Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), a big critic of the government shutdown, is again insisting that he thought holding up government funding as part of a fight against Obamacare was all a bunch of hocus pocus.
In an interview with Fusion's Jorge Ramos on Thursday, McCain slammed the shutdown as a "miserable failure."
“I said it couldn’t succeed from the start and it didn't,” he said. “It was a miserable failure and we must never do it again.”
When asked about tea party Congressmen like Sens. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and Rand Paul (R-Ky.), who led the anti-Obamacare efforts that caused the shutdown, McCain said they'd be "held accountable" for the move that furloughed hundreds of thousands of government workers, closed national parks and halted clinical trials helping desperately ill patients, among other things.
“Those responsible for it will be held accountable by the American people and I don’t care what party they are in," McCain said.
McCain made similar comments before, blaming the shutdown on the tea party and saying it started "on a fool's errand."
In his Fusion interview, McCain also touched on recent revelations about the United States spying on foreign leaders, calling for a national debate over the program.
“Friends often eavesdrop on friends, but when we are listening in on the private conversations of the private cell phone of the Chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany, obviously that is going to alienate our friends," McCain said.
McCain said there's "a fine line between respecting people’s privacy and the fact that we need to protect this nation against another 9/11 attack.”
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