Like many people, I reacted with cynicism to the news Tuesday that John McCain would return to Washington to vote on whether a push by Republicans to dismantle the Affordable Care Act (ACA) could proceed.
I presumed that McCain, who is being treated for an insidious form of brain cancer, would sound off about the need for his party to work with Democrats to shore up the health law only to vote in the end to repeal it anyway.
After voting in favor of taking up the bill, McCain admonished his party to end their habit of “trying to find a way to win without help from across the aisle.”
Exactly what I expected from the Arizona Republican.
The thought that McCain, who is being treated by doctors at the Mayo Clinic Hospital in Phoenix, might vote for a measure that would could leave 16 million people uninsured, offended me.
But in the end, I was wrong. Around 1:30 a.m. Friday, after a full-court press that included a last-minute plea from the vice president, McCain voted against the repeal. He was joined by two other Republicans: Lisa Murkowski, of Alaska; and Susan Collins, of Maine. The White House threatened Murkowski with payback that included blocking nominees from Alaska to jobs at the Interior Department and halting expansion of drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.
In exchange for his vote to keep the repeal going, McCain reportedly sought assurances from Speaker Paul Ryan that the House would use a measure passed by the Senate as the basis to negotiate between the chambers, rather than simply pass the Senate bill and send it to the president for signature. Whatever Ryan conveyed failed to assure McCain that a compromise measure would ensue.
McCain said later he’d like to see the ACA replaced “with a solution that increases competition, lowers costs, and improves care for the American people,” but that the so-called skinny repeal that he killed did none of those things.
He called on lawmakers to “return to the correct way of legislating and send the bill back to committee, hold hearings, receive input from both sides of aisle, heed the recommendations of nation’s governors, and produce a bill that finally delivers affordable health care for the American people.”
Writing in The New Yorker, Mark Singer said McCain “chose to vote with his soul – in defiance of the bottomless soullessness that, when the ultimate moment arrived, he rejected.”
John McCain long ago earned the status of war hero. But Friday on the floor of the Senate may have marked his finest moment.