There are a lot of Republicans who really don’t want to take the blame for their losses in the midterm elections — a night that resulted in the biggest gains for Democrats in nearly 50 years, and which is still getting better for them as absentee ballots are rounded up and counted as well.
Some tried to blame voting “irregularities,” although none have provided any proof that there were any. Some blamed Donald Trump. But maybe no Republican who lost the race they were running in had a worse take on the reason for their defeat than soon-to-be-former-Representative Jason Lewis of Minnesota’s 2nd Congressional District, who on Veterans’ Day of all days elected to place the blame squarely on the recently-deceased Senator John McCain.
Writing in an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, Rep. Lewis authored the disastrously-titled “Who Lost The House? John McCain,” a rambling article that posits the theory that all was well in the Republican rank and file until Ol’ Maverick decided to buzz the tower and vote against his colleagues on the “skinny repeal” of Obamacare.
The Republican Party lost its House majority on July 28, 2017, when Sen. John McCain ended the party’s seven-year quest to repeal ObamaCare. House leadership had done an admirable job herding cats. On the second try, we passed the American Health Care Act in May. Then McCain’s inscrutable vote against the Senate’s ‘skinny repeal’ killed the reform effort.
McCain’s last-minute decision prompted a ‘green wave’ of liberal special-interest money, which was used to propagate false claims that the House plan ‘gutted coverage for people with pre-existing conditions.’ That line was the Democrats’ most potent attack in the midterms.”
Of course, the phrase “false claims” here should be understood as “absolutely true.”
McCain’s daughter Meghan was quick to point out how, well, gross his statement was:
This is abhorrent. https://t.co/dPpjYcwk81
— Meghan McCain (@MeghanMcCain) November 12, 2018
So why did Rep. Lewis lose his reelection bid? Well, it may have had something to do with that unearthed audio of him lamenting the fact that you can’t call women sluts anymore, or it could just be that his constituents were sick of looking at his smarmy face.
Either way, picking Veterans’ Day to blame his shittiness on possibly the most famous veteran ever to serve in the US government is a pretty strong indicator that we don’t need idiots like Jason Lewis in the House in the first place.
Featured image via screen capture
