Senator Chuck Schumer said Wednesday that he plans to reintroduce a bill that would rename the Russell Senate Office Building after the late senator John McCain, amid a rekindled public feud between President Trump and the McCain family.
“I look forward to soon re-introducing my legislation re-naming the Russell Senate Building after American hero, Senator John McCain,” the Senate minority leader wrote in a tweet Wednesday.
Schumer’s announcement came after Trump said Tuesday at the White House that, “I was never a fan of John McCain, and I never will be.”
McCain passed away from brain cancer at 81 years of age last August. The Arizona Republican’s daughter, Meghan McCain, has vehemently defended her father from Trump’s attacks, saying Monday that the president’s focus on her father is a sign of his “pathetic life.”
Trump’s beef with McCain, who lost the presidential election to Barack Obama in 2008, stretches back to the 2016 campaign season, when he criticized McCain for being captured and suffering for more than five years as a prisoner of war in Vietnam.
“He’s not a war hero,” Trump said at the time of McCain. “He was a war hero because he was captured. I like people who weren’t captured.”
Trump’s frustration with McCain was aggravated by the senator’s dramatic eleventh-hour vote against repealing the Affordable Care Act in July 2017. The senator “told us hours before that he was going to repeal and replace,” Trump said Tuesday. “And then for some reason — I think I understand the reason — he ended up” voting against.
“We’ll be talking about the best way to honor Sen. McCain,” Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell said of Schumer’s proposal.