Senator John McCain’s Legislative Legacy

Senator John McCain (R-AZ), who died on Saturday at the age of 81, cast a monumental shadow during his 35 year career in Congress ― in which he served two House terms before serving in the Senate for the last 31 years in the seat previously held by Barry Goldwater.

Here’s a look at some of the highlights of his legislative legacy:

Tax Cuts

While there were certainly policy areas where McCain’s “maverick” instincts put him at odds with other Republicans, tax reform generally wasn’t one of them ― and votes for conservative, supply-side tax reform book-ended his career.

While serving his second term in the House, McCain supported the second round of tax cuts advanced by President Ronald Reagan in 1986. He opposed the Bush tax cuts of the early 2000s when they were first proposed, citing a need for increased defense spending, but supported their subsequent extensions in later years so as to avoid raising taxes.

The final vote of his career came in support of the GOP’s Tax Cuts and Jobs Act ― the most significant tax reform since 1986 ― which passed the Senate on a party-line 52-48 vote in December 2017 before being signed into law by President Donald Trump.

Campaign Finance Reform

In 1994, McCain and his Senate colleague Russ Feingold (D-WI) began working on a bipartisan campaign finance reform bill that aimed to counteract the role of “soft money” and issue advocacy ads in elections. Their proposal was unable pass both chambers of Congress until after McCain’s unsuccessful campaign for the GOP presidential nomination in 2000. In 2002, it was signed into law by President George W. Bush.

Known as the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act, the bill imposed limits on campaign contributions by corporations and unions which were ultimately struck down by the Supreme Court’s decision in Citizens United v. FEC in 2009 as an infringement on the First Amendment.

However, other provisions of the BCRA are still in effect, most notably the requirement that political candidates include a statement in their ads that “I’m [name] and I approve this message.”

Torture

As a former prisoner of war himself who faced torture at the hands of the North Vietnamese during his more than five years in captivity, McCain opposed the Bush administration’s use of “enhanced interrogation techniques” and the use of detention without trial.

In 2005, his efforts led to the inclusion of the Detainee Treatment Act as an amendment to a defense appropriations bill that became law. It restricted military & civilian interrogations to the techniques in the U.S. Army Field Manual on Interrogation ― effectively prohibiting waterboarding.

Obamacare Repeal

Despite being a vocal opponent of President Barack Obama’s signature healthcare law, McCain cast the decisive vote against Senate Republicans’ efforts to repeal and replace Obamacare because he felt it was brought up without enough deliberation.

While McCain took the criticism from within his own party in characteristic good humor, it’s worth noting that had he voted in favor, the enactment of Obamacare repeal was still far from assured. Significant differences remained to be reconciled between the House and Senate versions of the legislation, and there was no guarantee the conference committee’s product could’ve passed Congress.

Immigration Reform

McCain was a longtime advocate for comprehensive immigration reform that’d grant legal status to certain unauthorized immigrants, create guest worker programs, and improve border security.

He and Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-MA) worked on a series of bipartisan proposals in the mid-2000s, including one that passed the Senate in 2006 but didn’t get a vote in the House. As a member of the “Gang of Eight” discussions in 2013, McCain helped craft the bill that passed the Senate on 68-32 vote before it also stalled in the House.

More recently, he and Sen. Chris Coons (D-DE) crafted a bipartisan proposal that’d grant legal status to so-called “Dreamers” and require the production of a comprehensive border security strategy. It failed to clear a procedural vote in the Senate in February 2018, which McCain wasn’t present for because he was undergoing treatment for brain cancer at home in Arizona.

Bipartisanship & Regular Order

McCain’s most memorable Senate floor speech in recent years came after his vote against Obamacare repeal, in which he implored his colleagues to “return to regular order” ― the process of moving bills through committee to the floor while reconciling differences between the chambers and the parties in as open a manner as possible.

His colleagues honored his legacy by naming two bills after him that have become law in such a manner during the current Congress:

• John S. McCain III, Daniel K. Akaka, and Samuel R. Johnson VA MISSION Act: This bill made the Veterans’ Choice program permanent and renamed it the Veterans Community Care Program, allowing veterans to get the care they need from private providers using their VA benefits.
• John S. McCain National Defense Authorization Act for FY2019: This bill authorized defense spending for the 2019 fiscal year, marking the 58th consecutive year that Congress approved a bipartisan defense authorization.

— Eric Revell

(Photo Credit: Flickr user Gage Skidmore / Creative Commons)