Would McCain have voted to convict?
Impeachment poses tantalizing question
When the U.S. Senate convenes in January, Arizona’s two new senators will become jurors in the historic impeachment trial of President Donald Trump.
There’s some mystery about how Democratic Sen. Kyrsten Sinema will view the case; Republican Sen. Martha McSally made plain more than a week ago that she’s not inclined to convict Trump.
But perhaps just as tantalizing is a question that will go unanswered for eternity: How would the late Sen. John McCain have voted?
It’s the kind of plotline ready-made for a political cliffhanger.
McCain, a six-term Arizona Republican, was a man whose worldview was forged in the Cold War and whose efforts to promote democracy in Ukraine was a central concern of his final book.
His feud with Trump was so intense that it continued even after McCain’s death in August 2018.
The impeachment case revolves around Trump’s interest in seeing an investigation of former Vice President Joe Biden, a friend of McCain who spoke at his Phoenix funeral.
For good measure, remember that McCain voted to convict President Bill Clinton in his 1999 impeachment trial for perjury and obstruction of justice. And the self-styled maverick had an unpredictable streak that could keep even his closest friends guessing.
Would McCain eagerly convict Trump? Or give the Democratic-only impeachment case the thumbs-down?
“I think he would be very perturbed,” said retired Senate historian Donald Ritchie.
“I think he would just be flabbergasted over the Ukraine story. I don’t think he would have necessarily admired the House moving ahead to impeach. On the other hand, he would have expected the Senate to hold a responsible and dignified trial, the way they did for Clinton.”
Larry Sabato, the political scientist who directs the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics, said McCain’s legendary unpredictability means there can be no certainty how he would view the current case.
“You would think on a personal basis he would have relished being one of the Republicans who voted to oust Trump. But I don’t know that he would have approached it that way,” Sabato said.
“He might have said, ‘Everybody knows my view of Donald Trump, and it hasn’t changed. But that’s a separate question from impeachment. What he did was wrong, but it doesn’t rise to the level of impeachment.’ I could see him saying that. I just don’t know which he would have said.”
Bruce Oppenheimer, a political science professor at Vanderbilt University who researches the congressional process, said McCain would probably at least be willing to listen to the case with an open mind, and would not be pleased to see Republicans impugning civil servants and military figures, such as Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, one of the impeachment inquiry witnesses.
“John McCain was a great institutionalist,” said Raymond Smock, a former historian for the House of Representatives. “His independence was one of his great strengths. That didn’t mean he wasn’t voting Republican most of the time. You couldn’t take his vote for granted.”
Those who knew McCain well are less than eager to speculate on what he might have done.
A spokesman for former Sen. Joe Lieberman, I-Conn., a close McCain friend whom he considered as his 2008 vice presidential running mate, was unavailable. Former Sen. Jon Kyl, R-Ariz., who served with McCain in the Senate for 18 years, said he didn’t think anyone should speculate on such matters.
Still in the center of the storm
McCain has been gone for more than a year, but in some ways he never seems far from the news of the day.
On the night he was impeached, Trump attacked Rep. Debbie Dingell, DMich., who had voted with others in her party against the president.
Trump pointed out that he had given her husband, the late Rep. John Dingell, D-Mich., “A-plus treatment” for his funeral, and implied John Dingell could be in hell.
It was reminiscent of Trump’s repeated broadsides against McCain even after his death. Cindy McCain posted her sympathy for Debbie Dingell on Twitter, writing simply, “I’m terribly sorry. Please know I am thinking about you.”
There are other McCain ties to the current impeachment.
One of the witnesses in the House impeachment inquiry was Kurt Volker, the now-former executive director of Arizona State University’s McCain Institute for International Leadership.
In 1997 and 1998, Volker was a State Department legislative fellow in the Senate, where he worked on foreign policy for McCain.
One of Trump’s most ardent defenders is Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., who long seemed inseparable from McCain. Graham, who was one of the House managers during the Clinton impeachment trial, told CNN he wants a swift acquittal for Trump.
“This thing will come to the Senate, and it will die quickly, and I will do everything I can to make it die quickly,” he told CNN recently.
McCain probably would not be impressed, the historians say.
“He probably would have taken Lindsey Graham to the woodshed,” Oppenheimer said.
“Lindsey Graham seems to have lost his mind since John McCain passed,” Smock said. “There’s lots of evidence that Sen. McCain was a moderating influence on Graham.”
“I’ll tell you one thing that might have been different maybe is Lindsey Graham would not have been out there leading the charge for Donald Trump,” Sabato said. “Or if he had done so, McCain would have cut him off cold.”
Zigging while others zagged
McCain’s vote history and behavior offer evidence for both sides to lay claim to his support.
In May 2001, a year after losing a bitter presidential primary battle to George W. Bush, McCain voted against the new president’s top domestic priority at the time: tax cuts.
“I cannot in good conscience support a tax cut in which so many of the benefits go to the most fortunate among us, at the expense of middle-class Americans who most need tax relief,” McCain said in 2001.
He also voted against Bush’s 2003 tax cuts, saying the cost of the new war in Iraq was unknown.
By 2006, McCain voted to extend the tax cuts he once opposed.
McCain was one half of the bipartisan effort to pass comprehensive immigration reforms, which died on Capitol Hill at the hands of Republicans who saw it as too accommodating.
In 2010, when he faced a GOP primary challenge from former Rep. J.D. Hayworth, a hawk on border-security issues, McCain famously strolled the Nogales border in a campaign commercial and groused that the nation needed to “complete the danged fence.”
In 2017, McCain flipped the script once again with his most legendary vote.
Days after disclosing his deadly brain-cancer diagnosis, McCain returned to Washington to take part in the Senate’s nail-biting debate on repealing the Affordable Care Act.
McCain first allowed the debate to proceed after urging his colleagues to set aside their partisan anger. Then, two days later, he cast the decisive vote on the GOP plan to scrap former President Barack Obama’s signature legislative victory.
With a dramatic thumbs-down, McCain had preserved the legacy of the man who kept him out of the White House and thwarted the top priority of the man who had personally attacked McCain’s revered status as a prisoner of war.
“He was willing to break with partisan lines when something offended his principles,” Oppenheimer said, noting that McCain was especially concerned with foreign policy and perennially distrustful of Russia.
What McCain said in 1999
What was most significant about McCain’s vote to convict Clinton in 1999?
Was he upholding the standards he expected of the presidency, or remaining in good standing with Republicans ahead of his own presidential run?
McCain outlined his reason to convict in words that might — or might not — apply today.
“I deeply regret that this day has come to pass,” McCain said in a statement put in the Senate record in 1999.
“I bear no animosity for the president. I take no partisan satisfaction from this matter. I don’t lightly dismiss the public’s clear opposition to conviction. And I am genuinely concerned that the institution of the presidency not be harmed, either by the president’s conduct, or by Congress’ reaction to his conduct.
“Indeed, I take no satisfaction at all from this vote, with one exception — and an important exception it is — that by voting to convict I have been spared reproach by my conscience for shirking my duty.”
The words, like McCain’s votes, are like a puzzle left hopelessly unclear by missing pieces.
However McCain might have come down on the issue, it would have been based on a different calculus than what happens in the Senate today, Sabato said.
“John McCain was fearless, and anybody who says otherwise is denying his whole life story,” Sabato said. “I look at the Senate and I don’t see a fearless person in there. The Republicans are deathly afraid that Trump will just tweet about them.”