday — at the very least to get it out of the way.

It appears McConnell has the backing of President Donald Trump, who met on Monday with a moderate skeptic of the BCRA, Sen. Shelley Moore Capito, in her home state of West Virginia. On Tuesday, Trump launched into an early-morning tweetstorm urging senators to move forward with the process.

"Big day for HealthCare," Trump tweeted. "After 7 years of talking, we will soon see whether or not Republicans are willing to step up to the plate!"

When the Senate does "step up to the plate" on Tuesday, here's a rough outline of how the process is expected to go down:

• McConnell will call for a motion to proceed on the House's American Health Care Act. Since every Democrat is expected to vote against this, no more than two GOP senators could do so. Sen. Susan Collins has said she will vote against it, leaving McConnell little room for error.
• If the motion succeeds, 20 hours of debate — in legislative time — will begin, split equally between Democrats and Republicans.
• The first amendment to be voted on is likely to be the ORRA to satisfy Paul and other conservatives. This plan is likely to be shot down by moderates.
• The first amendment to be offered procedurally — but the second to be voted on, the news website Axios reported — would be the BCRA, which was last updated on Thursday. Again, Republicans can afford only two defections.
• According to reports, there is an agreement between Sen. Rob Portman, a more moderate holdout, and Sen. Ted Cruz, a conservative, on an amendment that would keep the structure of the BCRA but allow insurers to sell non-Obamacare-compliant policies and throw in $100 billion to the state stabilization fund. But since that would require 60 votes to pass, and it has not been scored by the Congressional Budget Office, it is almost certainly doomed, since there are only 52 Republicans in the Senate.
• There could then be a series of amendments to the House bill, including those from Democrats. Additionally, other healthcare legislation could be slotted in for a vote.
• Another option, according to NBC News, is for the Senate to pass a bundle of smaller amendments focused on repealing aspects of Obamacare like the individual mandate and medical-device tax. After this, the House and the Senate would flesh out a full replacement bill in a conference committee.

In essence, no one knows what the final bill will be or whether it will pass, and it's unlikely to be fully analyzed before the vote.

Based on reports, the whirlwind session will kick off around 2:30 p.m. ET.

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