You can almost hear the thundering hoofbeats of the great horse Silver. Unfortunately, the days of the Lone Ranger are over. But Paul Ryan's GOP House is putting up a good fight. The only question is how much egg will need to be removed from his not-so-smiling visage when he reads the draconian message of his Senate colleague Tom Cotton.

A Cotton damper

Tom Cotton is a serious conservative who has just used Twitter to inform Ryan that all of his posturings are in vain. Even if Donald Trump's bill makes it through the House, it will be stopped cold on the other side of the Capitol building.

In three rapid-fire tweets this morning, Cotton told the House to pause, start over, and get it right. He cautioned against an effort to bully through the widely opposed Trump measure.

The losing bet

There are two wagers on the table. The first is that the Trump Health Bill will fly through the House with a clear majority. There is some question about that. There is that contentious Tea Party wing that sees the Trump bill as Obamacare in disguise. And it is true that the Trump bill is not even close to the repeal and replace pledge of the President. Part of the reason is that though Trump is for it, it is actually Ryan's bill.

If this hybrid bill should pass the House the second wager is that it will go down to defeat in the Senate.

The smart money is on this bet. We have yet to see what the coming days will bring. There will doubtless be protests all over and they will have reached a crescendo should everything come down to a Senate decision. But no one should be confident that the House battle is over.

Where is the support?

The committee hearings need to continue for a while.

And the overwhelming opposition of once supportive groups like AARP and the US Chamber of Commerce need to be considered. That the conservative American Medical Association stands more for Obamacare than for anything in the Trump plan is a sign of approaching doom.

A weak effort

Compared to the Obama effort to organize huge support for Obamacare the Trump effort is puny and fly by night.

Even Paul Ryan is saying that the House is having growing pains because of the need to actually govern. Americans are a forgiving people but they do not have trust in governing that is palpably harmful. Messing with the people's health is not a recipe for greatness.

This may give the president pause. He says he will hold rallies to get his new law through the Senate. By that time that event comes, if it ever does, he may prefer playing golf or collecting new conspiracy theories on TV.