Mr. Markey.

Mr. McCain.

Mrs. McCaskill.

This skinny repeal bill is dead.

This whole process is thrown up into complete chaos.

Welcome to off-. I'm Isaac Dover. Today's guest, Cecile Richards,

president of the Planned Parenthood Action Fund and Planned Parenthood Federation of America.

She's not a politician herself, but she and Planned Parenthood have taken on an outsized role in the debates happening, and along the way developed an outsized influence on how they end up.

Look at what happened with the Obamacare fight. Yes, John McCain was the deciding vote that killed the chances of repeal in the Senate, but he could only have been the deciding vote because Lisa Murkowski and Susan Collins were

already voting no, driven in large part by their rejection of the attempts to include stripping

away Planned Parenthood funding. They didn't support that, and neither did a lot of the people

who were activated to protest it, in person, over the phone, over email. Would Obamacare repeal

have passed without the Planned Parenthood provision?

When I sat down with her in her office at the Planned Parenthood headquarters in downtown Manhattan,

she told me she's not sure.

But then Democrats got right into their own abortion fight,

with the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee Chair, New Mexico Congressman Ben Re Lujan,

saying that he doesn't want the

issue of choice to be a determining factor for Democrats running. This gets at a struggle that

Democrats are going through in a much larger way, which you can read about more fully in the

off-message story on our site that's about this interview. But you can start by hearing what

Richards had to say about that herself. And then there's the Trump White House official that she told me,

...