by John McCain
Before the diagnosis, I had discussed with Mark Salter an idea for a speech I was thinking about giving that I wanted his help with. I hadn’t liked the direction of Republican efforts to repeal and replace Obamacare, and had already made that clear in public remarks. Unable to find agreement among Senate Republicans for a replacement, the leadership was grasping for a minimalist proposal that could be acceptable at least temporarily to most Republicans. The House had already passed a bill, which I couldn’t support. Senate leadership would eventually settle on an approach that could best be described as “repeal and good luck to you.” No serious attempt had been made to see if Democrats would cooperate with us to address some of Obamacare’s problems while we continued trying to find consensus among ourselves on a comprehensive alternative. Lamar Alexander and Patty Murray, the chair and ranking minority member of the Senate Health Committee, had been working on just such an approach. But the Republican leadership, primarily Mitch McConnell and his staff, were making most if not all of the decisions. They are experienced, skillful political tacticians. Health care is an issue that divides Republicans in both houses of Congress, not so much in our opposition to Obamacare, but over how to reduce the numbers of uninsured people. Not long ago, John Boehner, enjoying the freedom of expression that comes with retirement, observed that Republicans would never agree on a replacement for Obamacare. He was speaking a truth learned over many attempts at trying to reach such a consensus. It was never there, and it still isn’t.
Republicans had just a two-vote margin in the Senate, three if you count the vice president’s tie-breaker vote, so they could only afford to lose two Republicans. Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski appeared to be likely no votes. Republican leaders looked for an alternative to Obamacare that would have the best chance of attracting the rest of us. They would come up with something they called “skinny repeal,” which repealed key provisions of Obamacare and offered nothing as a replacement. Mitch and I have been on different sides of a few issues over the years, especially in campaign finance reform debates, where we were each other’s principal antagonist. But contrary to Washington myth, we get along pretty well. We like and respect each other. We’ve known each other a long time. Both of us are in our fourth decade of Senate service. I admire his discipline, political IQ, and maturity. I also appreciate that he allows me an informal leadership role on national security issues. We’re friends. Nevertheless, I felt Mitch had assumed too much control over health care legislation, with too little input from others, and no outreach to Democrats. I didn’t think that approach would succeed.
I thought the best way to make some progress on the issue was to allow an organic, bottom-up effort to find a compromise or two or several that would be criticized by many, but acceptable to enough members on both sides in both houses of Congress. The way to do that was to allow legislation to proceed through regular order, the way most things used to be done here before we began trying to operate with minimal or no cooperation from the other side. Blocking amendments from being offered, limiting debate, putting everything we possibly can on the budget reconciliation measure, which requires only a simple majority to pass, and is how George W. Bush got his tax cuts and Barack Obama got Obamacare. Our dysfunction was years in the making, and it won’t be quickly unmade. We’re getting little done for the country, which exacerbates voters’ alienation from Washington, which encourages them to elect more people to Washington determined to stop any compromise, and block genuine progress on anything. Both Democratic and Republican leaders have been instrumental in creating these conditions. Both have tried to control the place more than its customs and human nature tolerate. Gridlock is the result. We hadn’t accomplished much more up to that point than confirming Neil Gorsuch’s nomination. Returning to regular order would give the Senate a chance to work its will on an issue, to use our ideas, our friendships, our initiative to see if we could slowly, inefficiently, frustratingly stumble our way to a result.
In the health care debate, the issue would be referred to the committee or committees of jurisdiction—preferably Lamar and Patty’s committee since they had already been working on related legislation—to consider a bill, vote on amendments offered by both sides, send the resulting legislation to the floor to be openly debated and amended by the full Senate, and then after a full debate, if it was clear some senators were filibustering the bill, file cloture to end the debate and bring it to a vote. That is exactly how the committee I chair, the Senate Armed Services Committee, succeeds every year in passing the defense authorization bill. It is always a bipartisan effort, always a series of compromises, always debated and amended openly in committee and on the floor, and always represents significant progress in meeting our security challenges.
I had started to make this argument before I learned I was sick, and I wanted to emphasize it after my diagnosis. I make fun of the Senate. I laugh at its pretensions, mock its byzantine customs, and bemoan its inefficiencies. But I love the place. I love it. I’ve known senators who were eminent statesmen, the equal of luminaries in the White House, Pentagon, and State Department. I’ve seen senators work diligently, collaboratively, and urgently in response to emergencies in war and peace, to meet a critical need or prevent a calamitous mistake, or to just make measurable, beneficial progress on the major problems of the day. I have made many friendships there that made my life richer and more purposeful. It’s an honorable institution, with honorable people serving in it and working for it, and I am very proud, however much the maverick I have occasionally played, and grateful to be allowed to serve my country in their company. It is an extraordinary privilege to be one of the hundred Americans elected to the United States Senate, and I hope to be remembered for serving in it.
The health care debate was the right occasion for me to speak of the Senate as a place worthy of affection and respect. I planned to arrive in Washington right before the vote on a motion to allow the Senate to bring the health care bill up for debate and amendment. Leadership still hadn’t announced what replacement for Obamacare they would offer as an amendment to the underlying legislation passed by the House. They wouldn’t propose the aforementioned skinny repeal, which offered no replacement at all until after the vote on the motion. Democrats had been blocking consideration of the House bill on the floor, and hoped to kill the entire effort by defeating the motion to proceed. They needed three votes. Mine would not be one of them. I wouldn’t stop debate of the bill, but I wouldn’t vote for final passage, either, if it weren’t considerably improved in the process. I would ask for floor time after the vote to make the speech Salter and I had worked on during the flight from Arizona.
I wasn’t prepared for the response to my sudden appearance on the Senate floor that day. I went directly from the airport to the Senate chamber, and arrived after every senator had voted on the motion. I walked through the door to the chamber, and all the senators gathered for the vote joined in sustained applause for a colleague who had often been a pain in the ass, but who had become, I guess, a part of the character of the place. It was, forgive the cliché, overwhelming. I was deeply moved, nearly to tears. Very few moments in my life have been as gratifying. I cast my vote for the motion, disappointing my friends on the other side of the aisle, no doubt. But when I asked for recognition after the vote on the motion had passed, I didn’t see a single senator leave the chamber. That had never happened to me before, not once in my thirty-one years of service in the United States Senate. And while I might not be remembered as one of the Senate’s legendary orators, I wanted to do my very best to deliver a speech that meant a great deal to me as it was intended as a tribute and encouragement to an institution I love. With the reader’s indulgence, I submit it in full here.
Mr. President:
I’ve stood in this place many times and addressed as president many presiding officers. I have been so addressed when I have sat in that chair, as close as I will ever be to a presidency.
It is an honorific we’re almost
indifferent to, isn’t it? In truth, presiding over the Senate can be a nuisance, a bit of a ceremonial bore, and it is usually relegated to the more junior members of the majority.
But as I stand here today—looking a little worse for wear, I’m sure—I have a refreshed appreciation for the protocols and customs of this body, and for the other ninety-nine privileged souls who have been elected to this Senate.
I have been a member of the United States Senate for thirty years. I had another long, if not as long, career before I arrived here, another profession that was profoundly rewarding, and in which I had experiences and friendships that I revere. But make no mistake, my service here is the most important job I have had in my life. And I am so grateful to the people of Arizona for the privilege—for the honor—of serving here and the opportunities it gives me to play a small role in the history of the country I love.
I’ve known and admired men and women in the Senate who played much more than a small role in our history, true statesmen, giants of American politics. They came from both parties, and from various backgrounds. Their ambitions were frequently in conflict. They held different views on the issues of the day. And they often had very serious disagreements about how best to serve the national interest.
But they knew that however sharp and heartfelt their disputes, however keen their ambitions, they had an obligation to work collaboratively to ensure the Senate discharged its constitutional responsibilities effectively. Our responsibilities are important, vitally important, to the continued success of our Republic. And 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 to defend her from her adversaries.
That principled mindset, 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.
I’m sure it wasn’t always deserved in previous eras, either. But I’m sure there have been times when it was, and I was privileged to witness some of those occasions.
Our deliberations today—not just our debates, but the exercise of all our responsibilities—authorizing government policies, appropriating the funds to implement them, exercising our advice and consent role—are often lively and interesting. They can be sincere and principled. But they are more partisan, more tribal more of the time than any other time I remember. Our deliberations can still be important and useful, but I think we’d all agree they haven’t been overburdened by greatness lately. And right now, they aren’t producing much for the American people.
Both sides have let this happen. Let’s leave the history of who shot first to the historians. I suspect they’ll find we all conspired in our decline—either by deliberate actions or neglect. We’ve all played some role in it. Certainly I have. Sometimes, I’ve let my passion rule my reason. Sometimes, I made it harder to find common ground because of something harsh I said to a colleague. Sometimes, I wanted to win more for the sake of winning than to achieve a contested policy.
Incremental progress, compromises that each side criticize but also accept, just plain muddling through to chip away at problems and keep our enemies from doing their worst isn’t glamorous or exciting. It doesn’t feel like a political triumph. But it’s usually the most we can expect from our system of government, operating in a country as diverse and quarrelsome and free as ours.
Considering the injustice and cruelties inflicted by autocratic governments, and how corruptible human nature can be, the problem solving our system does make possible, the fitful progress it produces, and the liberty and justice it preserves, is a magnificent achievement.
Our system doesn’t depend on our nobility. It accounts for our imperfections, and gives an order to our individual strivings that has helped make ours the most powerful and prosperous society on earth. It is our responsibility to preserve that, even when it requires us to do something less satisfying than “winning.” Even when we must give a little to get a little. Even when our efforts manage just three yards and a cloud of dust, while critics on both sides denounce us for timidity, for our failure to “triumph.”
I hope we can again rely on humility, on our need to cooperate, on our dependence on each other to learn how to trust each other again and by so doing better serve the people who elected us. Stop listening to the bombastic loudmouths on the radio and television and the Internet. To hell with them. They don’t want anything done for the public good. Our incapacity is their livelihood.
Let’s trust each other. Let’s return to regular order. We’ve been spinning our wheels on too many important issues because we keep trying to find a way to win without help from across the aisle. That’s an approach that’s been employed by both sides, mandating legislation from the top down, without any support from the other side, with all the parliamentary maneuvers that requires.
We’re getting nothing done. All we’ve really done this year is confirm Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court. Our health care insurance system is a mess. We all know it, those who support Obamacare and those who oppose it. Something has to be done. We Republicans have looked for a way to end it and replace it with something else without paying a terrible political price. We haven’t found it yet, and I’m not sure we will. All we’ve managed to do is make more popular a policy that wasn’t very popular when we started trying to get rid of it.
I voted for the motion to proceed to allow debate to continue and amendments to be offered. I will not vote for the bill as it is today. It’s a shell of a bill right now. We all know that. I have changes urged by my state’s governor that will have to be included to earn my support for final passage of any bill. I know many of you will have to see the bill changed substantially for you to support it.
We’ve tried 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 it’s better than nothing, asking us to swallow our doubts and force it past a unified opposition. I don’t think that is going to work in the end. And it probably shouldn’t.
The Obama administration and congressional Democrats shouldn’t have forced through Congress without any opposition support a social and economic change as massive as Obamacare. And we shouldn’t do the same with ours.
Why don’t we try the old way of legislating in the Senate, the way our rules and customs encourage us to act. If this process ends in failure, which seems likely, then let’s return to regular order.
Let the Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee under Chairman Alexander and Ranking Member Murray hold hearings, try to report a bill out of committee with contributions from both sides. Then bring it to the floor for amendment and debate, and see if we can pass something that will be imperfect, full of compromises, and not very pleasing to implacable partisans on either side, but that might provide workable solutions to problems Americans are struggling with today.
What have we to lose by trying to work together to find those solutions? We’re not getting much done apart. I don’t think any of us feels very proud of our incapacity. Merely preventing your political opponents from doing what they want isn’t the most inspiring work. There’s greater satisfaction in respecting our differences, but not letting them prevent agreements that don’t require abandonment of core principles, agreements made in good faith that help improve lives and protect the American people.
The Senate is capable of that. We know that. We’ve seen it before. I’ve seen it happen many times. And the times when I was involved even in a modest way with working out a bipartisan response to a national problem or threat are the proudest moments of my career, and by far the most satisfying.
This place is important. The work we do is important. Our strange rules and seemingly eccentric practices that slow our p
roceedings and insist on our cooperation are important. Our founders envisioned the Senate as the more deliberative, careful body that operates at a greater distance than the other body from the public passions of the hour.
We are an important check on the powers of the Executive. Our consent is necessary for the President to appoint jurists and powerful government officials and in many respects to conduct foreign policy. Whether or not we are of the same party, we are not the President’s subordinates. We are his equal!
As his responsibilities are onerous, many, and powerful, so are ours. And we play a vital role in shaping and directing the judiciary, the military, and the cabinet, in planning and supporting foreign and domestic policies. Our success in meeting all these awesome constitutional obligations depends on cooperation among ourselves.
The success of the Senate is important to the continued success of America. This country—this big, boisterous, brawling, intemperate, restless, striving, daring, beautiful, bountiful, brave, good, and magnificent country—needs us to help it thrive. That responsibility is more important than any of our personal interests or political affiliations.
We are the servants of a great nation, “a nation conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” More people have lived free and prosperous lives here than in any other nation. We have acquired unprecedented wealth and power because of our governing principles, and because our government defended those principles.