美国国家公共电台 NPR Amid Cancer Treatment, McCain Releases Battle Cry For A Functional Congress

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Arizona Senator John McCain is undergoing treatment for a deadly form of brain cancer, but you'd never know it by watching him work. As the chairman of the Armed Services Committee, McCain is managing the Senate debate on the annual defense 1 bill. It sets the priorities for the Pentagon. McCain is also using the bill to make a point about how he believes the Senate should work. NPR's Susan Davis reports.

SUSAN DAVIS, BYLINE 2: The annual defense bill gives John McCain a chance to do two things he enjoys the most - boost the U.S. military and chastise 3 his fellow senators.

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JOHN MCCAIN: For too long, partisanship 4 and politics have triumphed over principle and policy. This legislation is an opportunity for us to reverse that trend and restore regular order in the United States Senate.

DAVIS: Regular order. McCain has made this his battle cry in recent months ever since he cast a decisive vote back in July that effectively derailed his party's effort to undo 5 the Affordable 6 Care Act. McCain said of that bill's many offenses 7 that it ran afoul of regular order in the Senate. The vote also came just days after his brain cancer diagnosis 8. Ever since, McCain has been hounding his colleagues to do better at legislating 9, so now that it's his bill on the floor it's been a week of McCain pounding the podium - literally 10 - with this message.

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MCCAIN: This is the way that the United States Senate should conduct business.

DAVIS: The way for McCain means moving bills through the committees and with buy-in from the Democratic minority. The result is a national defense bill that passed unanimously out of the Senate Armed Services Committee and incorporated 277 amendments 12 from committee members in both parties. Speaking to CNN earlier this week, McCain said that committee work summed up his regular-order philosophy this way.

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MCCAIN: And we fought, and we argued, and we're still mad at each other. But we came up with a bill that all of us could support.

DAVIS: McCain and his Democratic counterpart, Rhode Island Senator Jack 13 Reed, are on track to together incorporate over 100 more amendments into the bill when it comes up for a floor vote. That kind of bipartisan collaboration 14 leaves Democrats 15 like Reed sounding like this.

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JACK REED: I don't think any of this would have been done without the leadership of the chairman and his insistence 16 that we adhere not only to regular order but that we don't forget this is ultimately about the men and women who serve us overseas.

DAVIS: It hasn't all been "Kumbaya" moments. One of McCain's longtime sparring partners on foreign policy, Kentucky Senator Rand Paul, used delay tactics to try and force a vote on his amendment 11. He wanted to repeal 17 the 2001 and 2003 war authorizations that have been used to justify 18 military actions ever since. Here's Paul.

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RAND PAUL: These wars are costing trillions of dollars. They're unauthorized. We have not voted on them. And I say, look; let's pay attention to some of the problems we've got here at home.

DAVIS: McCain, of course, opposed it.

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MCCAIN: I cannot support anything that fails to provide our men and women in uniform with everything they need, including the legal authority to keep our nation safe.

DAVIS: To no surprise, the amendment failed. Even under regular order, chairmen still usually get their way. As for McCain's health, a Monday MRI concluded that additional radiation and chemotherapy is needed. McCain's office says the senator will undergo treatment at the nearby National Institutes of Health instead of back in Arizona. That way he can maintain a regular work schedule in the Senate. Susan Davis, NPR News, the Capitol.