A defeated Republican congressman chose Veterans Day to attack the late Sen. John McCain, a war hero, for creating the blue wave that crashed into the House last week.
Jason Lewis, a Minnesota congressman who was unseated last Tuesday by Democrat Angie Craig, claimed in an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal that McCain’s thumbs-down vote against a so-called skinny repeal of the Affordable Care Act “prompted a ‘green wave’ of liberal special-interest money” that he said allowed Democrats to hammer Republicans on the issue of pre-existing conditions.
Repeal-and-replace efforts began in 2017 in the House, which passed the American Health Care Act as replacement legislation for Obamacare. But amid tense negotiations, Republicans in the Senate instead put to a vote what they referred to as a “skinny” Obamacare repeal, which would have gutted controversial provisions of Obamacare like the individual mandate while maintaining other aspects of the law. McCain, along with Sens. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) and Susan Collins (R-Maine), voted against the measure, sinking it.
Lewis wrote in his op-ed that the failed Senate vote allowed Democrats to campaign against Republicans with the claim that the GOP wanted to remove protections for those with pre-existing conditions, a keystone of many Democratic campaigns leading up to the midterms.
The freshman congressman argued that the House bill would have “[alleviated] the pre-existing condition problem,” rather than getting rid of the protections altogether as he accused Democrats of falsely claiming. PolitFact has rated claims that the House bill wouldn’t eliminate protections for pre-existing conditions as “mostly false.”
Although McCain was one of three GOP lawmakers to vote against the “skinny” repeal, Lewis singled out McCain for his “no” vote — which came after he criticized Republicans for trying to push a repeal bill through and called for the return of regular order — as an unnecessary attempt to slight President Donald Trump.
“The late Arizona senator’s grievance with all things Trump was well known, but this obsession on the part of ‘Never Trump’ Republicans has to end,” Lewis wrote. “Disapprove of the president’s style if you like, but don’t sacrifice sound policy to pettiness.”
McCain, a naval aviator who climbed from depths of despair as a prisoner of war in Vietnam to pinnacles of power as a Republican congressman and senator from Arizona and a two-time contender for the presidency, died earlier this year at his home in Arizona.
On Twitter, McCain’s daughter, Meghan McCain, called Lewis’s comments “abhorrent.”
This is abhorrent. https://t.co/dPpjYcwk81
— Meghan McCain (@MeghanMcCain) November 12, 2018