Senator John McCain traveled from his home in Arizona to Washington in order to cast the 50th vote to open debate in the Senate on the Republican healthcare bill. He was greeted by a round of applause and warm feelings by all, since he has just been diagnosed with brain cancer. I do not begrudge McCain his opportunity to vote, and I would further state that I (just like anyone with a shred of human decency and compassion) fully hope he wins his battle against cancer and send him fond wishes in his medical crisis. But that doesn't mean I can't also point out his naked hypocrisy today.

Indeed, others have already done so, but they've taken a slightly different route, by noting that McCain's health insurance is paid for by tax dollars and that he just voted to possibly deny access to millions of other Americans to the same life-saving medical care he is now getting. That is hypocritical, but even if McCain weren't in Congress he would still have earned the right to government paid-for health care, by dint of his military service. So I leave it to others to call out McCain on this front.

Instead, what struck me was a long passage from the speech he gave in the Senate right after Mike Pence cast the tie-breaking vote to open debate. Because McCain displays -- with jaw-dropping specificity -- exactly the same hypocrisy and/or naked cynicism he is purporting to decry, all in the space of a few paragraphs. I've included the entire extended passage from the full transcript, for context. McCain is speaking about the need for the Senate to start acting less "tribal," and return to the way it is supposed to do the nation's business.

I hope we can again rely on humility, on our need to cooperate, on our dependence on each other to learn how to trust each other again and by so doing better serve the people who elected us. Stop listening to the bombastic loudmouths on the radio and television and the Internet. To hell with them. They don't want anything done for the public good. Our incapacity is their livelihood.

Let's trust each other. Let's return to regular order. We've been spinning our wheels on too many important issues because we keep trying to find a way to win without help from across the aisle. That's an approach that's been employed by both sides, mandating legislation from the top down, without any support from the other side, with all the parliamentary maneuvers that requires.

We're getting nothing done. All we've really done this year is confirm Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court. Our healthcare insurance system is a mess. We all know it, those who support Obamacare and those who oppose it. Something has to be done. We Republicans have looked for a way to end it and replace it with something else without paying a terrible political price. We haven't found it yet, and I'm not sure we will. All we've managed to do is make more popular a policy that wasn't very popular when we started trying to get rid of it.

I voted for the motion to proceed to allow debate to continue and amendments to be offered. I will not vote for the bill as it is today. It's a shell of a bill right now. We all know that. I have changes urged by my state's governor that will have to be included to earn my support for final passage of any bill. I know many of you will have to see the bill changed substantially for you to support it.

We've tried to do this by coming up with a proposal behind closed doors in consultation with the administration, then springing it on skeptical members, trying to convince them it's better than nothing, asking us to swallow our doubts and force it past a unified opposition. I don't think that is going to work in the end. And it probably shouldn't.

The Obama administration and congressional Democrats shouldn't have forced through Congress without any opposition support a social and economic change as massive as Obamacare. And we shouldn't do the same with ours.

Why don't we try the old way of legislating in the Senate, the way our rules and customs encourage us to act? If this process ends in failure, which seem likely, then let's return to regular order.

Let the Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee under Chairman Alexander and Ranking Member Murray hold hearings, try to report a bill out of committee with contributions from both sides. Then bring it to the floor for amendment and debate, and see if we can pass something that will be imperfect, full of compromises, and not very pleasing to implacable partisans on either side, but that might provide workable solutions to problems Americans are struggling with today.

What have we to lose by trying to work together to find those solutions? We're not getting much done apart. I don't think any of us feels very proud of our incapacity. Merely preventing your political opponents from doing what they want isn't the most inspiring work. There's greater satisfaction in respecting our differences, but not letting them prevent agreements that don't require abandonment of core principles, agreements made in good faith that help improve lives and protect the American people.

The Senate is capable of that. We know that. We've seen it before. I've seen it happen many times. And the times when I was involved even in a modest way with working out a bipartisan response to a national problem or threat are the proudest moments of my career, and by far the most satisfying.

Now, McCain's words seem to soar at times, but the very lofty principle he is begging his fellow senators to rediscover is precisely what he is voting against. If he listened to and took his own advice, he would have either stayed in Arizona or voted against the motion to proceed. No amount of soaring phrases can deny this basic truth -- McCain is saying he is cynically voting for a bill that he hopes will fail and whose failure he hopes will begin a bipartisan process using regular order; but if that's what he truly wanted, he could have actually guaranteed it happened by voting against the motion to proceed.

Try as he might, McCain cannot square this hypocritical circle. From the top, after smacking loudmouths on television and radio (McCain, of course, never appears on any of these shows, right?) he proceeds to call for the Senate to return to regular order, saying: "We've been spinning our wheels on too many important issues because we keep trying to find a way to win without help from across the aisle. That's an approach that's been employed by both sides, mandating legislation from the top down, without any support from the other side, with all the parliamentary maneuvers that requires." But voting for the motion to proceed does exactly that. It is a parliamentary maneuver (a last-ditch option, really, for Mitch McConnell) which will score a "win" without help from the other side, which will mandate legislation from the top down. There's just no two ways about it.

McCain doubles down on this doublethink, openly admitting that he's voting to continue the parliamentary mischief from his own party, and openly admitting that Republicans aren't in the slightest bit interested in what Democrats think:

We Republicans have looked for a way to end [Obamacare] and replace it with something else without paying a terrible political price. We haven't found it yet, and I'm not sure we will. All we've managed to do is make more popular a policy that wasn't very popular when we started trying to get rid of it. I voted for the motion to proceed to allow debate to continue and amendments to be offered. I will not vote for the bill as it is today. It's a shell of a bill right now. We all know that.

Note that "it's a shell of a bill." Nobody knows what Mitch McConnell will do next, to fill that shell. There will be no regular order at all. McConnell's just going to wing it with a sixth of the American economy, and McCain doesn't even sound all that concerned if some disastrously bad bill actually passes with only Republican support or not. In case this isn't clear enough, McCain then lays it out in plain language:

We've tried to do this by coming up with a proposal behind closed doors in consultation with the administration, then springing it on skeptical members, trying to convince them it's better than nothing, asking us to swallow our doubts and force it past a unified opposition. I don't think that is going to work in the end. And it probably shouldn't. The Obama administration and congressional Democrats shouldn't have forced through Congress without any opposition support a social and economic change as massive as Obamacare. And we shouldn't do the same with ours.

Got all of that? Democrats forced Obamacare through Congress with no Republican votes. Republicans shouldn't do the same. Unless they do. Which would be bad, and shouldn't happen. So I'm going to become the key vote that insures the possibility of it happening, instead of shutting this whole process down right now with a "nay" vote. The stench of your hypocrisy is overpowering, Senator McCain. You had the power to force the Senate to do exactly what you say you want them to do, and you did not use it. It's all on you, in other words, and not on anyone else.

McCain might be excused this hypocritical rhetoric, if there had been 52 Republican votes to proceed. If his vote hadn't mattered one way or the other, then McCain might have had a moral leg to stand on to make complaints about his own party's actions. But that simply was not the case. McCain was the key vote, which is why he traveled from his sick bed to cast it. The decision about which way the Senate should go was entirely his to make.

McCain then rubs our noses in his massive, stinking hypocrisy, by laying out what he really, really would like to see happen instead of the process he just voted for:

Why don't we try the old way of legislating in the Senate, the way our rules and customs encourage us to act? If this process ends in failure, which seem likely, then let's return to regular order. Let the Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee under Chairman Alexander and Ranking Member Murray hold hearings, try to report a bill out of committee with contributions from both sides. Then bring it to the floor for amendment and debate, and see if we can pass something that will be imperfect, full of compromises, and not very pleasing to implacable partisans on either side, but that might provide workable solutions to problems Americans are struggling with today.

Lofty words, to be sure. But McCain is again ignoring the reality of the situation. If the motion to proceed had failed today -- if McCain had voted no on it -- then this is exactly what would begin to happen. McCain just voted for "this process," which he thinks is likely to end in failure. But he could have halted that process by just voting no. He could have begun the committee hearings and the bipartisan work to craft a real piece of legislation via regular order. He did not do so. Which is why his speech was so inexplicable.

The legislation currently under consideration was jammed onto Republicans (to say nothing of Democrats) in both houses of Congress by secretive meetings by leadership and drafting the language in back rooms. The bill's drafts were kept as secret as possible -- even from Republican members -- for as long as possible, because it was so politically awful. Not a single committee meeting -- on either side of the Capitol -- was ever held. Not a single person testified -- no experts, no doctors, no patients, no hospital administrators, no insurance company or drug company executives, not a single person's voice was ever heard. That would have all changed if the Senate bill had died today. In the Senate, Republican committee chairs have said they actually want to go through the regular order process, and that they resent the way McConnell is shoving his own bill down everyone's throats. Moderate Republicans have openly expressed a desire to work with Democrats to actually fix real-world problems rather than just bend over backwards to strip health insurance from as many millions of Americans is necessary to provide a gigantic tax break for billionaires. Even those Republicans who don't want to see such a compromise have admitted that that's likely what would happen next if "repeal and replace" fails in the Senate. Even Mitch McConnell himself has publicly admitted this.

So it's not like John McCain was unaware of what voting no would have achieved. He knows full well that the only way the Senate is going to return to regular order, the only way a bill can be written in committee, the only way Democrats are ever going to join in a bipartisan effort is if the current bill fails -- something McCain seems to actually wish for multiple times in his speech.

McCain could have been the brave maverick, bucking his own party to force them back into regular order. He could have been the voice of reason and actually lived up to the words in his own speech. Because there were only 49 other Republican "yes" votes, if McCain had voted against the motion to proceed -- or if he had simply stayed in Arizona and missed the vote -- then the Senate would have had no choice but to follow the path McCain says he wants to return to.

Instead, he voted to continue wasting the Senate's time on a bill he hopes to see fail. That's fine -- there were other Republicans who did the same thing today, after all. But to get up and castigate the Senate for attempting to pass a very partisan bill by a process which isn't even in the same time zone as "regular order" when you personally could have stopped this from happening is the absolute depth of hypocrisy.

Today, John McCain talked the talk. But he absolutely failed to walk the walk. So you'll forgive me if I don't have any crocodile tears to shed over the lack of regular order in the Senate, Senator McCain. If you want to know who is solely responsible for the lack of regular order on this bill, from this point on all you'll have to do to find out is to look into a mirror.

-- Chris Weigant

Follow Chris on Twitter: @ChrisWeigant