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Sen. John McCain left his sickbed in Arizona Tuesday, where he and his family are still undoubtedly reeling from the ominous diagnosis of his aggressive and deadly brain cancer. As expected, the senator voted to allow the Senate to start debating taking the kind of health care he's receiving from millions of other people. That wasn't a huge surprise. But then he decided to deliver a lecture, and that ... was a little surprising. Because that lecture slammed Senate leadership for doing what he just rewarded them for with his vote to go forward in this process—which, by the way, is breaking the Senate into smithereens.
He started out with his "appreciation for the protocols and customs of this body and for the other 99 privileged souls who have been elected to this senate." Then this, which might just be the most hypocritical thing said on the Senate floor ever, considering the action that McCain had just taken—rubberstamping the entire process McConnell followed to get them there:
Our responsibilities are important, vitally important to the continued success of our republic. Our arcane rules and customs are deliberately intended to require broad cooperation to function well at all. The most revered members of this institution accepted the necessity of compromise in order to make incremental progress on solving America's problems and defend her from her adversaries. That principle mind-set and the service of our predecessors who possessed it come to mind when I hear the senate referred to as the world's greatest deliberative body. I’m not sure we can claim that distinction with a straight face today.
And yet, he stood up there with a straight face bemoaning the fact that Senate debates have become "more partisan, more tribal, more of the time than at any time than I can remember." As if he's had nothing whatsoever in allowing that to happen since 2009, when President Barack Obama—the man who beat him to the White House—was sworn in. Sure, he makes a nod to his own behavior, saying that sometimes "I've let my passion rule my reason." Then he pleads for a "return to regular order," to "rely on humility on our need to cooperate, on our dependence on each other, learn how to trust each other again and by so doing better serve the people who elected us." Again, after he rewarded his leadership for shutting Democrats out of this critical legislative process with his vote. After a good dose of "both sides" do it, "mandating legislation from the top down without any support from the other side, with all the parliamentary maneuvers that requires."
Republican Senators JUST voted to proceed with Obamacare debate. Call your Senator at (202) 224-3121 and urge them to vote “NO” on the repeal. Then, tell us how it went.
He then declared "I will not vote for this bill as it is today." Here again he blasts leadership, again for something he just rewarded them for doing. "We try to do this by coming up with a proposal behind closed doors in consultation with the administration, then springing it on skeptical members, trying to convince them that it's better than nothing. That it's better than nothing? Asking us to swallow our doubts and force it past a unified opposition. I don't think that's going to work in the end, and probably shouldn't."
And then he lied. He said that they should step back and hold hearings, report a bill out of committees with "contributions from both sides. "Something that my dear friends on the other side of the aisle didn't allow to happen years ago." That's a flat-out lie. There were hearings. There were committee meetings. There were one-on-one bipartisan meetings. There were more than 100 Republican amendments included—like the one that provides for how senators get their health coverage.
With all due respect to Sen. McCain, and all due empathy for the gut punch that his cancer diagnosis has surely been: that’s far too little and far too late. The time for this kind of "principled" opposition was at the beginning of this process, when you could have said all these pretty things to save the institution you say you revere. Hell, the time for this was back when Republicans were in the minority and were fighting President Obama's every nominee, and every initiative. McConnell's total, unprecedented blockade of a perfectly noncontroversial and highly-qualified Supreme Court nominee would have been a fantastic time to get all principled. McCain just let all that roll on by, maybe because he could never reconcile himself to the fact that "that one" defeated his greatest ambition to be president. Maybe it was because he just couldn't be bothered to stand up for principle when the television cameras aren't on.
So if McCain means that he wants to "pass something that will be imperfect, full of compromises and not very pleasing to implacable promises on the other side but that might provide workable solutions Americans are struggling with today," well, it's too late. Unless he decides he absolutely won't vote for whatever is churned out this week. That's the only way that it's even feasible that Democrats would somehow have the opportunity to be included, if McCain and two others who might still have a modicum of concern for our system of government refuse their votes.
Absent that action, McCain's return to the Senate today was just so much theater—another empty attempt to burnish his increasingly hollow image as a statesman.