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America's Best Senators - John McCain: The Mainstreamer
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| Parent(s) |
Candidate
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| Contributor | Monsieur |
| Last Edited | Monsieur Jan 27, 2008 06:55pm |
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| Category | Profile |
| Media | Weekly News Magazine - TIME Magazine |
| News Date | Saturday, April 15, 2006 12:00:00 AM UTC0:0 |
| Description | Sometimes the power of a law depends on the lawmaker. Last May the Senate unanimously passed a Democratic amendment banning the torture of prisoners in U.S. custody. No one paid any attention. Then in October John McCain introduced his antitorture amendment, using identical language, and the issue landed on the front pages of newspapers across the country. The White House jumped to attention, dispatching Vice President Dick Cheney and National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley to try to talk McCain down. He stood firm, and the bill passed unanimously in December.
It wasn't just that McCain, 69, had been tortured as a prisoner of war in Vietnam. McCain has that rare ability to put an issue on the U.S. agenda that wouldn't naturally be there. "It's a question of moral authority," says former New Hampshire Senator Warren Rudman of his former colleague. McCain has earned that moral authority over the years by being patient and making the big play. Many of the problems McCain tackles are entrenched and unexciting: they challenge the rules in Washington and the cynicism of voters at home. Over the past decade, McCain forced through a reform that made the money coming in from rich interest groups and directed at political advertisements more transparent. He has spent his entire Senate career exposing wasteful pork-barrel projects. And in the past year, he took his backwater committee, Indian affairs, and used it to launch an investigation of lobbyist Jack Abramoff, whose admission in federal court that he conspired to bribe public officials produced a series of efforts to ban certain kinds of influence peddling. |
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