A GOP lawmaker who did not manage to win a congressional seat in last week’s midterms published an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, saying the GOP wouldn’t have lost its majority in the House but for the late Arizona Senator John McCain.
Rep. for Minnesota Jason Lewis, who lost his re-election bid to a Democrat, claimed that McCain’s vote last year to kill a repeal of the Affordable Care Act "prompted a 'green wave' of liberal special-interest money, which was used to propagate false claims that the House plan 'gutted coverage for people with pre-existing conditions'." According to him, it was the most “potent” line of Democrats’ attacks throughout the midterms, with the rhetoric broadly upheld by "blue" supporters.
Last year, by casting the decisive vote in the Senate, Republican McCain decisively blocked his fellow party members’ bill championing the brand new American Health Care Act, which could have reversed part of the so-called Obamacare, the Affordable Care Act.
"House leadership had done an admirable job herding cats…. Then McCain’s inscrutable vote against the Senate’s 'skinny repeal' killed the reform effort," Lewis wrote.
The op-ed coincided with the Veterans Day observed also on November 11, along with the WWI Armistice Day. McCain notably held the status of a prisoner of war after he was captured in Vietnam in 1967 and thereafter spent five years in captivity.
Twitter seems divided over the comments, mostly ignoring the timing of them. One upheld the rhetoric, saying that John McCain cared about something else besides having a decent health insurance system, while another stated that McCain was one of the three pillars of the party at large, noting that the article is “horrible.”
The daughter of the recently deceased senator, anchor-woman Meghan McCain, also evaluated the op-ed as “abhorrent,” expressing her utmost fury.
There were those who opted for suggestions as to why Republican Jason Lewis, the accuser, had been outright defeated in the election, with some picking up on his branding of sexual assault survivors as “sluts.” One Twitterian even branded him a "Trumpy parrot."
Another came up with a sober, more rational approach, saying Lewis skipped talking about what a staggering percentage of Americans would be left without healthcare in the next few years, were it not for McCain’s effort:
“What's missing in this Jason Lewis op/ex? What CBO said about the U.S. House health bill he voted for — 24 million fewer Americans with health insurance by the middle of the next decade,” the user wrote.
Some even openly called for a public apology “for this trash,” with others openly poking fun at “clueless Lewis.”