McCain Once Almost Left the GOP. What About Now?

In the long, tumultuous political career of Senator John McCain, it would have been remembered as a turning point. It was only rumored at the time. But the Arizona senator nearly bolted from the Republican Party in 2001.

In secret negotiations with then-Senate Democratic leader Tom Daschle, McCain plotted how he would depart the GOP. He was furious over the way the party establishment had treated him in the 2000 race for the Republican presidential nomination against the eventually victorious George W. Bush. And within weeks of Bush’s swearing-in as president in 2001, McCain told Daschle that he was looking for a way out of the GOP, probably by declaring himself an independent—a move that would have thrown control of the otherwise 50-50 Senate to the Democrats. The negotiations got far enough, Daschle later told me, that the two men discussed the logistics of the news conference at which McCain would make the announcement. “We came very close,” Daschle said.

All these years later, amid the chaos of Donald Trump’s presidency and with McCain casting his historic vote last week to defy the White House and derail a fevered Republican effort to undo Obamacare, Daschle and other Democratic strategists and lawmakers are questioning whether the party should mount a new campaign to lure McCain and other wavering Republican senators away from the GOP.

Other obvious targets for the campaign, they said, would be the two women Republican senators who stymied the GOP’s repeal efforts last week: Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska.

“After what we’ve seen on health care, and on so many other issues, it is important for us to reach out to Republicans right now to let them know how welcome they would be to join us,” said Daschle, who left Congress in 2005 and now runs his own political advisory firm. “I’m sure some of those conversations may already be well underway.”

Republicans currently hold 52 Senate seats. Two or three defections would swing the balance of power in the Senate to the Democrats—a political earthquake that would give Democrats control of the Senate confirmation process for Executive Branch and Supreme Court nominees, as well as the ability to launch more aggressive investigations of President Trump and his administration, including of possible collusion between Russia and his 2016 presidential campaign. It would also make Republican priorities from Obamacare repeal to tax reform even less likely.


archive.is/fduFl

The last Senate defection occurred in 2009, when Senator Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania left the Republican Party to become a Democrat, which gave the Democrats the all-important 60 votes needed to break Senate filibusters. Daschle was his party’s chief negotiator in the 2001 defection of Senator James Jeffords of Vermont, who left the GOP after 26 years in Congress to declare himself an independent who caucused with the Democrats; the move gave Senate control to the Democrats in what had been a 50-50 Senate.

Daschle marveled Friday as he watched McCain, who has always relished his reputation as a political maverick, literally turn his thumb down and cast his dramatic vote on the Senate floor to kill a Republican bill to overhaul – and likely, undermine – President Obama’s Affordable Care Act.

“He’s my hero,” Daschle said of McCain. “I really mean that. He’s my hero. That’s exactly what somebody needed to do. It was a courageous act.”

Now, Daschle wonders, with McCain so obviously at odds with the Senate Republican leadership and with a Republican president who has belittled his heroic war record, and facing a dire prognosis of especially aggressive form of brain cancer, would he be willing to cross the aisle, as he came close to doing 16 years ago?

“I think it’s unlikely he’d do it now, but John is an independent thinker,” Daschle said. In 2001, he said, McCain backed away from the idea of leaving the GOP only after Jeffords defected instead. He remembered McCain saying at the time: “Look, somebody else has given you the majority – you don’t need me anymore.”

Former Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, who succeeded Daschle as Democratic leader, said in an interview Friday that he had been delighted at McCain’s vote last week to block the Republican effort to derail Obamacare. It was, he said, a characteristic act of independence for his former colleague. “He’s my kind of guy,” Reid said.

“You bet I was happy,” he said. But thinking it through afterwards, “I wasn’t surprised.” McCain’s vote last week, Reid said, was “something that people will always remember– it will be in the history books.”

Reid, who worked with Daschle in luring Jeffords away from the Republicans in 2001, would not speculate on whether McCain might now be tempted away from the GOP. The current Democratic Senate leadership, led by Senator Charles Schumer of New York, “doesn’t need Harry Reid to tell them what to do,” he said. (A spokesman for Schumer said Saturday the senator had no comment on any possible campaign to recruit Republicans away from the GOP. Spokesmen for McCain did not immediately reply to requests for comment this weekend.)

But a sitting Democratic senator, speaking on condition of anonymity for fear of upsetting Schumer on such a sensitive issue, said, “I’m just certain Chuck is already thinking about this – reaching out to McCain and Collins and Murkowski and others and asking if they really want to stand with the GOP. Do they really want to call themselves Republicans at a time when a Republican President and the party’s leaders in Congress are doing such damage to the party – and to the country?”

Senators Collins and Murkowski have openly criticized President Trump in the past. And both have recently faced the president’s wrath. In the final hours before the health-care vote last week, Murkowski’s staff has revealed, she received a threatening call from Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke, warning that if she voted against the health-care bill, the Trump administration would punish her resource-rich state by switching policies on energy exploration and road construction.

“If I were Chuck Schumer, I’d be talking to McCain, Collins, Murkowski—and everybody else,” said Norman Ornstein of the American Enterprise Institute, the respected congressional historian and analyst. “And I would make not just a modest effort. I would make a deep effort to try to find some common ground” to convince Republicans to cross the aisle.

Ornstein thought it was telling that, in the final minutes before the historic health-care vote in the early hours of Friday morning, McCain was seen chatting happily on the Senate floor with Schumer and other Democrats he clearly considers friends – not with most of the Republican leaders he was about to outrage.

The Democrats, he said, can offer many incentives for Republicans to make the switch, including possible committee chairmanships in a Democratic-controlled Senate and other leadership positions. When Jeffords defected in 2001, for example, he was given chairmanship of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, an especially powerful perch for Jeffords in his home state of Vermont. (McCain now chairs the Senate Armed Services Committee, Collins chairs the Senate Aging Committee, and Murkowski chairs the Energy and Natural Resources Committee.)

Still, Ornstein said, he was not optimistic that McCain or other Republicans would make the switch – at least not imminently. “One thing I’ve seen with these Republicans is that the tribal identity runs deep,” he said. “It’s like a religion, and I think that’s more true of Republicans than Democrats.”

What could change the equation, he said, would be a campaign by Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell or Trump to punish or publicly humiliate the three rebel senators for their health-care votes last week. “I can imagine that if McConnell tries to punish McCain, or if Trump really starts to go after him, there’s always a chance that McCain could say ‘screw you’ and bolt.”

Why the fuck are you posting this?

You don't want McCain to leave?

Truly the best timeline.

Leave what? The republican party? But he's not a republican in the first place. He's a kosher democrat along with Collins and Murkowski.

How about he leave his mortal coil?
Hope he suffers with the brain cancer he has.

video related

JUST FUCKING DIE ALREADY YOU PIT BULL FACED STOOGE

Do it. Meme it. Then spread the story that the tumor told him to join their dying party. It would be akin to those parasites that hijack insects to do things that ensure the proliferation of said parasites.

I think McCain joining the Democrats would be the breath of fresh that their party needs. I mean what better way for the Democrats to send a strong message to middle America that they understand their plight and will work hard to implement that better deal?

Ya but it would tip off the normies who think he's a good old boy war hero republican.

They will see that he just fucked them over with Obama care & wants transgenders in the military just to fuck over trump.

He doesn't have cancer. He just pulled a fainting Clinton to get out of a hearing.

hell they delayed the vote on health care to have McCain vote, who then turned around and voted for keeping obama care in place..

a jewish brain implant maybe?

they have brain chips already

He's a good enough goy to never need anything like that. If anything, his brain is the hotbed where the breed the Kike bacteria.

ENCOURAGE THIS

ENCOURAGE THIS

ENCOURAGE THIS

This is exactly what needs to happen. This is Trump's night of the long knives. Think about it this way. Republicans are divided into three groups: Neo-cons, Libertarians, and the actual Rightwing. The neo-cons are a cancer to us. They're too rightwing to be democrats, but leftwing enough to undermine republicans at every turn. Naturally different subgroups will battle for dominance, but to the politician, flight is better than fight.

Neo-cons defecting hurts democrats the most. It forcibly drags them further to the right. But it also means a capitulation within the republican party, so they will be replaced by more far-right people. Suddenly we're in a position where the democrats have a bunch of people proven to not vote exactly as their party tells them to, and also have some sympathies to the republican party. There may be concerns that these people will get re-elected and cost republicans seats, I get that. But they aren't voting with us anyways, so it's not even a true loss.

There are two other factors to consider: Primaries and Incumbency.

The primary is where you want to fight to oust people you don't like from your party. Normally the person who has the most common ground with the average party member wins. But because everyone in a primary is either a republican or democrat, most politicians save money during primaries in preparation for the general election. It's also mostly ignored by the media. Incumbents, with their free-publicity via already holding the office, are the most likely to win a primary. So if a neo-con defects to the democratic party, he will most likely win the primary. Then Republicans are in a position where it's /their guy/ vs a guy who has some right-wing inclination.

Now if the democrats wanted him out. They would have to lose the general election, and then regain that seat in the next election. With a Senate seat this process would take a whopping 12 years.

If a politician in your area is a neo-con or never-trumper write to him, and say you'd still support him if he joined the democrats. This kind of spiral could bring about an American reich.

There's one problem with this that I feel must be noted. Shifting the cultural swing to the republicans (even amongst the democratic party) would make republicans seem like the establishment again. By the time democrats have an opportunity to regain those senate seats in 12 years, the pendulum may swing back towards them. My objection to this is that we're supporting Trump, not republicans. National Socialism is just as threatened by a corrupt republican party as it is by the anti-white democratic party. It is certainly a risk, but at the same time one must ask himself "What is the alternative?" If we fail to make meaningful nationalist changes under Trump, then that signals that there is no conceivable way to take power through the democratic system. If we get to the point where democrats become the hegemon again, then we've already failed, and started trying a new tactic.

t. political science student

Do you think that term limits would force the Republican party more & more to right?

I think that Term Limits would cause the Democrats to fuel our movement because as politicians become unable to serve, the left would become more radical because of new guys,which would make normie republicans more angry.

Yeah, the only Democrats left that anyone actually likes are the old guard. If they left it would seriously be nothing but mystery meat.

All this political theater. The ACA act is just a pretense for the gov't seizing control of people's medical care, which by extension, is them seizing control of society itself. Same reason RINO Supreme court justice/shameless whore Roberts showed just what a flexible little slut he is– practically helping the bill through by saying it's a tax when the original legislation explicity stated it wasn't one– and allowing it through. And now this.

McCuck will be dead soon and Arizonans will have an opportunity to elect a Trump loyalist to the Senate.

Can the Republican Party kick him out for being an insufferable Democrat?

Kick out 99% of democrats and republicans, save Rand and Jim Webb

I don't think it would have a major effect, but there might be a noteworthy effect. We pretty much have to accept that most seats are incontestable via simple demographics. Only certain seats can realistically be fought for and won. It would certainly be nice to get rid of the democrats like Feinstein, Schumer, and Sanders. It would also help open up seats like, say, Bill Nelson's in Florida. If at the moment we kicked out everyone who's been in office for more than 2 terms, it would be a net gain for republicans.

My big concern is that it might drive neocons from the house to run for governor and the senate. This is a very plausible outcome, and with their support from (((private interests))) they're favored to win the primaries. Term limits may end up undercutting efforts to purge the party, as new actors will be brought forth from underneath the stage. If this happens and a bunch of traitors defect, then neo-cons will be able to undercut Trump, and democrats will be able to regain their cultural hegemony in a decade. It may be shooting ourselves in the foot. My view may be pessimistic, but it's an objective fact that the right-wing is severely lacking in societal institutions; not even Fox news supported Trump.

Though your view about it fueling the democrats into radicalism is interesting. Technically speaking if the democrats become radicals it wouldn't have the effect of alienating others. Since if the democrats get radical, the republicans will too (republicans are actually capable of reacting to situations, unlike democrats who just double down) So technically our system by nature will become heavily polarized, and this gives us a very good shot at taking power at some point within the next 50 or so years. And if the situation is polarized now, it encourages rightwingers over neo-cons in primaries; since, as I explained in my earlier post, the person with the most universally accepted ideas usually wins. And neo-cons are centrists by definition, so they won't have the most common beliefs, and they will no longer have incumbency advantages.

I'd advise against term-limits, for now. But if it becomes clear that Trump won't make any serious changes, it would be a last hurrah. It'd give us a better chance in our future battles.

That Florida pic is missing a 20-year-old pregnant beaner with three kids pushing a stroller and a nigger in a wife beater and durag with a 14-year-old White girl in booty shorts.

That scooter fatty is actually Canadian.

If he was going to fake a serious disease I believe he would pick one that doesn't have a guaranteed chance to kill someone of his age in 6 to 8 months. What the hell would he do in 5 years when he's still around and symptomless?
The only reason he would pretend that he has glioblastoma is if he actually had some other equally lethal disease like kuru from all the child brains he been consuming, and he needed a respectable illness to die from.