From the New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is the deal.

Today, what exactly is a skinny repeal? And the president says transgender people will not be allowed in the military.

The military says that's news to them.

It's Thursday, July 27th.

Just hours after the Senate voted Tuesday to begin debating the future of the Affordable Care Act, they took a major vote on a bill to repeal and replace the law immediately.

On this vote, the Yades are 43, the Nays are 57. The motion is not agreed to.

It failed by a wide margin. Then on Wednesday, on this vote, the Yades are 45, the Nays are 55.

Senate Republicans took another vote on a bill to repeal the law in two years.

The amendment is not agreed to.

That too failed by a wide margin. Carole Holes, why do you take two big votes that you know are going to fail?

What they're doing right now is trying to find something anything that can get majority support.

It's very unusual, kind of unsenitorial in some ways the way they're doing this.

From the tradition, you know, you usually, you've got a bill, you know, we're going to make a few changes in it and we're going to send it out into the house.

In this case, they're kind of actually trying to find their bill out of all these votes.

You know, what can work? Mitch McConnell is pulling out all the stops. The failures of these other proposals could be setting up the Senate approval of kind of a last ditch plan that's being called on Capitol Hill, the skinny repeal or the skinny bill.

You know, there's always these cute little names attached to things.

Well, I want to get to what the skinny bill is, but you're identifying basically two failures leading to a third bill.

So as someone who covers Congress and has for quite some time, why don't you just start with the third bill you think might succeed?

It's sort of their final alternative. It's their last ditch. They'd rather not do it that way, but they don't like it as much as they like the previous two.

Right. I mean, there's more in the previous bills and they get to do more with it.

The skinny bill, as it's being called, just as a few things that there's basic agreement on.

It would get rid of some of the basic requirements that individuals have to buy insurance, which is a main element of Obamacate.

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