Looking Back: 4 Times John McCain Embraced Bipartisanship

As a self-proclaimed maverick, Arizona senator and former Republican presidential nominee John McCain embodies a brand of politics rarely seen on Capitol Hill these days. Though reliably conservative, with 30-plus years in the body, McCain has forged long-lasting partnerships and personal friendships with Democrats, even siding with them last year to defeat a hastily drafted attempt to abolish the Affordable Care Act, and co-sponsoring bipartisan legislation to regulate soft money in politics. His devotion to the institution of the Senate is arguably as important a part of his life story as his wartime experience.
For McCain, who was diagnosed with terminal brain cancer last year, the personal and political are inextricably linked, and his inspiring biography the bedrock of his public life and career. So it comes as no surprise that the Arizona senator’s most significant accomplishments are closely tied to his life story, and show a marked compassion for the lives of ordinary Americans. Here are four of McCain’s major legislative accomplishments.

1. NORMALIZED RELATIONS WITH VIETNAM

After the fall of Saigon in 1975, the U.S. broke off all diplomatic relations with Vietnam. Ties were slowly restored over the following decades, and in 1991, the Pentagon opened an office in Hanoi to help look for MIA service members. In 1994, almost 20 years after the last American troops left Vietnam, President Bill Clinton started the process of normalizing relations, lifting a nearly 19-year-long economic embargo against the country. While many conservatives and war veterans decried the move, McCain — who happened to be both conservative and a Vietnam vet — became an unlikely supporter of normalization, leading a 1993 trip to Hanoi with fellow vet and then-Sen. John Kerry.
In 1994, McCain co-sponsored a resolution urging full diplomatic recognition of the country, saying that normalization was the surest way to aid Vietnamese political reforms and protect American security interests in the region. In 1995, the two nations officially restored full diplomatic relations, and Secretary of State Warren Christopher traveled to Hanoi to open a U.S. embassy there.

2. LEADER IN THE FIGHT FOR CAMPAIGN FINANCE REFORM

The Keating Five may not have as large a cultural footprint as, say, Watergate, but it was among the bigger political scandals of the late 1980s. In 1987, a group of five senators, among them McCain, were accused of improperly intervening on behalf of financier Charles H. Keating Jr., chairman of the Lincoln Savings and Loan Association, which was the target of an investigation by federal regulators. Lincoln collapsed in 1989, leading to the loss of $3.4 billion dollars of taxpayer money, calling attention to the substantial political contributions Keating made to each of the senators who had previously shielded him from being investigated.
Though the Senate Ethics Committee ultimately cleared McCain of acting improperly (he was criticized for exercising “poor judgment”), the episode had a lasting impact on McCain, who became a leader in the fight for campaign finance reform. McCain went on to partner with a democratic senator, Russ Feingold, to enact a signature bill, the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002 — commonly known as the McCain-Feingold Act — to rein in the vast amounts of money swirling around politics. Though much of the regulatory muscle of the bill was stripped by the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision in 2010, the legislation still stands as one of McCain’s most important legislative accomplishments.

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John McCain gives an interview after returning from Vietnam in 1973. After enduring nearly six years of torture as a POW, McCain became an outspoken advocate against excessive interrogation methods.

3. SPONSORED THE DETAINEE TREATMENT ACT OF 2005

If nothing else, McCain understands the hell that torture visits on a body, having spent nearly six years as a POW in Vietnam. This experience lent him credence as a powerful voice in Congress against the use of so-called “enhanced interrogation techniques” such as waterboarding. After 9/11, his position on torture pitted McCain against the Bush administration, as Bush’s war on terror relied on techniques that many critics, including McCain, considered torture.
In 2005, McCain sponsored the Detainee Treatment Act as an amendment to a defense spending bill, demanding that the CIA adhere to the Army’s interrogation procedures, which explicitly prohibit the inhumane treatment of prisoners, including those at Guantanamo Bay.
This issue is once again front-page news, with President Trump’s recent nomination of Gina Haspel as CIA director. Haspel has been accused of overseeing a secret CIA detention facility in Thailand where detainees were waterboarded, and then subsequently destroying videotaped evidence of such interrogation sessions. McCain urged Congress to reject Haspel’s nomination, stating that “Ms. Haspel’s role in overseeing the use of torture by Americans is disturbing,” and “her refusal to acknowledge torture’s immorality is disqualifying,” though Haspel was eventually confirmed 54-45.

4. UNLIKELY SAVIOR OF OBAMACARE

McCain was opposed to 2009’s landmark Affordable Care Act (aka Obamacare), voting no on the original bill, and supporting subsequent motions and amendments to weaken or replace it. But in 2017, just days after the Arizona senator revealed that he had a malignant brain tumor, McCain voted no on a Republican-led effort to repeal the ACA, saying that the Better Care Reconciliation Act (i.e. the “skinny repeal” bill), would have destabilized insurance markets and possibly led to deep Medicaid cuts. (Arizona state officials had estimated that the BCRA would have cost Arizona’s Medicaid program $7.1 billion by the end of 2026.)
McCain’s vote, which stunned many of his colleagues and effectively killed the bill, was less an endorsement of Obamacare than it was a rebuke of the way that the bill was being rushed to passage without proper debate and a CBO score. In his Senate floor speech, McCain called for bipartisan health-reform legislation that was the product of “regular order,” where legislation goes through a transparent committee process and both parties are able to work on it.
McCain also voted no on the subsequent Graham-Cassidy proposal, which would have weakened or eliminated the rule that insurance companies need to cover patients with pre-existing conditions. “We should not be content to pass health care legislation on a party-line basis,” McCain said in a statement on the proposal. “The issue is too important, and too many lives are at risk, for us to leave the American people guessing from one election to the next whether and how they will acquire health insurance. A bill of this impact requires a bipartisan approach.”


Update: Sen. John McCain passed away on August 25, 2018, at his home in Arizona. He is survived by his wife and seven children.

Lawrence Lessig Reacts to the Citizens United Decision

Harvard Law School professor and campaign finance reform activist Lawrence Lessig tells NationSwell why he views the Supreme Court ruling on Citizens United as, “the greatest gift to the reform movement since Richard Nixon.”
The decision allows for unlimited funds in support of political candidates, with the stipulation that this money — over a predetermined dollar amount — can’t go directly to the official campaigns. Perhaps surprisingly, Lessig believes the verdict has done more to engage citizens with the issue of money in politics than anything else.
“What it did was to terrify literally millions of people to join the call for reform,” says Lessig, “But the critical fact of Citizens United is that it didn’t on its own create the problem of American democracy. On the day before Citizens United was decided, our democracy was already dead.”

Lawrence Lessig Breaks Down Mayday PAC

Harvard Law School professor and campaign finance reform activist Lawrence Lessig recently spoke to NationSwell about his crowdfunded non-partisan Mayday PAC.
Simply put, the political action committee’s goal is to raise money to support candidates who want to drive campaign finance reform. The irony of raising funds to influence elections to end the omnipresent impact of money in politics isn’t lost on Lessig; indeed, he addresses the apparent contradiction directly.
“Just like every single moment of the transformation of American democracy has used the existing rules to change the rules,” says Lessig, “that’s what we have to do here.”

Join the NationSwell Council Conversation with Lawrence Lessig

When it comes to making government work, Lawrence Lessig sees a straightforward solution. The country, he says, needs to overhaul the way elections are funded. The challenge, of course, is making that happen.
Lessig will discuss this challenge at a February 2 lunch from 12:00 p.m. to 1:30 p.m. with NationSwell Council members in New York City. We hope you will join the conversation by tweeting your questions before then by using the #NSCouncil hashtag or joining the live conversation on Twitter.
Lessig, the Roy L. Furman Professor of Law and Leadership at Harvard University, launched the Mayday PAC as a “counterintuitive experiment” to tackle the problem of money in politics. In phase two of this experiment, which was first tested in the 2014 midterm elections, Mayday PAC is looking to its supporters to recruit members of Congress who will support reform. As The New Yorker put it in a recent profile, “Lawrence Lessig wants to reform campaign finance. All he needs is fifty billionaires.”
In his TED talk, Lessig says that only by spreading funder influence beyond the “tiniest slice of America” can we restore the idea of a government dependent on the people alone. 
We have lost that republic,” he says. “All of us have to act to get it back.”