McCain heads home, will miss tax bill vote
Ailing senator willing to return to D.C. if his vote is needed to pass overhaul
PHOENIX – Sen. John McCain headed home to Arizona on Sunday but is willing to return to Washington if Senate Republicans need his vote this week on a sweeping tax code overhaul, President Trump said.
CBS News was first to report Sunday that McCain, 81, who has a deadly form of brain cancer, was going home to celebrate Christmas with his family and would miss the tax vote. He had been hospitalized since Wednesday at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Bethesda, Md., for what his Senate office described as “normal side effects of his ongoing cancer therapy.”
Senate Republicans, who control the chamber with a narrow 52member majority plus Vice President Pence as tiebreaker, appear to have enough votes to pass the package without McCain.
Trump was in touch with Cindy McCain, the senator’s wife, and said the McCains left for Arizona.
“They’ve headed back,” Trump said Sunday after returning to the White House from Camp David. “But I understand he’ll come if we ever needed his vote, which hopefully we won’t. But the word is John will come back if we need his vote. It’s too bad. He’s going through a very tough time, there’s no question about it. But he will come back if we need his vote.”
As of 6:30 p.m. ET Sunday, McCain’s Senate office had not made any official statement on the latest developments in his battle with glioblastoma, the aggressive brain cancer that was diagnosed in July.
His daughter, television commentator Meghan McCain, tweeted Sunday afternoon that her father will be in Arizona for Christmas. “Thank you to everyone for their kind words. My father is doing well and we are all looking forward to spending Christmas together in Arizona,” she posted on Twitter, along with an encouragement for people to donate to cancer research.
Ben Domenech, the senator’s sonin-law and Meghan McCain’s husband, said Sunday on CBS’ Face the
Nation that John McCain was “in good spirits.”
“I’m happy to say that he’s doing well. The truth is that as anyone knows whose family has battled cancer or any significant disease that oftentimes, there are side effects of treatment that you have,” he said. “The senator has been through a round of chemo, and he was hospitalized this week at Walter Reed.”
McCain’s chemotherapy and radiation treatment over the past several months has taken a physical toll: He has been in a wheelchair and wore a bulky medical boot after he tore his Achilles tendon.
McCain, the 2008 Republican presidential nominee, said his doctors gave him “a very poor prognosis.”
The House of Representatives is likely to vote on the final version of the tax legislation Tuesday. Soon after, the Senate is likely to take up the measure.
McCain supported an earlier Senatepassed tax bill before House and Senate negotiators reached an agreement on reconciling the differences in their competing versions.
McCain, who is in his sixth term as one of Arizona’s senators, had surgery in July to remove a blood clot from above his left eye. Doctors diagnosed McCain with having a tumor called glioblastoma, which is the most aggressive form of brain cancer.