Pearls are being clutched online over this clip because Carter was asked specifically about a woman, Lisa Murkowski, but clearly he’s talking about all of the fair-weather repealers in the GOP caucus. And just as clearly he’s speaking metaphorically.

Many Republican voters will sympathize with this sentiment, having just endured one of the greatest betrayals in modern political history. For cripes sake, here’s what the Senate’s resident conservatarian was reduced to this afternoon to try to find a silver lining in the Senate’s humiliating failure to keep its chief promise to GOP voters for the past seven years:

.@RandPaul: "It's a victory for conservatives that we did get a vote for a clean repeal." pic.twitter.com/CoY9qn3Kbq

— Fox News (@FoxNews) July 26, 2017

At least McConnell let them vote on it. That’s something, right?

I feel I have no choice but to utter the three least pleasant words in the grassroots conservative’s vocabulary: Boehner was right.

“Here we are, seven months into this year, and yet they’ve not passed this bill. Now, they’re never — they’re not going to repeal and replace Obamacare,” Boehner told a private crowd in Las Vegas, according to video footage obtained by The Washington Post. “It’s been around too long. And the American people have gotten accustomed to it. Governors have gotten accustomed to this Medicaid expansion, and so trying to pull it back is really not going to work.”

Boehner said the Republicans’ best hope in the coming months is to peel away aspects of the law, such as some tax provisions and regulations, and to end health insurance mandates.

“When it’s all said and done, you’re not going to have an employer mandate anymore, you’re not going to have the individual mandate,” Boehner said. “The Medicaid expansion will be there. The governors will have more control over their Medicaid populations and how to get them care, and a lot of Obamacare taxes will probably go.”

What Boehner’s describing there, keeping most of ObamaCare’s architecture in place minus the mandates and some taxes, sounds an awful lot like “skinny repeal.” But skinny repeal on its own is unworkable. Read this short Twitter thread revisiting the conservative dissent in the Supreme Court’s ObamaCare case five years ago, in which Scalia and company warned that striking down the mandate would necessitate striking down the entire law since the program couldn’t function without it. Without the mandate, there’s no funding mechanism to pay for all of ObamaCare’s regulatory goodies. The cash will have to come from either much higher premiums, triggering ye olde death spiral, or from taxpayer money. And why would the GOP want to leave itself on the hook potentially to have to pony up that money? If you think the base is mad at them now for refusing to repeal ObamaCare, wait until they fork over $50 billion to prop up ObamaCare.

Philip Klein delivers a brutal verdict: Today is the day ObamaCare became the law of the land.

The demise of the 7-year promise to repeal Obamacare is just the latest twist of the knife that Republicans have delivered to advocates of limited government. It’s a reminder that for all the shouting, the United States only really has one party: the party of big government. Democrats expand government when they’re in power, and Republicans cry foul when they’re in the opposition. But when Republicans gain power, they either expand government in their own way (as President Bush did with the Medicare prescription drug bill and No Child Left Behind federal education power grab) or merely preserve Democrats’ gains until Democrats can regain enough power to expand government some more. For a brief moment, there was some possibility that the Tea Party movement could break this cycle, and get the Republican Party to embrace a more limited government approach. But as it turned out, it didn’t break the cycle. It was just part of the long-term trend of Republicans talking a big game about cutting big government when they lack the power to do so.

Well, there’s always the midterms. I figure they can probably get repeal done with 70 Senate seats. The Republican Party 2017: Our leadership can’t fix health care with total control of government and our base wants the government to shut down “biased” media outlets. Sign me up.

Here it is: GOP Rep. Carter, asked about Murkowski: "Somebody needs to go over there to that Senate and snatch a knot in their ass." @MSNBC pic.twitter.com/1CVcENn9Kq

— Kyle Griffin (@kylegriffin1) July 26, 2017