John McCain's Long Good-Bye... Honestly, I Hope It's Much Longer

Last week, a White House ethics lawyer, James Schultz-- a 45 year old hardcore right-wing Republican-- resigned to return to private practice (Cozen O'Connor) in Philadelphia. He's been an especially vile Trump apologist who is widely blamed for the lax attitude on ethics inside the Trump Regime. A couple of days later, over the weekend, former Romney political strategist Stuart Stevens tweeted "We’ve gone from George Bush running on restoring honor & dignity to the WH to a WH trying to rationalize voting for an accursed child molester who doesn’t support Constitution. If a party doesn’t stand for anything but an election, what does it stand for?" Aside from Romney, Stevens has worked for a host of top Republican officials from President George Bush to Gov. Haley Barbour (R-MS), Gov. Tom Ridge (R-PA), Gov. Bill Weld (R-MA), Gov. Paul Cellucci (R-MA), Gov. Bob Riley (R-AL) to Senator Thad Cochran (R-MS), Senator Dick Lugar (R-IN), Senator Mel Martinez (R-FL), Senator Chuck Grassley (R-IA), Senator Roger Wicker (R-MS), Senator Jon Kyl (R-AZ), and Senator John McCain (R-AZ).

Sunday, Esquire published an extensive interview with McCain by David Usborne. "In July," wrote Usborne, "just eleven days after surgeons in Phoenix removed the cancer, he returned to Capitol Hill. As he walked onto a full Senate floor, his colleagues honored him with a standing ovation. He received hugs from leaders of both parties. Then he stood up and excoriated them all, Republicans and Democrats alike, for abandoning the “regular order” of debate. The Senate, he warned, was in danger of failing the country if it didn’t remember the importance of bipartisanship and compromise. It was arguably the most electrifying speech of his career, but McCain was just getting started. Three days later, past midnight one early Friday morning, he sabotaged the Republicans’ increasingly desperate quest to gut Obamacare. A bill dubbed the Skinny Repeal for its scarce details was set to pass as long as McCain cast a vote in favor. Instead, he entered the chamber, jabbed a thumbs-down, and killed the thing dead. Two months later, McCain thwarted his party again. In September, Lindsey Graham, along with Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, hatched another bill to overturn the 2010 health-care law. McCain’s opposition once again doomed the bill... Whatever fantasies are projected on him, after all, he is a conservative Republican in the Reaganite mold, a defense hawk who supported the Iraq War long after it became unpopular. A veteran of the military and of the Senate, he feels an enduring loyalty to his country and also to his party. When we met for the first time in May, at his office in the Russell Building in D. C., McCain told me that he felt 'totally compelled to do everything I can to help' Trump, with one exception: 'I’m not going to change what I believe is best for America.' As a matter of principle, this was fair enough, if a bit vague. But what, I asked him, did it mean in practice? In the early months of Trump’s term, it appeared that the greatest test was going to be Robert Mueller’s investigation into potential collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia last year. At the height of Watergate, in 1974, Goldwater had marched up to the White House and told Richard Nixon it was time to go. Would it fall to McCain to do the same? Or would his role be more modest, a check against the president’s most dangerous whims?"

“He can throw some elbows,” recalled John Weaver, a veteran Republican consultant who worked on both of McCain’s presidential campaigns. “I’ve received a number of calls from him over the years: ‘John, can you clean up the mess in aisle five?’ The calls would start, ‘Johnny, hey Johnny, you may receive a call from the Speaker’s office.’ I’d say, ‘And why is that?’ ‘Well, I may’ve had some short words with him.’ And I’d say, ‘Well, what does that mean?’ ‘Well, I think I told him to go fuck himself.’ ” On another occasion, Weaver said, McCain lost it with Senator John Cornyn of Texas.

“Cornyn had said something to McCain, and I think McCain called him a motherfucker.”

McCain’s temper is surely one reason he has often cut a lonely figure on the Hill. But Weaver has a different take on it. “I don’t think it’s because of the outbursts. I think it’s because of his principles,” he said. “If you have no principles, which more and more members of the Senate don’t, you look askance at someone who does.” Weaver went on: “He is marooned. And he has a sense of honor. Even the way he treats Donald Trump is very honorable, given what I believe his true feelings are, because of the military background he comes from.”

...I asked him about another reversal, from earlier this year. In April, Mitch McConnell had announced his intention to change the rules of the Senate so that Neil Gorsuch, Trump’s first Supreme Court nominee, could avoid a Democratic filibuster. McCain blasted the Senate leader for suggesting that the so-called “nuclear option” would return the chamber to normalcy. “Idiot, whoever says that is a stupid idiot who has not been here and seen what I’ve been through,” he blurted to reporters. “They are stupid, and they’ve deceived their voters because they are so stupid.”

Yet just forty-eight hours later, McCain voted in favor of the rules change. What happened? “You don’t explain it,” McCain admitted. “It was obviously a lot of pressure and a lot of team spirit and all of that. You know.”

...As for Trump, McCain made news in October with comments that many interpreted, despite his protestations to the contrary, as barely veiled swipes at the president. In one speech, McCain criticized the “half-baked, spurious nationalism cooked up by people who would rather find scapegoats than solve problems.” In an interview, he said it was wrong that young men from “the highest income level” had been able to avoid the Vietnam draft by finding “a doctor that would say they had a bone spur,” a description that just happened to fit the president.

McCain also spoke openly on the subject of Trump at Dirty Habit. “I don’t agree with the way he’s conducting his presidency, obviously,” he told me. “He’s an individual that unfortunately is not anchored by a set of principles. I think he’s a person who takes advantage of situations. He was successful as a builder, an entrepreneur, and all that. But I don’t think he has the fundamental underpinnings of principles and beliefs.” Still and all, McCain said, loyalty to his party would continue to inform his relationship with the president. “I don’t think there was any doubt about his views toward me. But I’m a loyal Republican.”

The time McCain has left to complete his last mission in public life is possibly even more limited than some imagine. He says he is not ready to accept a newly developed glioblastoma treatment, a kind of helmet that sends electrical fields into the brain. “I’m just not going to wear it,” he said, in a tone that sounded almost indignant. “I don’t want to walk around looking like that. There’s worse things than dying, okay?”

He also told me that he does not plan to linger in the Senate if the disease progresses sufficiently that his faculties start to fail. “I have enough close friends. They would probably get together, six or seven people who have been with me the last thirty years, and say, ‘John, go on up to the cabin and enjoy the sunrises and the sunsets.’ And I promise you I would go, and I would never come out again.”

McCain has it all planned out. When the appointed day comes, he will travel to Prescott, Arizona, to the same courthouse steps where Barry Goldwater, his mentor and predecessor in the Senate, declared his candidacy for president in 1964. There he’ll say goodbye. He’ll be brief. “Thanks a lot. Thank you very much” will be the gist, he told me with his crooked grin. And then he’ll vanish from public life.

That will be a hard moment. “He has such a zest for life and camaraderie,” says McKinnon. “I have a theory. He was in isolation as a prisoner of war for years and was denied human contact. So ever since he was freed, he soaks up interaction with people like a sponge. He loves to talk. He loves to trade gossip. He loves to tell jokes. What he hates is silence and solitude.”

...[T]here was something to admire as well. A lesser man than McCain might have chosen to fade away after his loss to Obama in 2008, but that has never been the senator’s style. And the unexpected events of the past year-- his dreadful diagnosis and the election of Trump-- seem to have given him a new urgency. McCain has chosen a simple but daunting task for the time he has left, to turn the Senate back into the deliberative, incremental, old-fashioned, and somewhat dull institution he’s revered for thirty-one years. If there’s an irony here, it’s appropriate to the strange times in which we live: As his last act, the maverick makes a call for regular order.