Sen. John McCain stood up against the Republican party line by stating that the U.S. Supreme Court made a mistake in allowing corporations to contribute unlimited amounts of money to political campaigns.
McCain has long been an opponent of excessive campaign cash, even when he was running against President Obama in 2008. He co-sponsored the McCain-Feingold Act a decade ago to limit campaign contributions, but that act was never followed—and it was rendered irrelevant by the Supreme Court decision in the Citizens United case, which stated that corporations had the same rights as individuals.
“That’s why we have different laws that govern corporations than govern individual citizens and so to say that corporations are people, again, flies in the face of all the traditional Supreme Court decisions that we have made — that have been made in the past,” McCain said in an interview on PBS with Judy Woodruff.
McCain’s statements were in response to news that Las Vegas billionaire Sheldon Adelson donated $10 million to a Mitt Romney SuperPAC, Restore Our Future, which reportedly spent $41 million during the Republican primary season.
Adelson got most of his profits from gambling properties in Macau, a gambling city in China that’s larger than Las Vegas, leading McCain to conclude that “in a round-about way” what we have is foreign money” coming into an American campaign, political campaigns.
But other Senate Republicans were still out there, towing the party line, like Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell. McConnell defended the court’s Citizens United decision on Friday, and then made the almost ludicrous claim that Obama administration was intimidating the billionaire Koch brothers and other wealthy Republican donors.
