For the reasons spelled out above, I think this misdiagnoses the source of the challenge and the solution to it. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell didn’t lock down the bill-writing process in order to block liberals from going over the bill with a fine-tooth comb. His chief insight was in recognizing a bias—not among liberals, but within the news industry—toward what you might call “new news.” Things we didn’t know before, but do know now. It is that bias, more than anything else, that has brought us to the brink of living under a law that almost nobody on the planet has seen but that will uninsure millions to pay for millionaire tax cuts.

If you consider how the secret Republican health care bill story ultimately broke through (to the extent that it has), or refer back to the much-more-thoroughly-covered health care debate in 2009, the new-news bias effect becomes fairly obvious.

What ultimately got Trumpcare a modicum of mass coverage wasn’t a critical mass of liberal outrage about secrecy, preventable deaths, or bloodless, soak-the-poor, right-wing ideology. It was that Democrats, responding to grassroots pressure, stopped cooperating with Republicans to run the Senate in an orderly fashion, and made Republicans actively reject requests to open up the process, protect children and veterans and so on. Which is to say, Democrats made a little bit of news.

The reason the Affordable Care Act debate was so thoroughly covered eight years ago wasn’t that the reporters who covered it were better, but that the debate then was like the Sutter’s Mill of news. Reporters had a surfeit of hearings, drafts, amendments, CBO reports, speeches, symposia and votes to cover, and those stories commanded prime media real estate. Because Democrats didn’t try to pass their entire reform agenda through the filibuster-proof budget process, they needed 60 votes. And because there were exactly 60 Democratic senators at the time, every single senator was a kingmaker—a newsmaker. Any Democrat who had a change of heart about anything—whether the bill should include a public option, whether the marketplaces would be organized at the state or national level, whether the government should tax expensive health plans—could reshape the bill, and could thus turn trivial changes in senatorial brain function into critical scoops.

This is what makes Republican denunciations of the debate over Obamacare so outrageously dishonest. While Republicans faked hysteria over the supposed secrecy of the process, what McConnell recognized about the 2009 debate is that nearly all of the Democrats’ struggles and setbacks stemmed from its openness. It wasn’t Democrats who set the template for Trumpcare; what Republicans are doing now is a through-the-looking-glass adoption of the lies they told about Obamacare.

As in 2009, almost every single Republican senator today has the power to change the contents or legislative course of the secret health care bill, or kill the repeal effort altogether. They are instead using their ignorance of the bill’s contents—feigned or otherwise—to shield the bill itself. The absence of new news is the bill’s greatest source of strength. The resurfacing of old Republican tweets and comments attacking the authors of Obamacare is fine by those Republicans, because it limits the newsiness of the health care story to examinations of Republican hypocrisy rather than Republican goals and values. By withholding details, they limit the range of reportorial inquiry to questions about the process itself. Have you seen the bill yet? No. Will you withhold support for the bill unless it runs through an open process? I am very dismayed about the process.

All of this underscores the importance of treating the coming bill text, and next week’s Congressional Budget Office analysis, as if they were vaguely-written letters from James Comey. There will be mere days if not hours to distill the contents and effects of the secret bill to the public before senators cast their final votes.

But it would be better in the long run for the news industry to migrate toward a more nuanced standard of newsworthiness that doesn’t cede all agenda-setting power to people who can commandeer front pages with misleading information just because it’s new, or escape scrutiny for moral crimes whenever they want to, simply by going dark.