Republicans say you shouldn’t blame them for the rushed, secretive way they are writing health care legislation. They say you should blame Democrats.

White House press secretary Sean Spicer on Tuesday got multiple questions about the legislation, now under consideration in the Senate, that would repeal the Affordable Care Act. Almost nobody, including most Republican senators, knows exactly what the bill would do, because leaders have tapped a small group of members to write the legislation and have done their best to keep the details out of public view.

They’ve submitted a version to the Congressional Budget Office for analysis and, supposedly, they will share text with their full caucus later this week ― which means details are likely to leak out to the public shortly thereafter. But the current plan is to hold a vote as soon as next week, with a minimum of formal public deliberation.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and his allies have come under withering assault for writing such an ambitious and consequential bill in this manner. They are responding by saying that Democrats are to blame, because ― as this argument goes ― Democrats have made clear they won’t work with Republicans on a repeal bill.

Here’s what Spicer said Tuesday ― speaking about Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) ― in response to a question from MSNBC’s Hallie Jackson:

If you look at what Senator Schumer said, both in February to a MoveOn.org call, where he said no Democrat’s going to go near this, and what he said in a letter May 9, that no Democrats would be part of an effort that would repeal Obamacare, so they have chosen … not to make themselves part of the process.

Spicer also said this was a key difference between the process Republicans are using to repeal the Affordable Care Act now and the process Democrats used when they first wrote the law, back in 2009 and 2010. This has always been one of the GOP’s favorite talking points ― that, according to the party narrative, Democrats wrote the bill in secret and then rushed a vote before anybody really knew what was in it. 

“We were very polarized because the Democrats did, frankly, exactly the same thing,” Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) told reporters on Capitol Hill Tuesday. “So we had a very polarized bill that the public debated for years and years. I don’t think the parties are any different. I would give criticism equally to the parties.”

It’s true that, this year, Democrats indicated early that they wanted no part of a bill that would take away health insurance from millions of people, as every repeal proposal being discussed would do. (The House bill, on which the Senate has based its legislation, would take away coverage from 23 million people, according to a Congressional Budget Office projection.) Of course, it’s also true that Schumer and Democrats made it clear they would happily work on bipartisan reforms, even major ones, that would make coverage more secure or affordable without causing the number of uninsured to rise.

But the really important context for this debate is the Republican claims about what happened in 2009 and 2010 and how those claims hold up to scrutiny.

They don’t hold up well.

In reality, Democrats spent more than a year debating their proposal out in the open. Five separate committees, three in the House and two in the Senate, held literally hundreds of hours of hearings and produced testimony from experts representing multiple philosophical views and officials from pretty much every group or industry involved with health care. Republicans had opportunities to question those witnesses and to propose amendments, some of which actually ended up in the legislation. 

McConnell, as it happens, made his own vow of noncooperation ― later telling The Atlantic’s Joshua Green he wanted no GOP “fingerprints” on Democratic legislation. Even so, Democratic leaders tried desperately to win over a handful of moderate Republicans who seemed most likely to support health care reform. Then-Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus (D-Mont.) and former President Barack Obama personally invested hours in one-on-one meetings with individual Republican senators, especially then-Sen. Olympia Snowe (R-Maine) ― who ultimately voted for the Finance Committee’s bill, even though she voted against the final Democratic legislation on the floor.

Before the final Senate vote, in December 2009, Republicans warned they hadn’t seen final details before voting on the bill. But by that point nearly a year had passed and the big questions were all settled. Later, as the debate dragged into early 2010, Obama personally engaged Republicans ― at length ― on two separate occasions, one at a Republican Party retreat in Baltimore and then at a daylong bipartisan session at the Blair House.

Apart from declaring war after Pearl Harbor, Senate has *never* rammed through such major legislation w/o hearings https://t.co/MeV4actHln

— James Fallows (@JamesFallows) June 19, 2017

Writing legislation is almost never elegant and there was plenty of negotiation that went on behind closed doors. The result was some famously ugly deals, such as the “Cornhusker kickback” that would have boosted federal Medicaid payments to Nebraska to secure the vote of then-Sen. Ben Nelson (D-Neb.). Many Democratic leaders were happy not to work with Republicans. (They were furious at Baucus for dragging out negotiations.) And of course the final legislation violated some key promises its supporters made ― chief among them, a vow to let people who liked their existing health care plans keep them.

But by and large the architects of the law were clear about what they were trying to do and how they proposed to do it ― in part because they’d been promoting and defending these ideas, in detail, ever since Obama had started his presidential campaign years before. And once in power they used the traditional committee process ― if not so much to write the legislative language then at least to give the media, interest groups and ultimately the public an opportunity to understand what was up for discussion and eventually form an opinion on that. 

You don’t have to mythologize the 2009-2010 process to see how different the 2017 process has been. (Take it from other reporters who covered the Affordable Care Act, like Sarah Kliff and Julie Rovner, who have made this point already.) And it’s not hard to figure out why Senate GOP leaders are proceeding in the way they are.

Although those leaders haven’t indicated how they intend to resolve some key issues, the ultimate impact of the bill is already clear, as HuffPost’s Jeff Young has written. That proposal would take away insurance from millions, remove consumer protections that people value, and push insurance in the direction of greater exposure to out-of-pocket costs.

None of this is popular. None of this is what Republicans promised to do. Debating their bill openly would force them to admit that, and so they are trying to avoid public scrutiny for as long as possible.