[Congressional Record Volume 164, Number 144 (Tuesday, August 28, 2018)]
[Senate]
[Pages S5999-S6001]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                        REMEMBERING JOHN McCAIN

  Mr. SASSE. Mr. President, like so many here today, I rise to honor 
John McCain and to sing John McCain's praises.
  There are many here--most here--who knew him longer than I did. I 
will admit that when the Presiding Officer and I first got here in 
2014, I knew John McCain as somebody from the history books. I knew 
John McCain as somebody destined for the history books. I knew John 
McCain as an American hero, but I didn't know John McCain, the man. I 
didn't know John McCain, the flesh and blood, genuinely hilarious guy, 
but over the past 48 months, I had the privilege of actually getting to 
become friends with John McCain.
  It is sort of weird to say, when you are roughly our age--I am 46 and 
John McCain was an octogenarian--that he befriended me. I went on many 
overnight flights with John McCain. I have been to refugee camps with 
John McCain. I have been to war zones with John McCain. I have been 
cussed out by John McCain lots of times. He called me a stupid bastard 
on a regular basis--and he meant it, affectionately. I am convinced he 
didn't use the term ``stupid bastard'' lightly. He reserved it for 
those he really cared about.
  I have laughed and cried with John McCain. I have wrestled policy 
with John McCain. I got to grill hamburgers and serve them to troops in 
Afghanistan on the Fourth of July with John McCain.
  As we in this body praise John McCain today and for the rest of this 
week, as we rightly should, there will be a lot of people talking about 
his time in the Hanoi Hilton.
  John McCain was in prison to fight for our freedom for more than 5 
years. He was in solitary confinement for about 3 years. He was 
tortured for years. If you have ever met any of the POWs who were in 
the cells around him, almost to a man they credit the fact that they 
didn't lose their minds during that time to the fact that John McCain 
kept them sane. He kept them stable.
  John McCain told me a story one time on one of those overnight 
flights--and he has told it to many other people around here--about tap 
code, which is sort of akin to Morse code, but new folks in the Army 
learn tap code. It is a way to spell out a five-by-five grid: You can 
put letters together and make words, make sentences, and make 
paragraphs.
  John McCain thought it was very important that the men who were in 
prison with him would learn to tell each other stories--they would tell 
poems they knew from their youth; they would tap out songs they knew 
from when they were kids--because if they had a sense of history past, 
they would have a sense of hope and history future. John McCain kept 
those people sane.
  I remember one time hearing him wax on and on about this story, and I 
was just in awe of how long it must have taken to persuade these men 
that they were going to teach each other songs and poetry from their 
youth. I said: How long did it take to do that?
  He looked at me like I was just a complete idiot, and he said: What 
did I care? What the hell did it matter to me? We had infinite time, 
you moron.
  He didn't say ``you moron,'' but it was clear: How do you not get 
that time was the one thing that just was completely irrelevant when 
you are in prison? If something takes too long, that is a virtue, not a 
liability.
  One of the things we don't tell here and that we need to tell more is 
the connection between how he thought about time and why he acted the 
way he acted as a Senator. If we want to honor John McCain around here, 
one of the most basic things we should do is recognize that the reason 
he didn't suffer fools lightly is because he had a concept of time that 
was--as a man who had spent 5\1/2\ years in prison, he wanted to redeem 
the time. After he was released, he wanted to make sure he spent all of 
his time on big things.
  His impatience, his volcanic temper flowed directly from the fact 
that he

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thought life was too short to waste on small stuff, and if you were 
willing to do small stuff, he was going to get up in your grill.

  So the fact that John McCain is a hero because of the way he endured 
torture on our behalf and the fact that John McCain worked really hard 
on big issues and often ran over people rudely in his interactions with 
them in the Senate--those things were inextricably linked. If we are 
really going to honor John McCain, we have to understand that his 
impatience was a huge part of what he saw as his mission--to serve his 
fellow Americans.
  So how do we honor this man? There is a lot of talk around here right 
now about what we should do to honor John McCain, and it is an 
important conversation. My understanding is, the two leaders are going 
to get together and put together a commission to deliberate over the 
next many weeks or months about the proper way to honor John McCain. I 
am glad they are doing that.
  There is a lot of discussion about renaming a building after him or 
renaming a different committee room after him, and some of those 
tributes may be the right tributes. I am not meaning to prejudge that 
right now. Obviously, there is something just hilarious about the idea 
that a Senate office building may be renamed after John McCain because 
if you had the ``McCain SOB,'' it is obvious what John McCain would 
want you to call that McCain SOB building all the time.
  So there are important things to talk about. Yet I want to urge one 
bit of caution, which is: We should not think that what John McCain 
would want us to do in this time and place is in any way reducible to 
marble because just as America is not the sum of her cities, so, too, 
the U.S. Senate is not the sum of its buildings. The U.S. Senate is not 
the places where we meet.
  As John reminded us in his farewell charge, read posthumously 
yesterday, America is an idea. America is a cause. America is about 
liberty. America is about justice. America is about universal human 
dignity. Even though John could often run over you, when you were 
having a debate and an argument if you were in his way, probably more 
than any person I have ever met John actually believed in universal 
human dignity.
  The reason he was so big on the global stage is because he stood on a 
tradition 230 years long, announcing what America believes: There are 
about 7\1/2\ billion people who are created in God's image with 
universal dignity, and that applies to everybody everywhere. It isn't 
America's job to fix every problem everywhere, but it is certainly part 
of America's mission in the world to proclaim that universal human 
dignity, and that is what John did. That was a huge part of his 
calling.
  Unfortunately, we know all too well that when the public looks at 
this institution right now, when the public looks to this city, they 
don't see a place that looks like its beating heart is to proclaim that 
universal American idea, to proclaim that American sense that everybody 
is created with infinite worth, and though we know that, we are not 
doing that much about it.
  In this institution, most of the time we finger-point, we don't 
problem-solve, and the public is groaning for us to do better. The last 
few years should be blinking red lights for all of us who are 
privileged to serve here for a time.

  When the American people look at Washington, they rightly think it is 
shady for Cabinet members and their spouses to be raising money from 
foreign sources.
  When the American people look at Washington, they rightly think there 
is a whole lot of shady going on and that people's taxes and finances 
ought to be disclosed when they are running for an office of public 
trust.
  When the American people look at Washington, they don't see most 
Members of Congress as stewards of the public trust but rather as 
hypocrites with taxpayer-funded sexual lawsuit settlements.
  When the American people look at Washington, they think it is weird 
that the average Member of Congress has an investment portfolio that 
grows much faster than the market average, and when people leave jobs 
in this institution they often head for ``cush'' jobs on K Street 
rather than moving back home, which is where they said they were going 
to end up after they ran for office.
  We have seen multiple indictments across both the legislative and 
executive branches just in recent weeks in this town. Is it any wonder 
the American people look at us and wonder if we really care about the 
crisis of public trust? Is it any wonder that John McCain was impatient 
with the pace of us tackling big problems in this place?
  We obviously have a truncated week here, and many of us are headed to 
Arizona for a funeral in the next few hours so I will not introduce 
anything now, but I want to say that when we get back, and as this 
Commission gets kicked off trying to figure out the proper way to honor 
John McCain, I plan to make a proposal that we should find a way to 
honor John McCain not just in marble. Maybe that is a step that is 
important, but if John McCain were here, I submit to you that John 
McCain wouldn't be all that concerned about what names and placards and 
signs we put up on buildings and meeting rooms.
  I think we should find a way to honor John McCain in a way that John 
McCain would have seen fit, and that is we ought to pass a piece of 
legislation that we wouldn't have passed absent this moment. We ought 
to come together, in a bipartisan way, and we ought to do something 
that makes both political parties really uncomfortable.
  That was one of the things John McCain was great at. This man is gone 
and we are surely poorer for it, but we can do something big that is in 
line with the spirit of how he wanted to disrupt this place. If we 
wanted to make both parties uncomfortable--and John was a guy who loved 
to point both barrels at both parties--I think we can find a way to do 
that in a way the American people will applaud, and I think that might 
be the right way to honor John McCain.
  His willingness to take on everybody and all the sacred cows in this 
town was why a lot of people hated him, but it is why a lot more people 
loved him. I think, if we are going to honor his spirit, we ought to 
find a way to do something that is big and disruptive and uncomfortable 
for Washington, DC.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Iowa.
  Mr. GRASSLEY. Mr. President, as a lot of my colleagues, I rise to 
speak for a short period of time about our deceased colleague, Senator 
John McCain.
  I begin my remarks by paying my respect for our colleague and friend, 
Senator John McCain. A great American has died.
  Senator McCain represented the people of Arizona and the United 
States of America with great honor, always holding his ground and 
sticking to his principles. ``Sticking to his principles'' have been 
the words used by more colleagues since his death than any other 
description of him. Senator McCain was tough and tenacious, both as a 
32-year Member of the U.S. Senate and also as a member of the U.S. 
Navy. His grit and determination as a prisoner of war in Vietnam are 
legendary and ought to be an inspiration. For the rest of his life, he 
understood from his own experience what it takes to keep a country 
safe, and he stood up for the security of the United States, and, in 
turn, that was standing up for the security of the world.

  He prioritized those in uniform and the veterans who safeguard our 
Nation. I had tremendous respect for Senator McCain's leadership of the 
Armed Services Committee and for the many ways he led on the No. 1 
responsibility of the Federal Government: our national defense.
  Senator McCain and I served in the Senate together since 1986. Even 
after he became ill last year, Senator McCain's charisma was as strong 
as ever. At Christmastime, he greeted me with an oft-repeated joke he 
had since he was a candidate for President and traveling around Iowa. 
He learned a lot about Iowa, and this greeting was something like: 
Well, Chuck, I had my glass of ethanol for breakfast. He would often 
say to me something he learned in Iowa about advertising by the John 
Deere corporation: Nothing runs like a Deere. Of course, being from 
Iowa, I liked to hear that sort of greeting, and it was often that he 
said those things to me.
  As I stand here today with his Senate desk close at hand and draped 
in his

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honor, my wife Barbara and I share our condolences with Cindy McCain 
and Senator McCain's entire family. Senator McCain sacrificed so much 
of himself for his country, and we are grateful for his lifetime of 
service.

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