McCain's Moment

By Charles Pierce, Esquire

28 July 17

The John McCain the country had been waiting for finally showed up early Friday morning.

arly Friday morning turned out to be the day that John McCain became John McCain.

He was the third (and fatal) Republican vote against the so-called "skinny repeal" of the Affordable Care Act, a hideous dog's breakfast of a bill that was written over lunch in the Republican conference on Thursday, and which was presented to the Senate at 10 o'clock Thursday night, whereupon Mitch McConnell graciously bestowed upon it two hours of debate, at least an hour of which was spent wandering around the stalagmites in the mind of Mike Enzi, Republican of Wyoming, who droned on endlessly, refusing to yield to questions from the Democrats and eventually making everyone listening to him wish that he'd just break into song or do a little dance, anything to break up the monotony.

After a motion to send the bill to committee sponsored by Democratic Senator Patty Murray of Washington failed, McConnell held the vote open for nearly an hour, giving his people time to work on any fence-sitters. Even Mike Pence came down to join in the lobbying and, if necessary, cast another deciding vote. Pretty soon, it became obvious that McCain was going to be the focal point of all the politicking. That was when Lisa Murkowski, Republican of Alaska, did a very smart thing. She walked over to McCain and talked to him for a good 45 minutes, essentially boxing everyone out, even Pence, who tried his best. The drama kept building and Murkowski kept talking to him. She, along with Susan Collins of Maine, were the true stalwarts against the bill, voting against every attempt to demolish the ACA, and even voting against the bill coming to the floor, which is something that McCain couldn't bring himself to do. Murkowski even stood up against some clumsy—and marginally illegal—threats from Ryan Zinke, the Secretary of the Interior. She and Collins were implacable. If you told me that some of their courage rubbed off on McCain, I wouldn't argue with you.

"Those were some of the bravest votes I ever saw in politics," said Angus King, the Independent from Maine.

After a while, with the entire Senate chamber rapt with attention, McCain walked down the aisle and across in front of the presiding officer's desk, over to the Democratic side of the chamber, where he joined a group consisting of Dianne Feinstein, Amy Klobuchar and Democratic leader Chuck Schumer. The smiles started small, and then spread around the semi-circle of Democrats and McCain, whose love for the dramatic gesture remains undimmed, spread his arms out and lifted his head in mock supplication. Everybody laughed. Not long afterwards, Mike Pence left the chamber entirely, rather than preside over an impending political catastrophe.

The only thing that saved the day was the way it ended. The rest was taken up by a legislative process that had as much to do with orderly democracy as a tornado does with home décor. All day, the two sides went slanging after each other over amendments that they knew had no chance of becoming law. By the end of the afternoon, McCain, Lindsey Graham, and Ron Johnson called a press conference at which Graham called the skinny repeal a fraud, but at which all three indicated that they still might vote for a bill that none of them wanted to see become law. They said they would vote for it only if they got assurances from the leadership in the House of Representatives that there would be an actual conference committee formed prior to the bill's final passage. Speaker Paul Ryan, the zombie-eyed granny starver from the state of Wisconsin, put out a bit of flummery that guaranteed no such thing. And then, when the actual bill finally came to the floor, it was worse than anyone had anticipated.

It did away with the individual mandate and, after a few years, with the employer mandate as well. It defunded Planned Parenthood. It left open the possibility that the states could once again allow insurance companies to decline coverage due to pre-existing conditions. A belated CBO score indicated that 16 million Americans would lose their insurance if the bill passed as it was written, and that six million Americans would lose their employer-based health insurance. And, because the bill was being passed through the reconciliation process, certain budgetary targets had to be met, so there was a huge cut to the Centers for Disease Control that was simply a case of collateral damage. All of this had to be debated in two hours.

You can spend hours trying to determine why McCain voted the way he did. He certainly took some convincing to do so, unless you think his inexplicable vote to proceed on Tuesday was the beginning of some Machiavellian exercise to saw off the limb behind McConnell and the president*. Maybe he truly was revolted by the bizarre process through which this exercise was conducted and perhaps he truly did yearn nostalgically for regular order. Maybe he didn't want what may be his last major act as a U.S. senator to be the person who jacked their healthcare from 16 million of his fellow citizens. Or maybe it was just pure cussedness. Whatever the case, when McCain walked into the chamber and dropped his thumb down, the whole place turned into a goddamned Frank Capra movie.

"It was a pretty good movie, wasn't it?" Angus King said. "It's easy to stand up to your opponents. It's much harder to stand up to your friends."

(Let history note, however, that David Perdue, Republican of Georgia, almost swiped McCain's big moment completely by accident. When they called his name, Perdue shouted, loudly, "No!" As a hundred reporters picked their jaws up off the floor, he changed his vote with a hand signal toward the president's chair but, by then, McCain had voted and general hilarity had broken out.)

In many ways, this was the end to the 2000 Republican primary campaign that looms so large in McCain's personal history. It was both a flashback to, and fulfillment of, those heady days when McCain seemed to be a legitimate heir to Teddy Roosevelt's Republican party, before George W. Bush and Karl Rove meanly ratfcked him in South Carolina. A lot has happened since then, most of it not very good. He wanted to be president so much that he lost touch with the soul of that campaign. He is going to be reckoned as a curious figure in American political history, but he is going to have that moment early Friday morning. On a humid Washington night beneath a hot orange sliver of a moon, there was something like redemption in the way the cheers rolled into the Capitol from the protesters who'd gathered outside, a blessing from a half-forgotten moment in time.