Earlier this week, Senator John McCain put forward a motion to recommit the Senate health care bill (H.R. 3590) to the Finance Committee with instructions to put back in the 500-something billion dollars in cuts made to Medicare Advantage (which the health insurance companies make a considerable amount of money from). Despite the fact that he wanted to cut 1.3 trillion dollars from medicare as part of his 2008 Presidential campaign platform, he went off on the Senate floor that H.R. 3590's cutting of less than half of what he wanted to cut was a massive disservice to the elderly and would cut benefits (despite the fact that the CBO and the AARP said that medicare's guaranteed benefits would not be negatively affected at all).
To convey his "concern," McCain recorded a robocall for the NRSC to call attention to this dastardly plot of the Democrats./snark
More below the fold.
The robocall was made to independent voters in the states of Senators Blanche Lincoln, Michael Bennett, and Ben Nelson. Live phone calls were made in North Dakota (where robocalls are banned by state law), the state that Senators Kent Conrad and Byron Dorgan represent. These calls implore the people to call their Senators to support his motion to recommit H.R. 3590.
Here's the text of the robocall made in Colorado (from the Huffington Post):
Hi this is Senator John McCain. On Monday, I introduced the first Republican amendment to the massive health care bill, which would send the bill back to the Senate Finance Committee and stop the Democrats from cutting $500 billion in vital Medicare coverage for our seniors. I need Senator Michael Bennet to join me in this effort. If you want to keep Medicare from getting cut please go to our website... and sign a petition to Senator Bennet urging him to join my efforts to fight a Washington D.C. government takeover of your health care. Thank you for your time.
Paid for by National Republican Senatorial Committee and not authorized by any candidate or candidate's committee.
Heh, since robocalls worked so well last year for John McCain to fearmonger about William Ayers' supposed connections to Barack Obama, it only makes sense to do them again to fearmonger about the health care bill./snark
And what good that robocall did when it came time to vote on McCain's motion to recommit H.R. 3590 today? Well, it failed by a vote of 42-58 with only Senators Webb and Ben Nelson defecting from the Democratic bloc.
You fail, McCain. You have revealed yourself to be a most un-marvericky tool.