John McCain is the toast of sane America this weekend, and rightfully so. Without McCain’s thumbs down on the U.S. Senate floor early Friday morning, a piece of legislation Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham called “a fraud” just hours earlier could have become law.

It is important to note that this is not a partisan analysis. To a person, Republican members of the Senate said the bill that failed 51-49 was not intended to become law. It was intended to force a House-Senate conference committee that was supposed to come up with a bill a majority of Republicans could support, even though neither chamber had been able to accomplish that goal independently.

The result, as Democratic Sen. Chris Murphy of Connecticut pointed out on the floor just prior to the vote, could have been House Republicans throwing up their hands and simply approving the Senate’s “skinny bill” – it was eight pages long – so they could claim to have kept seven years’ worth of promises to their base to repeal Obamacare. McCain’s vote very possibly prevented President Trump from signing into law a measure even its authors did not believe should be enacted, a measure that would have added 16 million Americans to the ranks of the uninsured and increased premiums on public exchanges by 20 percent a year, according to the Congressional Budget Office.

Read more at The Boulder Daily Camera.