In a rare majority gathering of senators on the floor for formal debate Tuesday afternoon, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) lamented the costs of the government shutdown to military families and ripped the route to defund Obamacare as a promise that never possessed anything of the sort.
McCain quoted from a story that said the shutdown was prohibiting the delivery of a $100,000 ‘death gratuity’ to multiple families of soldiers who lost their lives in Afghanistan over the weekend, saying that members of Congress should be ’embarrassed’ and ‘ashamed’ that their inability to negotiate a reopening of the full federal government has caused such hardship. The Arizona senator then retraced the Senate’s steps to the current impasse, warning that he wouldn’t speak too long out of fear of becoming too emotional — but those words wound up being quieter than the ones that followed.
“We started out with a false premise here, on this side of the aisle,” McCain began. “And that was that somehow we were going to repeal Obamacare — that’s after 25 days of debate, including up until Christmas Eve morning, fighting against Obamacare; that’s after a 2012 election, [when I] traveled this country with passion, the first thing saying, ‘The first thing we’re gonna do when Mitt Romney is President of the United States is repeal and replace Obamacare,’ and the American people spoke. So somehow to think that we were gonna repeal Obamacare … of course, was a false premise, and I think did the American people a grave disservice by convincing them that somehow we could.”
McCain went on to urge that the Senate take the lead in crafting a bipartisan compromise that would be more amenable to GOP members of House, possibly including a repeal of Obamacare’s medical device tax, which several Democratic senators supported in a symbolic vote earlier this year, and the adoption of a provision to eliminate certain health care subsidies for official Washington under Obamacare.
He said that such negotiations should take place immediately — especially since the country knows the eventual end game, anyway.
“How is this going to end? We know how it’s gonna end. We know how it’s gonna end!” McCain exclaimed. “Sooner or later, the government will resume its functions, sooner or later we will raise the debt limit. The question is, is how we get there. If there’s anybody who disagrees that we’re not gonna reach that point, I’d like to hear from them. So why don’t we do this sooner rather than later?”
McCain’s remarks came after Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) used a procedural vote to beckon the presence of absent senators to the floor for discussion and debate — the vote is a rarely-used way to demonstrate a quorum (51 members present) or lack thereof in order to conduct official business. The Senate normally operates far short of a quorum by ‘presuming’ that 51 senators are present until a member ‘suggests the absence of a quorum’.
Full video of McCain’s speech below:
