The Daily Background

Gasp! John McCain has finally broken his string of no Senate votes cast for 5 straight weeks! It’s probably a good thing too, since his Republican colleagues were starting to get pissed at him.

So, what was more important than the Iraq bills, and all the other crucial legislation that the Senate has been voting on for the past two months that McCain didn’t bother to show up for because he was too busy campaigning for president? This:

It was an amendment to the immigration bill by Sen. Daniel Akaka (D-HI), “To exempt children of certain Filipino World War II veterans from the numerical limitations on immigrant visas.”

A McCain aide has told the local press, “Although he has missed a few votes, he works really hard to ensure that he has not missed any votes in which his vote would have been the determining one.” But here’s the thing: This amendment wasn’t controversial, and passed 87-9. This leads us to believe McCain simply had to show up for a vote in order to stop the talk about his absences.

Sorry, what? He couldn’t be bothered to show up to represent the constituents whose job it is to represent for five whole weeks on a slew of important issues, and now he shows up to cast a vote for a totally and completely safe bill that would have passed easily without him?

McCain has missed over half of the votes cast this year in the Senate. Note that other Senators running for President haven’t missed nearly as many votes (Obama has missed 6.4% of the votes this year, Clinton has missed 1.8%, Brownback has missed 30%, Biden 28%, and Dodd 19% according to the Washington Post votes database.

Filed under: Z-TDB Blog