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

Today, two more Republicans come out against the Senate Health Care Bill. Is that the fatal blow?

And why our America first president has come to relish his time overseas?

It's Tuesday, July 18th.

Hello, Carl. Michael.

Carl Hulse, we are calling you at home. It is late Monday night and I am rudely distracting you from what I imagine is a well-earned cocktail I apologize.

Matt, a problem.

What just happened?

In a surprise move, Republican senators Mike Lee of Utah and Jerry Moran of Kansas have come out and said they won't support the new Republican Health Care Bill.

And that has pretty much put that bill on the edge of disaster. And I have to commend them. It looks like they sort of coordinated it. So neither one of them would be the person who brought the bill down.

So you're saying that they put out a statement together so it's to insulate each other from being the person who defeated it.

It put out tweets and statements at the same time and Mike Lee mentioned in his tweet that he and Senator Moran had done this. So I credit them with a pretty capable rollout.

Carl, we already had two senators opposing this bill for very different reasons. Rand Paul thought that it wasn't conservative enough. Susan Collins said that the cuts to Medicaid were going to be too tough on her constituents.

So I'm moderate and a conservative opposing it. Tell us more about Mike Lee of Utah and Jerry Moran of Kansas. Why did they come out against this?

So they're opposing an attempt to bring this particular bill, the draft of this bill to the floor. And both of these senators are pretty much coming at it from the right.

They're not saying that it doesn't do enough for Medicaid. Senator Moran is saying that it doesn't repeal and replace the way that he would like to see. Senator Lee is saying it still raises premiums for middle class Americans.

Do you think that the Americans do have a need to cover preexisting conditions? And this is the second version of a Senate health bill. They've already tweaked it.

And with the attention on Senator McCain's illness that no one else came out and said, I'm not going to vote for this. But these two senators did tonight and they really created an uproar.

So you mentioned Senator John McCain. This all began earlier today with the strong sense that John McCain alone was going to be holding up this bill because of a medical problem. He had that kept him out of Washington.

Do you think that the delay that John McCain's absence triggered might have led us to this point?

Yeah, and in some ways I do because people wanted to sit down evaluate the bill. And I think these two senators sat down and said, well, we shouldn't let this just drift right now and wait John McCain to come back in a week or two weeks.

We're going to say right now that we're against it. It's a bit of shock.

...