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McCain hasn’t missed ‘any crucial votes,’ except all the crucial votes

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I’ve mentioned before that I’m willing to cut senators, from both parties, quite a bit of slack for missing votes during their presidential campaign. It’s tough to hold down a day job while running for president.

But if a sitting senator is going to miss a lot of time while out on the campaign trail, he or she should be careful to avoid two things: 1) complain about others not spending enough time on Capitol Hill; and 2) pretend he/she hasn’t missed a lot of votes.

Accordingly, I don’t much care that John McCain is blowing off his Senate duties; I do care that he’s being so dumb about it.

Last week, McCain, who hasn’t cast a vote in four months and who has a worse attendance record than Sen. Tim Johnson (D-S.D.), who took months off to recover from a brain hemorrhage, complained that lawmakers shouldn’t take an August recess.

This week, he insisted he hasn’t missed key votes.

“I have a long record of that support of alternate energy,” McCain said, adding, “I’ve always been for all of those and I have not missed any crucial vote.”

I guess it depends on the meaning of the word “crucial.”

Satyam set the record straight.

In July alone, he missed every single energy vote brought to the floor. This session, McCain has skipped votes supporting renewable energy tax credits four times, all of which were filibustered. In June, for example, McCain missed a vote on the landmark Lieberman-Warner climate change legislation.

McCain has also been the “crucial” absent vote on key legislation. In December, legislation stripping tax break giveaways to Big Oil and investing in cleaner sources failed by one vote, 59-40 (Vote #425); McCain missed that vote to campaign. In February, McCain skipped a vote on extending tax credits to renewables, which also failed by one vote (Vote #8). Both times, McCain was the only senator absent.

Thomas Friedman devoted an entire column to the subject this week. (Indeed, McCain’s response was to a question regarding Friedman’s piece.)

It was only five days earlier, on July 30, that the Senate was voting for the eighth time in the past year on a broad, vitally important bill — S. 3335 — that would have extended the investment tax credits for installing solar energy and the production tax credits for building wind turbines and other energy-efficiency systems.

Both the wind and solar industries depend on these credits — which expire in December — to scale their businesses and become competitive with coal, oil and natural gas. Unlike offshore drilling, these credits could have an immediate impact on America’s energy profile.

Senator McCain did not show up for the crucial vote on July 30

, and the renewable energy bill was defeated for the eighth time. In fact, John McCain has a perfect record on this renewable energy legislation. He has missed all eight votes over the last year — which effectively counts as a no vote each time. Once, he was even in the Senate and wouldn’t leave his office to vote.

Again, if McCain wants to forgo his Senate duties, I’m inclined to understand. It’s much harder, though, to accept his blatant dishonesty about it.

Comments

  • zhak

    says:

    Why is this surprising? It’s SOP for the modern-day Republican to lie blatantly because he knows that more often than not, he’ll be given a free pass. The media is not just a propaganda arm for the Republican party, they are also lazy.

    All the Republicans care about it getting that soundbyte out there that an ill-informed & stupid population will half-listen to while waiting for the sports to come on.

  • joey

    says:

    All mouth no action. McCain can lie at will without fear of recrimination. “I think we should all ride air ponies”…applause…American auto makers are in trouble because they refused to make energy alternative vehicles, refused to change direction from oil dependence and emission standards…enabled every step of the way by McCain who now wants to give them all our tax dollars and tax breaks so we, and not they, are the losers.

  • OkieFromMuskogee

    says:

    Republicans “create their own reality.”

    Does anyone have a link to the McCain response to the Friedman piece?

  • beep52

    says:

    It’s hard to remember sometime that this guy is really running for the highest office in the land. This is the guy who claims to be the most qualified candidate, the the straight-talker, the guy you can trust.

    But McCain isn’t creating some kind of new reality with his constant lies, misrepresentations, inappropriate jokes and outright stupidity, this guy is NUTS.

  • N.Wells

    says:

    I don’t think McInane is pandering to voters so much as he prefers deep self-delusion. He simply and unfailingly gives the answer that he thinks at the moment ought to be true, reality notwithstanding and irrespective of what he has said in the past. Missing votes sounds bad, ergo he hasn’t missed any. In the context of environmentalism and energy conservation, wind energy sounds good, so he’ll say that he’s fully for it and always has been. In the context of federal spending and federal programs vs private ones, he thinks it sounds bad, so he’ll claim that he’s fully against it, and always has been.

  • SF

    says:

    We may be missing the point here: this campaign and Republicans in general REWRITE history when it’s inconvenient. Revision can take place anytime, anywhere — a decade after the fact, or six months, or at the end of the same sentence. For them, facts are plastic, useful not for clarification but for potential remolding. The rights’ political operatives really do think, as a Bush henchperson said once, that they can make reality be what they say it is. This may reflect a profound contempt for voters; it may be that they are so deep in the game that it’s all a virtual reality to them of ads and image and they are, thus, to some degree deranged. The problem for Democrats is to evade (and it isn’t easy) their frame and then the awkwardness of debunking it: facts always take longer than lies. Everyday in every way this guy McC proves he is not a “straight talker”; we — all of us — must repeatedly call him out as a faithless liar, as dangerous, nasty, vicious, irresponsible, as a hot-dogger and personal fraud. Laughing at him helps too, and helps strip the aura of “gravitas” from this mendacious phony.

  • Steve in Sacto

    says:

    Now that’s some Straight Talk my friends!

    (Broken record alert) If the Obama campaign would just go directly after and take down McCain’s ‘Straight Talk’ foundation, by name, this election would be over. It’s not like McCain doesn’t provide more ammo to do this every week…

  • Blaidd Drwg

    says:

    The Dem advertising blitz needs to start the day after the convention in Denver, and continue all through the rest of the campaign. BHO needs to illustrate, point by point every lie, every flip-flop, every inconsistency, and every policy McSame has that echos GWB. That alone will provide more ammunition than he could possibly use in just 8 weeks. If he also offers his own plan in the same ad, with examples, and specifics, McC should be dead in the water by Oct 1.