Letter to the Editor: John McCain’s Call for Bipartisanship

Like many of you, I have been saddened by the passing of Senator John McCain. He has been a true hero for this country, not only because of the torture he endured during the Vietnam War, but also because of his stalwart voice in the Senate for decades.

The eulogies given for him will mention many things, but I will remember most his vote against his colleagues on the repeal of the Affordable Care Act (Obama Care). He voted “Nay” not because he was a supporter of the ACA, but because he detested two things about how the repeal bill was created, namely:  1) that it was written by the leadership of the Republican party, rather than going through “regular order” (meaning the process where a Senator writes a bill, it is assigned to a committee, public hearings are held, a debate ensues, a vote is taken and if the bill passes in committee it moves to the Senate as a whole for a vote), and 2) the repeal bill was not a bipartisan effort. In short, he wanted all the people to be represented in the bill, not just a partisan minority.

John McCain saw clearly that the greatest sickness in our democracy today is partisan division so great we cannot be civil to one another.  He knew like the greatest Republican ever, Abraham Lincoln, “A house divided cannot stand.” John loved this country so much, he was willing to endure the anger of his party in the ACA vote, and endure the personal, cowardly slander of the current President, because he believed the partisanship must stop and “regular order” must prevail if America is to continue to fulfill the Exceptionalism he believed was our promise to the world.

We must hear this man, whose voice has cried out seemingly alone in the wilderness, whose body and mind have been so broken for us, and whose vision of needed bipartisanship is so prescient for us to be again the “shining city on a hill” that President Reagan so eloquently opined.

We need to act now to follow John McCain’s call to return to civil discussion and regular order, and so heal this country. We can do so mostly be respecting each other’s opinion and try to realize that we are, as President Obama so poignantly exclaimed, “Not red states or blue states, but the United States of America.” Call your Senators and Representative and say you want them to follow John McCain’s call for bipartisanship. In the next elections, pick candidates that are moderate and recognize the importance of civil discourse and loyal opposition.  John McCain gave his life to this ideal; surely we who are still alive can carry his torch now for him.

Patrick Cerra

Egg Harbor, Wis.